Content warning: Graphic execution pictures.

Res ipsa loquitor.

Posted by: Ace at 09:18 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 12 words, total size 1 kb.

I already linked this, and suggested it might just be the case that the caption was wrong. I meant to relink it after Bryan Denton's disclosure that he had witnessed Lebanese digging up dead bodies already in graves for presentation to the media as fresh victims. And, while Denton walked away from such obviously-sham photo opportunities, he says that the Lebanese stringer photographers were lining up behind him to snap pictures.

But, in the rush of things, I then forgot to relink it.

Reading Allah, I learned this photo comes from Chiyeh, one of the areas Denton was a journalist in.

So maybe this is picture/caption combination -- stating that bodies already wrapped tightly in funeral shrouds were recovered from the wreckage of a recent Israeli airstrike-- deserves a second look.

After I suggested the caption might simply have been confused as to timing, Confederate Yankee dug up additional captions running with other photos of the same bodies, and they all seem to say the same basic thing-- bodies already wrapped in funeral shrouds were being dug up out of the wreckage.

The one kink in this is that, if this were a Hezbollah propaganda operation and the photographers were in on it, the captions stating that the bodies were already wrapped in shrouds shoudn't have gone out -- i.e., a well-executed propaganda play would have the photographers wait until the bodies were unwrapped, or run captions saying the bodies were recovered from the wreckage, then wrapped in shrouds.

So I still don't know. As Confederate Yankee says: Surreal.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 PM | Comments (1)
Post contains 283 words, total size 2 kb.

I reviewed Brick when it was out in theaters, and now it's out on DVD and probably pay per view too. I raved about it then; check it out, if the idea of a Sam Spade mystery mixed with a John Hughes high school pecking-order comedy appeals to you.

Maybe it doesn't sound like a mash-up that can work, but it does. It really does.

I'm bumping this post because I just remembed V For Vendetta is now out on video, too. In the interests of sparing you $4.79 and two hours and ten minutes of your life that you'll never get back, I'll direct you to my evisceration of this metrosexual terrorist-friendly fantasia, which I call "Brokeback Batman." It's a long review, and will take you six minutes to read, but trust me, six minutes of my review is better than 130 minutes of V For Vendetta.

Also out now on Pay Per View is Grandma's Boy, which I tried to get in a couple of videostores but it was out and/or missing. It's a gonzo comedy, like Zoolander or Happy Gilmore, where there is absolutely no worry about the suspension of disbelief when it comes to a good gag. If a joke requires a "karate monkey," well, verismilitude be damned.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 PM | Comments (27)
Post contains 1317 words, total size 8 kb.

Gee, and I thought it was just that I was hopelessly inept in bed.

Yes, science has now proven what everybody already knew: Women have a "Golden Fortnight" of high sexual interest after the start of a relationship, and then would rather watch Murder, She Wrote than give up the nookie.

THE female sex drive starts sputtering to a halt as soon as a woman has got her man, according to a new study.

Researchers have found that women's libido plummets so rapidly when they believe they are in a secure relationship that after just four years the proportion of 30-year-old women wanting regular sex falls below 50 per cent.

There are few things that appear able to keep a woman sexually interested, the study found, but living apart for extended periods can help.

The findings for women contrast with those for men, whose sexual appetite hardly flagged at all up to 40 years after marriage.

The study, by researchers at Hamburg-Eppendorf University in Germany, challenges the popular image of modern women as equal to men in sexual appetite.

"Female motivation matches male sexual motivation in the first years of the partnership and then steadily decreases," concludes Dietrich Klusmann, the medical psychologist who conducted the study.

I'm always amused by women who claim they're just as into sex as guys. Ladies, if you only knew.

I'm also always amused by these idiotic pictures they run with sex-stories like this. If a story involves boobs, they show you big massive boobs, for example, just in case you don't know what a mommysac might look like.

Here, they helpfully provide models to help explain the story:

Models, mind you, not actors. Check out on that convincing furrowed brow on the dude. Why, his sexual frustration almost leaps right out of the computer, right into my pants.

Allah, again. I'm glad that Michelle won't let him put stories like this up. I get his cast offs.

Posted by: Ace at 07:08 PM | Comments (39)
Post contains 351 words, total size 2 kb.

Here's an idea for my editorial cartoon. A Muslim executioner stands above Uncle Sam, whose head's on a chopping block. The executioner holds an Ali Baba sword that is shaped like the Islamic cresent, and labled "Terrorists." The chopping block itself is labled "Moderate Muslim Demands."

Think the Sacramento News & Review would publish that?

I actually don't get too seriously bothered by cartoons like the one above. Maybe that's just because I'm not Jewish. But maybe it's also that I think that, given that our policy towards Israel is considered controversial for some, I don't think there should be a per se ban on critiquing it, even using images like the above. The cartoon is really saying no more than "the US is captive to a reflexive support of Israel," which isn't true, and wouldn't be objectionable even if it were true (at least not to me -- I don't mind saying I'm pretty knee-jerk when it comes to supporting non-terrorists over terrorists).

