In another milestone in the United Nations’ march toward a finer, freer world, the world body has “elected” Iran to a seat on its Commission on the Status of Women. Here’s the story from FOX News.

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Let’s pause for a moment to savor the bittersweet irony of this.

It’s a classic U.N. Compromise – “We have something for everyone! For liberals, we have enthusiastic support for abortion on demand. For conservatives, we have the stoning of women. Everybody should be happy!”

It’s hard to make anything like meaningful statements about “world opinion” and “international sentiment” (which is one of the basic problems at the core of the whole U.N. enterprise), but it seems to me a lot of the world (especially Europe) is counting on perpetual Islamic hatred for the United States to keep them out of the terrorists’ sights.

But this won’t last forever. Eventually, either because America has stood firm and scared the jihadists off, or because it has succumbed to dhimmitude, Islam will turn its eyes on the rest of the non-Muslim world (or, as it’s called in the Koran, “The House of War”).

And then, “the world community” will either have to man up and defend what they think of as their values, or say goodbye to their sexual experimentation, “gay” rights, feminism, and secularism.

It occurs to me that I probably ought not to worry as much as I do about the advances of social liberalism in America. They will almost certainly be stopped in time, either by a resurgence of Christianity in this country, or by the substitution of Shariah.

Tip: Townhall.com blog.

Disney to buy Greece for $120 billion – Alice Schroeder writes a column she anticipates being published in eight months:

Morgan Stanley topped 2010 global debt-and-equity league tables and broke banking records by representing Walt Disney Co. in its $120 billion acquisition of Greece.

… Already under construction are Space Mountain Olympus, the Pirates of the Aegean water theme park covering hundreds of nautical miles, the Little Mermaid Harpoon thrill ride, and “Trojan,” a multimedia adventure that the company reassured shareholders yesterday will not be adult-themed. . . . The market was filled yesterday with speculation about similar deals, including reports that Diageo Plc is in discussions with Ireland, Spain and Portugal, three countries known for their alcohol production and consumption.

Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant will portray Claudius and Hamlet in a BBC production of Shakespeare’s play to be shown on PBS’ Great Performances tomorrow night and online afterward. Watch a trailer for it on the Great Performances site.

Photo credit: Getty Images.

I’m not much use today, I’m afraid. A drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk. Slogged my way through work, and then drove home knowing I ought to mow the lawn, but pretty sure (I was correct) that I didn’t have the energy to do it.

I woke up last night a little before 3:00 a.m., to the sound of someone pounding on a door. I’m not sure it wasn’t my door, but in any case it’d stopped by the time my head was clear. I pulled on some clothes and went out and looked around, but saw no sign of either Paul Revere or the Angel of Death. So back to bed, and insomnia (as is my wont when my sleep’s disturbed in any way at all). Got up again. Checked email and Facebook. Finally grew tired again and managed a couple hours more sleep before the alarm went off.

So instead, just a link to Mitch Berg at Shot In the Dark, who came out with this gem today:

Our father in heaven:

In the past year you took away my favorite b-list cheesecake actress, Britney Murphy. You took away my favorite libertarian-conservative columnist, William Safire. And you took away the inventor of one of my favorite guitars, Les Paul.

I just want you to know that Barack Obama is…

…still the worst president of my lifetime. Don’t take him…

Read the rest here.

Miley Cyrus is coming to grips with life in the 21st century. She has stopped tweeting and uses the web less often than she used to. “I’m a lot less on my phone, I’m a little bit more social,” she says. “I have a lot more real friends as opposed to friends who are on the Internet who I’m talking to — which is like not cool, not safe, not fun and most likely not real. I think everything is just better when you’re not so wrapped up in [the Internet].”

Of course, she doesn’t read BwB, so that part of her life (that very small part) is malnourished.

Hey, Lars! We’ve been nominated for an award in the 4th Annual Cannonball Catholic Blog Awards. We’re in the category: “Best Blog by a Heretic.” I’m not joking, and I hope we stomp our competition.

In celebration of this nomination, I offer this video of one of my favorite songs–favorite being a loosely defined word that could mean anything.

I have been busy this week and will be next week as well, so my blogging (and pre-blogging, prep-blogging, post-blogging, and linking) will continue to be light and even lite. But at the moment, I am putting folding clothes, so here’s a link to a post on amusement over out of context Bible verses on t-shirts.

One of the best out of context verses I’ve heard was a missions conference banner reading, “All this I will give you – Matt. 4:9.” The person telling the story said he couldn’t recall a missions context in Matthew 4, and if you don’t remember that reference either, I’ll tell you it’s a quote from the devil when he said he would give Jesus the world if he would worship him. I can only assume a biblical illiterate used a program to search for a few words and ran with the best ones.

Freedom isn’t free.

The problem is that most high quality content found on the internet (music, video games, stories, illustrations, etc.) costs significantly more money to create than it is making on-line. There is a huge gap between the cost of production and the price of consumption. Some organizations, such as the New York Times or the makers of the game Spore, complain about this gap and seek to correct it. When they do, they are endlessly mocked on blogs and many consumers refuse to pay up. This results in such organizations either backing down or finding themselves with far fewer customers. In either case, the degradation of content continues, professional people are laid off, and the public gets more and more Beyoncé mashups to feast on.

Fr. Thomas McKenzie offers suggestions for Christians using digital content.

I should have known this: today is the 70th anniversary of the attack by Germany on Norway and Denmark, in 1940.

Mitch Berg (who, I’m embarrassed to admit, knows the subject far better than I) tells the story here.

Norway thus became the only country conquered by Hitler to never surrender to the Nazis. Haakon, leading Norway’s legitimate government (no country ever recognized, even by the dubious standards of world diplomacy, Vidkun Quisling’s puppet regime) at the head of over 20,000 troops in exile, 50,000 troops in the underground, and the 22,000 men and hundreds of ships of Norway’s merchant marine.

Bill O’Reilly gives us his favorite obscure words, so you can call someone a nebbish pettifogger, if you like. Isn’t pecksniffian a Dickens’ word?