Media desperately trying to debunk Syria nuke plant story

Hot Air linked to an LA Times piece from their "Babylon & Beyond" blog last night that works furiously to blow the lid off the Syria al Kibar nuclear plant story. It's a feeble attempt at best.

First, they cite this image as being manipulated, saying "The lower part of the building, the annex, and the windows pointing south appear much sharper than the rest of the photo, suggesting that they were digitally improved."


The image was lifted from a video slide show presented to Congress, which included much CGI animation. It's not a "digitally improved" photo...it's a Computer-Generated Image, you dolts!

Next, they enumerate the things that should have been there if this was a nuclear plant, but weren't:

• Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
• The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
• Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.

This is so simple, it's pathetic: The plant wasn't complete. If Syria was trying to keep this as secret as possible until the plant was operational, they'd have kept to a minimum the number of people aware of its construction. Obviously, the more supporting infrastructure and defenses, the more people become aware. That supporting infrastructure wouldn't have been put in place until the last possible moment before the site was to become operational.

Finally, the writer offers up two images of the facility, one showing a rectangular structure and the other a square one, with the accompanying text:

The site looks like a rectangle in the first shot, but more like a square in the second shot. Huh?

Once again, pure stupidity. Take a look at the curvature of the excavated area to the left of the structure. It's elongated in the one at top compared to the one at the bottom. One of the images (I'm guessing the "rectangular" one) has been resized without the aspect ratio being preserved, distorting the proportional sizing of all the objects in the scene.

Next!

What's wrong with Wright?

Between yesterday's address to the NAACP and this morning's speech to the National Press Club, today's news has been wall-to-wall coverage of Barack Obama's spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And frankly, the more I hear him talk, the more I despise him. With every utterance, it becomes clearer that the man hates America and views his own country as ruled by - and for - white racists. He elevates racial demagoguery to a whole new level and makes race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton look like amateurs. I know not one single person who publicly or privately holds such a jaundiced view of America.

In casting the "attacks" on him as attacks against all black churches, he puts all pastors of black churches under a pall, because he's effectively saying that the venom and hatred he spews is the same venom and hatred spewed at all black churches. I've never been to a black church (I don't even go to "white" churches these days), but I've never before considered the possibility that black churches everywhere in these United States were spewing seditious hatred. Now?

During the Q&A segment of his talk to the NPC today (click here for transcript), Wright had this to say as part of his response to a question about his relationship with Louis Farrakhan:

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn’t make me this color.

If his enemies are the people who did those things, then Wright resents things that didn't even happen to him, and he resents being black.

What's with this guy?

Supreme Court defeats Democrats' election fraud efforts

The Supreme Court has upheld state voter identification laws which Democrats said would disenfranchise minority voters prevent them from committing election fraud on a massive scale.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to deter fraud.

Justice Scalia nicely countered the Democrats' argument that it's too damned hard to get a valid photo ID:

Scalia, favoring a broader ruling in defense of voter ID laws, said, "The universally applicable requirements of Indiana's voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not 'even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

Bush Derangement Syndrome hits new low

Just about what I've come to expect from the loony left.

A man heckling First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna outside the 92nd Street Y was arrested after he punched a wheelchair-bound girl whose parents had told him to shut up, authorities said Wednesday.

German Talis, 22, was shouting obscenities at the Bushes, who were leaving the building Tuesday, when he crossed paths with Wendy and John Lovetro and their daughter Maureen, 18, who has cerebral palsy.

They had been in the audience to hear the Bushes talk about their children's book, "Read All About It."

"He began yelling about Iraq and Iran at Jenna Bush. She was waving at the crowd. I told the guy, 'What are you doing? Shut up. This is about a child and books,' " said John Lovetro. "He was unperturbed. I said, 'Get out of here! You're being a moron!' "

The next thing he knew, Talis was allegedly punching Maureen, a fan of the first lady since meeting her in 2004.

Stay classy, lefties.

Impotent outrage of the day

This is the most snicker- and snort-worthy news item I've seen today. Mohamed ElBaradei, the dickless wonder and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is sulking over not being advised by the US or Israel of Syria's now confirmed nuclear ambitions.

