Tag: wtf

More on Gaza – and our lovely media

Goodies from LGF and the LA Times, today. Via LGF comes a followup story from the mother of an Israeli soldier about the school being used as a launch point, and what impact that would have on the people living and working there. Here are some choice excerpts:

Yesterday, mortars were fired FROM the school In Jebalya. This was a direct and intentional attack on Israel, on Israel’s soldiers and population. Mortars are explosions. They are loud. You can’t pretend you didn’t hear them…

Everyone in that building yesterday KNEW that the school was being used as a launching ground…and yet, apparently not one of those thought it would be a smart thing to leave. That seems strange to me, unnatural. I was once in Jerusalem, walking with my two daughters when something “exploded” ahead of me. Everyone around me stopped, as I did. It was a bus hitting something that went flying in the air and crashed loudly into something else. People began to move and yet I stood there, unsure what to do. It should be both human instinct and parental instinct to move away from danger…

I heard a father mourning the death of his son. He blames the Israeli government, and I blame him. “Are you insane?” I want to ask him. “How could you allow your son to be near mortars being fired? What did you think Israel was going to do?” Why didn’t you take your son? Why didn’t you behave responsibly?

Hard questions, but valid ones. And as our media seems totally unwilling to look at these, as well as the implications of why the UN never raised a finger in protest to Hamas using their schools as launching grounds for terrorism, we get this lovely piece from everyone’s favorite sham of a newspaper, the LA Times: “Hamas speaks: A Hamas official insists that a ‘legacy of suffering’ under Israel is what fuels Palestinian resistance.”

Yes, you read that right. They published an op-ed from a Hamas official. Namely Mousa Abu Marzook, who was deported from the United States in 1997 and is legally recognized as a terrorist, thus being blocked from entering the country. Apparently the LA Times has no issue with this, and has no problem letting him vomit his lies and hate on the pages of its once-reputable newspaper. Well, I have no issue with the LA Times going under, so I’d suggest passing the word along that they’re officially supporting known terrorists now and see if we can’t dent their subscriber base a bit. Barring that, there’s always the good old fashioned vitriolic letter to the editor.

But that’s just one newspaper, right? No way the broadcast media would touch this, right? Well, sort of. They didn’t invite Hamas to speak on the topic of Gaza, but a few of them invited a lunatic named Mads Gilbert on for a word or two. When I say “a few,” I mean the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, the Independent, Sky News, and the New York Times, among others. Who is Mads Gilbert? He’s a doctor from Norway and a member of a radical Marxist party who is on record as supporting the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the quote, courtesy of LGF:

In an interview with the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, shortly after the attacks, Gilbert stated:

“The attack on New York was not surprising, after the policy that has led the West in recent decades. I am upset over the terrorist attack, but am equally upset over the suffering which the United States has created. It is in this context that the 5000 dead people must be seen. If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, then there is also a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians are the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.”

When asked by Dagbladet if he supported the terrorist attack on the U.S., he replied:

“Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned.”

This is why I don’t watch TV anymore.

“As soon as he saw me, his eyes went wide with terror.”

Not sure what to file this under so I’ll give it both the WTF and Awesome tags. The above quote came from a statement made by a man who had just chased off a would-be thief from his home – now, being the UK it wasn’t with a firearm, but the guy came up with a creative alternative:

Six-foot-tall fitness fanatic Torvald Alexander, 38, was wearing a full God of Thunder outfit – complete with flying red cape and tinfoil silver-winged helmet – when he spotted the raider in his front room rifling through a desk.

Mr Alexander, who runs building firm Alexander & Summers in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the burglar threw himself out of a first-floor window [ed: that’s second floor in American] of his £350,000 home in the Inverleith area of the city when he opened the door and confronted him.

The man landed on a roof outside the window, which broke his fall, enabling him to escape.

Click the link for the picture, it’s the best part of the story. Hat tip to Ace for this one.

More school insanity

Via Ace –

This is that story you’ve heard: a student was silently reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan, a book about Notre Dame’s efforts, um, versus the Klan. You know, the Klan being defeated.

A black student saw him reading it during their Spanish CLEP test practice class, and told him she didn’t like the Klan. The student agreed — the Klan is bad. She reported him anyway. And, incredibly, the university took action against the student for racial harassment.

