From Mohammed at Iraq the Model:

Today Baghdad is witnessing a tragic disaster; hundreds have died and more were injured when huge crowds of pilgrims heading to the shrine of Imam Kadhom caused the fence of the A'imma bridge to collapse pushing people to fall into the Tigris river.

The news is still uncertain about the cause and casualty toll of this disaster but sources in the ministry of health say that around 640 people were killed in the incident...

Baghdad Stampede on Bridge Kills 640 Shiite Pilgrims (Update2)

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) — At least 640 Shiite Muslim pilgrims were killed in a stampede on a bridge spanning the Tigris River in Baghdad today after a nearby mosque was attacked by insurgents, Iraqi National Assembly adviser George Sada said.

"When people heard that the mosque had been attacked, they panicked and rushed toward the bridge to get out of the area," Sada said in a telephone interview from the capital. "There were so many people on the bridge that many fell over its sides and drowned in the Tigris, others were crushed." He said the force of the crowds broke the bridge's barriers. Other accounts said people in the crowd reacted to rumors of a suicide bomber among them...

NOLA has the latest news, including reports from specific neighborhoods.

New Orleans Craigslist may help find friends and relatives

Open comment thread, news and information about survivors

Katrina missing persons board

Ken Wheaton's family is OK

What will happen when the looters meet the land sharks?

Dave J. has a letter from his damaged but not downhearted alma mater, Tulane

Instapundit has info on everything, including more charities

While a few policemen may be involved in looting, hundreds of policemen are rescuing stranded children, elderly people and puppies. Guess which event makes the headlines. Michele has more.

Susan Estrich, the first woman president of the Harvard Law Review and the first woman to head a national presidential campaign believes that Cindy Sheehan is expressing "anti-Semitism masked as opposition to Israel."

Did an ABC staffer insert the following lines in an email sent by celebrity antiwar mother Cindy Sheehan?

"Am I emotional? Yes, my firstborn was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." That is what Sheehan is claiming.

If you don't believe that explanation — if you don't believe an ABC staffer set about to put anti-Semitic words into Cindy Sheehan's mouth — then your hero, my liberal friends, is a raging, ignorant anti-Semite. Sorry, but what are you doing hanging with that crowd?

I am as sympathetic to Cindy Sheehan's loss as the next mother. When I heard of her plight, while on vacation with my own children, my heart ached. Why not simply meet with her, I thought — and wrote, like the other liberal columnists — instead of going on a bike ride to nowhere?

I am the last person to "swift boat" a mother who lost her son in this war. I don't blame anyone, man or woman, for being "emotional." I have certainly seen the charge used to belittle women many too many times, myself included, with less justification than in this case.

But I will not stand silent and see anti-Semitism masked as opposition to Israel and Israel blamed for George Bush's mistakes, if that's what they are. She did say this, apparently:

"What they're saying, too, is like, it's OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. ... It's OK for Israel to occupy Palestine ... for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it's not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. They're a bunch of (expletive) hypocrites."

Anyone who cannot tell the difference, in any terms, between Israel on the one hand and Syria and Iran on the other is not someone who, as my grandmother would put it, is "good for the Jews" — or for the country, I'd like to add.

There may be more than 55 dead in Mississippi.

New Orleans survived the immediate effects of the hurricane, but the city is now being flooded by a levee breach:

The effect of the breach was instantly devastating to residents who had survived the fiercest of Katrina's winds and storm surge intact, only to be taken by surprise by the sudden deluge. And it added a vast swath of central New Orleans to those already flooded in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.

Beginning at midday, Lakeview residents watched in horror as the water began to rise, pushed through the levee breach by still-strong residual winds from Katrina. They struggled to elevate furniture and eventually found themselves forced to the refuge of second floors just when most in the neighborhood thought they had been spared.

"It would have been fine," refugee Pat O.Brien said. "The eye passed over." But his relief was short-lived. "It's like what you see on TV and never thought would happen to us. We lost everything: cars, art, furniture, everything."

Scott Radish, his wife Kyle and neighbor Brandon Gioe stood forlornly on their Mound Street porch, where they had ridden out Katrina, only to face a second, more insidious threat. "The hurricane was scary," Scott said. "All the tree branches fell, but the building stood. I thought I was doing good. Then I noticed my Jeep was under water."

CNN and the Washington Post do have a list of aid agencies, though.

I love New Orleans - it's my favorite place to visit. I hope they'll be able to recover from this, and I hope they might move some of their treasured landmarks inland.

I used to live in a hurricane prone area (Cape May, NJ). There used to be a South Cape May, but that's underwater now. It has been underwater for decades. Friends of ours had a seaside home, but they sold it because they were tired of cleaning up after flood damage. I don't know if it's global warming or something else, but the ocean seems to be moving inland. Even if we all stopped driving cars tomorrow, lived in harmony with nature and dressed ourselves in bannana leaves, this trend would not reverse itself. We're probably going to have to learn to live with things as they are, and give large bodies of water some breathing room.

Oliver Willis says:

As a proud Democrat it hurts to say, but Frank Rich’s conclusion is right..

..The Democrats are hoping that if they do nothing, they might inherit the earth as the Bush administration goes down the tubes. Whatever the dubious merits of this Kerryesque course as a political strategy, as a moral strategy it’s unpatriotic. The earth may not be worth inheriting if Iraq continues to sabotage America’s ability to take on Iran and North Korea, let alone Al Qaeda.

