THIS IS MY BLOG!
Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in North America (video)
More on the documentary here. Yes, do go there and read, read!
Also check out sidebar section, lower left under “Key Reports” to read the Explanatory Memo on General Strategic Goal for Muslim Brotherhood in North America to see a listing of Muslim Brotherhood groups operating in the U.S.
Found HERE. Go there also and read, read!
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Who Made That Trampoline?
In 1960, George Nissen rented a kangaroo named Victoria from an animal-supply outfit on Long Island so that he could train her to hop on a trampoline he set up in Central Park. After a week of waltzing with Victoria, clasping her front paws as he taught her to bounce in time with him, Nissen finally produced a mind-bending photograph. In it, Nissen and the kangaroo stare into each other’s eyes as they levitate over the trampoline. The photo was reprinted around the world and helped establish the trampoline as a global phenomenon.
Nissen invented the trampoline in the 1930s, when, as a teenage gymnast, he and his coach created a piece of equipment out of scrap steel and tire inner tubes for his act in the Iowa Hawkeye Circus. This “bouncing rig” gave Nissen the power to leap into a back somersault. Later the two men formed a company to manufacture a portable version, and Nissen christened it with a name he acquired while performing in Mexico: Campeón de Trampolín.
Read the rest HERE.
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Femisogynists Wage the Real War on Women
I was half-watching some installment of the Twilight saga the other night, and turned my full attention to the screen when gorgeous Edward sweetly proposes to stunningly beautiful Bella in an idyllic field. (Yes, I’m a softie romantic underneath it all.) So Bella responds to Edward’s proposal in the language of our times: marriage is meaningless, “it’s just a piece of paper.” Groan. Edward says something to which Bella replies, “do you know the divorce rate?” and tosses out some percentage of failed marriages (maybe 1 in 3?). To which Edward should have replied, “well, gee, Bella, no wonder marriages fail if everyone believes as you do that marriage is just ‘a piece of paper’.” He didn’t, he said something amusing about the vampire-human divorce rate being lower, but the fact remains: if you diminish what many see as a sacrament, what we as a culture once believed to be inviolate regardless of our religious leanings, then doesn’t it stand to reason that that “piece of paper” can be wadded up and tossed aside like so much . . . paper?
Such circular reasoning is typical of leftists when they are busily chipping away at our socio-cultural foundations in their relentless quest to debase and destroy all that is good and moral and just. Marriage is “just a piece of paper,” but if you oppose the religious “marriage” of gays, you are full of hate. Don’t bother pointing out that the left’s mission for decades has been the destruction of the American family, including but not limited to marriage. Don’t bother pointing out that by their own devices marriage is now penalized in tax codes, including but not limited to proposed taxes by 0 (his $200k for individuals, $250k for married couples is a clear disincentive to marry). Don’t bother pointing out that many of the very leftists who actively, vocally, shrilly support gay “marriage” have opted not to marry themselves (Susan Sarandon comes immediately to mind, but there are so many others). And don’t bother pointing out that marriage before God is indeed a religious sacrament, that forcing churches to marry gay people is a direct violation of their religious liberty. Or that marriages viewed by their participants as sacraments are the ones that tend to last, that tend not to end in divorce after three months (marriage for so many on the left–and yes, even among conservatives because it’s such a prevalent view in our society–is really just a ramped-up form of “going steady,” just like abortion-on-demand is a ramped-up form of birth control . . . morals be damned). And don’t bother pointing out that civil unions are completely acceptable to many conservatives (myself included), as long as religion is kept out of it. Equal rights for gay couples can be obtained without trampling on religious freedom, but that’s not what they really want.
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Dexter cupcakes:
Red Velvet with whipped vanilla icing, shards of sugar glass and red simple syrup splatter.
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Not Even the White House Knows the Drones’ Body Count
Government officials claim they’re ultra-precise killing machines that never, ever miss their targets. Outside groups say they’re covered in children’s blood. The fact is no one has a clue exactly how many militants and how many innocents have been slain in the U.S. drone war that spans from Pakistan to Somalia. Remember that before you start your next Twitter feud about the drone war.
Neither the American government nor the independent agencies have the consistent presence on the ground needed to put together true assessments of the damage drone strikes do. Most of the evidence is third-hand, whispered from a local soldier to a far-off reporter. The death toll claims, which vary wildly, are all educated guesswork.
