"God" is a big fan of snuff-films, as it turns out:

The children climb down into the crater left by an explosion and start picking up scraps of twisted metal. "Allah is great!" they shout before the camera hones in to show what one boy is holding: torn fabric, the colour of the camouflage fatigues worn by US troops. The next scene shows the same children holding aloft a human leg, shreds of the same camouflage fabric hang from it and the foot is clad in a military-style boot. The children trample the leg and kick it around in the dust.

"Today the Americans came to these parts and the buried bomb blew up their Hummer vehicle," says a teenage boy, adding, "if Allah wants it, the mujahadeen will win."

This grisly footage, purportedly shot in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, has appeared in the form of a three-minute video on the Internet. It marks the latest attempt by Jihadist militants to exploit children for propaganda purposes.

Last week Adnkronos International (AKI) obtained a copy of another video shot in Ramadi. On that occasion the action shown took place in the apparently placid setting of a school classroom.

Still, sinister references to the carnage that blights Iraq on a daily basis soon became evident. The pupils were being taught to sing Jihad songs by hooded militants who rewarded their efforts with pens, rulers and erasers. The video concluded with images of two small boys, clad in black tunics and wearing black ski masks and one holding a pistol in his tiny hand.

Compare:

The Children's Crusade involved Christian children, some as young as six, making a pilgramage to take back the Holy Lands from the Saracen infidels.

It was a very sick thing, just about everyone agrees, that children should get the idea to go fight for God, and that some adults along the way should encourage or aid them in their pilgrammage.

So, what the West did in 1212, Muslims are doing in 2006.

Except... not really. Adults actually attempted to discourage the children from going off to Crusade, and many of the child-crusaders were turned back at the various cities en route to the Mediterranean port-cities which were the gateway to the Holy Land.

And, oh yeah: despite the venom leftist writers pour on the West for this sickest of all sick crusades, it seems the Children's Crusade probably never really happened at all, but was just a folk-tale that got recorded as "history."

But adult Muslims really are encouraging children to kill, themselves as well as others, for "God."

"God" wants children to commit suicide-murder.

One would think that "God" could manage his executions and bombings without resorting to the agency of children, but that's just me.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 03:20 PM | Comments (33)
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Hollywood's fake snow is usually shredded paper, potatoes, or soap. It looks a little like real snow, except it doesn't seem to fall right. The fans they have blowing to simulate wind tend to loft the light flakes and make them buzz around like flying insects, rather than just falling down slowly but inexorably to the ground, like real snow is supposed to do. It's too light, or not wet enough.

Maybe they use those fans to deliberely keep the fake snow swirling about, so that each flake remains in flight longer, and they have to shred fewer potatoes. Though I doubt that; potatoes are pretty cheap.

I mention this because a fake-looking Hollywood snow is now falling, sort of, in Boston. The flakes are very tiny and very light and are lofted on the strong wind, just like fake snow does in a movie. There is absolutely zero accumulation; in fact, there's very little snow at all. You could almost not notice it's snowing at all, except every once in a while you see what seems to be a white gnat buzzing around a hedge, not really falling at all, just flying around low to the ground.

If I were a poet I'd now link this odd meteorology to some human emotion and claim the snow feels like an indifferent sadness, or a futile attempt at winter's last beauty, or some crap like that. But that's just homo-shit, and I don't do homo-shit. It doesn't make me feel like anything, except I'm a little curious. I don't remember seeing this half-hearted weak-sister snow "fall" before. This isn't even a flurry. It's just a thin swarm of tiny flakes that are afraid to land on the ground.

The only time I've seen similar pale light flakes wafting in the wind is during fires -- as ash falls -- and the last time I saw that was on 9/11. But I have cleverly deduced it's not ash, because it's pure white, not pale gray, and because there is no screaming of big-bastard firetrucks anywhere to be heard.

Coincidentally, in Korea, a yellow snow is falling, and not because an archangel is whizzing into a cloud.

A meteorology department statement said the reason for the yellow snow could be due to sand or dust from the desserts in the north of China.

A forecaster told Reuters that they had not seen yellow snow before, adding, "It is difficult to say if this is a mixture of yellow sand with snow or vice versa."

He also added that one should not eat the yellow snow, but then, everyone knows that from an early age.

So there is strange snow falling here and in Korea, and you know what that means.

Global warming.

I'm tired of cold global warming, though. I want to get to that warm global warming we've had patches of through the winter.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (17)
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About 450 to go for the all-time record.

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (26)
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Yes, Dave, I know it's old. Your geek credentials are stronger than mine.

Pretty good once you get past the lame melodramatic "love story" in the beginning and get to the fighting. Which makes it, I guess, a pretty darn spot-on imitation of a Hong Kong action movie.

Thanks to Bbeck.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (3)
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God, they think they're so cute and clever.

I'll spare you the quotes. Basically it's a snide and glib comparison (all the amateur webzine Slate is good for is snide and glib analysis) of Claude Allen's double-counting refund fraud with Bush's alleged double-counting budget fraud.

There is something deeply wrong with these people.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (8)
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Dorkafork opines:

Here's a thought experiment: Try to imagine V for Vendetta being released anytime in the year after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Of course you can't, and not just because it would have been distasteful. V is being released just eight months after the 7/7 subway attacks, and the opening scene features him using the subways to blow up Parliament.

No, such a film is unthinkable because it would tend to suggest that Timothy McVeigh was justified. Sometimes blowing up a building can change the world, V says. McVeight thought so too.

