The Guardian is reporting that Britain is suffering from an epidemic of female genital mutilation (FMG) as they predict that up to 2000 young Muslim girls will be “cut” this summer alone.

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

Then the girls will return to their schools and try to get on with their lives, scarred mentally and physically by female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that serves as a social and cultural bonding exercise and, among those who are stitched up, to ensure that chastity can be proved to a future husband.

Unfortunately, The Guardian – in an especially hackneyed and pathetic way – ascribes this practice to a generally vague notion of social “conformance,” inferring that this extreme form of misogynistic violence could occur in any English home to any English family, much like being randomly selected for rationing by the National Health Service. It’s left up to the racist, intolerant, Islamophobic reader to determine that this “procedure” is in fact performed in “conformance” to Islamic tradition (The Guardian can’t have anything interfere with their precious golden calf of diversity and multiculturalism, don’t you know).

Islam is notorious for both its emphasis on sexuality as per the strenuous exertions in that regard by the Prophet Muhammad himself while schizophrenically suppressing sexuality through a number of bizarre traditions and fatwas. For example, it’s acceptable for a man to commit bestiality in order to prevent “fornication” with a woman, but if the abused animal is later slaughtered for market, its meat can’t be sold locally, though selling it in neighboring villages is permitted.

Female genital mutilation, especially when the vagina is partially sewn shut, is a particularly barbaric procedure that is designed to enhance the male’s sexual pleasure while, of course, eliminating any reciprocal feelings of sexual pleasure for the woman. The Guardian, noted for its nuance and tolerance, dismissed any possibility that the noble Religion of Peace ™ – with its burqas, stoning of women for simply being accused of adultery, honor killings of women for “apostasy” (usually for converting to Christianity) or for not remaining a chaste and humble Muslim, etc. – could even be associated with such a brutal practice. In fact, The Guardian achieves such duplicity by utilizing the standard straw-man of relativity among the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths:

Cleanliness, neatness of appearance and the increased sexual pleasure for the man are all motivations for the practice. But the desire to conform to tradition is the most powerful motive. The rite of passage, condemned by many Islamic scholars, predates both the Koran and the Bible and possibly even Judaism, appearing in the 2nd century BC.

Although unable to give consent, many girls are compliant when they have the procedure carried out, believing they will be outcasts if they are not cut. The mothers believe they are doing the best for their daughters. Few have any idea of the lifetime of hurt it can involve or the medical implications.

And just in case you remain skeptical that FGM isn’t an Islamic tradition, Asha-Kin Duale will set you straight:

Asha-Kin Duale is a community partnership adviser in Camden, London. She talks to schools and to families about safeguarding children. “Culture has positive and negative issues for every immigrant community. We value some traditions, and most are largely good.

“FGM is not confined to African countries. It has no basis in Christianity, it has no basis in Islam; none of Muhammad’s daughters had it done. For some parents it is enough to let them know that and they will drop it completely. Everyone needs to understand that every child, no matter what the background or creed, is protected by this law in this land.”

Fortunately, these young girls live in Britain and not some stone-age Islamic hamlet, as the British government, under Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, is not only shouting “You are protected by this law in this land!” But is springing into impassioned, aggressive, and concerted action to stop this horrendous practice!

The coalition government is to put the fashion industry under pressure to stop promoting unrealistic body images and clamp down on airbrushed photographs in magazines and adverts…Lynne Featherstone, the Equalities Minister, who has long campaigned against size-zero photoshoots, will convene a series of discussions this autumn with the fashion industry, including magazine editors and advertising executives, to discuss how to promote body confidence among young people. The first will focus on airbrushing, which Featherstone argues is contributing to “the dreadful pressure that young people, girls and women come under to conform to completely unachievable body stereotypes”.

