Archive Listing
July 15, 2011 - July 8, 2011
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Bootboarding
Just asking.
Should I analyze more, explain more, comment more, draw inferences and conclusions? uh, no. It's all exactly what it looks like: Idiots in Charge all round.
P.S. I realize some of you don't take the initial links on IP posts. This time, I'm thinking I'd better show you what's behind the "Busy Busy Busy." Here it is:
Keeping up the sports theme, the president and the vice president will take a photo with the U.S. World Cup soccer team and former President Bill Clinton, who is chairing the 2018 World Cup bid, on the North Portico. The White House has previously announced that Vice President Biden and Jill Biden will attend the World Cup in South Africa next month.
Afterward, the president will a private have lunch with President Clinton in the Private Dining Room.
In the afternoon, the President will deliver remarks on the BP oil spill and the conclusions of his ordered 30-day safety review and hold a press conference in the East Room.
The president will announce standards to strengthen oversight of the industry and enhance safety, a first step in a process that the independent Presidential Commission will continue, a White House official says.
In the meantime, the moratorium on permits to drill new deepwater wells will continue for a period of six months. In addition, the planned exploration off the coast of Alaska in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas will be delayed pending the Comissions review and the August lease sale in the Western Gulf will be cancelled. The lease sale off the coast of Virginia will also be cancelled due to environmental concerns and concerns raised by the Defense Department.
After taking questions from press, the President will then receive a briefing in the Situation Room on the 2010 hurricane season forecast and an overview of the federal government’s national hurricane preparedness. The briefing will be led by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, as well as five FEMA Regional Administrators.
In the afternoon, Mr. Obama will hold a bilateral meeting with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia in the Oval Office.
Later in the afternoon, the President, the Vice President and First Lady Michelle Obama will host a reception in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month in the East Room.
Afterward, in the evening, the First Family will travel to Chicago, Illinois for a four-day Memorial Day weekend vacation. The Obamas have not been back to their hometown all together as a family for more than a year.
Awwww. Let's hope they have enough quiet time to enjoy all their old friends in Chicago and that there's enough machine oil to power the barbecue. If there isn't, they could probably have some flown up from Louisiana.
WHO WAS E. B.? A commenter on a recent post -- one Eric Blair, presumptuously enough -- suggested this site was using the word 'war' without fully understanding the meaning of the word. Well, we do understand the meaning of the word and we are using it with deliberate gravity. Here's an excerpt from the post he entirely failed to understand:
The answer to that is daunting if not downright terrifying. It's us -- the common sense American conservatives -- against an Islamic fascism that can't be named, a European cultural and moral exhaustion that can't be forestalled, a burgeoning population of tin-pot, appeasement-emboldened dictators around the world, a secular know-it-all nihilism that can't be out-shouted, an increasingly supine population of government dependents and self-styled victims in the industrial world, and a traitorous, self-hating elite in our own country that has somehow appropriated the media, the academy, science, the public school system, the entire federal and state bureaucracy, and even a significant mindshare of organized Christian churches into a cult of anti-American sedition.
I'd have thought that was a clear statement of casus belli. Apparently not. So now I'm moved to provide an example that even a dead twentieth century Brit might appreciate. The smart ones are contemptuous of resistance to a plan to build a mosque next to Ground Zero and hold the opening festivities on Seprember 11, 2011. Any reason to be disgruntled about that? No:
By Gabriel Winant
AP: Traffic passes a building in lower Manhattan that once housed a Burlington Coat Factory store. A 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center is planned to replace the building that was damaged by airplane debris on Sept. 11, 2001
The way Sarah Palin and the Tea Party populists bash East Coast big city elites, you'd think they might care a little bit less about neighborhood development in lower Manhattan. Maybe I'm old-fashioned that way, but that kind of thing just seems more like an issue for the neighborhood association than for Fox News.
Of course, I'm kidding around. What they care about is treating the place where New Yorkers live, work and worship as a battlefield against a massive, faceless enemy. That enemy, of course, is Islam, writ large.
