Category: Uncategorized

What comes up….

Did you ever wonder about that story of a penny dropped from a skyscraper on a pedestrian’s head?

A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said. [The]bullet struck…on the top of the head and exited at the bottom of his skull…

(Yet more proof of my long-held theory that the today’s KKK is just a bunch of hicks politicians use to attack “extremism.”)

Jews and Political Radicalism

VodkaPundit: “I’ve always joked that Jews who don’t stay Jews end up as either communists or Objectivists.”
How true. I have two compounding explanations for this: (a) For historical and cultural reasons, Jews are more educated and intellectual than the average citizen, so they are more included towards participating in two the dominant philosophical trends of our time: Marxism, and it’s opposite: Objectivism. They are also more intelligent than the public (for social rather than biological reasons I’d say) so they are more likely to seek and adopt the root of the philosophical tendencies they are exposed to. (b) A history of persecution and holding unpopular minority beliefs had led many former Jews towards more radical social solutions, especially utopian ones. Ironically, this led Jewish intellectuals to be some of the strongest supporters of the Weimar-era philosophical and political movements that brought about Fascism. It also created the utopian socialist vision that brought about the State of Israel, for better or worse.

More Leftist Nonsense…

Laurel mentions a panel at the University of Chicago’s “Center for Gender Studies” pushing for unisex bathrooms. I found these lines both hilarious and revealing:

…many women’s restrooms have a caricature of a person in a dress on it. “Going into it implies that we are willing to be associated with that image. There are only two [images] to choose from. This moment involves an act of self-labeling.
…
Nate Claxton, another panelist, knew people who had contracted bladder infections because choosing a gender bathroom bothered them so much that they did not go to the bathroom all day.

I can’t say whether sexual orientation is a choice, but one’s sex? Not unless you’re a transgendered freak –in which case you need an operation, not a unisex bathroom.

Bin Laden in Iran

Fox News analyst Mansoor Ijaz:

Al-Zawahiri was seen within the last two weeks, and bin Laden was spotted in July, says the network’s foreign affairs analyst Mansoor Ijaz.
…
Iran’s provision of safe harbor, finances and logistical support for al-Qaida is a measure to counter the possibility that U.S. action in that region could result in democracies on both sides of the country, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ijaz said a warlord who controls Afghanistan’s western provinces, Gulbuddin Hektmayer, is working with al-Qaida on a plan to bring a large army of Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops into Afghanistan during the winter months to attack U.S. interests and to try to take control of the entire country.

Iran does not want to see us succeed in building a democracy in Afghanistan under any circumstances,’ he said.
…
‘But it was my judgment,’ he said, ‘that it was vitally important for the broader part of our government’s decision-making apparatus to know exactly what it is that’s going on there, because it’s very clear that the Iranians are trying desperately to not only hang on to power, but to fuel the terrorist enterprise in that part of the world.’

New Battlestar Galactica Series

Last year, I started watching 1979-era Battlestar Galactica episodes on the SciFi channel. The show was pretty decent, and when I heard that a new series was being made, I was initially excited. Then I read the intro:

So we’ve set out to bring the old boy back to life and give him a new look and a new outlook on life. And we’re going to ask him to tell his stories again, from the beginning. Tell them again, but this time go deeper. See, we were young once and when the old guy spun his tales of Apollo and Starbuck, we were satisfied with clear-cut heroes and nakedly evil villains. But we’re older now. We’ve eaten a lot of popcorn over the years. We’re ready for a bigger meal. Make the story more complicated. Make the people less black-and-white. Challenge us, provoke us, grab us by the throat with those massive hands and dare us to invest ourselves in flawed characters who face ambiguous choices in an imperfect world. Dare us to root for heroes with all-too-human weaknesses. See if we’ll still embrace them if they fall prey to their imperfections.

See if I still care to watch the show. Incidentally, that seems to be the theme of all the original movies and many shows the SciFi channel makes: empty, plotless and nihilistic shoot-em-ups where there are no good or bad guys, just hormone and violence crazed lunatics running around and bitching about how pathetic and primitive human beings are.
(There is some good stuff in the mix: Stargate SG1 is a great show, and Tremors isn’t bad either. SG1 and Law and Order is pretty much the extent of the shows I watch on a regular basis.)

The Palestinian people does not exist.

I came across a revealing quote today:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It’s by PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.