Wait. Maybe I need to hit a “reset” button or something, but why isn’t she talking about FGM? I thought the British government was going to focus on the real emotional, psychological, and physical trauma a primitive, dark age religion’s “promotion” of “unrealistic body images” is genuinely causing Muslim women, leading many to submissively wear burqas and undergo genital mutilation. Not the hurt feelings of some London teenager who doesn’t think it’s fair that she has a muffin top in tight jeans.

She will push for a Kitemark or health warning on airbrushed photographs, warning viewers that they are not real. “I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing, so they don’t fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone can have a 12in waist. It is so not possible,” she told the Sunday Times…

“All women have felt that pressure of having to conform to an unrealistic stereotype, which plagues them their whole life. It is not just the immediate harm; it is something that lasts a lifetime. Young girls are under intense pressure the whole time,” she said, adding: “I was a young girl many moons ago.”

Really? Well, I’ll bet she also didn’t get “cut” those “many moons ago” either. Rather than focusing on reality, the British government is instead focusing on fantasy. While 2000 young girls will be physically disfigured and emotionally traumatized for life, the appropriately named bureaucratic lightweight Lynne Featherstone is instead concerned about whether a girl is trying too hard to look like an airbrushed supermodel’s magazine photograph. Instead of their quixotic tilting at the fashion industry’s airbrushed windmills, the British government could actually be doing something both pro-active and positive in preventing real childhood abuse – with its attendant, life-long trauma – from ever occurring in the first place. A good start would be for the government to place Kitemarks and health warnings against FGM outside all of Britain’s mosques and madrassas.

But what would be even better is for Britain’s multicultural fetish to be discarded on the ash-heap of history where it belongs because if immigrants were conforming to British cultural norms rather than Islamic ones, this would be a non-issue. But don’t fret as Britannia still rules the waves somewhat as Jason Morgan, of the London Metropolitan Police Department’s “Project Azure” FGM Unit says “empowering youth” is the solution. But since most of these crimes occur when the girl is young, it becomes more of a case of “overpowered youth” rather than “unempowered” ones that is the problem. As Britain is proving, when a society loses its self-confidence and relativizes itself to every other culture, no one is “empowered.” Sadly, even more young Muslim girls will be “cut” before Britain, if it ever does, finally snaps out of its long descent into night.

With apologies to Crossfit and their Workout of the Day (WOD)…

I humbly present to you…(drum roll):

The Word of the Day (WOD)…(rim shot)

That’s right children, here at The Dialectical Playa, I like to imagine myself as a poor man’s, ultra-lite version of Mark Steyn’s “One-man Global Content Provider.” In my case, it’s more like that annoying Dude-in-the-bar-at-2am-who-won’t-shut-the-hell-up Content Provider. Regardless, I press on. While I put the finishing touches on quite possibly the greatest blog-post evah, I have deigned to leave my Olympus and mingle among you unworthy plebes, granting you just a glimpse of the brilliance that will soon overwhelm you with this, my humble WOD. This is kind of like the quest for fire, but I’ve decided to just give it to you out of my Promethean sense of duty and love for you losers so you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to discover it. That way, you won’t be distracted by unimportant things like trying to figure out what the hell I’m saying and you’ll give me the attention that I deserve. So…

Popularized by la latina sabia Sonia Sotomayor, the term latina/latino is actually a misnomer. I work with a guy who likes to imagine us (I’m of Hispanic descent) as latinos though his Spanish is labored and very unfluentish. As for me, the only thing I’m fluent in is profanity. Even if I was down with the whole La Raza thing, I wouldn’t even speak the same lingo as my “brown brother” as my “latino” ass would be speaking Portuguese rather than Spanish since my heritage on my mother’s side is Brazilian.

To add to the overall level of multi-racial confusion at my job, my fellow proletarian and I are actually whitey white. His parents are Puerto Rican, but they are obviously pure-blooded Spaniards. While my mom is Brazilian, she is very Portuguese looking – as am I – though I inherited my Anglo-Saxon dad’s height as I’m 6’1″. When I visited the Portuguese Azores in the early 1990s on your tax dollars, everyone there looked like my mini-me since the older generation of Portuguese are hairy and short like Hobbits. Even the women looked like me, except with thicker mustaches and back hair.