The head of the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency on Friday criticized the U.S. for not giving his organization intelligence information sooner on what Washington says was a nuclear reactor in Syria being built secretly by North Korea.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei also chastised Israel for bombing the site seven months ago, in a statement whose strong language reflected anger at being kept out of the picture for so long.

I guess Dickless felt that he and his agency should have been allowed to exhibit the same stellar performance in Syria as they have in Iran.

Three hots and a cot

Actually, it's far more than just 'three hots and a cot' at some British prisons. It seems that conditions are so good in some prisons that not only are inmates ignoring opportunities at easy escape, drug dealers are actually breaking in to peddle their wares to the inmates.

In one example, a drug dealer regularly broke into a Yorkshire jail over a six-month period, using a ladder to climb the walls and supply inmates with drugs and mobile phones.

[ ... ]

"It tells me there's something wrong in society when people are breaking into prisons to bring in drugs, but the prisoners are quite happy to stay inside."

Inmates at a top security prison recently told Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, that conditions there were like a "holiday camp".

They said they enjoyed the use of satellite television and video game consoles as well as their free bed and board.

Prisoners receive wages topped up by bonuses for good behaviour, while drugs are sometimes cheaper in jail than on the streets.

It is understood that there have also been examples of prostitutes being smuggled into HMP Sudbury, a Category D prison, in Derbyshire.

Who says crime doesn't pay?

Bizarre news item of the day

Bizarre not just for its topic, but for its brevity and lack of context. Jyllands-Posten reports that Danish Imam Abdul Wahid Petersen (there's the first indicator of weirdness) along with other Muslims has started a group to campaign for ... wait for it ... pigs' rights. The article is short -- maddeningly short -- so you'll get it all here.

Danish imam Abdul Wahid Petersen and several other Muslims have started a group, 'Muslims for Danish pigs' rights', to show that Muslims have a lot more on their minds than headscarves, reports public broadcaster DR.

'As Muslims, we think about a lot more things than we're normally associated with,' he told DR.

He explained that Muslims believed they had a religious obligation to the world they were a part of. And since pigs were part of the world, they were there to look after them. (LYT)

They may be haram, but they have rights!

Update to African Islamic schools post

In my previous post on the tragedy of child slavery at Senegal's Islamic "schools", a commenter posted a link to this video he helped produce. It's good to see attention being paid to the problem, and good people doing something about it.

This link has information on how to contribute to the aid effort.

Democrats' long national nightmare continues

The conventional wisdom going into yesterday's primary in Pennsylvania was that Hillary Clinton needed a substantial win over Barack Obama to stay in the race. Her 10-point win seems to have qualified as substantial.

What's nice about this is that the internecine warfare between Obama Democrats and Clinton Democrats will continue. With Indiana's and North Carolina's primary two weeks out, look for the political equivalent of WMDs and battlefield atrocities to be committed by both sides. Obama has a 13-point lead in the polls in NC, but just a 5-point lead in Indiana. But keep in mind that those numbers are pre-Pennsylvania and are bound to shift in Clinton's favor.

Mutually Assured Destruction!

Beer dog

'Forget global warming, prepare for Ice Age'

OK, everyone. Fire up your SUVs and leave 'em idling in the driveway. Replace all those CFL light bulbs with good old-fashioned incandescent ones. We have to head off the coming Ice Age and save the planet!

SUNSPOT activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that - far from warming - the globe is about to return to an Ice Age.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman writes in The Australian today.

"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

Looks like we need all the CO2 emissions we can get and do the job the sun won't do.

Obama's web site hacked; redirects to Clinton's site

Heh...

A cross-site scripting vulnerability in the social networking section of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign site was exploited over the weekend to redirect users to the URL of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), researchers claimed today.

According to the U.K.-based antifraud company Netcraft Ltd., someone identified only as "Mox" confessed to the hack in an entry on the Community Blogs section on the Obama site Sunday. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, leads Clinton in the race for the party's presidential nomination. The site exploit occurred just before this week's big Pennsylvania primary.

Yet more sea piracy

It's getting hard to keep up with the acts of piracy off the east coast of Africa these days. Most recently, a Spanish tuna boat was taken by pirates about 250 miles off the Somalian coast.

