Hollywood has its share of dubious fashion trends: the purse-sized chihuahua, the oversized sunglasses, the return of leg-warmers. But the apparent desire by some of Hollywood's hottest young female stars to be photographed getting in and out of limousines in short skirts while wearing absolutely no undergarments is arguably one of Tinseltown's most disturbing new crazes. Not that I mind, mind you...
Britney Spears is the latest celeb to be repeatedly caught on film with her bare genitalia on full display, following in the footsteps of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. In Spears's case, her C-section scar is also visible, making for an image most civilized members of society really don't want to see. Ummm... True...
Yet the triple-X pictures can be found this week on myriad websites and blogs, as have recent pictures of Lohan - sans skivvies - stepping out of limousines into a sea of paparazzi. Hilton too has frequently been photographed with her private parts clearly visible in an apparent new fad that makes Sharon Stone's groundbreaking scene in "Basic Instinct" seem as tame as Martha Stewart demurely preparing a dish of oysters Rockefeller. Paris Hilton has private parts? I thought they were all public?
Are they doing it on purpose?
#4
"It's unhygienic not so much for the woman who's not wearing underwear, but to the people around her," says Thomas, who practises in Toronto. "Let's face it - like every other woman, they've got a certain amount of discharge and they are hanging around with other people."
Yikes! Think about that at the wrong time and all human reproduction will cease.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is demanding Congress investigate US Airway's removal last week of six imams from one of its flights. The Muslim-rights group claims the imams, who were behaving suspiciously, posed no threat. It's "very, very inappropriate to treat religious leaders that way," a spokesman fumed.
According to CAIR, imams are as harmless as Buddhist monks and deserve no less respect. Tell that to flight attendant Kimberly Banducci.
According to police reports I've obtained, the Delta Air Lines veteran was assaulted by a Muslim cleric in a bizarre attack aboard a flight from Miami International Airport three years ago. The wild scene, which involved federal air marshals and local police, was never reported in the media.
#1
A local Muslim leader bailed the violent groper sheikh out of jail. Authorities say a man named Sofian Abdelaziz (aka Sofian Zakout, aka Sofian Abdelaziz-Zakout, aka Sofian Zakkout) representing the American Muslim Association of North America, or AMANA, posted bond for the 35-year-old Hamman, who was visiting Florida during Ramadan. Abdelaziz-Zakkout, a Kuwaiti native, was his trip sponsor.
He's also a radical Islamic activist who is a close personal friend of the notorious Shukrijumahs of South Florida, a Saudi family whose son, Adnan, is an al-Qaida operative thought to be in line to head an encore attack on America. The FBI calls him "the next Mohamed Atta." His late father was a local Wahhabi imam on the Saudi payroll.
In light of recent developments, the groping incident comes across as just another probing of airline security. Had Air Marshalls not come to the stewdress' assistance, Sheikh Ahmed Hamman Mahmoud Hamman might have rightly concluded that there were no security personnel present on that flight and signaled accompanying coconspirators to launch an attack.
There are simply far too numerous interconnecting links between the Minneapolis Six and so many other high profile terrorist fugures for all of this to be a coincidence. What we have here is a network of terrorist point men looking for holes in transportation security.
A co-founder, Salah As-Sawi, is a professor at Al-Azhar in Egypt, a bastion of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, American Open University is a fully accredited satellite campus of Al-Azhar. As-Sawi worked with Idris at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Sciences in Washington, a propaganda center set up by the Saudi Embassy to spread Wahhabism in America.
Why is this place still open? Whether it provides leads on terrorism or not, it represents such a significant threat that little can justify its continued operation.
#2
I'm demanding Congress investigate CAIR. What kind of charade is this ? Are Saoodis funding this pack of fools too, just like all the moskks being built in US ? I'd like to promote an annual night of fire once per year to dispose of projects which outrage the community in general.
#4
The stewardess was surely wearing heeled shoes. The sheikh's behaviour goes well beyond being in need of assistance, and she should have stomped on his instep until the bones were crushed. Or yanked out two good handsful of hair. Or broken a few of the grasping digits. He would've let go of her breasts sometime during the process.
/yes, I'm a white belt in several different disciplines, and will never get beyond that because of my innate squeamishness. But I've been given just enough instruction in the key skills to give me very constructive nightmares.
The opinions that pundits and politicians alike are voicing about Iraq these days concern me.