You don’t have to be in the majority to exhbit leadership qualities, and when it comes to Iraq, the Democratic party just hasn’t led at all.

..whatever happened to democrats who could stand up and proudly proclaim that they love their country? Just that. No conditions, no proclaiming a greater loyalty to some other group or ideology, just a simple, non-nationalistic patriotism, directed towards the US as it is, not as it will be in a dream of the future.

Wilson had it. FDR had it. Truman had it, he went without question to fight in WWI. Kenedy had it. Even Johnson had it. McGovern didn’t, despite his war-hero background. Carter didn’t. He was proud to president only of a potential America, as were Mondale and Dukakis.

What the hell has happened to the democratic party?

When I was a web geek for a large corporation, the marketing people were the bossy types who wore pearls and/or suits, ate long lunches and left the office promptly at five. All proper geeks, alpha, beta and even the gamma ones like me, ate at and slept at their desks, wore t-shirts and jeans and hated marketing.

Unfortunately, according to human resources, even the geeks in the department were marketing.

Now, everyone is marketing. Neo-marketing, that is..

Salman Rushdie, who is accustomed to dealing with bullies, gave George Galloway the (verbal) beating he deserves.

I hope the Galloway vs. Hitchens debate is as good..

When he wasn't beating on Galloway, Rushdie said:

Rushdie said Kashmir had changed since the 1950s and 1960s. "There was no radical Islam in Kashmir then - it was pacifist, Sufist - and it had nothing to do with jihad. But in the last half century this terrible fundamentalism has got hold of the region."

The AP article about Fred Phelps and his family is a great illustration of how the press repeats biased half-truths over and over and over, until the fable is accepted as fact; unfortunately, Phelps and his bogus "church" is just one fable among thousands.

Once upon a time reporters may have been capable of creating objective hard news stories, free from bias. In those mythical days, they may have checked their sources and investigated data pertaining to the story.

If they ever existed, those reporters are gone. For decades hard-news stories and the hacks who create them work with a mixture of bias, punditry and cribbing from the press kit. This the only way that Iraq becomes another Vietnam.

Most liberals, leftists and conservatives were suprised to learn that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church is made up of Democrats. This is no secret, just as the 100 million dead as a result of Communism was no secret - the press just never discussed it because these facts were in conflict with their personal and professional leftist beliefs. We've become so accustomed to the resulting Left-leaning bias in the news, we don't even notice it.

Replacing Left-wing bias with right-wing bias helps expose the lies. It's also easy and fun. Here's the Cindy Sheehan peace mom fable from CNN:

Sharpton, Sheen visit antiwar camp

The Rev. Al Sharpton joined hundreds of war protesters camping near President Bush's ranch for an interfaith service Sunday, saying he felt compelled to meet Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who started the rally three weeks earlier.

Sheehan arrived in Bush's hometown August 6 and refused to leave until she could question the president about the war that has killed more than 1,870 U.S. service members, including her son Casey.

"I feel that it is our moral obligation to stand and to be courageous with these families, and particularly Cindy, that have become the conscience of this nation," said Sharpton, an activist and former Democratic presidential candidate.

Sharpton and Sheehan laid roses at crosses near "Camp Casey," named for Sheehan's 24-year-old son who was killed in Iraq last year.

Actor Martin Sheen, who portrays the Democratic president on NBC's "The West Wing," also met with Sheehan on Sunday.

Sharpton, Stormfront visit antiwar camp

The Rev. Al Sharpton a former Democratic presidential candidate and an activist implicated in a hate-based arson attack which killed seven people, joined Stormfront and members of other hate groups camping near President Bush's ranch for a press conference Sunday, saying he felt compelled to meet Cindy Sheehan, the activist who started the rally three weeks earlier.

Sheehan arrived in Bush's hometown August 6 and refused to leave until she could question the president about the war that brought about what Iraqi poet Awad Nasir called "the rebirth of Iraq as a free nation."

Putting on a somber face beneath a swarm of Paparazzi, Sharpton said "I feel that it is our moral obligation to stand and to be courageous with these families, and particularly Cindy, that have become the conscience of this nation,"

[Photos thanks to Yahoo]

According to one Stormfront member, "What we risk doing by not showing up at the massive protests against the Bush/Neocon War for Israel is to leave the field of battle."

The tools of those lost unicorns that we call "investigative reporters" included objectivity and a need to tell the truth. The tools of most reporters today are the ability to scan a press kit, cut and paste. Garbage in, garbage out is what we call "news".

The NJ Carnival of the Bloggers #15 is up at PDC Ryan's.

See New Jersey bloggers in their natural habitat via an interactive map.

Anti-gay protests at GI funerals

SMYRNA, Tenn. - Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq.

The church members were met with scorn from local residents. They chased the church members cars' down a highway, waving flags and screaming "God bless America."..

..The Rev. Fred Phelps, founder of Westboro Baptist in Kansas, contends that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq as vengeance from God for protecting a country that harbors gays. The church, which is not affiliated with a larger denomination, is made up mostly of Phelps' children, grandchildren and in-laws.

The church members carried signs and shouted things such as "God hates fags" and "God hates you."

About 10 church members protested near Smyrna United Methodist Church and nearly 20 stood outside the National Guard Armory in Ashland City. Members have demonstrated at other soldier funerals across the nation.