Where the common misperception of the word occurs is in its limitation to only Third World, Spanish speaking people who look like Mexicans. For one thing, most Mexicans are actually Mestizo (descendants of European and Amerindian ancestry though predominately Amerindian in appearance) and Amerindian (who are descendants of Amerindians and are, uh, predominately Amerindian looking). If one is intellectually honest, latina/o actually refers to the Latin culture of Rome, which was spread by their empire throughout the Mediterranean and Balkan areas of modern day Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Romania; leaving an indelible legacy on those nations in regards to their respective cultures and languages.

Through Spanish conquest and colonialism, the language and culture of Rome was bestowed upon the subjugated peoples of Central and South America. In fact, one could argue that such an occurrence happened with Anglo-Saxon England due to the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans were originally Scandinavian Norsemen led by the Viking chieftain Rollo and were bought off from raiding Paris by the French King Charles the Simple through the payment of coastal land at the mouth of the Seine River in 911 A.D.

This territory eventually became known as Normandy, with the Viking “settlers” known as Normans (a corruption of Norsemen). By William the Bastard’s era, any vestiges of Scandinavian culture had been subsumed by the area’s more dominant French culture, with the consequence that the Norse language of William’s ancestors had become replaced by the French of William’s contemporaries. One legacy of his English conquest was that he changed his name from the unflattering William the Bastard to the more suitable and grandiloquent William the Conqueror. The other legacy was the influx of Latin words via French into Old English, with the result that we use such Latin words as “attorney,” “bailiff,” “chancellor,” “baron,” “count,” “duke,” “army,” “artillery,” and “battle,” among many, many others. So all Americans can actually claim with the utmost sincerity that we’re all latinos and latinas now! Open borders with Mexico! Viva la open border! Woohoo!!! Or as they say in Spanish, “Woohoo!!!”

So why wouldn’t Nicholas Sarkozy say that he’s a “wise latino?” Probably because he’d rather be embroiled in a typical, French non-scandal given life by France’s typically scandalous Socialists. Personally, all this self-hyphenating racial identifying can be tedious and disturbing. I mean, no one wants to be white anymore, and much to my chagrin, I’ve discovered that I’m white. Wow, Obama and I have something in common after all.

There’s been some serious self-introspection by both elites and wanna-bes over Europe’s growing burqa ban. The usual argument against the ban runs something like this: It’s a violation of both religious freedom and civil liberties. Oh, kind of like banning pedophiles from serving as priests so they can’t molest alter boys? While we worry about “alienating” or “radicalizing” Muslims over banning these cotton prisons, Muslims throughout the world are killing and oppressing non-Muslims. How about this, if they let Christians build a church in Mecca, then we’ll let Muslims build minarets in Switzerland. If Islam allows Muslims to convert to Christianity without penalty of death, then we can allow “modest” Muslim women to wear this abomination. Personally, just like purging the Catholic Church of pedophiles, I think the burqa ban is merely a good start.

Part of the problem is that most people in the West – influenced by their intellectual class’ Marxism, self-loathing, and post-colonial guilt – become somewhat self-righteous and pretentious themselves in regards to “accepting” different cultures. It’s axiomatic in nations founded predominately by immigrants, such as the United States, that assimilation is gradual and inevitable. But what happens when assimilation never occurs due to the resistance exhibited by militantly unassimilable cultures such as Islam, especially when such resistance is justified by liberal multiculturalism?