What's happening: The community board in lower Manhattan has endorsed, by a 29-to-1 vote, a plan to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center about two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. Predictably, outrage has erupted. If you type "mosque" into Google, the first suggestion is "mosque at ground zero," which gives a sense of how quickly this has moved into the popular consciousness.
The imam in charge, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is consciously moderate, and has described combating radicalism as his personal mission. Nor is he jumping on the chance to get in the neighborhood to make some point: The mosque is already just a few blocks away, in Tribeca, but has overgrown its current space. Rauf says that he hopes that having a moderate mosque so near ground zero can send a message of tolerance and peace.
But this is something the right wing just can't pass up. These people, and this neighborhood, can't just be people in a neighborhood. They've been conscripted for a larger war...
Mark Williams, a Tea Party leader and Fox News commentator, wrote on his blog, "The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god." He added, "In the meantime I have a wonderful idea along the same lines as that mosque at Ground Zero thing… a nice, shiny new U.S. Military Base on the smoldering ruins of Mecca. Works for me!"
At WorldNetDaily, the Birther Web publication popular on the conservative fringe, an article, written in classic WND style, begins by acting like a straight report -- albeit laced with purple prose about "that fateful day when time stood still." Then author Chelsea Schilling moves on to ominously noting that building inspectors had trouble investigating construction complaints -- almost as if somebody was hiding something. She finishes up by quoting a random selection of racist blog commenters: "Muslims are doing this only to see if they get away with it. It's the way Islam spreads in every country these days, like a cancer -- through incremental totalitarianism," writes one. Another writes, "This is not different than allowing the Nazis to establish their headquarters and propaganda office in NYC in 1938. How come people could tell right from wrong then and not now?"
Lest you think it’s just anonymous trolls producing this stuff, though, check out Pamela Geller, the head of the group "Stop Islamization of America," talking to Joy Behar on CNN. According to Geller, instead of a mosque, the site should be host to a monument to the "victims of hundreds of millions of years of jihadi wars, land enslavements, cultural annihilations and mass slaughter."
You’d think someone who runs a group with "Islam" right in its name might know that the religion is about 1,400 years old -- not "hundreds of millions." I know that all that desert stuff seems super-ancient -- "sands of time" and and all that -- but honestly. "Hundreds of millions"? That’s way, way older than homo sapiens as a species. (Maybe that explains Williams' "monkey god" reference?)
Then there's Andy McCarthy, National Review writer and recent author of a book arguing that liberals are consciously conspiring to betray America to the ravenous Muslim horde. McCarthy recently pointed out on Fox News that there are 2,300 mosques in America, but no churches or synagogues in Muslim holy cities Mecca and Medina.
First of all, I think this fairly puts to rest any notion that the more militant strain of anti-Islamist hawkishness is anything other than full-scale, civilizational hatred. After this eruption, it's going to be a stretch to take seriously claims that the interest of the right-wing base in armed conflict in the Middle East is about anything but an active desire for full-on race war. (I've taken some heat in the past for using this term, but I stand by it. The occurrence of the phrase "monkey god," I think, makes my point rather neatly.) Moreover, it's penetrated quite far into the mainstream of the right, with the flowering of a sub-literature that treats migration patterns and labor markets in Europe like they’re the secret plan for the conquest of Christendom.
In recent years, liberals have become fond of pointing out that this kind of belligerent overreaction to the terrorist threat is exactly what makes terrorism effective. It plays into the hands of Osama bin Laden to treat Islam like our foe in a global, apocalyptic struggle. That's exactly how he sees it, and joining him in this fantasy endorses al-Qaida's ideology.
This is a true and important point, pragmatically. But there's something even worse going on here. It's not just that Gellar, McCarthy, Williams and the rest in the War-with-Islam group are inadvertently playing into the hands of Islamic extremists. They are, exactly, their analogue within our own society. The same things that benefit Islamic radicals benefit anti-Islamic militants. Both groups feed off conflict, and prosper when violence erupts. Their only break from accusing Islam of guilt in wars and mass violence seems to come when they call for wars and mass violence against Muslims.