However, I don't see the fact that some might be offended as a reason not to run a cartoon that expresses a sentiment which, while I don't share, is neither illegal nor antisemitic.

I'm generally against over-sensitivity resulting in self-censorship, even if the group claiming offense is one I generally support.

Still, as Hehpundit points out, we do have something of a serious double standard going on here. It's open season on Israelis, who do not murder us, but apparently the highest level of cultural sensitivity and self-censorship is due to Muslim extremists (and, um, "moderates"), who do murder us.

Kind of ass-backwards, isn't it?

Commenters Disagree: Just about everyone thinks I'm wrong to say that the alternate, non-anti-semitic explanation should be taken as the intended one, absent evidence to the contrary. Or that there really is no non-anti-semitic interpretation at all.

Magnetism87 writes:

Ace, the Mogen David is a symbol of Judaism. To me the cartoon screams "Jooos control the U.S.", and is intended as an anti-semitic statement. Why do you make the assumption that this cartoon intends to criticize Israel and not Jews in general?

Caspera writes:

I would say the cartoonist could have easily placed horizontal bars on the top and bottom of the image to make it look exactly like the Israeli flag. Would have been easy. He chose not to do that.

I am not Jewish, but I am an advocate for sensitivity in editorial cartoons when they involve the Mogen David for the following reason[]: the Mogen David was chosen as the symbol for Israel because it represents the Jews, not the other way around, so its default interpretation as a historical matter would tend towards "Jewry" more than "Israel" given no other context. The symbol simply predates the country.

...

Do the following thought experiment. Take Uncle Sam out of the stocks in this image, and replace him with a Burghermeister labeled Europe. Congratulations. You now have a Der Sturmer cartoon.

I'll give you the last word as O'Reilly does, by which I mean I won't give you the last word at all.

Caspera's thought experiment is inapposite, as there was no Israel in the 1940's, and hence no other plausible interpretation except "the scheming Jews are snaring all good Christian Europeans with their cunning manipulations."

As a general matter, I'm just not comfortable with the quick imputation of bad motives to someone as regards racism, antisemitism, or homophobia, or etc. Magnetism87 may be right that this guy is just an antisemite who is playing, as usual, fast and loose with "Jews" and "Israel" so while he's really attacking Jews, he's set up the defense that he only meant Israel. And, as I said, while I strongly suspect that this irrational hatred of Israel is often just a product of Jew-hatin', straight-up-no-chaser, I don't know if one can say that strong criticism of Israel is necessarily based in antisemitism.

Not to go off on a tangent, but is Christopher Hitchens an antisemite just because he seems to positively despise Israel, and engages in terror-apologism only in the case of Palestinians murdering Jews? Well, maybe that's a bad example, because he is, after all, a creature of his culture, and that culture is the hypereducated British left, who are, in fact, pretty antisemitic.

I don't know. I appreciate the passions this cartoon stirs in some Jewish readers, but I'm also hesitant to endorse a regime of bullying some into silence simply because their words (or stupid hackneyed doodles) are offensive to some. Not giving offense is important, but more important, I think, is airing legitimate points of view.

And I do consider criticism of Israel, or suggestions that the US is too much on Israel's side, to be legitimate, at least in the sense of "socially permissible." I just consider them usually completely wrong.

JD writes:

Too much thought going into this one, gang.

The Sacramento News and Review (an alternative weekly) tries very hard to be to the left of the Sacramento Bee. Their editors consider the SuckBee (a paper which has not recommended a republican for the presidency since going back to the days of World War I) to be a fascist right wing hate rag.

To the SN&R, everything that is wrong in the world is composed of three components: 1) Greed; 2) Oil; and 3) Israel.

A week or so ago we were having this argument about the left being antisemitic, and someone said, basically, that the left may or may not be antisemitic, but it is defintely anti-Western and kneejerkedly, unthinkingly on the side of any side that they deem "victim" due to being poorer, less technologically advanced, or darker in complexion. I forget how he summed it up, but he suggested something like "Let's just agree they're idiots whose conclusions are wrong because they're based on crap philosophy."

Again, I keep saying this, but I go back and forth on this question. On one hand, that's sort of a decent enough explanation for all of this, in the sense that it explains it all completely without having the need for another explanation like simple antismeitism.

On the other hand... well, these people really, really, really don't seem to like the Jews.

I don't know.

By the way, Ryan the troll, if the rightwing is so lockstep and possessed of a herd-mind, why is this argument going on in this blog, and why are people able to disagree without being disagreeable?

Just curious.

We don't have Townhouse to tell us all what to think or to write, so sometimes we have these little arguments.

Posted by: Ace at 06:59 PM | Comments (35)
Post contains 1103 words, total size 7 kb.

We love life, they said, whereas they love death.

They seem to have meant it.

A HUSBAND and wife arrested in the British terror raids allegedly planned to take their six-month-old baby on a mid-air suicide mission.

Scotland Yard police are quizzing Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor over suspicions they were to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb.

The theory is one of the reasons security chiefs are now insisting mothers taste babies' milk at check-in desks before allowing them to take bottles aboard flights.

