Another Hoax on the Media

Zombietime provides us with an analysis which debunks the accusations that Israel intentionally bombed Red Cross ambulances - violating the Geneva Convention in a most egregious way. The AP, BBC, Time, the LA Times et al swallowed this story unquestioningly (after all it destroys Israel's moral superiority in this conflict).

You have to read the entire article to see how Zombie refuted the Lebanese claims and how this hoax was perpetrated by the media. The first photo to the right shows an ambulance hit by an Israeli missile dead center on the red cross on its roof. However, further close ups of this hole reveal much more.


Zombie notes the unpainted metal flange on the edges of the hole which are not curved inward as it would be had a missile truly struck the vehicle there. Also, note the large amount of rust on the vehicle. Now look at this photo:


See what appears on the center of the cross? An ambulance vent or siren/light used to occupy the "bombed" vehicle's hole.
Let's take a look at a vehicle which was truly hit by a missile:

And here is a photo of the interior of the allegedly bombed ambulance:



Quite a difference, isn't it? The ambulance is amazingly free of scorching and the interior is ridiculously clean for being bullseyed by a missile. The frame of the ambulance is still intact. Remarkable.

Next, let's take a look at one of the victims. Qasim Chaalan was a driver for the ambulance; here is a photo of him entering the hospital with a wounded chin. Note his ear. Looks fine, doesn't it?


However, here is another photo of him recuperating in the hospital after being admitted - and that same ear is now bandaged:


And here he is one week later looking miraculously healed - no scabs, scars or cuts:


Once again, the MSM has done its job well. For Hezbollah, that is. (H/T Michelle Malkin).

FOX News Reporter and Crewman Still Missing

There has not been much coverage on the kidnapping of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. Both men were kidnapped at gunpoint by unknown terrorists in Gaza over a week ago. Friends and families of the two men have been making statements asking for information on their status.

No word has come from the Palestinian terrorists who took these two men.

I'm posting this at the request of Michelle Malkin so that the public does not forget these two men. Let's hope that they make it home okay.

UPDATE

From Fox News, a video of the two kidnapped journalists have been released with demands that the US exchange Muslim prisoners for their freedom.

The video showed the two men in apparently good health, making statements which appeal for their release.

The group claiming to the crime calls themselves the Holy Jihad Brigades, and they have given the US 72 hours to comply with their request. They have not stated what the consequences would be if their demands are not met.

Hamas lawmaker, Mushi Masri, has “condemned” the kidnappings, yet blames the US for it:

"The kidnapping (of civilians) doesn't represent the Palestinian culture. The Palestinian people respect all countries of the world and takes no one as an enemy, except the Zionist enemy that occupies our land," he said.

However, Masri said the U.S. bore some responsibility for the abduction. "We hold the Zionist enemy and the American administration responsible for such acts because of their unfair policies," he said.

Well, Mr. Masri, that only demonstrates how infantile your people are. If you don't like something you throw a tantrum and violate an innocent person who happens to be standing nearby?

More on Mayo Mayhem

Catherine Mayo, 59, the self identified peacenik who was arrested for creating a ruckus on a trans Atlantic flight from London to DC had been "vacationing" in Pakistan. From James Taranto at WSJ's Opinion Journal online:


One obvious question is, what kind of person vacations in Pakistan? Was Mayo drawn there by what Lonely Planet describes as "some of Asia's most mind-blowing landscapes, extraordinary trekking, a multitude of cultures and a long tradition of hospitality"? Perhaps. But an Associated Press report suggests there was another attraction:

Mayo's son, Josh, 31, described his mother as a peace activist and said she had been in Pakistan since March. She has traveled there often since making a pen pal before Sept. 11, 2001. The pen pal hasn't been allowed to visit the United States, he said. . . .

Henry Lefebvre, a neighbor who met Mayo a couple of years ago at a picnic, said she told him she was headed to Pakistan.

"She said she had a boyfriend there," he said.