No film like this would be released during a Democratic administration. If Hillary! becomes President, do you imagine Hollywood cranking out a movie suggesting domestic terrorism against a left-wing socialist fascist government is justified? Of course not-- because even if in the fictive world of the film, such actions are justified, they would recoil from the suggestion that such acts were justified against Madame President Hillary!'s government.

Hell, even I, as a conservative, would object to such a film. (Unless, of course, Hillary! really did become a fascist tyrant and dismantled the democratic system, which I really don't think she'll do.)

In an era where psychopaths really are blowing up buildings to make some sort of satanic political point, is it a good idea to give such bastards ideological and moral succor by making a movie featuring a noble hero that they may find sympathetic?

The movie suggests that terrorism is justifiable, and it does so through a romantic, charismatic, heroic and noble figure of mystery. Am I crazy to have a problem with this?

Incidentally, the Wachowskis ultimately concluded their Matrix series by suggestig that violence was not the answer. Even when the foes were conscienceless machines that had genocidally slaughtered 99% of humanity and enslaved another .9% (while the remaining .1% had underground raves), the Wachowskis ended the film with a truce. War was not the answer, Neo realized, as did the machines (finally). Peaceful co-existance was the answer, even if it meant that a good number of humans would be left in a comatose captitivity to provide energy for the machines.

So, in that case: War is not the answer.

But in the case of a right-wing government meant to be suggestive of THatcher's England and Bush's AmeriKKKa: War is definitely the answer, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 12:20 PM | Comments (39)
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Almost too horrific to contemplate, but it just happened, unfortunately, to a Villanova basketball player.

It's an injury called "globe luxation." Fortunately, assuming you can poke the thing in back pretty quickly and do not suffer other related injuries (tearing of ocular muscles, tearing of the optic nerve), you'll actually probably be all right in a few weeks.

Shudder. I have trouble thinking of things I'd be less enthusiastic about going through, except maybe watching the Boy George/Rosie O'Donnell musical "Taboo."

Thanks to Craig.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (21)
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There are different sorts of dishonesty. The obvious case is simply misrepresenting facts in a way you know to be untrue.

A less obvious case is advancing an argument you know to be invalid and therefore, effectively, a lie. Your only defense is abject stupidity; you can claim, after the blatant dishonesty of the claim is exposed, that you didn't realize how idiotic you were being in advancing it.

Usually people say this is being "disingenuous," not "dishonest." But let's not split hairs. "Disingenuous" is just another word for "dishonest."

Richard Roeper is either a liar or an idiot. He's a smug, self-satisfied prick, so he'll never admit to being and idiot, so, this possibility excluded, we'll have to just content ourselves with callling him a liar.

Here's how Roeper defends the sick pro-terrorist politics of V For Vendetta:

Although the time frame is in the not-too-distant future, the London depicted in the movie bears only a structural resemblance to today's reality.

...

In "V," Big Brother has taken over Britain. The fascist leader of the country (played by John Hurt) is a Hitlerian tyrant who spews invective on giant monitors placed everywhere. Free speech, homosexuality and artistic expression have been outlawed; citizens must abide by a curfew; and the streets are controlled by secret police. The government has conducted gruesome medical experiments on innocent citizens, with tragic and horrific results.

In short, the London in "V for Vendetta" looks like the world if Germany had won World War II.

There's no mistaking the Nazi imagery throughout the film, from Hurt's performance to the uniforms worn by the police to the flags adorning the city. The Wachowski brothers stopped just short of having Hurt sporting a Hitler mustache.

...

Like the anti-heroes in "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Beauty and the Beast," the masked creature known as V is a conflicted, tortured soul who falls for an innocent beauty and brings her into his hidden world.

Is V a terrorist? The oppressive government labels him as such. He tells Natalie Portman's Evey, "Blowing up a building can change the world." At one point she calls him a monster. He's also borderline insane, as Evey learns the hard way.

Still: Is he a terrorist? Of course, the real-life criminals that bombed subway trains and a bus in London last summer are terrorists, thugs, monsters. But that doesn't mean every act of blowing up a building is an act of terrorism. If we knew Osama bin Laden was alone in a building right now, would blowing up that building be an act of terrorism?

The villains in V are many. There's the Hitler-like dictator. His ruthless henchmen. A pedophile bishop. A hate-filled commentator who worked in a torture camp.

These are the power elite that V wants to destroy. The London in "V for Vendetta" is not the real London. In the London of "V," taking down the government would be an act of heroism, not terrorism.

Anyone see the idiocy of that argument?

Roeper is claiming that, if a film creates a fictive world where the moral choice in that world is to do what would be unthinkable in real life, it's not irresponsible, and it's not suggesting that doing the unthinkable in real life may, in fact, be thinkable.

But this is childish. Every film creates its own moral universe of good and evil. In the Godfather series, of course, Michael and the Don were relatively "good" because the film created a false moral universe in which everyone else -- movie executives, cops, politicians -- were worse. They are heroes, because in the "reality" the film conjures, everyone else is a villain.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (39)
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The poll asks both who you'd like to see run and who you wouldn't like to see run.

George Allen is leading the field with 42% net positives, but Guiliani is surprisingly strong with 28% net positives. John McCain has a big net negative score, on the other hand. So Guiliani's strong showing can't simply be explained away as a case of the Internet being more libertarian or liberal on social issues than the greater GOP base. There's certainly truth in that, but one would expect that, if this were just a case of more liberal Interent GOP users voting, McCain would be doing somewhat better.

Posted by: Ace at 09:53 AM | Comments (44)
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Long but very good. Recently published at Front Page, but delivered back in 2004 (thus the references to Arafat still being in power).

I'll put up some quotes in a moment. Right now I'm still reading it.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (3)
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