"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." -Sir Charles Napier
Michael, God bless that cotton pickin' fertile ding dang noodle of yours!
I now know that there is a thinking man among us who dares to speak up.
xoxox Pam
BigEarth of New Mexico sez, The warmest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great national moment, reserve their neutrality.
Bill Whittle's mom sez, If you can’t say anything of deep and meaningful scientific or political import that is not supported by fact, reason, historical precedent and in-depth step-by-step logical analysis then don’t say anything at all!
:: Friday, December 31 ::
STINGY, INSENSITIVE GEORGE BUSH AMERICA UPSETS UN BY RAISING RELIEF FUNDS
Except for its failings with the preventable genocide in Rwanda, the stoppable genocide in the Balkans, the stoppable genocide in Darfur, the enforceable 17 Security Council resolutions against Iraq, the changeable theocratic terror that was Afghanistan's Taliban, the removable Ba'athist regime, the damnable Chinese infanticide policy, the proclivity to license reporters via the corrupt UNESCO, the moral responsibility to open its books to audit, the moral responsibility to allow investigators to probe the oil-for-food scandals right up to the Secretary Generals's son, the UN is the only body with the moral authority:
We need a President to call this spade a spade. We need a speech that outright condemns the UN as worthless and asked to leave. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Chuck Lichenstein, and Jesse Helms had the stones to condemn it - who will be next?
Again, this is where the press fails to inform the public. Presidents are still Presidents even when out of Washington. There is more than the PDB, the Public Daily Briefing; the job is on, the job which includes leading the global war against terrorists. And what exactly do they think Bush is supposed to do while they continue to fail to report on the massive foreign aid America gives regularly?
What they want is what they praised Kerry for: words. Imagine a President Kerry right now, in his wet suit in the Indian Ocean, quoting someone in the UN and blabbering about global warming, while First Lady Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry advises them to run naked and think about food first.
:: michael Wednesday, December 29, 2004 [+] ::
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AGAIN... NO JEW HELP WANTED
I have been waiting for this very headline:
This is actually not an outright rejection for a judenrein relief effort, but the Sri Lankans object to the Israeli military presence accompanying the mission (as if Israel would take their filthy, devasted island). This Sri Lankan rejection recalls the UN rejection of Israeli blood donated for the Palestinians after they started the second Intifada. The UN delayed blood delivery until they could get non-Jew blood from Jordan. It also recalls the pan-Arab rejection of the Israelis' offer to share their knowledge for growing crops in the desert.
Yesterday the UN official calls us "stingy" and sanctimoniously brings up the giving spirit of the Christmas season. Israelis, in the spirit of living, offer to share their survival skills. Necessity, of course, is the mother of Israel's superior survival and disaster relief skills as well as their security, existing here ironically because of the likes of the Sri Lankan mentality.
Remember - The Iranians refused Israeli charity exactly a year ago when they lost the city of Bam to an earthquake.
Remember also- just over a year ago at the Islamic Conference, the then-Malaysian PM got a standing ovation from the representatives of the 57 Islamic nations when he called for arming against the Jews.
Of course you are reading that headline.
:: michael Wednesday, December 29, 2004 [+] ::
...
To clarify, that is the same U.S. which led the liberation of Afghanistan, where people, including previously burkha'd women, just voted for the first time in history. That is the same U.S. that just did the worthless UN Security Council's job for it in Iraq while UN officials corrupted the Oil-for-Food program. That is also the same U.S. whose government-provided foreign aid is charted in part here.
The official, a European, of course, is Jan Egeland, who, in fairness, is on record criticizing the Security Council here. But this actually boils down to his belief that we are undertaxed:
Is this a deliberate ignorance of the bounty from our private charities? A hostility to the genuinely spiritual motivation for our freely religious nation to give? Oddly, Jan (hey - that's a girl's name!) seems to know of the genuinely spiritual motivation for our freely religious nation to give, and seems to unintentionally disqualify the religions of poor nnations in the process:
Are there any leftists in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, India, the Andamans, Bangladesh, Myanmar, or Indonesia who say their countries deserved the tsunami disaster?
Will Islamists rise to power with this kind of nonsense argument? The Maldives may be in that very danger.
I can't find a Pinch Sulzberger at the New Delhi Times, but stay tuned for blame on western indulgence - I found this at Reuters:
Here's what Rumsfeld said Friday: "I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people whobombedthe mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombingin Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shotdown the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cutoff peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be."
This isn't even a complete sentence, but looking at simple subject-verb who-did, he is not saying the US shot the plane down. His sentence was way, way, too long for anyone to understand what he meant to say. Sure, I am open to the shot-down theory of Flight 93 and I do not think that lessens the heroism of Todd Beamer and company. In his example, whether the plane was shot down or not, civilian passengers have since taken action on planes, and that, I believe, has prevented copycat hijack-suicide missions.
Via Joanne Jacobs: A school in Tampa bans rubber bands. She blogs the article without a direct comment of her own, but offers a funny twist.