Probably her lawyer is right, and she is just a nut. But boyfriends can be dangerous. A BBC account from 1986 describes the case of Nizar Hindawi, a Syrian-backed Jordanian national who used his pregnant Irish girlfriend in an attempt to murder some 380 passengers traveling from London to Tel Aviv:

Mr Hindawi attempted to blow up the flight by planting a timer bomb inside his girlfriend's hand luggage. Ann Murphy had been under the impression that he would follow her on a later flight.

The explosives were only discovered when a security official searched the bag thinking it was too heavy. The 3lb of plastic explosives and a detonator concealed in a pocket calculator had made it through two X-ray machines undetected.

Mayo surely would have come in for extra scrutiny if Britain had an Israel-style system of airport security, in which agents ask probing personal questions in an effort to find would be terrorists.

Scary thought: There are lots of single lefty females desperate for a boyfriend, (at least where I live). Islamofascists would have a rich ore of unwitting non-Muslim terrorists to mine...

Correction

I decided to write this in response to the post by Mr. Porretto of Eternity Road since he has eliminated the comments section of that post. He has endorsed a friend’s blog whom he has described as a “devout” Catholic, who loves sex, was a former prostitute, etc...

Not knowing this friend’s life story, I have nothing to say about her former profession. However, I took exception to Mr. Porretto calling her a “devout” Catholic after reading some of the posts at her blog, which delineates the sexual pleasure she derives from anal penetration, masturbating with sex toys, etc…

I wrote a comment that Mr. Porretto does not know what a “devout” Catholic is, since no Catholic can claim to be devout while cheerfully committing a sin against chastity.

His heated response in defense of his girlfriend (and he is a married man - apparently an unhappily and sexually frustrated one at that - as one of her posts declares as such) was that the Church was not “infallible” and that he uses his conscience to guide him in such matters. The Church is infallible in FAITH AND MORALS. And chastity falls under the category of MORALS. There is no argument over whether masturbation is a sin or not, Mr. Porretto; READ THE CATECHISM (Vatican Edition) and you will find in Part 3, Paragraph 2352, that:

“By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. Both the Magisterium of the Church, in course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose. For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.”

Mr. Porretto, you are WRONG. You cannot call yourself or your friend a DEVOUT Catholic as you pick and choose which laws of the Magisterium to obey. As I said in your now defunct comments section of that post, I don’t care what you do or with whom, however I take exception to your using the term DEVOUT CATHOLIC to describe someone whose actions clearly violate the laws of the Church. Your lame excuse regarding your conscience is also erroneous: the Church teaches that the conscience as a guide must be INFORMED by the Magisterium. This is another reason why people who are not Catholic are misinformed and confused by the teachings of the Church: its members themselves don’t know what the teachings are.

I would have preferred to simply respond to his comments in that post, however his removal of it compels me to write this here in fraternal correction.

Mr. Porretto, I dare you to consult an ORTHODOX CATHOLIC PRIEST for further guidance on this matter. Hopefully you will have the fortitude to take his instruction.

ADDENDUM

I received a trite comment about being "judgmental". Problem is, if humans do not exercise the faculty of Judgment, which is a function of the MIND, then we may as well go on all fours. I'm not telling the person they are going to hell. I'm telling them that they have no bloody business calling themselves or others "DEVOUT" when they practice something which clearly violates MORAL LAW as taught by the Magisterium of the Church! It's that bloody simple. And if anyone else wants to leave the same kind of insipid remarks I'm simply going to delete it.

Thoughts to Ponder

Seth at Hard Astarboard has posted some sobering thoughts about the future of democratic governments. According to 18th century history professor Alexander Tyler:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Sounds like a familiar scenario... Furthermore:

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.

During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage "

Apathy certainly exists, especially among the youth here in the US. Statistics point that many of them don't bother to vote, or even read the news.

The post further delineates interesting statistics regarding the 2000 Election:

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election.