Iraq has little history with democracy. For the most of the last two generations it was governed by a criminal gang that deliberately played upon the fears and loyalties of the Iraqi people to stay in power.
Fourteen million or so Iraqis voted to form the present government. They have voted on provincial and local governments as well. They appear to be convinced that a popularly elected government will work in their country.
The country is largely peaceful, with the violence centered around Baghdad and its surrounding provinces. The terrorists engaged in the violence have demonstrated the ability to create large numbers of dead and horrific images for the media to capture.
To deal with this violence, and to generally maintain law and order, over 300,000 Iraqis have volunteered to join the military or the police. Thousands of them have given their lives for their country, having become a focal point for terrorist murderers.
How seriously do you think Muslims take those teachings?
Do you have any reason to think that the way Muslims are suffused with the teachings of Islam, a system of Total Regulation and Complete Explanation of the Universe, is different from the way that either Judaism or Christianity impinges on, or organizes the life of, Jews and Christians?
What do you know of Muslim teachings regarding non-Muslims?
Have you ever read the Qur'an and at least a few hundred of the hadith, possibly directed by a scholar of Islam?
Are you acquainted with the life of Muhammad, as written and read by Muslims, and do you realize the role that Muhammad plays as the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil?
Do you know about the decapitation of the prisoners of the Banu Qurayza? The attack on the Khaybar Oasis? The murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak for mocking Muhammad? The marriage to little Aisha?
Are you familiar with the agreement that Muhammad made with the Meccans in 628 A.D. when, feeling not yet strong enough to attack them directly, he made an agreement for a truce, a period of ten years, and then eighteen months later broke that truce on a pretext and, now with stronger forces, attacked the Meccans?
Are you aware that in the entire history of Islam, this behavior by Muhammad is hailed as being exceptionally clever, and has been taken as a model for all agreements and treaties made between Muslims and non-Muslims?
Are you aware, for example, that all of the Muslim commentators on the law of war and peace in Islam are in universal agreement that no permanent peace treaty can ever be made between Muslims and Infidels, only temporary agreements made necessary when the Muslim side is too weak?
Have you read, for example, or has anyone brought to your busy attention, Majid Khadduri's War and Peace in Islam, with its discussion of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya?
These questions, and your answers to them, will be published in the five leading newspapers of Israel.
Please, Mr. Prime Minister, think carefully before answering.
And come to think of it, why shouldn't this little quiz, which so clearly will elicit for us information about the comprehension of Infidel leaders everywhere, be given, in one form or another, all over the world, beginning with those in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid?
Why shouldn't we all demand that those who presume to protect and instruct us (they go together: protection must be accompanied by instruction on what one is being protected against, and how, and why) take this test?
This is not a multiple-choice examination. It will not be graded by some computer, measuring the little lines who shaded in with a No. 2 pencil.
No, this test requires the ability to put a few sentences together. It does not supply the pre-fabricated answers.
And it will not be graded by a whirring machine in Princeton, New Jersey.
It will be graded, instead, by all of us. And we are in no mood, the publics of the Western world, to indulge or overlook in any way. Too much depends on the understanding of these matters.
Olmert, I'm afraid, has already failed with the surpassing idiocy of his every statement and move. Bush, in his messianic missing-the-point fervor -- he had an idea and now the idea has him -- to create a Light Unto the Musiim Nations instead of exploiting the situation to weaken the Camp of Islam -- has not done much better. Almost all of the known leaders of the Western world have similarly failed.
But there are others, waiting in the wings. They should all be asked to take the test above -- all those hoping to be the next Republican or Democratic candidate. We want to know, more than anything else, what they understand about Islam. We want to know if they are fooled, or foolable, or unwilling to state things, even if not with the full freedom that one has at this website, but slightly more obliquely (that may at first be necessary, and if undertaken only for tactical reasons, may in some cases be understood and forgiven).
#1
If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic" to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths?
The Great Islamic Jihad is certain that Western Civilization is about to come to an end.
Islamic Fascism looks forward to the rule of the new Caliphate, in which the whole world will swear submission to Allah and bow five times a day towards Mecca. It aims to kill or enslave every person who will not accept its twisted vision of Islam. With the help of its allies among the worlds dictators and within our own media, it is confident that it will achieve its goal.
But even as this beast tears at our throats, a new defensive force is being born, a determination to preserve all that is good and right and true within the Western world. Even as we are abandoned by our leaders, by the sophists in our academies, and by the propagandists of our major media, ordinary people are connecting with one another, and are ready to stand up and defeat those who would destroy us.
