This video interview a nice little list of some of the techniques which will be used against your kids – and you, if you are a “resister”, by the “educational” establishment.
Short version: If you don’t like the curriculum, don’t take their offer to be on the committee.
I heard Joel Mowbray on KSFO this morning mention a couple of scandals. One is that USAID is supporting a terrorist school: Islamic University, in Gaza. So legitimized is that Hamas school now that Intel plans to open a high tech plant and school there.
Perhaps worse, Al-Hurra, which used to be our “Voice of America” in the Arab world, has been turned over to an ex-CNN cronie who has made it more of a terrorist voice than al Jazeera.
That whirring sound is the Bush Doctrine spinning in its grave.
Reasonable men can certainly disagree on politics, and what course U.S. foreign policy should take. Clearly (as in any war) grievous mistakes have been made in Iraq. Civil discourse does not require raised pinkies nor the kind of politeness which Ralph Waldo Emerson said “ruins conversations.”
Given all of that, why does it seem that a certain sector of political speech seems hell bent on looking like freaks?
NB: Even though all of those photos were taken in broad daylight on a public street, some of them are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).
The “Palestinians” hit bottom and keep digging.
Days like this I wish there really were a hell, because I can point a finger at some folks who really belong there. Sooner rather than later, too.
Because, back in Tennessee, his star shines less brightly.
I know. It’s rather pointless posting a review of 300, especially a week after it opened. As Andrew Stanton put it, it’s the most unapologetic movie ever. It doesn’t care if you like it or not.
I admire its purity.
This is not great filmmaking. It has some unintentional laughs. (To its credit, it has a couple of very good intentional ones.) But it is what it is, and it doesn’t hold back. In the entertainment biz we talk about “committment”. This movie is 100% committment: Full throttle, no let-up, Katie-bar-the-door committment.
There is a part of me very happy to see it having great success at the box office. All the 14 year old boys watching, no matter how old they are, are going to get:
To as modern-day Iranians getting frothed up about how Xerxes and the Persians are portrayed I say
I will not be sending my mom to see 300. As much as she might enjoy the resulting 1800 abs, she’d probably start regretting her ticket purchase the umpteenth time a spear goes through somebody. That’s if the beheadings don’t get her first. And let’s be honest: If you’re in this movie’s demographic you’ve already gone to see it. Which is why reviewing it is rather pointless.
Still, it’s my blog.
If you can handle violence and really loud rock music, and you haven’t gone yet, consider it. If you just want the erudite take on how historic it is, I refer you to VDH.
Hoo-aah.
Update:
Fred Thompson’s take is pretty funny. I’m going to have to keep my eye on this guy.
The kind back when a man had a “church gun“. You can read this, and other wonderful stuff, on the LawDog blog.
His take on the violent moonbat who impersonated a recruiting officer is especially nice.
It’s worth pawing around in the archives.
They’ve formed a blog home for themselves.
Love the domain name, too.
Latest outbreak of pareidolia has struck in Mobile, AL.
I’m sure no alchohol is involved.
LGF reports on two attempts by Jihadists to silence opposition using the courts. First, they want to sue Steven Emerson for telling the truth on Hannity and Colmes. And, worse, the six imams who staged the grievance theatre operation against US Airways are not only suing the airline, but the passengers who reported them.
OK, multiculturalists. Watch this and tell me that Arab/Islamic culture is just as good as any other.
This is good news all around. Fox News has agreed to link to Michael Yon’s dispatches on their front page – and to not edit him. Read Ernie is Dead.
This week, journalists are all around this area—ABC, Fox, New York Times, Associated Press, The Telegraph, Stars & Stripes (DoD publication) and others, all flagships—but where are the bloggers? Prohibitive costs, very high risks, and an increasingly shrinking market for the work probably contribute to the poor showing. Will the blog-world still maintain the attack on coverage from the mainstream media? Instead of looking for mistakes in some coverage, the common cause might be better served by well-informed bloggers searching all sources for the reports that get it right and driving readers to those.
As we all know, consensus, intimidation and physical threats are the key to science.
Benchley said there was no end to which humorless people wouldn’t go to analyze humor. On the other hand, the research can be both funny and illuminating. Muffin jokes and all. (Free subscription required. If you don’t like registering, there’s always bugmenot.)