Spain dispatched a warship and called for Nato help yesterday after Somali pirates boarded a Spanish fishing boat and seized the crew.

The Playa de Bakio was fishing for tuna about 250 miles off Somalia when it was attacked with grenade launchers at around 1pm on Sunday and boarded by four men.

[ ... ]

Its 26 crew members, among them 13 Spaniards and 13 African nationals, were believed to be unharmed. "I am the captain of the boat... we are all well and there is no problem, for the moment there is no problem," said Amadeo Alvarez, 55, the Galician skipper, speaking to Spanish national radio.

He was interrupted by a man who identified himself as a member of a "Somalia militia" and said in broken English that there would be no problems if their demands were met. Details of the pirates' demands have not been made public but the Somali was heard to say: "It's a question of money."

It always is. And these acts of piracy will continue unabated because the money almost always is paid. The article concludes:

There were 31 actual or attempted pirate attacks in 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau. The targets varied from giant tankers to private yachts.

This was an increase from 10 in 2006 and only two in 2004, making Somalia second only to Nigeria for ocean piracy last year. More than 154 hostages were taken during 2007, more than half of all kidnappings on the high seas. Critics say the surge in attacks is due to shipping firms paying ransom.

Duh.

African Islamic schools: A study in child slavery

This AP story appeared in the print edition of the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star this morning, but with no link I could find in the online edition, so I dug the AP link out of Yahoo News. It describes the tragedy of children in western African Islamic countries forced into a life of begging in exchange for an Islamic "education". The scare quotes are there because the education consists of two hours a day of memorizing Quranic verses and nine hours of begging for money on behalf of their "teachers". You'll want to read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

On the day he decided to run away, 9-year-old Coli awoke on a filthy mat. Like a pup, he lay curled against the cold, pressed between dozens of other children sleeping head-to-toe on the concrete floor. His T-shirt was damp with the dew that seeped through the thin walls. The older boys had yanked away the square of cloth he used to protect himself from the draft. He shivered.

[ ... ]

There are 1.2 million Colis in the world today, children trafficked to work for the benefit of others. Those who lure them into servitude make $15 billion annually, according to the International Labor Organization.

It's big business in Senegal. In the capital of Dakar alone, at least 7,600 child beggars work the streets, according to a study released in February by the ILO, the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Bank. The children collect an average of 300 African francs a day, just 72 cents, reaping their keepers $2 million a year.

Most of the boys — 90 percent, the study found — are sent out to beg under the cover of Islam, placing the problem at the complicated intersection of greed and tradition. For among the cruelest facts of Coli's life is that he was not stolen from his family. He was brought to Dakar with their blessing to learn Islam's holy book.

In the name of religion, Coli spent two hours a day memorizing verses from the Quran and over nine hours begging to pad the pockets of the man he called his teacher.

It was getting dark. Coli had less than half the 72 cents he was told to bring back. He was afraid. He knew what happened to children who failed to meet their daily quotas.

They were stripped and doused in cold water. The older boys picked them up like hammocks by their ankles and wrists. Then the teacher whipped them with an electrical cord until the cord ate their skin.

Coli's head hurt with hunger. He could already feel the slice of the wire on his back.

He slipped away, losing himself in a tide of honking cars. He had 20 cents in his tomato can.

[ ... ]

Not all Quranic boarding schools force their students to beg. But for the most part, what was once an esteemed form of education has degenerated into child trafficking. Nowadays, Quranic instructors net as many children as they can to increase their daily take.

"If you do the math, you'll find that these people are earning more than a government functionary," said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, an Islamic scholar at Columbia University. "It's why the phenomenon is so hard to eradicate."

Middle men trawl for children as far afield as the dunes of Mauritania and the grass-covered huts of Mali. It's become a booming, regional trade that ensnares children as young as 2, who don't know the name of their village or how to return home.

[ ... ]

Coli made his way to a neighborhood where he had heard of a place that gave free food to children like him.

"Do you know where you come from?" asked the kind-faced woman at Empire des Enfants. The shelter's capacity is 30 children, but it usually houses at least 50.

