Quote of the Day

I'm still not here. However, Mark Steyn's latest exercise in dot-connecting is just too important to let go without flagging:

If you've ever wished your Third Grade daughter had a better rack, good news!

ABC reports that [Abercrombie &Fitch] has a new line of bikinis for preadolescents that feature padded, “push-up” bikini tops for girls as young as eight years old.

The Pundette calls this "the sexualization of childhood". But it's worse than that: it's the abolition of childhood, and the mass conscription of the young for a hideous social engineering project. From the United Kingdom:

Children as young as 11 could soon be asked about their sexuality without their parents’ consent, it has emerged.

Teachers, nurses and youth workers are being urged to set up pilot studies aimed at monitoring adolescent sexual orientation for the first time.

A report commissioned by the Government’s equalities watchdog found that it was ‘practically and ethically’ possible to interview young children about their sexuality.

Wonderful! So we'll be available to identify any Third Grade boys thinking about a sex change and issue them with Abercrombie & Fitch push-up bras. A state commissar hectoring grade schoolers into approved orientations isn't merely "the sexualization of childhood" but the totalitarianization of childhood.

In a way, this is part of the same story as Libya, and I'm not so sure that in the long run it isn't the more important part. Islam will readily acknowledge our technological superiority: If you want to operate a no-fly zone over Benghazi or send an unmanned drone into Waziristan, we have the capability and they don't. The difference is that Islam thinks our technological superiority doesn't matter - because we're unmanned drones in a more basic sense: we believe in nothing except the most transitory and dreary self-gratification, an endless adolescence that begins with a push-up bra at eight and continues through free government condoms for 30-year olds. Not only do the surging Muslim populations in European cities have no wish to "assimilate" with such a culture, they do not believe they will have to - for they have bet that such a society cannot survive.

Yuppers.