“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”
NASA provides some stunning images from a calibration test for the Stereo A statellite. I didn’t even know about Stereo A and Stereo B. They promise to provide some amazing 3D images of solar flares later on.
Tom McLintock writes of a last-ditch effort to reign in the mess in Sacramento. The radical idea: Ask the voters before raising taxes.
Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, now pending in the Senate, would restore that political balance at its fundamental level: the voter. It would bring back the common dictionary definition of a tax and require that all taxes be approved by voters. By reinstating taxpayers to the decision-making process, voters could judge for themselves whether their money is being spent wisely and whether they wish to entrust government with still more of their earnings.
I hope it works. I don’t know if we can survive much more of Gray Davis On Steroids.
Make sure you’re sitting down.
To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment’s civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.
And here’s an argument made better than I’ve heard gun rights advocates make it:
When we look at the Bill of Rights as a whole, the setting of the Second Amendment reinforces its individual nature. The Bill of Rights was almost entirely a declaration of individual rights, and the Second Amendment’s inclusion therein strongly indicates that it, too, was intended to protect personal liberty. The collective right advocates ask us to imagine that the First Congress situated a sui generis states’ right among a catalogue of cherished individual liberties without comment. We believe the canon of construction known as noscitur a sociis applies here. Just as we would read an ambiguous statutory term in light of its context, we should read any supposed ambiguities in the Second Amendment in light of its context. Every other provision of the Bill of Rights, excepting the Tenth, which speaks explicitly about the allocation of governmental power, protects rights enjoyed by citizens in their individual capacity. The Second Amendment would be an inexplicable aberration if it were not read to protect individual rights as well.
The whole decision, in PDF format, here.
I happened to be in the car today when Rush Limbaugh was quoting MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen as saying that environmentalism has become a religion, complete with superstitious beliefs and requirements for strange rites, like changing lightbulbs and planting a tree for every airplane flight. I’ve tried locating the source for that, and haven’t been able to. Please leave a comment if you know where it is.
Meanwhile, I did find a lot about him which is well worth reading if you can handle anti-alarmist science. He wrote this op-ed in 2006. He’s mentioned in this smackdown of the whole anthropogenic global warming scene, and written about in the Boston Globe. I got close to what I was seeking with this article. If you happen across whatever Rush’s source was, please chime in.
Omar says, “Back to politics!”
There’s a big reshuffle of political alliances going on. Looks like at least some of the fallout will be beneficial.
Speaking of the reshuffle, it looks like about 10 ministers will be changed -mostly of civil services ministries- of which six are run by ministers from the Sadr movement.
Someone’s trying to repeal the First Law of Thermodynamics.
A very bright coworker wonders if this is a scam, hoax or delusion. I’m coming down on the side of scam. But these days you never know.
As reported here, the new Mexican President is showing signs of being much better than Vicente “Clinton” Fox, not that it would be too hard. This is good:
If implemented, his proposals could help transform Mexico from a labor-exporting country with relatively low growth, productivity and wages into an investment-rich, job-producing economy with better living standards for its 107 million people, nearly half of whom still live in poverty.
But this is why I caution that there is no such thing as a conservative in Mexican politics:
Among other things, he has proposed labor, energy and judicial reforms to encourage investment, promote competition and create jobs; improved tax collection to generate more revenue to fight poverty and improve education; universal health care and support for small and medium-size businesses.
Since when has “more [government] revenue” ever fought poverty?
Still, this looks to be quite an improvement. Calderon at least seems to know how to govern. Fox was, just like Clinton, a campaign-only president. He just kept campaigning all through his term. But he’s not as clever or well-read as Clinton.
When in doubt, drive a stake through his heart.
This looks cool.
NASA paints Google Earth with near real-time information by ZDNet‘s Garett Rogers — NASA is now providing some interesting KML files that add near real-time overlays to Google Earth. The information they are using comes from MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) — some data from this source (updated daily) can be viewed on Google Earth by clicking here. One example of the new data is temperature maps.
You’ll never guess who is sending copies of his vile little book to public libraries.
One of the speakers writes about how her eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam. This is how anybody calling herself a feminist should think.
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