You may recall ten years ago or more when the Super Soaker water gun was being abused by some to shoot bleach. The liberal solution: ban the water gun rather than ensure severe punishment to deter the crime. The comment /feedback section at the Jacobs blog, however, gets to the ultimate root of the problem. The poster, using the name Allen, offers a solution I think the Chinese would love:
Cripes, all these half-measures. Why not go to the root of the problem? It's all those damned kids. They need somewhere to sit. They need a place get out of the rain. They complain. They've got parents who complain. They need to be taught something. Need, need, need. It just never ends. The solution's obvious: get rid of the kids. Imagine how quiet and peaceful the schools would be without all those kids. No lessons to plan. No reports to turn in. No parent-teacher conferences. No fighting. No throwing up. No endless stream of rules to try to keep up with every new outrage, problem, concern, danger and worry. What could be better?
IN OTHER REGIONS OF UNEDUCATED SPACE:
The Middle East Media Research Institute reports on an Iranian TV show depicting Israelis as eye thieves:
And I didn't even work this week. Where does the time go?
I returned from NYC, where people were stepping around the street people to go protest the removal of a huge, filthy hawk's nest from private property overlooking Central Park, but where Steak Tartare was also being served at Casimir in the East Village with a raw egg on top - under the micromanaging nose of Mayor Bloomberg!
My long-time friend Francis, who I visited part of the time in Manhattan, works at the Apple Computer store on Prince Street in SOHO, where Ann Coulter was just there for him specifically, with a Christmas kiss and a present.
The week began with a warning from the Pope about materialism and Christmas - followed by a great big "RIGHT-ON!" from me:
And a still condemned-as-unintelligent President Bush re-nominates the judges so we can see again the Democrats for who they are.
In outer space, a probe named Huygens was released from the Cassini spacecraft into the Saturnian moon Titan, which was noted by the media about as much as whatever Arlen Specter said this week about Bush's judicial agenda.
This has been a week of damn-cold temperatures as well. It's this time of year I return to childish science and... put my ice-cube trays just outside my sliding kitchen door instead of in the freezer - and they say conservatives don't care about wasting energy! I chill my wine and Champagne this way, too. Back to the ice cubes, though - the wierdest thing - these upside-down icicles rise up out of the cubes, looking like stalactites, but the things rise up out of a surface that gravity made flat at the start. Are there any geeks out there who can explain this to us?
Each year I take an item from my mother's vast collections of things and wrap it up for Christmas to see if she recognizes it. This year, a tin of Russian tea like she had at the long-gone Russian Tea Room five years ago. She has owned it for five years and never opened it. She just unwrapped it and again, I win.
Hey, remember that about the Bush administration? -his address to the nation declaring that we had a "moral" duty to help Africa with its AIDS crisis? To clarify, this is the same Africa where Africans are still enslaved in Muslim areas. In the meantime, they must not be helped if the Bush Administration gets any credit, and while we wait for Bill Clinton's apology for long-gone U.S. slavery to still have some influence.
There was this 25-30 woman in front of the very groovy Coffee Shop Bar at Union Square calling out to people, "Would you like to help save our National Forests today? Sixty percent of our forests are gone!" Ah, the irony of saving the forests from the concrete jungle.
And I love the sight of full-length fur coats. It threw me back to the last inauguration in DC... there was clearly a new party in town!
:: michael Thursday, December 16, 2004 [+] ::
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THIS SHOULD TAKE ABOUT SEVENTEEN PLEDGES
Annan Pledges to Aid in Oil-For-Food Probe
WASHINGTON - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) pledged full cooperation Thursday with investigations into alleged abuses in a U.N. oil and aid program that have led Republicans in Congress to demand his resignation. He said U.N. employees can be fired if they do not comply.
...and then we will have to take charge.
:: michael Thursday, December 16, 2004 [+] ::
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SO KAROL HOSTED A BLOGGER PARTY AND...
it took me three days to get to a computer...
It was a super early Christmas present to finally meet:
doesn't mean this renowned philosopher is all that smart:
"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins." -Antony Flew, British philosophy professor
I expected a professor in the PC hell of a British University to know that rugs are Oriental, that he should use the word "Asian".
That's the downside of fire, really. Smoke and heat. Where's there's fire, there's smoke... and heat!
Oh, and it has to start before the fighters can be called in.
Look also at this goverment report about a fire in a government building - no sprinklers and locked stairwells! Gee, if only the victims could have gotten out before the fire fighters had to break the doors down for them.
I'm surprised there wasn't an environmental impact statement, but on that subject:
A mighty blow for environmentalism! These homes were huge, too. Think of the plastic and pressure-treated wood that went up in toxic smoke and the fire-fighting water that carried the chemicals into the soil. Gee, if only the firefighters had prevented the smoke from...
Jeff Jacoby marked the death of Yasser Arafat with a bold certainty that God, against the apparant good will of George Bush, would not bless Arafat's soul, but damn it to hell.
Pat Buchanan, unsurprisingly indignant, followed up:
Oh, no - we should never impose our point of view or democratic ways on people who aren't ready or culturally different. Who the hell are we to say we are better?