Coli knew the name of his mother, but not how to reach her. He knew the name of the region where he was born, but not his village. "My mother is black," he said. "I'm sure I'll recognize her."

[ ... ]

Coli's marabout entered the shelter flanked by a column of religious leaders in cascading robes that tumbled onto the ground. One of them stabbed his finger at the clouds and yelled out, "The sky will fall down on you if you don't hand over our children."

The shelter is used to such threats. But this time the marabouts had discovered the center's legal paperwork was not complete. They threatened to close the shelter if it did not hand over 11 boys.

To save more than 40 others, the shelter handed over the 11. Coli was on the list.

Back at the school, they beat the 9-year-old until he thought he was going to faint. At night, they dragged him off the floor, doused him in water and beat him again.

Three days later, he ran away again. When he arrived at the shelter, he said: "I want to go home to my mom."

[ ... ]

Early on the fifth morning, a woman in a pressed peach robe walks up to the shelter.

Coli rushes outside. He stands a few feet away as tears topple down his cheeks. She covers her face with her veil and weeps.

The two sit side-by-side in plastic chairs. Coli's mother looks at her feet. Her family is poor, she says, and she wanted Coli to get an education. It took her several days to reach the shelter because she didn't have $2 for the bus fare.

For more than an hour, Coli cries. Tears run down either side of his cheeks, forming two watery garlands. They meet at his chin and plop down on his collar bone, pooling above his shirt.

She stands up and wipes his chin. They leave, crossing the dusty boulevard.

Her arm reaches around his shoulder and the long sleeve of her robe falls around the little boy. It hides him from the remaining children, who silently watch Coli go home.

EPILOGUE:

Soon after Coli left, his marabout traveled to Guinea-Bissau. He angrily demanded to know why Coli had run away.

Ashamed, Coli's father promised to make up for the boy's bad behavior.

He is sending the marabout two more sons.

Like I said, read the whole thing.

Norway reaches final decision on Krekar(?)

The latest news in the continuing saga of Mullah Krekar's status in Norway seems to indicate that the Nordic country is stuck with the Ansar al-Islam terrorist. Judged a threat to state security, he's been under an expulsion order that would have him deported back to Iraq. But a Norwegian law prohibits deportation when the deportee's life would be endangered. Krekar faces execution in Iraq.

After months of quiet diplomacy, the Norwegian government has given up on efforts to send former terrorist-group leader Mullah Krekar back to his homeland.

Krekar, who has been under an expulsion order after being determined a threat to Norway's national security, initially came to Norway as a refugee from Iraq in the early 1990s.

It later emerged that he was the head of guerrilla group Ansar al-Islam and he repeatedly violated the terms of his asylum by travelling back to northern Iraq to lead guerrilla activities.

[ ... ]

Mullah Krekar’s lawyer, Harald Stabell, is satisfied with the outcome. "An agreement for deportation would not have held up in relation to international regulations on human rights," said Stabell to newspaper VG.

However, he notes that Krekar continues to be without rights in Norway and the deportation order remains in place.

Right...last I heard, Krekar was free to roam about Norway at will.

Revealed: Where all those leftists come from

I've often wondered why there seems to be so much naïveté on the far left, and I've come up with a theory: It's a failure of Darwinian Natural Selection.

Many of the bizarre positions taken by the hard-core leftist, I believe, can be traced to a desire for acceptance. The stronger the desire, the farther the drift to the left. It's for this reason that so many people in the arts are extreme leftists. People with a strong urge to be loved gravitate to activities which provide constant affirmation of others' love for them. They're largely the ones who take up music or drama or other artistic endeavors as a means of receiving adulation from their fans. This need to be loved, or at least liked, is at the root of much liberal thought, and explains why so many in the movie, TV and music businesses are leftists.

So when Islamist freakazoids attack us and kill 3,000 people, it simply can't be because the attackers were hate-filled, bloodthirsty fanatics, but because we did something to make them mad at us. We're the ones who need to change...not them. The same thought process is what makes dolts like John Kerry say any military intervention on America's part must pass some silly-ass "global test" before we embark on it and what makes Democrats lament the Iraq war's effect on our relations with other countries.