This multicultural “tolerance” willfully ignores the fact that in Islam’s growing confrontation with the West, EVERYTHING is a political declaration and manifesto because unlike Christianity, Islam is inherently political. There is no separation between State and Mosque as there is between Church and State; and every “successful” Islamic state imposes upon its citizens some form of sharia, to the detriment of everyone living in that country. For Islam in its desire to literally conquer the West, the burqa is less a garment of “modesty and humility” and more a political and religious statement: A statement of hatred for the “other,” a statement of cultural exclusion, and a statement of Islamic exceptionalism in the form of jihadi couture. The idea that the burqa represents anything remotely “civil,” “libertarian,” or “free” is risible. Rather the burqa is the outward manifestation of a totalitarian religious-political-economic-cultural system that seeks to subordinate all other systems to it.

Also, the belief that we need to “desperately” acculturate Muslims is insulting to those non-Muslims, including my mother who immigrated to America from Brazil in 1970, who have never had a problem with assimilating into American culture. The problem isn’t America, the problem is Islam. What we “desperately” need to do instead is limit Islamic immigration and de-Islamify those who wish to remain in the West as assimilating Muslims necessarily requires that they no longer be Muslim. It is impossible for Muslims to not be violent, misogynistic, intolerant, imperialistic, homophobic, etc. because that is the innate nature of Islam, which has qualitatively and quantifiably manifested those characteristics over the entire span of its 1400 year history. The problem with banning burqas and minarets is not the “danger” of “antagonizing” and “alienating” Muslims, but in dhimmiing them into…what? Socialists? Democrats? Republicans? Free Market Capitalists?

Both Europe’s existential crisis and its civilizational clash with Islam has proven that the left’s shibboleths of secularism and multiculturalism are absurd intellectual fantasies. And unless Europe re-connects with its Christian heritage and tradition, re-discovers its Enlightenment principles of governing, and continues to intensify its pressure on Muslims to either emigrate or assimilate by resolutely implementing its own form of sharia-based discrimination against Muslims – i.e. by classifying them as third-class citizens, requiring them to wear specific clothing and colors, dictating specific size and height limitations on mosques, imposing an onerous jizya for remaining Muslim, applying political and economic disenfranchisement, etc. – then the entire attempt will go nowhere.

Man is a complex being and finds his greatest happiness when all the various spheres that comprise his existence – spiritual, physical, intellectual, emotional, etc. – are in harmony and balance. Even now, such militant anti-theists as Dawkins and Hitchens acknowledge that there is something in man – a genetic code even – that practically compels him to “have religion.” For them, it’s Darwinism; for me, it’s Orthodoxy; for others, it’s Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Fascism, Islam, or some other political ersatz-religion.

An ideology so malignant, aggressive, pathologically violent, and intolerant that it can inspire 19 men to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and then, with $100 million dollars of Saudi funding, demand to build a mega-mosque and Islamic Center complex practically at Ground Zero in an imperialistic statement of subjugation can only be dealt with as it has dealt with others. Banning burqas and burkhinis is only a start.

From the “Partial Terms of Endearment” episode of Family Guy:

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

There’s no funnier topic than abortion. In fact, earlier this morning I fell onto the floor unconscious after laughing myself into a state of self-induced, auto-comedic asphyxiation just thinking about it. And partial birth abortions, don’t get me started! Hysterical! So what do you get when you add such an entertaining – dare I say whimsical – topic to poor animation and a heavy dose of liberal sanctimoniousness, condescension, and elitism? Why, you get the Family Guy’s “Partial Terms of Endearment” episode! Yes children, I admit that The Playa is jaded, cynical, and even embittered, but I’m proud to be an American whenever an animated program’s visionary creator – or even it’s writer and producer – shows courage and nuance in discussing an uncomfortable topic…like, for example, Santa Claus:

Mr. Smith [a veteran “Family Guy” writer and producer], who describes himself as “a recovering Catholic,” said the [abortion episode] script was not especially contentious when it was revised by the show’s mostly male writing staff. “We’ve had more spirited debates about whether or not we should state whether Santa Claus is real,” Mr. Smith said.