Video here, but it makes a couple of notable mistakes – it seems to think that the fact that the student was reading a “good” book is what makes this such a tragedy. Last I checked, this is America. The student could be reading Mein Kampf or the Little Red Book for all the university should care, as there is no harm done to anyone by reading the book. To the contrary – this student might actually learn something! At a university, of all places! On the other hand, maybe that’s why they have such a problem with it. We can’t have the student learning anything that is outside of the standard doctrine, can we?

It’s an all-too-typical example of the decline and fall of American education into insanity and closed-mindedness. Some of you who frequent the geekier blogs may recall the incident reported by the HeliOS project, in which a teacher confiscated Linux discs from a student who was showing people his Linux install on his personal computer and then threatened the person who gave the student the Linux discs with legal action because “no software is free” and “Microsoft is the only legal software.” That case was another case of schools overstepping their boundaries and forcing a narrow – and decidedly incorrect – view onto students for no other reason than that The School Says So.

Now it may seem that this case is radically different than the one above because it’s talking about software instead of books, and about Linux instead of the Klan – but again, I remind you that in both cases the school was not addressing anything that was directly affecting the school, nor was it addressing something that was covered by any sort of law or institutional rule, but rather it was enforcing some sort of arbitrary standard onto these students who broke the mold that the teachers had set. It’s a nasty sight to see, coming from these places lauded as bastions of education and free-thinking.

For the children!

Via Prester Scott: how have I not heard of this?

In the Wall Street Journal, Rick Woldenberg was quoted as describing February 10, 2009 as National Bankruptcy Day because that’s the day when many of us will go out of business due to the implementation of the CPSIA Regulations. I’m dismayed at how little it’s been discussed online and in the news. I’m shocked that so few manufacturers know about it. Of the ones that do know, most think it either doesn’t apply to them or it will magically disappear or it won’t be enforced so they can ignore it. Come February 10th, a lot of people will be hit hard by reality when their products are returned or their financing is declined.

Another key piece of awesome: Congress wrote the law and forced the CPSC to implement it before the regulations were written. Why do our lawmakers keep voting in laws that aren’t even completed yet? Anyway, the long and short of this bill is that it’s a backlash against the Chinese toy safety scare from last year, and imposes insanely strict manufacturing and testing standards on everyone who would sell, well, basically anything a human being might touch, all in the name of the children. So you want to buy that handmade doll for your kid that you saw at the craft fair? You’re now dealing in illegal contraband, unless she’s willing to eat the roughly $4000 it would cost to properly test her dolls. Scott wisely suggests stocking up on any sort of consumer product (especially child-related product) you might need before this law – and its associated costs – hit the market.

Notably, it passed the House with only a single “no” vote: Ron Paul. Three went “no” in the Senate: Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, and my hometown hero Jon Kyl. And then, of course, Bush gladly tossed his signature onto it and sent it merrily along.

Scott also mentions a similar scenario coming down the pipe that’s devastating for small farms:

The USDA’s proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) was originally designed to give the big beef producers help in getting export markets which required disease controls. The idea is that every single livestock animal in the United States will be identified and tagged. All livestock animal movements will be tracked, logged and reported to the government. The benefit is to the big factory farms who probably do need this type of regulation. They get to do single ID’s for large groups of animals. Small farmers, pet owners and homesteaders will have to tag and track every single animal.

The law is of course devoid of any common-sense provisions or exceptions and will needlessly bludgeon small farms and even some pet owners with costs and regulations to the point of having to close their doors, which very much limits the options for people who want things like hormone-free foods. It has been back-doored into law under the tag of national security (second only to “for the children” as a favorite bogeyman) by the USDA, and is scheduled to take effect January 1st. In the meantime, we get to enjoy SWAT teams coming to shut down our eeeeevil food co-ops.

Scott suggests the next step is weapons – I would say, why stop there? If this is the route the government wants to take, then it won’t be long before every posession we have is tracked by the .gov, which in turn leads to the tracking of the people themselves. It’s a nasty trail to go down, so let’s raise some hell while we can – I just finished writing my representative. How about you?