The biggest problem: the clearly psychotic Reverend Phelps is walking the streets, a danger to himself and others. Our mental health agencies are, for the 1,236,457th + time, demonstrating ignorance and incompetence that borders on the criminal.

But back to the near-criminal idiocies of the press. Here's what they always get wrong about the Phelps "church".

1. Mainstream and fundamentalist Christians have denounced Phelps and his cult as a producer of anti-gay propaganda and violence-inspiring hate speech. His cult is composed of members of his own family who live within a family 'compound'. The press knows this, but they choose to call this psychotic family a "Church"

2. Fred Phelps is a registered Democrat. and the members of his cult have had very strong ties to the Democratic Party. From Wikipedia:

   In the 1980s, the Phelps family were strong political allies with then-senator Al Gore. The home of Fred Jr., Phelps' eldest son, located in the Westboro compound, acted as Gore's campaign quarters for one of his senate races, and the Westboro compound was host to a fundraiser. Numerous photos exist on the internet of Fred Phelps Jr. and his second wife, Betty Phelps-Schurle, posing with Al and Tipper Gore in Phelps Jr.'s home. Phelps also served as a Gore delegate on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988.

The article could also be written this way..

Anti-war democrat protests at GI funerals

SMYRNA, Tenn. - Democrats and anti-war activists who claim that God is punishing American soldiers for defending this country brought their anti-America message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq.

The Democrats were met with scorn from local residents. They chased the activists' cars down a highway, waving flags and screaming "God bless America."..

Anti-war activist Fred Phelps, a registered Democrat who was invited to (and who attended) the Clinton/Gore inaugural party in 1993, contends that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq as vengeance from God. Phelps' cult has been condemned by mainstream and fundamentalist Christians, and is made up mostly of Phelps' children, grandchildren and in-laws.

These anti-war democrats carried signs and shouted things such as "God hates America", "Thank God for 9/11" and "God hates you."

About 10 Democrats protested near Smyrna United Methodist Church and nearly 20 stood outside the National Guard Armory in Ashland City. Members have demonstrated at other soldier funerals across the nation.

The original AP article ends with one quote from "Danny Cotton, 56", who says, "If they were protesting the government, I might even join them," If Mr. Cotton weren't fed on a constant diet of half-truths and bias from the media he would realize that Fred Phelps does hate Bush and America. Phelps has offered support to Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein.

If baby-boomer Cotton realized that the press has been selling him similar half-truths about other totalitarian/extremist groups for decades, he might begin to rethink his views.

Or maybe not.

[Cross-posted at Dean's World]

A few days after July 4th, I brought my digital camera, a Fuji s3000 on a hike through this watery, slippery gorge.

Of course I slipped and fell. The camera broke and the batteries disappeared downriver. The chip was saved, so I brought it home, put it in a "safe" place and thus lost it.

I just found the chip yesterday. The purpose of this sad story is to explain the delay in bringing to the blogosphere what it has been waiting for: my film of Shriners riding little cars at the Mayville July 4th parade.

Via USA Today:

The mosque stood empty beside the road in a Christian town in Kenya. Funded by Saudis, it wasn't meant for worshippers. It was meant to stake a claim.

The mosque annoyed the locals. Windows were broken. A goat grazed in the garbage-speckled yard. Yet that shabby mosque was part of an extremist campaign that threatens widespread strife in the years ahead...

...No region is as vulnerable as Africa. The differences between the Saudi ruling family and bin Laden aren't so much about goals as about methods. The Saudis were furious over the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam not because of the viciousness of the acts, but because the attacks threatened to call the West's attention to quiet subversion by fundamentalist Wahhabis in the region.

Arabs still regard black Africans as inferior, fit only to be subjects. As a result, their charities don't fund clinics, universities or sanitation systems. They just keep on building mosques, staking graphic claims to a once and future empire of faith.

Even in the United States, Saudi-funded Quranic schools encourage religious apartheid. While events have forced their mullahs to tone down public hate-speech directed toward the West, Saudi madrassas never encourage young people to integrate into their host society. They praise rigid separation.

In East Africa, this takes the form of pressuring the young to devote themselves to studying the Quran. This prevents Muslims from getting a practical education. As a result, they remain unqualified for the best jobs, which are taken by Christians with university degrees, further exacerbating antagonism.

The Saudis and their accomplices know exactly what they're doing. They don't want a "separate but equal" system. Separate and unequal does the trick, creating a sense of deprivation, of being cheated, among Muslims and driving a wedge down the middle of fragile societies. The last thing the bigots of the Arabian Peninsula want to see would be prosperous, patriotic, well-integrated Muslim communities in Africa...

..Nor is this slow-motion jihad confined to the coast. It takes still uglier forms in the interior. Saudi money and arms smuggled from Yemen keep tribal strife alive in northern Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and, of course, Somalia.

During my stay in Kenya, nearly a hundred tribal people were massacred near the Ethiopian border. The religious undertone of the slaughter - which included the executions of schoolchildren - was played down. The Kenyan government fears a wider conflagration and quietly accepts its inability to control its northern borders. But extremist sentiment is growing, while Kenya's policy of benign neglect collapses.

The jihad in eastern Africa stretches from the butchery in Sudan down to Tanzanian villages where poverty was exacerbated by decades of socialism. It takes multiple forms, from a name-calling contest with émigrés returning to Somaliland from the West to support for separatist movements on Zanzibar and Pemba islands.

No one has called the Saudis or their partners to account.

