When it comes to riots, Muslims certainly know how to do it up right. As Muslims torched embassies over the weekend, the crowds resembled nothing so much as the draft-card incendiaries and bra-burners of the 1960’s. There’s a good reason for that.

While many commentators are discussing the similarities between the most recent Muslim unrest and the 1938 Kristallnacht event, there are other connections that are at least as important. In order to see what is going on now, we have to remember what happened then.

As most people know, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has long been a hot-bed of support for intelligent design theory. Take for example, their biology department. The entire staff of the biology department insists, and has insisted for quite some time, that what we see happening in the world is not natural, rather, it is the result of actions taken by an intelligence not properly part of nature or the natural world.

Similarly, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is a strong supporter of intelligent design theory. Just one year ago, on February 19, 2005, the AAAS released a report that insisted supernatural phenomena were having long-term, serious impacts on the world we inhabit.

I recently sent my new book, Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, to EWTN for a possible inclusion on Doug Kecks' BookMarks program.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've never actually watched any EWTN program, nor have I heard more than a literal handful of their radio shows. We don't own a television, and the radio - when it is on - is generally tuned to classical music. Still, many Catholics swear by EWTN, so it is a useful place to make a Catholic offering known.

Now, Designed to Fail has been very well-received by reviewers, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the book had been turned down for theological reasons.

“Let’s have a child!"

“How are we going to do that, big man? I got spayed and you got neutered long before we got married, remember? We would have to get the operations reversed, and reversals aren’t always successful. Besides, you know I don’t have the time to deal with doctor’s appointments, labor, delivery, recovery and all the rest. The merger is coming up in the next year, and it’s my job to get it done!”

“Don’t worry about the pregnancy. We could get Sally to carry the child for us. She would be a great surrogate mother. She’s always exercising, she eats right and she loves being pregnant. Besides, you still ovulate. We could harvest your eggs.”

The National Center for Men have finally gone and done it. For over a decade, they have been looking for a test case to overthrow the child support laws in every one of the 50 states. Now they think they have found it.

A man who was deceived by his girlfriend conceived a blob of tissue/fetus/child (depending on your point of view) and is now being compelled to pay child support. He’s arguing compulsory child support violates the equal protection clause. If you want to see the strength of the case, consider the argument:

The Associated Press is taking great pains to support Dan Brown in his defense against the copyright infringement lawsuit leveled against him by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

The very well-named Jill Lawless, the AP reporter who brings us the story, tells us the suit is for copyright infringement, but doesn’t tell us why this is important. She reports on Brown’s testimony in part by saying the “courtroom [was] packed with journalists, religious skeptics and fans” – a phrase her editor somehow failed to strike for its inordinate redundancy.

A few months back, the conservative world was in an uproar because the Supreme Court ruled that the state has the right to take any property it wants if that land can be used to generate more revenue for the state. Matt Dubay’s lawsuit, in which he attempts to avoid paying child support on the grounds that he didn’t want a child, has an interesting resonance with that ruling.

Illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. They use up an enormous amount of government-subsidized unemployment and medical coverage. They are lawbreakers. They take our jobs. That’s the image. Is it true? Well, let’s run the numbers.

As Tony Snow recently pointed out, 66 percent of illegal immigrants pay social security, 62 percent pay income taxes. How do they do it? They use false social security numbers. That means illegal aliens are contributing to a system that will never give them back a dime of the money they put in.

The Gospel of Judas, for those not in the know, is a Gnostic Gospel that was discovered about thirty years ago. The MSM has decided to dust it off and make it a centerpiece for the Easter season, since it contains distinctly weird theological statements.

Take the New York Times' discussion as an example of the nuttiness contained therein:

Ignatius Press is upset at my recent observation that Christian apologists in general, and Ignatius Press in particular, have been tilting at windmills in Dan Brown’s famous novel. Specifically, most Christian apologists have been promoting the false idea that Brown’s novel is Gnostic. Carl Olson has attempted to defend Ignatius Press from these charges. http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2006/
ceo_codegnosticism1_apr06.asp  Sadly, he inadvertently demonstrated how Ignatius Press, like so many others, have scotoma. As Dan Brown doesn’t point out in the quote above, scotoma is just the Latin word for “blind spot.”