So, why is this trait so prevalent these days? Here's where the failure of Natural Selection comes in. In harsher times past, suckers like these would be filtered out of the gene pool. A leftist caveman who somehow managed to bag an animal would, in an effort to be liked, invite a couple of other cavemen to dinner. Those other cavemen, who had not yet proven themselves friendly, would kill him and take his food, thus keeping the leftist caveman from procreating. In other words, he would be naturally deselected.

As humanity evolved and became more structured and secure, marshmallows like our leftist caveman became shielded from such adversity. Their numbers naturally grew, and places like Boston, New York, California and post-World War II Europe sprang into existence.

This mentality manifests itself today in guys like Barack Obama saying he'd engage in "dialog" with freaks like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others of his ilk. Far from proving himself friendly, Ahmadinejad has demonstrated he's far more likely to take Obama's food.

Thus proving that leftists are freaks of nature, I conclude this pseudo-scientific post.

Russian paper dishes on Vladi; gets shut down

Russian newspaper Moscow Korrespondent has been shut down after reporting that Vladimir Putin was having a budding romance with Alina Kabaeva, a 25-year-old gymnast and member of the Russian parliament.

Billionaire owner Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent, pulled the plug on Moscow Korrespondent hours after the Russian president issued an angry denial of the report about former Olympic gymnast and nude model Alina Kabaeva, a member of parliament who is 31 years his junior.

Well, that's one way to kill a rumor, I guess.

Comfort food

The dish you see here is known in this restaurant (Fiesta Del Mar Too in Mountain View, California) as 'Great Grandma's Especial'. The main part of the dish is chunks of chicken in "enjococado" sauce.

Of the four dinners I've had on this trip to the Bay Area, I've had this three times. A more satisfying dish you'll not find.

Delta and Northwest to merge

So it seems that Delta and Northwest airlines have agreed to a merger, which will result in the world's largest airline. As a Delta frequent flyer, I have some mixed feelings on this.

On the one hand, this may allow me to fly my usual airline on more trips, meaning I can keep more of my frequent flyer miles in one place, and improves my odds of getting an upgrade on those longer trips.

On the other hand, my observation of mergers is that the combined company tends to keep the worst policies of each company and discard the best, resulting in a high level of crap for both customers and employees.


I figure it's at least a year before we start seeing the effects of the merger, so it's wait and see for now. But if there's a significant downturn in service or frequent flyer benefits, I won't hesitate to jump to United.

Greenpeace founder goes nuclear

He still buys into the climate change dogma, but Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, lays out a good case for building more nuclear power plants in the US.

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

[ ... ]

And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.

The no-nuke movement is all about fear...not one nuclear power plant has been built in the US since.

Rev. Wright mouths off again

Barack Obama's spiritual adviser went off on another anti-American rant, this time at a funeral for a Chicago judge.

First reported by The Chicago Sun Times, Wright told mourners at the funeral that Thomas Jefferson, who partook in “pedophilia,” would also be considered unpatriotic these days because he wrote, “God would punish America for the sin of slavery.” He also quoted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said that the U.S. has a “congenital birth defect.”

The left loves nothing more than to denigrate America's founders, but I've never heard of the allegations of pedophilia against Jefferson. I assume he's referring to the affair Jefferson is believed to have had with one of his slaves, a teenager at a time when teenagers were considered to be of marrying age.

But judging historical figures in the context of contemporary values is another favorite pastime of the left as Wright, in saying that Jefferson would "also be considered unpatriotic" ignores the fact that Jefferson actually was around in the days of slavery.

That Wright spewed his hatred at a funeral says more about the man's character (or lack thereof) than I could ever say.

Red Sox watch

Well, the boys from Beantown are off to a less than stellar start, but the good news is that so is the Evil Empire. Both are 6-6 so far in the young season, behind the Blue Jays and the Orioles, who are in (*gasp*!) first place.

Speaking of the Evil Empire, I spotted this item at Hot Air headlines. It seems some knucklehead construction worker at Yankee Stadium who happens to be a Red Sox fan buried a David "Papi" Ortiz Red Sox jersey in the bowels of the stadium last year while he was working on the construction. He later bragged about, and because he only worked at the site for one day, some fellow hardhats not as sympathetic to the Red Sox cause figured it could have only been in one place. So the broke out jackhammers and dug it up.