These apologists are working overtime to hide the fact that Saudi money has created this tribal strife.

Many of these apologists work for our own government. Our relationship with the Kingdom has been, to say the least, spineless. We've got to start following the example of others; we must begin to stand up for ourselves and for the rest of the world. If we're not fighting these sponsors of terror, what kind of war on terrorism are we fighting?

[link thanks to LGF]

Freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. That's the current motto of the right-left alliance that calls itself "anti-war".

Can you guess who said this?

There is no downside to dignified street activism. The Crawford, Texas encampment by Cindy Sheehan is arguably the single most brilliant tactical propaganda move in decades. What Cindy Sheehan did was simply to "do it".

She just got in her car and drove to Crawford to physically announce her righteous moral stand against a war based on lies.

We can do the same thing. We can also take advantage of the entire media of the world being in Crawford for the next few days. Or we can let the opportunity go. We can worry about whether our message will be properly understood. Or we can do what Cindy Sheehan did....just show up in front of Bush when he is cornered like a rat lolling about at his ranch. Clearing brush, riding his $3,000 bicycle, and catching up on his reading.

A basic principle is that "if you don't come to the dance, you don't get the girl".

We're going to the dance.

a) Joan Baez

b) David Duke

c) Al Sharpton

d) a member of the neo-Nazi Stormfront community

Hard to tell, isn't it? They all support Cindy, and they all use the same terminology.

If you said d), a member of the neo-Nazi Stormfront community, you're right.

The 21st century anti-war movement is not your parents' anti-war movement. The current anti-war movement is a rainbow coalition of hate; they claim to be anti-war while supporting the Palestinian war against Israel, the Intifada; Stalinists join hands with neo-Nazis, anarchists praise peace and threaten destruction, the head of the DNC proudly declares that he hates a large proportion of the American public.

They're converging on Crawford to sing Kumbaya and support Cindy Sheehan, the "peace mom".

UPDATE: They're also converging on Walter Reed Army Medical center, targeting wounded soldiers.

Kids and Dads..

[Video link thanks to Dean]

Pat Robertson is a lunatic, but that's not really news..

..Robertson and Hugo Chavez are on the same gamma-rays-from moonbeam marigolds' wavelength that only pomeranians and loony zealots are able to hear (that's why they bark so much) but that's not really news either..

..when Sluggo calls Robertson a Fathead, that is real news. Everytime I see Robertson, his head keeps getting bigger. I don't know what's in there, but someday, that thing is gonna blow..

Lately, it seems that the western world is beginning to grow a spine..

(Well, the anglosphere is, anyway..)

Australia rejects Islamic Sharia law, and tells Muslims who want to live under Sharia laws to leave..

SYDNEY (AFP) - Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law should get out of Australia, a senior government minister has said, hinting that some radical clerics might be asked to leave.

Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament, Treasurer Peter Costello told national television late Tuesday.

"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," said Costello, who is seen as heir-apparent to Prime Minister John Howard.

"I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false.

"There's only one law in Australia — it's the law that's made by the parliament of Australia and enforced by our courts. There is no second law.

Unfortunately, our government has not followed Australia's lead.

Britain's Home Secretary Charles Clarke "angrily hit out at the United Nations" for their tendency to favor the rights of terrorists over the rights of terrorism's victims

Home Secretary Charles Clarke angrily hit out at the United Nations after a senior official warned that Britain's plans to deport Islamic extremists breached its international human rights obligations.

Mr Clarke said the UN should pay more attention to the rights of the victims of attacks such as the London Tube bombings rather than "simply focusing all the time on the terrorist".

"Certainly, the human rights of people who are criminals, they have to be looked after," he told the ITV News Channel. "But more important in my view are the human rights of the people against whom the criminals commit their acts.

"So the human rights of those people who were blown up on the Tube in London on July 7 are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights of the people who committed those acts.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Britain wants presidents and prime ministers of the 15 U.N. Security Council nations to meet next month on ways to punish people who incite terrorism, a British diplomat said on Tuesday.

To Omar Bakri Mohammad,

We, British Muslims, urge you not to return to the United Kingdom.

You have caused enough trouble already. Your statements, pronouncements and fatwas are neither supported nor looked kindly upon - except by the British media which seems to have a strange love-affair with you.

I hope this is the start of a trend, one that Americans should follow...

John Bradley is a British journalist who spent two and a half years as a newspaper editor and reporter in Saudi Arabia. He worked for Arab News as an editor in the aftermath of 9/11. His book, Saudi Arabia Exposed, received this review from Joshua Teitelbaum, author of Holier than Thou:

Veteran journalist John R. Bradley, armed with a knowledge of Arabic, refreshingly breaks away from officialdom and the stale post-9/11 cliches about the kingdom to offer us an insightful first-person account of what life in Saudi Arabia is really like. This valuable book provides fascinating insights unavailable to most outsiders, as pressures there build toward breaking point.

Colt from Eurabian Times interviewed Bradley. Here, Bradley tells us why the Saudi system is not really a feudal monarchy, why Bush may not be as enthusiastic about the US-Saudi alliance as he seems, and why many Saudi citizens do not support the current regime.

At Winds of Change, Bradley answers questions and criticism.

..with Jersey bloggers and cool shots from Google Earth, thanks to SloppyDawg.

Norm Geras has been interviewing bloggers on a weekly basis for quite some time. He's now celebrating the normblog profile century.