It’s one of many conclusions in a new report on the covert, robotic air war that doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narratives about the drone campaign, pro or con. (The report is due to publish at midnight GMT on Sunday.) Using interviews with dozens of people in northwest Pakistan — one of the epicenters of the unmanned air assaults — The Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s human rights clinic have crafted a nuanced view of the civilian impact of this most controversial component of the Obama administration’s counterterror efforts. Table your preconceived notions about the drone war before you read — starting with the notions about who the drones are actually taking out.
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What’s behind Obama’s curious timing of Gitmo jihadist Omar Khadr’s release
From Michelle Malkin:
If I read one more description of Gitmo jihadist Omar Khadr as a former “child soldier,” I will throw up. As some of you may have read over the weekend, the 26-year-old Muslim killer who pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty to five charges related to the battlefield killing of U.S. soldier Christopher Speer was released from Gitmo by the White House on Saturday and sent back to Canada.
Khadr was captured during a 2002 bloody firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound near Khost, Afghanistan.
Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald/McClatchy broke the story this weekend of his repatriation:
Khadr departed the base in Cuba before dawn Saturday, a secret transfer 10 days after a Canadian diplomat paid Khadr a visit on his 26th birthday. He landed at a Royal Canadian airbase in Ontario and was transferred to the Millhaven maximum security prison for what his lawyer described as an assessment of the most suitable place to serve out his sentence.
The case of Khadr — Guantánamo’s last Western captive — stirred debate in international law and human rights circles.
Because he was captured at such a young age, some called him a child soldier who was dropped off in the war zone by his father and deserving of rehabilitation not interrogation. Others called him the respected scion of an al Qaida family, nicknamed Canada’s First Family of Terror in news reports, and opposed his repatriation.
Psychiatrist Michael Welner, testifying at the Guantánamo war court for the prosecution and paid by the Pentagon, called Khadr a continuing danger who spent his time at the U.S. prison camps in Cuba “marinating in a community of hardened and belligerent radical Islamists.”
I have followed Khadr’s case and his sob-story lawyers since 2003 (archive of Khadr posts here and columns here and here.)
Background I reported in 2003 about the Khadr family, led by a senior al Qaeda member who was killed in 2003 in a battle with Pakistani forces:
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is vacationing in the Dominican Republic this weekend, where he will tee off with former U.S. President Bill Clinton for the newly inaugurated Soft-on-Terror Masters Tournament.
While Chretien golfs, his fellow countryman and favorite accused terrorist Ahmad Said Khadr is still on the loose.
Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen, is considered by intelligence officials to be the highest-ranking Canadian within Osama bin Laden’s inner circle. He studied computer science at the University of Ottawa and worked for an Ottawa-based Islamic charity, Human Concern International, which was generously subsidized by Chretien’s government.
Khadr is suspected of siphoning charity funds to bin Laden and other jihadists, and of serving as a chief terrorist recruiter. Known as “al-Kanadi” (Arabic for “The Canadian”), Khadr had previously been in custody in Pakistan for the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad that killed 17 people.
As I’ve noted before (and it is especially worth repeating in light of attempts by some high-ranking American diplomats to make amends with Canada), our so-called friend and supposed War on Terror partner Chretien was instrumental in securing Khadr’s freedom.
Chretien personally intervened on behalf of Khadr during a 1996 state visit to Pakistan. He aggressively sought guarantees from Benazir Bhutto, then the country’s prime minister, that Khadr would receive due process and fair treatment. The suspected Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist was released shortly after Chretien’s diplomatic lobbying campaign.
The United Nations, U.S. and Canada (last, of course) have since frozen the fugitive Khadr’s assets due to his suspected ties to bin Laden. One of his sons, an al-Qaida operative and former terror training camp commander, is on the run with Khadr.
Another of Khadr’s sons, 16-year-old Omar, is in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay for his alleged role in an ambush of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan last summer. Omar is accused of lobbing the hand grenade that killed Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces.
More here.
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From HERE.
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Arab Spring Break
Last year, Chris Jeon, a 21-year-old UCLA math major, left his $9,000-a-month internship at a financial firm in San Francisco in search of “real” experience. He wound up fighting with the rebels in Libya, where things got real fast.