#1
Kindered spirits at RB take note: the good guys are starting to organize.
Posted by: Mark Z ||
11/30/2006 8:29 Comments ||
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#2
It aims to kill or enslave every person who will not accept its entirely accurate twisted vision of Islam firmly based in the koran and the hadiths.
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds Is America in danger of civil war? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card thinks that we're in enough danger that he's authored a cautionary tale entitled Empire that's set in more-or-less present times.
In Card's novel, which is straight thriller fiction a la Jack Bauer rather than the science fiction for which Card is generally known, shadowy forces use terror and assassination to trigger a civil war in an America sharply divided along Red/Blue lines. In the Afterword, Card writes:
"Rarely do people set out to start a civil war. Invariably, when such wars break out both sides consider themselves to be the aggrieved ones."
Such is the case now, he notes, when both Left and Right feel threatened by the other side, and unfairly so:
"Can it lead to war? Very simply, yes. The moment one group feels itself so aggrieved that it uses either its own weapons or the weapons of the state to 'prevent' the other side from bringing about its supposed 'evil' designs, then that other side will have no choice but to take up arms against them. Both sides will believe the other to be the instigator . . . . In America today, we are complacent in our belief that it can't happen here."
Well, I certainly don't believe that it can't happen here. Civil war can happen anywhere and, given enough time, usually does. And it happened here once, after all.
I've noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks -- and reignites -- such conflicts elsewhere. And we can, perhaps, thank the ongoing Civil War reminiscence industry for helping to keep the horrors of that war alive in people's memories. Throughout the remainder of the 19th Century, many people feared a reignition of the Civil War, but it didn't happen.
Nonetheless, Card's cautionary tale is worth bearing in mind. Civil wars are, traditionally, among the most bloody, and the hardest to prevent once the ball gets rolling. So what do we do?
One question is "who's 'we' here?" I don't see much of a sign that the American public -- which, after all, overwhelmingly favored centrists in this month's elections -- is as divided as Card suggests. But -- as Card also notes -- the elites are much more divided, and the media tend to play up those divisions, because division and conflict are good story-drivers. ("We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.") To the "activist" crowd on the left and right, people who don't share their views 100% are evil, and on the other side. This tends to backfire politically, which I think is why the elections favored centrists this time, but that doesn't stop the polarization. In a way, it tends to make it worse.
I think that we're a long way from a civil war. But I also think that Card's right to warn people against too much division, and too little emphasis on our common interests as Americans. While I don't think that we're in danger of a civil war, I do think that our current political system is unhealthy, with polarization serving mostly as a tool for the folks in power to keep their bases in line, while they pursue agendas that are mostly self-serving. I hope that both the people and the press will make some conscious efforts to moderate the tone, and make that approach less effective.
#1
I think an American civil war will boil down to these basic issues:
1) A visage of how America is: free enterprise, respect for religious practces, reduced and small government and a strong defense, and personal freedom and responsibility
2) Versus a visage of how America should be: hyper-regulation of all human activities, financial, personal and religious concomitant with the taxes it would require.
A civil war will be sparked when visage A decides that those who press for visage B have gone too far. Visage A will win because all of the ideas promulgated by the left are based in whole or in part on lies and contradictions, and deception is not a stable basis for a free and open society.
#3
I've noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks -- and reignites -- such conflicts elsewhere.
I can easily see a low level Civil War ala Northern Ireland here. Start with an impotent Governmental response to Jihadi terror which fosters a backlash by vigilante groups.
I give Bush a lot of credit for taking the war to Afghanistan after 9/11. A non-response like we got after the USS Cole would've certainly created a UDA/UFF/Red Hand-style movement like the Belfast Prods and there would be plenty of burnt out mosques, taxis, and ACLU offices.
I'm not endorsing it but I can see how grievances like those of Loyalists and Nationalists in NI can lead to spiraling violence if the Government isn't seen to be addressing the problem(s).
#5
Any attempt by Demo-led Feds to effectively repeal the Second Amendment will be a guaranteed opener. I'd be very interested in knowing just how many patriotic Americans are thinking that the first government official who comes to their house to confiscate their guns will be the first person they've ever killed.
Posted by: mac ||
11/30/2006 17:14 Comments ||
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#6
The lawyers and the celebrities who don't leave for France as promised will be targeted first!