I've compiled a sort of composite normblog profile by giving, for each question, an answer from one of the profiles. Be advised that this has been done in a hurry and in a rough and ready way - not on the basis of deep thought and a close comparative study of all the answers. (Gimme a break, already!) But please feel free to visit all the 100 profiles at your leisure and study away. Onward...

Q: Who would play you in the movie about your life?

A: If he had better boobs, I'd suggest Peter O'Toole.

I was inadvertently thrown offline for a few days, due to a busted old computer and a family celebration that's currently taking place in the wilds of New York State.

They said that they'd have wireless in the hotel, but, like the highways that turn unexpectedly into cowpaths, their definition of "roads" and "wireless" is different from mine.

My husband blames it all on Windows and Bill Gates. He may be right.

Typing this quickly in between demands that I attend a birthday party. Life is hard, be back soon..

I finally found one way of dealing with bureaucracies:

Rule #1* - when you're speaking to a bureaucrat, don't accuse his/her department of incompetence - accuse another, possibly competing department of incompetence and ask for their help in proving your case.

In Hoboken, parking tickets are a minor industry. Most of the fault is the drivers', who park on the edges of corners, in front of fire hydrants, etc. But on a windy days in Hoboken, I've seen traffic tickets dancing down the sidewalk like fall leaves. I'd assumed that people had seen them and tossed them on the ground, but when I got a late fee for a parking ticket (I forgot to feed the meter) that I'd never seen, I realized that the meter maids weren't securing the tickets to the cars.

This has happened before. The people in the Traffic Violations bureau must be pretty sick of hearing this complaint. Which is why I won a very minor victory (a court date to hear my case).

I hope the judge is also p.o.'d at the meter maids.

* I have no other rules because I'm fairly incompetent at dealing with the DMV and their ilk. My only other strategy is to avoid them as much as possible.

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - More than 100 homemade bombs planted by suspected Islamic militants exploded nearly simultaneously across Bangladesh on Wednesday, killing two people, including a young boy, and wounding at least 73.

Eight people were arrested. There was no claim of responsibility, but leaflets from a banned group seeking the imposition of Islamic law were found at many scenes.

Police said the bombs apparently were designed to cause limited damage. The blasts killed a bicycle rickshaw driver in the northern town of Chapainawabganj and a 10-year-old boy in the central town of Savar.

The explosions caused panic and massive traffic jams in a number of cities, as people fled for safety and rushed to schools to bring their children home.

At least 73 people were injured in more than 100 blasts, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press from police, hospital, eyewitness and local media sources.

Leaflets from the Jumatul Mujahedin were found at many blast scenes, police said. The group wants to establish an Islamic state in Bangladesh, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation governed by secular laws.

We, and the rest of the world, are not fighting terrorism, which is a tactic of war, and we're not fighting "extremism" - we're fighting apartheid and a system of laws that seek to legalize and enforce crimes against humanity.

Well, that's what we should be fighting.

I am a benny

Well, at least I'm not a shoobie.

Retired CEO Tom Evslin says Self Publish or Perish

Almost as soon as I retired as CEO of ITXC a year ago this summer, I began work on My Novel. It’s an historic murder mystery set in the first Internet bubble and rubble. I had a ringside seat in 1998-2003. It’s fun to tell the story. It’s more fun for me to do it in fiction than any other way. And the first draft of the book is done.

My Novel is going to appear first on the web. I’ve been in software so long that I’m gonna start with a beta release version 0.91 published on a blog engine. It’ll be free; you can subscribe to it; you can visit it online; you can file bug reports and feature requests; you can roast it in comments; and there’ll be other ways to interact online as well. The fictional company in the book will have a real website. That SHOULD all start in a month or two (hey, this IS like software).

Of course there are always the mavericks who are ahead of the crowd.

[link thanks to Jeff Jarvis]

...and this is why.

[thanks to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change]

I don't agree with what Ms. Sheehan says, but she should be allowed to say it, as loudly and as often as she pleases. Her entourage, which includes varied folks from the Left and the Right, including David Duke, convicted terror supporter Lynne Stewart, pro-Intifada activists Cynthia McKinney and Paul Findlay, should be allowed to speak out as often as possible. Americans need to know that the so-called anti-war movement is now openly allied with white supremacists and supporters of totalitarianism. Cindy's entourage can tell them all about it.

Other than that, all I can say is that I've always been repulsed by those who presume to speak for the dead. Since I know a few people who share Cindy Sheehan's views, I feel the need to repeat my own personal 'not in my name' statement.

I ever happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can protest for peace with fascists and appeasement and hearts and flowers but DO NOT DO IT IN MY NAME! If you use my name to promote a cause that I vehemently disagree with, I will haunt you until you die. I'll be the cold sweat that wakes you in the middle of the night. You'll see my face in every crowd, you'll feel a chill in your veins when the lights go out. Your flowers will die, your milk will curdle and your keys will always be missing. You will have no peace.

UPDATE: Dean is right

..is up this week at Dan's Riehl World View.

There's political outrage, non-political outrage, photographs of bygone eras and news of a contract being put out on local bears. It seems that Yogi and Boo Boo have been walking heavy into the wrong establishments.

more at Dan's...

