Question: Are they worshipping a god that doesn't exist? I mean, the OT is pretty specific about all sorts of things, homosexuality among them. That God was a tough guy, and it's almost impossible to reconcile Him with the Jesus of the NT.

Posted by: Zorachus

My religious expertise is about as robust as my expertise on the clip/magazine distinction, but I'm pretty sure the NT contains a somewhat famous quote that goes something like this:

For God so loveth the world that He gave his only begotten Son, so that he should believeth in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Pardon me if I have a word wrong here or there.

To invert this a full one hundred eighty degrees and proclaim, gleefully, that "God Hates The World" is a particularly demented kind of cultish idolatry.

They're not worshipping "God." They're worshipping Satan or a Great Old One.

At best, it's what we used to call plain old blasphemy.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (47)
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Maybe it's time to withdraw from America.

In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa's high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning for threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the murders at Virginia Tech.

Schools Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton. Both towns are in southeastern Louisiana.

"The note referred to what happened at Virginia Tech," Payne said. "It said something like, 'If you think that was bad, then you haven't seen anything yet."

We really don't punish death threats harshly enough. Even if they're empty threats, they're designed to cause disruption, distress, and panic, and usually do. (And cost a lot of money besides.)

Besides, anyone who issues death threats is a ticking time bomb anyway. Lock 'em up.

But I doubt these miscreants will suffer a penalty much beyond explusion. "Troubled youth" are never really responsible for their actions.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (9)
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This is getting frigging stupid. The man stated the obvious -- those torchlight marches are, aesthetically, gorgeous, and Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda movies are amazingly well-done. So well-done this Nazi accomplice is often still regarded ambiguously by many Hollywood/critical apologists who can't seem to separate technical or artistic skill from moral worth.*

And the simple, stark, powerful imagery of the swastika, the iron cross, the eagle, etc? Terrific, in terms of symbology and branding.

Their uniforms? Duh. It's a running joke in both the movies and real-life history that you can always tell who the bad guys are by who's wearing the cooler uniforms.

At any rate, Bryan Ferry stated the obvious, but has been forced to apologize.

British singer Bryan Ferry apologized on Monday for remarks he made in an interview with a German newspaper in which he praised the Nazis' iconography as "just amazing" and "really beautiful".

The 61-year-old lead singer of Roxy Music told Germany's Welt Am Sonntag newspaper last month: "The way that the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord!

"I'm talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags -- just fantastic. Really beautiful."

In a statement, Ferry said he was "deeply upset" about the negative publicity the interview triggered, and added:

"I apologize unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective.

"I, like every right-minded individual, find the Nazi regime, and all it stood for, evil and abhorrent."

Jewish leaders in Britain, some of whom had condemned Ferry's comments and questioned whether he should be dropped by the Marks & Spencer retail chain that employs him as a model, welcomed Ferry's clarification.

"We do welcome the fact that he has issued a swift comment that there was no intention to condone the Nazi regime," said Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council.

Um, of course he's anti-Nazi, for the love of God. Why would one assume differently? Why wouldn't one assume from the start he was talking about precisely what he seemed to be talking about -- iconography and stagecraft -- rather than assuming he was endorsing the actual genocidal fascist agenda of the Nazis?

Absurd. We have far too many advocacy and screech-groups assuming the very worst, and libeling people, rather than assuming the more reasonable and the more literal.

If these people wanted a clarification from Ferry, they might have asked him for one before demanding he lose his job.

BTW, I don't have any particular high regard for Bryan Ferry. I'm not sure I know a single song of his besides the overplayed Love Is The Drug.

This just seems to be a raw deal inflicted on him by an increasingly silly culture.

As British Jews attack Ferry, who's safely white and Christian, the British government continues to coddle Holocaust-denying (or Holocaust-enthusing) "moderate Muslims" with little outrage.

Unless Ferry has some history of anti-semitic statements or cryptonazi sympathies (which I'm googling now), I don't see why someone would assume so much based on so little.

* By which I meant not that Riefenstahl's apologists are pro-Nazi. Just that they engage in excuse-making, claiming she was more of a dupe of Hitler's, or frightened into doing his bidding, rather than a venal, willing propgandist for evil, which she was.

The assumption seems to be that no one with that much cinematic talent could really be a bad person. A vanity, I'd reckon, pretty common in Hollywood generally.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (15)
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Coincidence or enemy action?, as Goldfinger would ask.