It's notable how McCarthy seems to think that, in pointing out that the United States has many mosques, but the holy cities of Saudi Arabia have no churches, he's making an appropriate comparison. It's almost as if he demands that we behave just like a theocratically tinged authoritarian monarchy. The hatred these people have for the Muslim world conceals a noticeable yearning -- an envy for its ability to carry out the undemocratic, anti-pluralist, and puritanical measures that the United States has long since abandoned. [boldface mine]
Sigh. New York City. You know the horror movie where the girl is repeatedly warned by her terrified boyfriend on the phone to get out of the house but she refuses to listen because she's a girl who never listens? What happens to her? She gets her throat cut. That's New York City. She always knows better, right up to the moment when the bogeyman grabs her from behind.
In truth, it is a horror movie. New York is our national allegory, the population with the biggest bullseye on its back and the biggest case of denial in the history of western civilization. They condescend to everyone, unfailingly, and they make no bones about the fact that they're superior to all the rest of us, the flyover commoners who gawk up when we're in town and don't know where to buy diamonds and fashions at the right price, or worse the right diamonds and fashions at any price.
Maybe we shouldn't care. They are, after all, pricks of the first order. Except that we know what they don't, which is that they are made possible by the rest of us and are, regardless of their arrogant myopia, part of us and freed by the rest of us to hold their idiotic parochial views of what's going on in the world as if they really were a race apart and above. Which they're most definitely not.
They constitute the capital of Occupied America. They're the new and improved Warsaw Ghetto, improved because sublimely unaware of the trains that are waiting to ship them into a hellish past of persecution, rape, torture, and death. They can't see past their camelhair overcoats and glossy intellectualism to the naked blades that await them. Everything they do, say, and believe increases their attractiveness to the killer in the hockey mask who doesn't think but merely stalks and kills. They're a ten million strong version of the promiscuous counselors at Crystal Lake.
Here's what they refuse to perceive in their 29-1 approval of a mosque aimed like a dagger at their heart:
Is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — founder of the hugely controversial Ground Zero mosque — lying to the American public and his fellow New Yorkers?
We have uncovered extraordinary contradictions between what he says in English and what he says in Arabic that raise serious questions about his true intentions in the construction of the mosque.
On May 25, 2010, Abdul Rauf wrote an article for the New York Daily News insisting:
My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists. We are the people who want to embolden the vast majority of Muslims who hate terrorism to stand up to the radical rhetoric. Our purpose is to interweave America’s Muslim population into the mainstream society. [emphasis added]
Oh, really?
Only two months before, on March 24, 2010, Abdul Rauf is quoted in an article in Arabic for the website Rights4All entitled “The Most Prominent Imam in New York: ‘I Do Not Believe in Religious Dialogue.’”
Yes, you read that correctly and, yes, that is an accurate translation of Abdul Rauf. And Right4All is not an obscure blog, but the website of the media department of Cairo University, the leading educational institution of the Arabic-speaking world.
In the article, the imam said the following of the “religious dialogue” and “interweaving into the mainstream society” that he so solemnly seems to advocate in the Daily News and elsewhere:
This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian. The image of Muslims in the West is complex which needs to be remedied.
But that was two months ago. More recently — in fact on May 26, one day after his Daily News column – Abdul Rauf appeared on the popular Islamic website Hadiyul-Islam with even more disturbing opinions. That’s the same website where, ironically enough, a fatwa was simultaneously being issued forbidding a Muslim to sell land to a Christian, because the Christian wanted to build a church on it.
In his interview on Hadiyul-Islam by Sa’da Abdul Maksoud, Abdul Rauf was asked his views on Sharia (Islamic religious law) and the Islamic state. He responded:
Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more than just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Sharia that are required to govern. It is known that there are sets of standards that are accepted by [Muslim] scholars to organize the relationships between government and the governed. [emphasis added]
When questioned about this, Abdul Rauf continued: “Current governments are unjust and do not follow Islamic laws.” He added:
New laws were permitted after the death of Muhammad, so long of course that these laws do not contradict the Quran or the Deeds of Muhammad … so they create institutions that assure no conflicts with Sharia. [emphasis in translation]
In yet plainer English, forget the separation of church and state. Abdul Rauf’s goal is the imposition of Shariah law — in every country, even democratic ones like the U.S.