At Kesher Talk:

Tisha B'Av - which begins tomorrow evening - commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnetzar (which led to the founding of the influential Jewish community of Babylonia), and again in 70 CE, by the Romans. It also serves as a catch-all day of mourning for other major Jewish historical calamities (such as the massacres of the Crusades), but its central text - Jeremiah's Eicha, or Lamentations - is an unflinching description of the horrors inflicted upon Jerusalem by Nebuchadnetzar's seige and massacre.

So now is also an appropriate time to revisit the condition of the Temple Mount, site of the holiest places in Jewish ritual..

This blogburst has several sections:

Introduction

Tisha B'Av

Israel past present and future

Jihadism and reality

The Mount since 1967

Poetry pierces the iron curtain

..now there's proof..

Via the NYTimes: In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby...

...When she came here, she was all small and curled up," said her mother, Henda, 30. "It's Plumpy'nut that's made her like this. She's immense!"

Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals. But that is akin to calling a 1945 Mouton Rothschild fortified grape juice.

The usual course of treatment is four weeks of Plumpy'nut, costing about $20, along with grain-based food like Unimix, a vitamin-packed flour that can be made into the porridge many Africans eat. But some children return to health in as little as two weeks.

The product is the brainchild of a French scientist, André Briend, who had labored in vain for years to concoct a ready-to-eat nutrition supplement, until serendipity - a bottle of the popular Nutella breakfast spread on his kitchen table - led him to try a paste instead using candy bars and other kinds of food. Later, Nutriset, a French company that specializes in making food supplements for relief work, began packaging the formula under the name Plumpy'nut.

From the recently released oral histories of 9/11:

"We were saying, 'Don't worry, we're with the Fire Department. Everybody is going to get out,'" he recalled. But, he said, "We were just as scared as anybody else. We were just victims too. Basically the only difference between us and the victims is we had flashlights."

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled hearing someone yell before the collapses that something was falling from the towers.

"It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other," she said. "We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was. ... I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit."

Emergency medical technician John Felidi recalled that when the south tower fell, "We heard a rumble. I heard the rumble and looked — in the back of me all I seen was a monstrous — I can't even describe it. A cloud. Looked like debris, dust."

[click on the photos for larger version]

James Wolcott

Gossip columnist and Vanity Fair editor James Wolcott has his panties in a bunch about the fact that apostates from the Democratic Party are being allowed to express themselves in a public forum.

One of Wolcott's minions delivered this insult at Michael Totten's site:

Your high-minded political positioning is, and always has been, about your own perceived virtue. It's a way of flattering yourself and avoiding accepting the consequences of your alliegences.

Wolcott says:

I made it clear that I was referring specifically to bloggers who support Bush's War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, bloggers who slant conservative Republican in the overwhelming of majority of their posts and--

--and then at irregular intervals rhetorically wag their hands to say, Hey, don't pin a label on me, I support a woman's right to choose, or gay marriage, or decriminalization of drugs, etc.

As if that absolves you for vigorously championing an immoral war based on lies, supervised by a leadership class corrupted by ideological cowards and incompetents.

Oh, I forgot. Comrade Kerry has been purged.

Never mind.

Wolcott obviously thinks that it's time to bring back the re-education camps. Of course, it'll be hard to fit them into his busy schedule - with golf, lobster fests, the Marshall Field Glamorama bash and his weekly worship at the shrine of Pauline Kael (the only reason to pick up the New Yorker), he just doesn't have the time.

So, he'll probably delegate the job to his minions. Get snappy, Comrades, it's time to paint this town red.

Via the Belmont Club:

In the 1930s the bomber airplane took the place of the U-boat as the unstoppable weapon in the public's imagination. Fired by the concepts of Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, many interwar policymakers believed that bomber aircraft alone could bring a nation to its knees. The destructive capacity ascribed to the biplane bombers of the day approached that later attributed to nuclear weapons during the Cold War and so terrified politicians that it fueled the policy of appeasement. According to Wikipedia:

The calculations which were performed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the interwar years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British appeasement in the 1930s.

Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in words calculated to convey the futility of war that "the bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves." From there, as with those who ascribe the same irresistibility to the suicide bomber, it was natural to turn to appeasement. And that was what Baldwin did.

Read more at the Belmont Club.

Christopher Hitchens believes that 9/11 was one of those "measurable historical moments" when we were all put in a position to take a strong stand for what is right.

Most Americans stood for what was right. The reactionary Left did not. As Hitch says:

The left failed this test. Instead of strongly standing against these nihilistic murderers, people on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, began to make excuses for these murderers, openly saying that Bin ladin was, however crude in his methods, in some ways voicing a liberation theology. This is simply a moral and political collapse.

The latest installment came from a link whoring attempt by a blogger who calls himself "Mithras". Mithras personally attacked several popular non-Leftist bloggers and waited for the hits to roll in. Dean Esmay was one of the non-Leftist bloggers who was attacked, but he wisely chose not to link to Mithras.

In his post, Mithras shows his contempt for Africans:

Darfur is an especially favorite topic [at RedState] because it both shows Islam in a bad light and has the advantage of not having to actually do anything.

he also shows his contempt for women..

Michelle Malkin: Far-right affirmative action hire who is so bigoted she'd arrest herself for trying to cross a border. Famously published a book praising internment of Japanese-Americans that was (a) incoherent and (b) probably not written by her. If she didn't have tits, she'd be stuck writing at Townhall.com.

The reactionary Left's demand that conservative women stifle themselves is especially vituperative when directed towards Michelle Malkin. Just do a search for her name combined with any misogynistic slur. Not coincidentally , the sites that Mithras calls "funny" pop up every time.

