Recently in Culture, or the lack thereof Category

I have to agree with Insty on this one:

The best TV commercial, ever.

Believe it or not, it's an ad for a Siemens washing machine.

Note: Not safe for work. See the video here or view it below the fold.

As much as the "multi-culti" folks might disagree with me, I have to state in no uncertain terms that all cultures are not equally valid. Let's face it, there are some that are the antithesis of everything good and decent in the world. Multi-cultis will accuse me of being prejudiced, that I have no basis to make such a claim. But they are wrong. There are things in some cultures that are so debauched, so evil that they cannot be seen as being just as valid as Western culture. Frankly, I am willing to say our culture is better than many out there.

[T]he West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," [Geert Wilders] says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Wilders goes on to explain that cultures that sanction the execution of homosexuals, the beheading of women, the genital mutilation of girls, or treating women as nothing more than chattel, are in no way equal to or superior to Western culture. Many of these same cultures described by Wilders have no such thing as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of (or from) religion. Some of them also sanction genocide, ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, 'honor' killings, infanticide, and a host of other customs that we in the west find heinous and barbaric. The list could go on and on.

These are not the hallmarks of cultures that are equal to Western culture. Many of them produce nothing but misery. Instead, they are cultures that either need to change or to wither away and disappear into history as have so many others well deserving of it.

I know people really wanted to get an early start shopping on Black Friday, but knocking down and killing store employees is not a good way to do it.

Apparently a mob of shoppers waiting outside a Long Island, New York WalMart figured they'd waited long enough and forced their way into the store, knocking down several employees and trampling one of them. 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour, to death.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

I know people are looking for bargains during their Christmas shopping, but this is taking saving on their purchases to a new low. It is depraved behavior.

I wonder how many kids would want their Christmas presents if they knew their parents actually killed someone to get it?

Why does this not surprise me?

The average American citizen flunked a civics test given by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. What could be worse than that? Our politicians, the ones running our country, did even worse.

How can the average American or our politicians be trusted with preserving our nation, our rights, if they don't even know what either entails?

This is the worst part for me:

The question that received the fewest correct responses, just 16 percent, tested respondents' basic understanding of economic principles, asking why "free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning?"

I blame the universities and the public schools. I mean, Marxist economic theory is routinely taught in classes but naming an economic institute after Nobel Prize winner Milt Friedman? Well now that's controversial.

That's scary, to think that the folks making the decisions in Washington DC and our state capitols have a poor understanding of history or basic economic concepts. No wonder we're in the mess we're faced with. The boobs in Congress went against basic economic principals and in the process screwed up the economy. Such are the wages of ignorance.

If you want to test yourself, the test can be found here.

In case you're wondering, I passed the test with a score of 33 correct out of 33, or 100%. I give credit to my parents and the public schools I attended (well before the disease that started afflicting them took root in the 1970's).