But these attitudes are nothing new for the (alas, few) people who have been paying attention. Way back on September 30, 2001, Feisal Abdul Rauf was interviewed on 60 Minutes by host Ed Bradley. Their verbatim dialogue from this CBS News transcript concluded:
BRADLEY: Are — are — are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?
Imam ABDUL RAUF: I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.
BRADLEY: OK. You say that we’re an accessory?
Imam ABDUL RAUF: Yes.
BRADLEY: How?
Imam ABDUL RAUF: Because we have been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.
This is the “anti-terrorist” of the Daily News article?
The Feisal Abdul Rauf who spoke to 60 Minutes in 2001 is the same Abdul Rauf who, in the last couple of months, espoused the spread of Sharia law on Arabic websites and said the opposite in the pages of the Daily News. He is the man New York City authorities are about to allow to build a mosque on Ground Zero.
Caveat emptor. Meanwhile, perhaps some enterprising reporter should ask Abdul Rauf his opinion of that fatwa forbidding Muslims from selling land to Christians who intend to build a church on it.
Jeez. Here's the thing. I actually do love New York. I've always known that New Yorkers were completely crazy -- I mean, full-grown 40-year-old men who can't drive a car? -- but I don't want them to die. I prefer them to live in the Oz they have created for themselves, even if they don't have the least understanding of the fact that all their financial shenanigans wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't factories and farms and technologies they've had no hand in creating or maintaining. They're like, well, a spoiled daughter, who really thinks the world revolves around her. She's beautiful, she's ours, and who's going to tell her she's more parasite than goddess?
Nobody wants Paris Hilton to be a terrorist victim. Yes, she's a moron, but she looks really fine in her best fashions, doesn't she? Enough, even, that most of us can even overlook it when she forgets her panties getting out of a Rolls Royce.
The problem comes when she forgets her panties with people who want to kill the rest of us. When is it exactly that we decide to stop spoiling her? And shave her head. And turn her out in the public square as a traitor. Thing is, it's not just Paris and the cafe set. It's all the ones we called out before, who also live in and rule New York City. The ones who think they're smart enough, clever enough, and wise enough to live their platinum lives in support or in spite of...
When their skyline looks like this, it won't be just their business any longer. It will be all our business, and we'll all be in deep shit.
What they don't realize is that the bubble they live in is and has has always been at our sufferance, protected by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, no matter how superior they feel at the theater. When can we, and should we, lower the boom?
What does it take to make us realize that we are an Occupied Nation stuffed to the gills with collaborators? Would that put you on a war footing?
It has me.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
ECHOES. I don't know anything about Robert E. Howard, and I've lost all my faith in the Brits, but this still sounds like a movie worth seeing, whenever it's released in the U.S.
From a review at Big Hollywood.
I saw the film and I can tell you that it’s way better than you’d expect. Excellent music, effects, acting. A top notch supporting cast which includes Max Von Sydow and Pete Postlethwaite, but even better, a great leading man in the title role, James Purefoy. Purefoy rocked Rome as Marc Antony and is perfect here. Purefoy does Howard’s character right.
Yes, it’s got demons, witches, and warlocks in it. It’s full on, unapologetic pulp fantasy and it’s definitely on point. Most fantasy films fail to pull it off because they don’t understand the rules. They either let some actors chew scenery or they throw in attempts at humor that undermine the suspense of disbelief needed to keep you with the story. Writer/director Michael J. Bassett knows how to do fantasy. The film is solidly entertaining from start to finish.
Maybe some of you know more about the author and the book than I do. Feel free to educate me. But I really like the pilgrim hat. And the swords and guns and savage killing.