An unofficial rule of political correctness - ethnic/misogynistic slurs can be used by the Left to denigrate someone that they define as "racist" or Republican. They're okay with calling Condoleeza Rice an "Aunt Jemima" and Colin Powell an Uncle Tom, because as Republicans, they deserve it. Just like America deserved the 'blowback' of 9/11.

Ethnic slurs are as Leftist as free trade coffee. As Malkin points out:

Ex-Klansman Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, casually used the phrase "white nigger" twice on national TV this weekend. Enraged civil rights groups organized a protest campaign against Sen. Byrd and demanded that he undergo sensitivity training ... not. The ex-Klansman, you see, is a Democrat. Democrats can join hate groups and utter the ugliest racial slurs and get away with it because they are Democrats.

If I reacted as Duong did to every ethnic slight ever uttered against me or to every loser who talked to me in pidgin English, I'd be on life support by now...

..In Canada, two "hip" Internet retailers - chinkdesign.com and Yellowfellow.com — sell popular T-shirts with slant-eyed icons and ethnic slurs. For $17.99, you can buy a "Badass Chinaman" shirt featuring Bruce Lee at chinkdesign.com. Or try the "Babydoll" Chink T-shirt. "With a tight fit and a wide collar, this spiffy shirt sports the CHINK logo," the ad copy reads. "Now, when they stare at your chest, it'll be because of your political incorrectness."

They belittle us and everything we stand for, then they castigate us because we won't vote for them. To them, we're meatheads, dead from head up. (the updated version of meathead is "wingnut", The Enemy or just plain Republican)

The bigest bigot (no pun intended) is Michael Moore. I got a chance to see Fahrenheit 9/11 for the first time this week, and it was "mediocre propaganda." The only thing that shocked me was Moore's blatantly racist attacks against the Coalition of the Willing.

He depicts the residents of the Republic of Palau as stereotypical "native" dancers. A peasant on a donkey cart represents Central America's oldest Democracy, Costa Rica. Moroccans are portrayed as tourist friendly native drummers. If he had portrayed our Japanese allies as Canadian t-shirt style slant-eyed babydolls, I would not have been surprised.

Black youth are portrayed by Moore as gullible and uniformly poor, easily duped by The Man. The idea that the white members of a Fresno pacifist group could be harmful in any way is dismissed as ridiculous.

Michael Moore belittles the meatheads who don't share his views. He believes that we American meatheads are the dumbest people on the face of the earth.

The latest elections proved that the American public isn't willing to tolerate intolerance from Islam or the Left. They won't vote for a Howard Dean, a Pat Buchanan, a Ralph Nader or any other Bunkeresque bigot.

Archie Bunker had a few sympathetic qualities - he loved his family, he loved his country. The reactionary Left lacks Archie's appeal. They're bigotry without the charm. They're a misanthrope of a philosophy that will die alone, its body only discovered when the neighbors notice the newspapers piling up and the smell. It will die unlamented, buried by history in an unmarked grave, with a bitter eulogy delivered, perhaps, by Hitch himself.

Until it dies, the reactionary Left will be the sad old fart whining about days gone by; lost in nostalgia, flummoxed by events; an abusive jerk shouting at everything it doesn't understand. Writing about it makes for a sad post - but it could be an interesting series..

Boy, the way Bob Dylan played.
listening through a dopey haze.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!

Kickbacks from the welfare state.
Mom and Dad pulled our weight
Wasn't all that free love great
before AIDS!

You could spit at soldiers then!
Girls were chicks, flag-burners were real men.
Mister, we could use a man like George McGovern again.

Kickbacks from the welfare state.
Mom and Dad pulled our weight
Wasn't all that free love great?
Those were the days!

Why is it that people who defend multiculturalism have an encyclopedic knowledge about everything that's supposedly wrong with American society, but they know next to nothing about other cultures?

Trent Telenko had a post up at Winds of Change about the long-awaited serious intellectual backlash against 'Multi-cult'.

Multi-cult" advocates never used to have to defend their ideas in honest debate outside the hot house atmosphere of acedemia. Now they have to intellectually defend themselves based on reality and not their utopian fantasies. Their normal debate-ending tactics of screaming "Racism," "Sexism" and "Homophobia" are being drowned in the bodies of those killed by Islamist beheaders and suicide bombers.

Tough for them. Good for the rest of us.

He did say:

I'm not an authority on Islam, but I am an authority on certain areas in science, so I know what it means to be an authority on a topic. I also understand the importance of intellectual humility, even in the area where one is an acknowledged authority.

I asked Beard to clarify what he meant by "understanding". He said.

There's some pretty grim teachings and beliefs in Islam, but you can find some pretty grim things in the Bible, too. The questions are, what groups believe what, and which will take what action. I don't doubt that we have a serious problem with Islamic fundamentalists, and that those Muslims point to their scripture for their justification. But there are other, much more moderate, Muslims as well.

There's some pretty grim teachings and beliefs in Islam, but you can find some pretty grim things in the Bible, too.

I tried to ask Beard to define "understanding" again, through this question:

So, define "understanding". Since you don't define understanding as factual knowledge, the word must mean something else to you. Do you consider guesswork to be understanding? Projection?

