Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

The grape that can with logic absolute
The two-and-seventy jarring sects confute
- Omar Khayyam

Two Wrongs Make Right

Six Italian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. When is Mussolini going to come back from the dead and turn that abysmal backwater into Italian Central Asia? The world's most woman-loving people overseeing the world's most woman-hating people: a match made in Versailles! At least Mussolini would have moved the giant Buddha statues to Rome instead of letting the beard mafia blow them up. "But that's colonialism!" - ex-Buddhist silk traders throwing acid at schoolgirls in the name of an illiterate prophet born half a continent away is colonialism. Colonialism atop colonialism is merely history correcting itself. Maybe the Mongols can help civilize these people?

Hairless Mammals Belong In The Sea

Why would any man choose not to grow facial hair? The beard or moustache is to a man what the breast is to a woman: a flourish of the gods. All the great prophets, dictators, cowboys, barbarians and Jews have had facial hair. Penis envy is a less likely explanation for feminine resentment than beard envy. The clean-shaven male is a symptom of Western decline, or at the very least a symptom of growing Sinoization. Grow a beard and you will grow gravitas. Grow a moustache and you will grow stones. It's not about looking attractive, it's about demanding attraction. The bearded men of antiquity all had at least five wives. The sign of (Western) Christianity's lack of divine severity is its clergy's absence of beards. What sort of religious figure does not grow facial hair? The kind who plays acoustic guitar while singing MOR hymns. And don't get me started on the cosmic, sky god meets earth mother crackle of facial hair tickling vagina hair. Would a peacock clip its feathers? No less should a grown man shave his chin!

Best Opening Sentence To A Wikipedia Biography

Raymond Roussel (Paris, January 20, 1877 - Palermo, July 14, 1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, chess enthusiast, neurasthenic, drug addict, and likely suicide.

Lesser Jihad: Paeans To The Human Bomb

Violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.
- Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence

Truth is, it's not hard to understand how a suicide bomber thinks; a lot easier than understanding how an accountant thinks, if you ask me.
- Gary Brecher, If it Ain't Fixed, Break it All Up

Terrorists, like pirates, must be given their proper status in law: hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.
- Douglas R. Burgess Jr, The Dread Pirate bin Laden

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions.
- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

All revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses . . . justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, of a new state. As this law to come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence that may offend the sense of justice, its future anterior already justifies it.
- Jacques Derrida, Force of Law

The inner nature of this nihilistic terrorism is that everything is permissible, whether because God exists and I am his representative, or because God does not exist and I take his place.
- André Glucksmann

If I do not kill I shall never establish the world dominion of justice . . . that is the argument of the intelligent terrorist. . . . We, however, profess that higher even than the happiness and justice of existence stands existence itself.
- Kurt Hiller, Das Ziel

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

The reason terrorists don’t use those risible cosmetic terms of ours such as "collateral damage" is that they not only have no intention of sparing the innocent, they have no more desirable target in mind.
- Clive James, The Question of Karl Kraus

The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by their people. By itself, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.
- Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

We have said a hundred times or more that when modern revolutionaries carry out actions, what is important is not solely these actions themselves but also the propagandistic effect they are able to achieve. Hence, we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action as propaganda.
- Johann Most

The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future . . . but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The persistent illusion of the terrorists is to invoke a success in order to justify themselves before posterity. In effect, only the success can absolve them. But this success, where is it? The terrorists devoured by the scaffolds that they themselves erected, the Republic not only lost but rendered execrable, the political counter-Revolution victorious, despotism in place of the liberty for which a whole nation swore to die: is that success? How long will you go on repeating this strange nonsense, that all the scaffolds were necessary to save the Revolution, which was not saved?
- Edgar Quinet

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.
- Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.
- Arthur Schnitzler

The Terrorists cannot overthrow the government, cannot drive it from St. Petersburg and Russia; but having compelled it, for so many years running, to neglect everything to do nothing but struggle with them, by forcing it do so still for years and years, they will render its position untenable. Already, the prestige of the Imperial Government has received a wound from which it will be very difficult to heal. An Emperor who shuts himself up in prison from fear of the Terrorism is certainly not a figure to inspire admiration.
- Sergius Stepniak, Underground Russia

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.
- Miguel de Unamuno

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
- Oscar Wilde

The top winner in the contest for the greatest blunder of 1998 was a Latin American patriotic terrorist who sent a letter bomb to a US consulate in order to protest against America interfering in local politics. As a conscientious citizen, he wrote his return address on the envelope. However, he did not put enough stamps on it, so that the post returned the packet to him. Forgetting what he put in it, he opened it and blew himself to death.
— Slavoj Žižek

Ten Nations More Deserving Of Independence Than Palestine

10. Gypsies
9. Mayans
8. Kurdistan
7. East Turkestan (Xinjiang)
6. Assyria
5. Biafra
4. Kabylie
3. Tibet
2. Southern Sudan (Nubia)
1. Western Sahara

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

Lance do boju, szable w dlon,
Bolszewika, gon, gon, gon!
[Lances forward, swords in hand,
Chase the bolshevik far, far, far!]
- Polish cavalry circa Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21

Production Line

Some magical process where things start somewhere else and end up with me.

God, I Wish I Had A Hat This Tall