Beantown-loving construction worker Gino Castignoli, who lives in The Bronx, confessed to The Post last week that he buried a Red Sox slugger David Ortiz jersey at the site last summer while working at the stadium.

After reading about the traitorous act in The Post, the two workers approached a construction manager and said they remembered Castignoli, who only worked at the Stadium one day, and thought they knew where he must have placed the shirt.

They led the manager to a service corridor near the site of the planned Legends Club restaurant, behind home plate and toward the third base side.
After the hardhats pointed to the spot, workers brought out jackhammers and dug furiously for five hours, creating a 2-foot- by-3-foot, gravel-filled pit in their search for the tainted threads.

They spotted the jersey at 3:25 p.m. and called Yankee brass. The cursed shirt was about two feet deep in cement.

Yeesh. Try to get a simple curse going, and the guy can't keep his mouth shut long enough for people to forget who he was or what part of the stadium he worked on that one day.

Lawyers, guns and money

I'm trying to learn the late, great Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money" on the guitar, so I was browsing YouTube for guitar versions of the song (Zevon's original recording on Excitable Boy is a piano piece) when I stumbled upon this. I figured I'd post it because (1) it's good political commentary (with some obligatory gratuitous cheesecake) and (2) it's a great tune.

By the way, if you're looking for a guitar version of LG&M, here you go. Performed by the man himself.

The left, in a nutshell

Spotted over at No Pasaran. This one clip tells you everything you need to know about the left.

Content warning for language.

Worst President Ever to meet with terrorists

One might think that if objections from the State Department aren't enough, then objections from Barack Obama might be. Even world-class idiotarians Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela decided the "timing was wrong". But so far, Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter shows no sign of canceling his visit with Hamas terrorist-in-hiding Khaled Meshaal in Syria.

What makes Jimmy Carter so tone deaf?

Now do you understand the difference?

Passed along by my brother Mark today...kinda says it all, doesn't it?

John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama were walking down a Washington D.C. street when they came upon a homeless person.

The Republican, John McCain, gave the homeless person his business card and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took $20 out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.

Hillary was very impressed, so when they came upon another homeless person, she decided to help. She walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office. She then reached into John McCain's pocket and got out $20. She kept $15 for her administrative fees and gave the homeless person $5.

When they came upon yet another homeless person, Barak told the homeless person to 'have hope...change is coming...' and gave him nothing.

Now do you understand the difference?

Laws for thee, but not for me

Convicted Muslim sex offenders in Britain are demanding that they be exempted from a treatment program required for early release. Why? It seems that talking about their crimes is against Islam.

Muslim sex offenders are asking to be let off a prison treatment programme on religious grounds.

Rapists, paedophiles and other dangerous attackers are expected to discuss their crimes with other inmates as a condition of release.

But Muslim prisoners complain that criminals should not have to talk about their offences - a "legitimate Islamic position", according to Ahtsham Ali, the Prison Service's Muslim adviser.

Do they just make this shit up as they go along and as convenience dictates?

More piracy off African coast

Another ship, this time a 288-ft. luxury cruiser, was taken by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

Fears were growing last night for the crew of a luxury yacht hijacked off the African coast, as the British former girlfriend of one crewman revealed that he had been worried about a pirate attack.

Le Ponant, a 288ft cruise ship, was spotted sailing south after the hijack and was believed to be headed for the Somalian coast.

[ ... ]

The pirates have yet to make demands, but Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, did not rule out paying a ransom.

"We've made contact and the matter could last a long time," he said. "We have to do everything to avoid bloodshed."

It's understandable that they want to avoid bloodshed, especially in the case of a pleasure craft with passengers on board. The problem though, as I posted last August, is that this piracy continues unabated because it's profitable.

Absolut Aztlan

I saw something about this the other day over at Hot Air, but didn't have time to really read it. Vodka maker Absolut had this ad running in Mexico, presumably in the hopes that nobody outside Mexico would see it. Absolut issued a typical non-apology:

"As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market, and for that we apologize."