The pair are among up to 23 suspects being questioned over a plot to bring down nine airliners over five US cities, killing thousands of people in the air and on the ground.

The questioning of the group comes as British Government sources yesterday revealed many of those suspects posed as relief workers to travel to al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.

It has also been revealed that security services are secretly monitoring "dozens" of fresh plots involving hundreds of suspects which could be unleashed at any time.

One government source said at least 30 priority cases were under urgent investigation.

" All those 30 are seen as serious, determined attacks that will happen unless we stop them," the source said.

Like I said, this baby-bottle exception strikes me as a lethal loophole. Just having a parent taste it is hardly proof it's actually milk; a person can train himself to avoid wincing at anything less than a powerful acid or base.

I really, really think we might want to consider the possibility of airplane stocks of formula only.

Thanks to Craig, via LGF.

Update: TexasRainmaker calls it Islamofascism's Take Your Child To Work Day.

Posted by: Ace at 06:31 PM | Comments (19)
Post contains 320 words, total size 2 kb.

Regarding a letter signed by numerous Muslim "moderates" who chose to immediately make all the same demands on the British as their terrorist fellow-travellers:

"I'm not going to question the motives of anyone who has signed this letter," [Home Secretary John Reid] told BBC News 24. "But I think it is a dreadful misjudgement if we believe the foreign policy of this country should be shaped in part, or in whole, under the threat of terrorist activity if we do not have a foreign policy with which the terrorists happen to agree."

A wake-up-and-smell-the-kuffar moment for the city formerly known as Londonistan, hopefully.

Other ministers have called the letter "facile", "dangerous" and "foolish" and Downing Street said Mr Blair "stands ready" to confront his critics when he returns from summer holiday and defend his record over the Middle East.

The letter was signed by 38 groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain, and three of the four Muslim MPs.

Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, created controversy yesterday when he called for "passenger profiling" on flights. Writing in the News of the World, he said airport chaos could be cut by more rigorous checks for "young Muslim men". He said that similar procedures had made Israeli airports the "safest in the world".

Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "This is an extreme form of stereotyping."

Citizenship does not and should not require lockstep agreement with a nation's policies. But it does demand loyalty to a nation, and the refusal to lend support to its enemies in wartime.

The "moderate" Muslim spokesmen seem unwilling to make any such commitment, and indeed continue pressing the demands of their terrorist fellow-travelers, often while civilians are being pulled from the wreckage of the latest terrorist mass-murder.

Terrorist groups often form supposedly terror-free "political wings" which can speak for them with "legitimate," non-criminal voices. Of course these "political wings" were and are always in coordination with terrorists, and frequently have terrorists staffing them root to branch.

It's about time "moderate" Muslim groups began demonstrating in word and in deed that they are not merely a slightly-sanitized "political wing" of Al Qaeda.

Thanks to Allah at HotAir, which will, I'm told, will tomorrow expose Saturday's DC "peace rally" for the Hezbollah war rally it really was.

Oh, and here's that Mike Wallace interview. I've seen him ask tougher questions of supermarket checkout clerks accused of not giving the full discount on double coupon Tuesdays.

Maybe he's running for a position in Al Qaeda's political wing.

Posted by: Ace at 06:12 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 436 words, total size 3 kb.

I'm posting this for one reason only:

The accuser is coming forward 5 years after she says the assault took place.

She claims she was part of a group known as "3K" made up of 9th and 10th grade girls who would perform sexual favors for upper class boys.

We're not detailing what 3K stands for because the title is explicit in nature.

Okay, I'll bite. It's not on Urban Dictionary. What does it mean?

Posted by: Ace at 02:28 PM | Comments (41)
Post contains 93 words, total size 1 kb.

Blame the "moderates."

When your political culture consists of little else than wallowing in absurd victimology, claiming to be forever besieged by Infidel Crusaers and Jews, peddling insane and vicious conspiracy theories, engaging in nonstop scapegoating, the infantile insistance that no Muslim on the face of the earth has ever been responsible for a single act of terrorism (all frame-ups by the CIA and Mossad, you know), and forever engaging in apologism for political violence in the service of vindicating largely-delusionary "greivances" -- what effect do you think that's going to have on the less stable, or more excitable, members of your community?

There is a link between media violence and real violence. It might not be a huge link, but it exists.

Now imagine a neverending stream of images of violence and unhinged conspiracy-mongering foisted upon children since they could stand, clumsily, on their own feet.

Let's talk "root causes."

You guys like talking about "root causes," don't you?

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (21)
Post contains 174 words, total size 1 kb.

Most of the current human population descended from kings and nobility, geneaologists claim.

Most.

I know there are exceptions, and I further know that I'm one of them.

My family's closest brush with the nobility came around the sixth century, when a great-great-etc.-grandmother serving as a toilet-bucket wench got a Nasty Adolf from King Alfred. My family's crest depicts a lion rampant, and one of my ancestors right behind the beast, cleaning up poop.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (24)
Post contains 92 words, total size 1 kb.