And there are so many other artistically inspirational mines that are begging to be explored for their comedic ore! Maybe one day, Seth MacFarlane, the Family Guy’s creator, will produce a show discussing such inherently humorous topics as concentration camps, turning old people into soap, making cosmetics out of babies, and people jumping to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center! That’s some funny stuff! But until those deliriously funny episodes are produced, we will always have the Family Guy’s “Partial Terms of Endearment” episode.

The New York Times lamented the fact that Fox, which carries the show, refused to air the episode in the United States, choosing instead to air it in more enlightened Britain. Fortunately – despite the best efforts of George W. Bush and his nefarious Patriot Act…curse him! – Fox will release it on home video this September. Mr. MacFarlane was philosophical about Fox’s fascistic attempt to stifle his progressive creativity through censorship.

“Times really have changed,” said Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy.” “The network is making a decision that is, unfortunately, probably based on people’s current ability to handle and dissect controversial narratives.”

That’s right losers, he’s talking about you. You stupid, “average” people just can’t fathom the complexity of his thought or comprehend the exquisitely variegated, paradigm-altering streams of consciousness emanating from his subtle, yet sublime, being. Hell, you clowns can’t even figure out how to work the self-checkout at Wal-mart much less comprehend the arcana of something as contextual and subjective as abortion. MacFarlane then takes the ippon by throwing you to the mat with a righteous verbal uchimata as he criticizes you for voting “Yes We Can” in 2008.

“People in America, they’re getting dumber,” Mr. MacFarlane said. “They’re getting less and less able to analyze something and think critically, and pick apart the underlying elements. And more and more ready to make a snap judgment regarding something at face value, which is too bad.”

Wait, he wasn’t talking about America’s collective suspension of reason in order to vote for Obama! He was talking about your inability to make the personal, political! Wow, that’s like a double standard or something! So since I don’t find abortion funny, and since I find it immoral and socially destructive, and since – in extending this argument to its most logical conclusion – I won’t find MacFarlane’s abortion episode to be – as The New York Times did – “audacious” or “rebellious,” then I must be part of the America that he determines is “getting dumber.”

So while MacFarlane is no doubt the kind of iconoclastic, liberal zealot who indignantly demands that government stays out of a woman’s womb; through his support of ObamaCare, the womb will be the only part of a woman the government won’t be in. How times change, in 1920, progressives passed Women’s Suffrage; by 2020 – if ObamaCare isn’t repealed – progressives will just let women suffer. And while MacFarlane advocates killing off future American taxpayers and potential Family Guy viewers, he’ll have to modify his program’s language format to Español in order to appeal to the Mexicans who are coming here to not only do the work Americans won’t do, but to become Americans because there won’t be enough Americans having babies to do that either. Plus, good-luck enjoying all those Nanny State freebies when there’s no one here to pay for them. So who’s really the person “getting dumber?”

Funny how that works, isn’t it.

The Olympian Christopher Hitchens is not a charming god. Often in debates, where magnanimous and graceful temperaments are required, Hitchens comes across less as an insightful and gracious Jove and more as a sneeringly condescending, irascible, contemptuous, and bored, if not entirely disinterested, Hera. But oftentimes, this perception is dependent upon whether you agree or disagree with his argument. While this aspect of his personality may be grating for some, in my opinion these bourgeois manners are inconsequential as I’m often accused of exhibiting the same defects. Rather for me, what equates to psychological waterboarding is Hitchens’ Trotskyism…or what’s left of it. No other man in the communist pantheon was more barbaric or more of an ideologue than Lev Trotsky (even Stalin tacitly accepted Lenin’s NEP – his rudimentary form of capitalism). And it’s precisely because of Trotsky’s sanguinary dogmatism that I find it so ironic that Hitchens, who considers the “violence and superstition” of religion intellectually and morally repulsive, would nonetheless find Trotsky to be a chap worth admiring. If we acquiesce to Hitchens’ demand to make reason and critical thinking our only benchmarks for life, then what sounds more logical: the Biblical account of man’s creation:

Genesis 1:26-28

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that moves on the earth.” So God made man; in the image of God He made them. Then God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds in heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

or Trotsky’s “new man” as created by Communism?

Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest…He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction, and within the necessary limits, subordinate them to the control of reason and will…The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and become in his own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychological training…Man will make it his goal…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will…Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious…The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.

To further emphasize this dichotomy, Christ taught forgiveness and mercy while Hitchens’ beloved Trotsky was merciless in his desire to destroy the “class enemy” and reveled in “revolutionary violence” for its socially transformative qualities.

In less than a month, this terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter.

In several previous posts (The Libertine, Part 1,The Libertine, Part 2), I’ve eviscerated Hitchens for his virulent anti-theism and his irreconcilable contradictions: one moment he’s Man’s Prometheus, freeing us from fear and ignorance by proclaiming that not only is God dead, but that He never existed to begin with; while in the next moment he’s God’s most ardent defender as he defends Malaysia’s Christians from the Muslims. Obviously he has a penchant for wanting it both ways and apparently found it with his “scandalous” tryst with two male classmates at Oxford, the “mildly enjoyable relapse” he wrote about in his book, Hitch 22. Because of Hitchens’ success in making anti-theism fashionable among the dilettantes and intellectual solons of Western society, it’s now become axiomatic for leftists to proudly proclaim their atheism as a distinction that merits our adulation and a testament to their transcendent powers of reason, much like Australia’s new Labour Prime Minister has done. Yet their shibboleth of science is also inadequate as it fails to provide either a moral code for life, a reason for altruism, or to answer many of our most profound existential questions. In fact, science still has never been able to advance Darwinism beyond theory and yet leftists ironically present it as a complete, dare I say it, religion.

While I haven’t come to praise Christopher Hitchens, I certainly haven’t come to bury him either. Even though Hitchens insists that God is a crutch people invent in order to feel a love they are undeserving of, the dialectical playa has nothing but love for Mr. Hitchens and he is in my prayers as he undergoes chemotherapy for esophageal cancer. Since I know Mr. Hitchens wouldn’t approve of my requests for divine intervention, I’ll also sip on a tumbler of Balvenie 12 and – in honor of Hitchens – I’ll drink it neat. Here’s to you, Ole Boy.

The God Debate – Rabbi David Wolpe vs Christopher Hitchens (Parts 1-9):

Berwick’s supporters say he is the right man in the right place at the right time. But his opponents have lined up against him. They say that while he may be a the highly respected doctor, he is also an outspoken proponent of the British health care system, which they say is all wrong for Americans.

“This recess appointment is an insult to the American people,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Tuesday night. “Dr. Berwick is a self-professed supporter of rationing health care, and he won’t even have to explain his views to the American people in a Congressional hearing.”

Click here for story.

Maybe the rationale behind Dr. Berwick’s appointment is that people will be more amenable to putting down their grandparents or killing their babies if the order comes from a doctor. I know the fact that he was a doctor made Dr. Mengele’s victims feel a lot better. Aside from the parallels Democratic health care has with Nazi eugenics and concentration camp experiments, it’s no stretch of the imagination to believe that what Obama really wants the American health care system to emulate from the lauded British model is its insolvency. This achievement would be the proverbial “win-win” for Obama as the collapse of American hospitals and clinics nationwide would satisfy his desire of sticking-it to Whitey AND pay off his supporters in Big Porn by providing them with affordable sets for their big-budget productions. Maybe the Democrats could ram through a health care addendum to ObamaCare ™ making it mandatory for hospitals to grant porn studios preferential access over patients to entire wards and emergency rooms since they – unlike patients – are not only sources of substantial revenue but, more importantly, are sources of pure profit. This is already happening in England, where a financially struggling hospital rented out one of its wards to a pornographic film company in order to receive a “substantial income.”