Update At Hot Air. Two sixteen year old boys were arrested for the Maryland case. The claim is they just wanted to see if the acid would melt the plastic. When it didn't, they just left, supposedly unaware that that acid would have a more serious effect on human flesh.

The cops seem to believe them, as they've released the jackasses into their parents' custody.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Add Comment
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An American Indian male is being sought on suspicion of carrying a gun into a high school.

No shots reportedly fired as of yet. Cops have surrounded the school and put it into lockdown.

We're also approaching the Columbine anniversary, aren't we?

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (8)
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Or "Ismail-AX"? FoxNews is reporting the killer had this written on his arm, and signed his suicide note by this name.

Sources told the Tribune that the words "ISMAIL AX" were also found written in red ink on the inside of one of Cho's arms.

The reference may be to the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, in which God commands the patriarch to sacrifice his own son. Abraham begins to comply, but God intervenes at the last moment to save the boy.

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the son is Isaac, father of the Jewish people; in Islam, it is his older half-brother, Ismail (Ishmael in Hebrew).

Abraham uses a knife in most versions of the story, but some accounts have him wielding an ax.

A more obscure reference may be to a passage in the Koran referring to Abraham's destruction of pagan idols; in some accounts, he uses an ax to do so.

This blog notes the connection between "Ismail" and Islam, but that seems pretty silly to me. The Ismail reference is explained more simply and directly by recourse to the Judeo-Christian tradition. And who the hell knows what a madman is really thinking? If it doesn't quite make sense, that's to be expected -- we are talking about a lunatic, after all.

More details about this "troubled" maniac:

According to the Chicago Tribune, the note railed against "rich kids" and "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.

The Tribune also said Cho had been behaving strangely lately, setting a dorm room on fire and allegedly stalking women. Other reports said he had been taking medicine for depression.

A Virginia Tech professor said Cho's work in creative-writing class was so disturbing that he had been referred to the school's counseling service.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

I trust the media isn't going to turn this story into a "lower-class-loser wages class warfare against 'rich kids'" metanarrative similar to the ethnographic fairy tale they ran with in the Duke 3 case.

Links via Flopping Aces, which has a long, long tick-tock update post, thanks to RocketBrainTrust.

"He Tried To Touch My Privates!" Cho's comically bad attempt at a creative writing class play, titled, ahem, "Richard McBeef."

It's not disturbing enough, I don't think, that this bit of idiocy would of course alert a school to someone's psychpathic tendencies. (There may of ccourse be other writings of his which were so disturbing as to put people on notice.)

It does seem to reveal he 1) has issues and 2) was destined for failure in just about any endeavor he attempted.

Incidentally, I kind of get the feeling that if anyone had ever, at any point, actually attempted to touch this loser's "privates," we may not have witnessed yesterday's tragedy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (137)
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Via Michelle Malkin, Andrew Sullivan finds it "creepy" that pro-gun-rights bloggers are noting that VaTech banned weapons on campus, disarming only law-abiding citizens, and taking weapons of self-defense from students and faculty.

However, he seems to have entirely glossed over the NYT's predictable editorial in favor of gun control. Sullivan reads the NYT every day; one of the many things that makes him a twit is his constant NYT-boosting. So it's simply not possible he just missed the article.

Why is it creepy to note the downside of gun control (citizens unarmed by state decree) while it's not creepy to agitate for further gun control measures?

He also seems to have entirely missed ABCNews making a spurious connection between the lapsed assault weapons ban and the availability of extended capacity clips. Not only were such clips not made unavailable by the ban, but there is (as of yet) no evidence I know of that the shooter used such clips at all. (I'll correct this of course if I find out otherwise.)

Creepy? No. To Andrew Sullivan, the only "true conservative" left in America, it's only creepy to suggest conservative solutions to problems.

The Shooter: ID'd as a Korean national named Seung Hui Cho. A "loner," if you can believe that.

The serial numbers were filed off his weapons, suggesting, but not quite proving, he purchased them illegally.

And yet the gun control lobby wants more ineffectual gun control.

I don't know if that's creepy so much as jackass stupid.

Confederate Yankee also notes the possbility -- possibility -- that these might have been illegally-converted machine pistols (at least a commenter notes this possibility). That is, conventional semiautomatics (one shot per trigger pull) converted via mechanical alteration to full-automatic mode (gun keeps firing bullets until the trigger is released).