I'm not a vodka drinker, so a personal boycott of Absolut would be meaningless. But I hope a real boycott of Absolut products gets some traction in the US.

'Green is the new red'

In a column in the Daily Mail, Nigel Lawson articulates much of what I've been thinking on the global warming/climate change scam, namely that a group of hucksters have founded a new religion on the basis of at best questionable science. A few excerpts:

First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.

The world's temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain's Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.

True. Global temperatures have remained static since 2000, and have actually declined since 1998. During that same time, CO2 emissions have increased at an unprecedented rate. This runs completely counter to the fundamental basis of the global warming/climate change theory; that increased CO2 raises global temperatures.

Let's look at just two of the alleged "catastrophic" consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.

So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, "globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase". Yes: increase.

As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as "virtually certain" to happen - and that was "reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure".

This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about.

So, netting things out here, warmer is better than colder.

There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed.

For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.

Lawson has a book called An Appeal To Reason coming out on 10 April in the UK which Amazon says will also be available here in the US on that date. I definitely plan on picking that one up.

Brit Muslim spared license revocation because he has two wives

When Mohammed Anwar appeared in court for driving 64MPH in a 30MPH zone, he faced immediate revocation of his driving privileges. But when he explained why he was speeding and why he needed to keep his license to drive, the court let him off with a £200 (around $400) fine. His excuse? He needs his license so that he can travel between his two homes...each of which house a different wife.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't polygamy still illegal in the UK?

Loopholes

No, I haven't taken up an illegal alternative to cigarettes. Like many places these days, Canada has banned smoking. The trouble with that in a place like Montreal is that it's frackin' cold here. So, tired of frostbitten fingers every time I stepped out for a smoke, I found this place called Stogies, a cigar bar with a special permit to allow smoking.

When the waitress saw me smoking a cigarette, she said I had to wrap it. "Wrap it?", I asked. Usually when a woman tells you to wrap it...well, never mind. Apparently, I had to wrap my cigarette so it looked more cigar-like. She was happy to sell me a pack of "GoldenWrap" for $4.50 (the Canadian dollar is trading roughly 1:1 to the US dollar now).

Secure in the knowledge that my cigarette was now producing even more pollutants, I wrapped that rascal and lit up.

Chickens ... come home ... to roost! at Obama's church

I caught a clip on CNN just now with Rev. Otis Moss, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's successor at Trinity United Church of Christ, complaining about the press and the public reaction to Rev. Wright's hate speech. I can't find anything online about Moss's remarks, but there's this item in today's Chicago Tribune.

On Thursday, Thomas will join Wright's successor, Rev. Otis Moss III, and the head of the National Council of Churches at Trinity to stress that houses of worship are not political arenas [Oh, really?? --ed.] but hallowed spaces reserved for sacred conversations with each other and with God.

"Churches are not designed for this," Moss said. "All of a sudden you inject a group of people looking for a story and some unethically looking for something salacious to report -- it heightens the anxiety."

Moss said the day-to-day business of the church cannot pause for a national controversy. During this period, families have dealt with divorce, terminal illness, a shooting and a car accident. Their pain, he said, was amplified when reporters showed up at funerals to interview members.

The press, as usual, is conducting itself abominably, but Wright and Moss have brought this upon their parishioners themselves.

Canada's Liberal party shamed

I'm still in Montreal, and spotted an item in today's Globe and Mail dead tree edition. Canada's Liberal party (their version of our Democrats) were embarrassed over their legal efforts to prevent Montreal's La Presse from publishing a list of potential Liberal party candidates for office. The Liberals ultimately called off their lawsuit, not for any concerns over a free press, but because they found that the list La Presse held wasn't what they thought it was.

Embarrassed federal Liberals called off frantic court efforts yesterday to stop a newspaper from publishing a list of Quebec election candidates after learning that the paper did not possess the potentially revealing document in the first place.

The party faced internal ridicule for wasting money and accusations of attempting to suppress press freedom before it dropped the matter on seeing the list that the paper had obtained.

How liberal of them.

Cultural diversity

Only in Montreal would you find yourself in an Irish pub eating Indian food (Tandoori chicken) watching a hockey game.