#7
You said it mac ...I have a couple sacrificial guns that could be turned in if the 2nd falls and some self defense guns that will have to be taken after my death and possibly that of others. Protection of family comes above any laws of any government!
Posted by: Jim ||
11/30/2006 19:45 Comments ||
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#8
They try take away guns, they will find out a LOT about just how cleverly explosives, IEDs and boobytraps can be employed.
Al Qaeda is a bunch of pikers compared to the havoc that could be wreaked by angry Americans.
#9
I remember reading about a Marine officer who asked his men whether they would obey an order to confiscate the weapons of American citizens. To a man, they said they'd refuse, based on the Second Amendment.
#10
Al Qaeda is a bunch of pikers compared to the havoc that could be wreaked by angry Americans.
And something like 650 thousand dead Americans in 4 years of brutal, bloody war proved that notion quite effectively. The south's economy was shattered and the north's economy was teetering by the end of things during our first go-'round.
A second go-'round would, I believe, be even bloodier and more brutal. Our population of idiots is a lot higher, for one thing.
#11
It may well be more bloody and brutal, but only because there's a TON of LLL out there in the urban areas. I'd venture to guess that instead of wanton destruction across entire states, we'd see mere craters of a few select cities to get rid of any gun-grabbers.
Posted by: BA ||
11/30/2006 23:49 Comments ||
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When we last visited this issue the producer of the Hollywood "documentary" An Inconvenient Truth denouced a science teacher's group as being in the pay of Exxon-Mobil when it refused to distribute 50,000 copies of the film.
It turns out that Laurie David lied, or at least omitted some important facts.
On November 26, the Washington Post printed an opinion piece from environmental activist Laurie David, a producer of the film "An Inconvenient Truth." In her op-ed Ms. David reports that NSTA rejected the opportunity to distribute 50,000 copies of the DVD to NSTA members.
During conversations with Ms. David's representative we suggested making the DVD available via alternative means of distribution (e.g. by providing a mailing list of our members to producers, announcing its availability in our publications, etc.). It appears that these alternative distribution mechanisms were unsatisfactory.
It was not the intent of the NSTA to restrict "An Inconvenient Truth" from its members and we are currently pursuing options to make the DVD available to teachers.
#1
Laurie David, wife of Larry David - ultra-liberals both - does not seem to be convinced that teachers are able to make up their own minds w/ regard to the types of information they need to indoctrinate America's kids. Why would Ms. David be unsatisfied with the NSTA's offer to provide the NTSA mailing list, so as to allow Ms. David to distribute herself? I suppose it's not enough for the NSTA to assist in distribution. No, the NSTA must be forced to fully endorse Al Gore's tripe by directly distributing.
#2
I would not be happy if my union leader (something, admittedly, we housewives don't much go in for, but to continue) gave my name and address to someone with an agenda. But publicizing the availability is perfectly acceptable. Other organizations make do with paid ads in the house organ, so why should Ms. David's offer get special treatment?
#3
Obviously a primary ramification of implementing strict controls on greenhouse gas emissions would be a steep increase in transportation costs (autos, air travel, etc). If transportation costs increase, the result will be a decrease in travel, which means people spend more time in the home and less time socializing with other human beings.
It occurs to me that the entertainment industry - particularly the television and PPV/DVD/Downloadable movie industry - would stand to benefit immensely from such a circumstance. How much would the entertainment industry benefit from a 30 - 40% increase in the amount of time spent in the recliner as opposed to a traveling to see a play, sporting event, dance party, etc?
I can see the entertainment industry loving every minute of such a scenario. Keep the money base glued to the tube...
#4
Yep, and when the fat-cat, Hollyweird types are the only ones benefitting, then they'll be the only elite ones to drive around in big SUVs to boot!
Posted by: BA ||
11/30/2006 13:03 Comments ||
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#5
You didn't expect her to pay for postage, now, did you? I mean, she might have to take one less flight on her Gulfstream jet....and how could she defend the environment if she had to keep her jet grounded? Silly peasants!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Hollywood has its share of dubious fashion trends: the purse-sized chihuahua, the oversized sunglasses, the return of leg-warmers. But the apparent desire by some of Hollywood's hottest young female stars to be photographed getting in and out of limousines in short skirts while wearing absolutely no undergarments is arguably one of Tinseltown's most disturbing new crazes.
Is America in danger of civil war? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card thinks that we're in enough danger that he's authored a cautionary tale entitled 