A “big budget” pornographic movie was shot in a London hospital that hired out one of its wards to a film company, AFP reported Tuesday citing information from a lawmaker.

The X-rated film generated “substantial income” for the hospital, Conservative member of parliament Penny Mordaunt said Monday during a House of Commons debate on improving transparency in government accounting…

“But apart from cheering up a few of the in-patients, it cannot be said to be contributing to the objectives of the primary care trust.”

Click here for story.

So in the grand scheme of ObamaCare ™, I think Dr. Berwick, since he prostituted himself and the entire medical profession to Obama and the left for free, is an inspired choice as he can now prostitute what’s left of the medical establishment to real pimps and hustlers in exchange for cash and a cameo in the next Naughty Nurses. In Washington D.C., sometimes life really does imitate art.

On the evening of July 3rd, fists were hurled, elbows were thrown, and knees were launched with such ferocity that it will take months to find the remains of the vanquished and clean up the carnage from inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena, the site of UFC 116. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it’s not hyperbole to say that UFC 116 was THE event of the year in MMA thus far and if my reaction to it can be distilled down to only one word, it would be “impressed.” Though he lost, I have to admit that I was quite impressed with Shane Carwin. I was also impressed with lightweight George Sotiropoulos, who defeated Kurt Pellegrino by Unanimous Decision. And I’ve also became a fan of Brock Lesnar as I was impressed by his gracious and humble post-fight press conference.

So what did I learn? I learned that Carwin can definitely compete with the UFC’s most physically imposing fighter. Actually, I was stunned by how completely he dominated Lesnar in the 1st round. I was also astonished to discover that Carwin’s wrestling skills are, at least in an MMA setting, commensurable to Lesnar’s as he was able to successfully counter several of Lesnar’s takedown attempts. I was also impressed by Carwin’s athleticism – especially considering his size – as it was during one of those attempted takedowns that Carwin effortlessly transitioned from defense to offense in order to give Lesnar a departing shot with a Muay Thai knee strike. And finally, I found it somewhat astounding that Carwin’s sprawl was as effective as it was in countering Lesnar’s attempts to shoot-in as I had predicted that Lesnar would takedown Carwin “with impunity.”

None of these positives, however, could mitigate Carwin’s biggest negative: his over-aggressiveness. This tendency, along with the technical and strategic disadvantages of lacking submissions, is a wrestler’s greatest liability because it negates the discipline and patience needed against an opponent like Lesnar. Hence Carwin’s desire to end the fight in the first round rather than wearing Lesnar down over a period of time ultimately cost him the belt. So will Carwin always be in Lesnar’s shadow? Not if he follows Lesnar’s lead and continuously improves as a fighter. That means he needs to improve the technical aspects of his game: He needs to be more disciplined with his striking and he needs to learn submissions. He also needs to learn patience and to fight within himself. If he had pursued Couture’s original strategy of attrition, I believe Carwin would have won.

As for Lesnar, he has become one of the most fascinating and intriguing men in mixed martial arts. He survived a bludgeoning from Carwin in the first round and patiently executed his strategy on an obviously fatigued Carwin in the second round and I believe that it was this patience  – and Lesnar’s ability to take punishment – that gave Lesnar the victory. Lesnar also impressed me by submitting Carwin via arm triangle choke, which demonstrated that Lesnar is becoming serious about developing a submission ground game. Personally, Lesnar earned my respect by the way he overcame his health issues and the emotional trauma and doubt that such adversity usually creates and maybe it was because of this experience that the “new” Lesnar is so appealing to me as his post-fight presser was refreshing for its lack of braggadocio and venom.

Next up for Lesnar will be Cain Velazquez, who possesses far better skills than Carwin, but lacks Carwin’s size and power; meanwhile Carwin will probably fight the winner of the Roy Nelson-Junior dos Santos fight or maybe Ben Rothwell prior to a rematch with Lesnar.