"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance."

Goethe said that about 200 years ago, and few truer words have been spoken since.

A couple of news items lately have me contemplating the wisdom of Goethe, shaking my head at how little we've learned since his day, and quaking in my boots at the great potential for disaster modern day pinheaded idiots are working so hard to achieve.

Let's start off in Shiloh, Illinois, shall we? Where some parents are bouncing off the walls over a children's book about penguins.

A true story about Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo who took on the duties of hatching out an abandoned egg, and were eventually given one that could actually hatch.

(Chinstrap penguins, by the way, are called chinstrap penguins because of a black marking that looks like, well, a chin strap. The name has nothing to do with leather fetishes or a propensity for straps of any kind. As far as I've been able to establish, no documented cases of sadomasochism in penguins have ever been found.)

In the book, as in real life, Roy and Silo end up raising Tango, a fluffy little female chick, until she is ready to move along, leaving them with a bad case of empty nest syndrome.

So? You may well ask.

Roy and Silo are both male penguins. Shock. Horror.

Parents want the book, called "And Tango Makes Three" banned because they say it, "deals with homosexuality."

(For anyone who spends way too much time thinking about how others have sex and condemning ... you'll be happy to know that Roy and Silo broke up, and for a brief time Roy had a relationship with a female penguin.

I have no more information on Silo, but I'm assuming he was devastated in ways only a penguin can be.)

And here's another group of moronic moms and dumb dads.

These folks have older kids, high school in fact, kids at an age when the brain is supposed to be functioning pretty much on its own, since adulthood is only a short time away.

Thinking, however, is not something these parents in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, have in mind (Yes, I know ... thinking / in mind ... whatever.), neither for themselves or anywhere in the future of their kids.

The book they want banned from their schools is Maya Angelou's, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

The parents who objected to their little darling having to read a true account of Ms. Angelou's very difficult life where offered an alternative, but this wasn't good enough. They're demanding the book be removed from the curriculum, therefore making certain none of the kids will think about it.

Continued ...