That modification can be done with most, if not all, semiautomatics. Trouble for gun control advocates is that that's already illegal.

Further, whether it's actually a very effective modification is questionable. Pistols are already the most inaccurate of weapons, and turning a light pistol into a machine gun is only going to reduce accuracy further. Plus, you're going to run out of bullets in an awful hurry -- extended capacity clips or not -- and most of those will end up parked in the scenery.

The Evil 9mm Round? The 9mm round is pretty much the world standard for pistol rounds. The US converted from the more-effective .45 ACP round for its standard sidearm to the less-deadly 9mm partly just to be in sync with the rest of NATO.

Which makes it curious that the Screaming Mimis would suddenly decide that it's this particular round that's to blame for the shootings.

My wife and I (OU_Gryphon) were watching CNN last night because Fox had Geraldo Rivera doing his usual schtick. It was special report with Anderson Cooper. He had a short segment on the weapons used in the shootings which was extremely biased (Surprise!) and along the lines of the ABC story you linked yesterday.

The segment implied that the 9mm round is a military round favored by gangs and is the caliber of choice for criminals. He all but came out and said it was an evil cartridge which should be banned.

He tried to send a video link, but sent the wrong thing. I'll post it as soon as I get the correct one.

Question: Is it the evil Europeans and their venal adoption of the 9mm parabellum/Luger round -- with its insidious metric measurement -- that's actually responsble for the massacre?

The sarcasm there isn't meant to make light of the deaths of the VaTech students. But we are entering a decidedly stupid phase of uninformed speculation and ranting, and I think that stupidity should be lampooned.

No one benefits when stupidity is permitted to pass for wisdom and expertise.

Edit/Correction: It just occurred to me that I have no idea what I'm talking about re: magazines vs. clips. I think it is correct to say "box magazine," not box clip. I apologize for the foolishness. Should have looked that up before accusing others of getting it wrong.

I think what I did was this: I knew one was right and one was wrong. The media was using one, so I assumed that was the wrong one. A few minutes later I thought about it, and realized no, "box magazine" is correct, it's "clip" that's incorrectly used.

Apologies again. Please, call off the hounds.

Posted by: Ace at 09:23 AM | Comments (285)
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Dri tells me that the Westboro Baptist Church freaks are planning to "protest" the funerals of the Virginia Tech dead, via Michelle Malkin.

Here's their take on "We Are the World," which they've changed to "God Hates the World."

Question: While few religions don't make a distinction between the belivers and nonbelievers, haven't these guys crossed the line into actually worshipping a different "god" than the God of the Bible entirely?

Who exactly are they worshipping at this point? I can only think of a couple of candidates. Satan, of course. And...

An ad from the WBC below, defending their celebration of the death of American soldiers via IEDs. "We're thankful for death of the IEDs that kill the fruit of this nation... I'm so happy about those IEDs it makes me jump up and down with glee. To mock the jarheads, I say 'hoo-ah.' Thank God for IEDs." more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (34)
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The only guarantees in life are death, taxes, and Beatles-Metallica mashups.

A little fun from Beatallica again as you crunch through TurboTax. Click on "Sandman." (Language warning.)

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (22)
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Update: See the extended quote, which sounds a hell of a lot more reasonable and less my-socially-liberal-way-or-the-highway.

Question: Is the MSM quoting Giuliani out of context to tank his nomination chances? (Answer: Doubless.)

...

The actual quote:

“Our party is going to grow, and we are going to win in 2008 if we are a party characterized by what we’re for, not if we’re a party that’s known for what we’re against,” the former New York mayor said at a midday campaign stop.

Republicans can win, he said, if they nominate a candidate committed to the fight against terrorism and high taxes, rather than a pure social conservative.

“Our party has to get beyond issues like that,” Giuliani said, a reference to abortion rights, which he supports.

Ehhhhh... It's one thing to say "We share common ground and we can compromise where we disagree." It's another thing to declare people who sincerely disagree with you should jettison all prior beliefs just to be on the same page with you.

He seems to now be pursuing McCain's 2000 strategy, which of course worked like the Dickens and endeared him to social cons everywhere.

Bryan at Hot Air isn't exactly seconding the sentiment.

Related: Evangelicals not saying hoseannas to current GOP frontrunners.

Posted by: Ace at 03:25 PM | Comments (123)
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