It’s midnight in Libya, and the math major from UCLA is standing on an overturned pickup truck screaming, “Libya is great!” He has just survived an amateur “drifting” accident – the pickup he was in tipped over on its side, skidding across Benghazi’s Keish Square at 40 miles an hour – and he is jubilant. With his carefully tousled hair and goofy T-shirt (featuring a cartoon bomb that’s crying while it explodes), he looks like a stoner undergrad on spring break, which, remarkably, he is.
“This is wild,” he says.
There are a thousand or so Libyans standing in the overheated square, watching a 21-year-old Korean-American kid from Orange County pledge his allegiance to their country. Not all of them are amused.
A year before, Chris Jeon knew next to nothing about Libya. In the spring of 2011, as Libyans were rallying in Benghazi, igniting a revolution against Muammar Qaddafi, Jeon was a business-minded junior, angling for a high-paying summer internship at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset-management firm. The pay was good, and the internship was a stepping-stone to a career path he’d spent his life gunning for, but it disappointed Jeon almost instantly. Each monotonous day in his cubicle at BlackRock’s San Fr
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1 October SWJ Roundup | Small Wars Journal
READ.
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Read the following:
Chicks on the Right (a new one I like)
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1936 Olympic Games- Jesse Owens stands over his Japanese and German competitors after winning gold in the long jump
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Don’t Think of Elephants
The sonogram technician, Tina, is short, conservative. Her two children smile from pictures of birthday parties past, blonde and generic, proof that life in all its red, white and blue glory does go on. The younger of the two is missing teeth, mugging for the camera and aiming an ice cream cone directly at the viewer. You are not at the point where you resent other people’s children, though you can see how it sometimes happens.
You waitressed at the Faculty Club during your undergraduate days, where cheerless professors downed Jamesons and ate sunflower-yellow paella. One of the regulars, a sociologist with a Santa Claus white beard and glasses to match sipped vodka tonics and pronounced, “Women like you should have lots of children, but they never do.” You were at the age where unsolicited comments were the norm: flounces are for girls without ounces, you’d be pretty if you lost ten pounds, legs like that should be on a soap opera actress.
You didn’t care. You hated, in no particular order, your parents, children, the world, people who brought children into the world, the government, yourself, capitalists, college in general and Harvard in particular, apartheid, roommates, the heat. That summer, you cried daily for no reason. You vowed not to have children with malignant twenty-something certitude. You shouldn’t have been anyone’s mother.
You make small talk with Tina. You both avoid politics and agree that children should have their summers to themselves for tearing up the neighbor’s gardens. One summer, when you were much younger, your sister climbed through a vacationing neighbor’s dog door on a daily basis to steal licorice. When you think of having children, these are not the stories that first come to mind.
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50 Years After Integration, Ole Miss Grapples With History
OXFORD, Miss. — There still may be a few bullet holes in the stately white columns of the Lyceum, the Greek Revival building here that symbolizes the University of Mississippi, but most were unintentionally plastered over during a renovation years ago.
So a new historical marker now serves as the physical reminder of the night of Sept. 30, 1962, when hundreds of federal marshals and thousands of Army and National Guard troops met a violent mob of segregationists from all over the South and the campus became a battleground. Two people were killed, hundreds were wounded and the vicious realities of a racist society were broadcast around the world.
The following morning, James Meredith enrolled in classes, and Ole Miss was racially integrated.
In recent weeks, the university has been commemorating that tumultuous period with a program called “Opening the Closed Society.” The schedule has included lectures by prominent figures like Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the singer and activist Harry Belafonte, movie screenings, panel discussions and a “walk of reconciliation and redemption.”
MORE.
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Iran’s rial plunges 7% to all-time low as sanctions bite
DUBAI – The Iranian rial plunged more than 7 percent in open-market trade on Monday to a new all-time low of about 32,000 per US dollar, traders and currency-tracking websites said, meaning the currency has lost about a quarter of its value in the past week.
The rial traded at 32,250 on Monday, currency-tracking website Mazanex said; an Iranian foreign exchange trader in Dubai confirmed the drop. The Iranian currency was trading at 24,600 last Monday, according to currency-tracking site Mesghal.
The rial has dropped steeply in the past nine months because of new Western economic sanctions imposed over Iran’s disputed nuclear program.
The currency has been hit particularly hard over the last week, after the launch of a new government “exchange center” which was intended to stabilize the rial’s rate but appears to have contributed to the market turmoil.
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Afternoon picture.
Ashley Brookes
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