Or just drop the whole issue of Islam and define understanding through science. Is it possible to understand string theory without doing any research on the subject? Can you understand trigonometry by ignoring the texts on the subject and using projection or guesswork? How about if you spend ten minutes googling for anything related to trigonometry? Is that enough?

If any multiculturalists out there can answer this question, it would be a big help. How can you "understand" something without having done any research, or having real factual knowledge about the subject?

Arabist and Saudi apologist Juan Cole has officially declared that the United States is "Dependent on Saudi Arabia". He says that using alternate energy sources are a complete waste of time because windmills kill birds and nuclear power plants are scary.

Cole is a liberal arts major, with no scientific training at all, but he thinks we should take his word for it because he's a professor. He's also got a bunch of links and everything.

Since Cole's predictions are predicatably wrong, this is the best news I've heard all day.

..not even able to tolerate a little backtalk.

Brave, brave Sheik Omar Bakri.

When danger reared its ugly head,
He picked up his skirts, said "not fair!" and fled.
Brave, brave Sheik Bakri...

[Link to Sheik Bakri's 'not fair' plea thanks to Dean Esmay]

..sometimes physically, always mentally. I guess that made me a rebel?

You scored as Punk/Rebel.

Punk/Rebel - 81%

Drama nerd - 63%

Stoner - 50%

Loner - 31%

Geek - 13%

Goth - 13%

Prep/Jock/Cheerleader - 6%

Ghetto gangsta - 0%

I never did figure out how to make my hair do the spikey thing. Fausta and Sluggo had equally puzzling results.

What's your High School Stereotype?

The "conservative" Fox Network has kowtowed to the terror-supporters at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Most of the MSM dutifully caters to CAIR's every whim. But Investors Business Daily is doing what no other mass media "news" source has ever done. They're telling the truth about CAIR.

Sad to say, but "truth in journalism" is a real bleeding edge concept. Hopefully, the idea will catch on...

Via Investors Business Daily:

War On Terror: An American Muslim pressure group has come out strongly against police profiling of young Muslim men behaving suspiciously at train stations. But the group doesn't have our best interests at heart.

The terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, says two New York officials' push for such targeted profiling on city subways is offensive and ignorant.

"Terror comes in all shapes and sizes," insists Wissam Nasr, director of CAIR's New York branch.

Never mind that eight young Muslim men bombed London's tube. Or that 19 young Muslim men attacked New York in 2001. Or that every suspect on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists is a Muslim man, with nearly half going by the name Mohammed.

CAIR's national spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, says police should ignore such obvious terror traits and search riders at random, while paying close attention only to people "sweating." Never mind that during New York's balmy summer months, that would include folks who don't remotely fit the terrorist profile.

CAIR should know better than anyone who does fit the terrorist profile. Three of its own officials were recently convicted of terror-related crimes. One even worked for Hooper. He's now in prison for conspiring to kill Americans...

..CAIR may talk a good patriotic and moderate game. But it has a secret agenda to Islamize America.

Before 9-11, its founder and chairman, Omar Ahmad, also a Palestinian American, told a Muslim audience: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

Before coming to Washington, Hooper himself is on record stating: "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic."

Hooper is also on record claiming CAIR receives no "support from any overseas group or government." But land records revealed in the book "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington" put the lie to that claim.

It turns out that an anti-Israeli foundation run by the crown prince of Dubai owns the very deed to CAIR's headquarters located almost in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. The foundation has held telethons to support families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

[link thanks to LGF]

The Northern NJ/NYC area has been plagued by a series of sexual assaults. As a result, Union City NJ, is offering self-defense classes for women.

Via the Jersey Journal

UNION CITY - It was standing room only Thursday night as more than 75 women filled the gymnasium of Veterans Memorial School for a free self-defense seminar in Union City.

On July 18, a 51-year-old city resident was raped and strangled, and there have been three other sexual assaults in the city since May...

.."This is not a safe area and we want to be able to defend ourselves," said Stephanie Taveraz, 16, who came to the seminar with two friends.

...The three-hour class, led by professional defense expert Ken Good, a former Navy SEAL, advised women on a range of subjects, such as how to avoid a possible attack and how to use high heels as a weapon.

"Women need to know how to turn their fear into anger and rage when threatened," said Good, who has trained female Union City and New York City police officers.

The rapists who are currently threatening women in Northern NJ and New York have proven their intent is to kill. Our response should be equivalent.

In a life-threatening situation,

this is not a weapon..

This is a weapon.

I don't know guns, but, like most women, I know knives. I can debone a chicken with a few quick slices using a knife like this. It takes many months of training to use a gun, but these knives are available in any local sporting-goods store.

The Nanny-staters among us will tell us that women shouldn't carry real weapons because the attacker will grab it and use it against them. So, here's an idea - instead of teaching young women how to use shoes as weapons, lets teach them how to effectively use weapons as weapons.

According to the constitution, every American has the right of self-defense, but in the New York Area, this right is not encouraged. Mayor Bloomberg is openly gun-phobic. One chuckleheaded judge ruled that mace was a deadly weapon. This extremely blue-state area still clings to the old herd mentality, which basically states that "we don't need to defend ourselves, we just have to be able to run faster than the other targets."

The goal of self-defense shouldn't be to thwak the bad man with our high heels and run away, leaving him free to attack someone else; the goal should be to stop the attacker in any and every way that we can. The New York City area needs to catch up with the rest of the country. Self-defense isn't just an American right, it's a responsibility.