Population of counties won by:

Gore: 127 million

Bush: 143 million

Square miles of land won by:

Gore: 580,000;

Bush: 2,427,000

States won by

Gore 19;

Bush: 29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by

Gore: 13.2

Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..."

From this information we see the roots of apathy and dependence firmly entrenched in our land. Where will it lead us?

UPDATE

I just found out that the stats for the murder rates are incorrect. According to Snopes it reads as follows:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), in the year 2000 the national murder rate was about 5.5 per 100,000 residents. Homicide data by county for 1999 and 2000 can be downloaded from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NAJCD), and the counties won by Gore and Bush can be identified using the county-by-county election results made available by CNN. (The NACJD provides not only the number of reported murders for each county, but also the population for each.) The average murder rate in the counties won by Gore vs. the rate in the counties won by Bush can be determined from this data.

By calculating the murder rate for each county and then taking the averages, we find a murder rate (defined as number of murders per 100,000 residents) of about 5.2 for the "average" Gore county and 3.3 for the average Bush county. But since people, rather than counties, commit murders, a more appropriate approach is to calculate the total number of murders in the counties won by each candidate and divide that figure by the total number of residents in those counties. This more appropriate method yields the following average murder rates in counties won by each candidate:


Gore: 6.5
Bush: 4.1

There is a distinct difference between these two numbers, but it is nowhere near as large as the quoted e-mail message states (i.e., 13.2 for Gore vs. 2.1 for Bush). Note that the average of these two figures is 5.3, which, as expected, is very close to the reported national murder rate of 5.5.

H/T Indigo Red

A Man Only a Liberal Could Love

At a campaign rally, Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuela captured four US spies and returned them back to America.

US National Intelligence Director John Negroponte had appointed J. Patrick Maher as "mission manager" for Cuba and Venezuela.

"They selected 'Jack the Ripper,"' Chavez said. "What a little problem this is."

Hmm, Jack the Ripper was English...

"These are signs that the empire doesn't rest," Chavez said. "The plan to try to destabilize us has already begun."

Uh, you don't need us to help you with that, buddy, you're already unstable.

Chavez said he wishes the best for the American people and hopes they one day "live under democracy, because they live under a fascist dictatorship."(H/T Fox News)

Wow! A guy only a lefty could love! I bet he'll soon be on their short list of Most Beloved World Leaders, among illustrious persons such as Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro.

From Peace Activist to Piss Activist

From Fox News we see a woman caused a plane diversion in Boston with her bizarre behavior. She muttered inarticulately which made the passengers and flight crew nervous, then she squatted on the floor of the plane and urinated. The crew had to tackle and cuff her when her behavior became more "frenzied".

Catherine Mayo, 59, is a peace activist who travelled to Pakistan where she has published news articles there criticizing President Bush.

"The folksongs of the 1960s will never be written again because of President George Bush," she wrote. "He has hampered the liberties of my country in the name of September 11. Songs now can only talk of patriotism they cannot mention peace."

That's right. There is a law against writing songs which use the word "peace".

Her son, 31, says:

"I guess she just had a bit of a bad time on the plane, and everybody's a little paranoid."

Uh huh. If this occurred pre 9/11 no one would have blinked an eye at a woman pulling down her knickers and squatting on the floor to urinate in public.

FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz confirmed Thursday that authorities found a screwdriver and an unspecified number of cigarette lighters in her bag, items which are banned under new security regulations. Marcinkiewicz also confirmed that matches were found Mayo's bag.

She also had a bottle of water, which did not appear to be supplied by the flight crew. It wasn't clear how the items made it through airport security, which has been significantly tightened since the terror plot arrests.

"Significantly tightened"? Apparently not enough. I get pulled over for carrying eyebrow tweezers in my makeup bag. She gets away with a screwdriver???

Her attorney, federal public defender Page Kelley, said Mayo was "just barely lucid" when they spoke. "She's got some very serious mental health problems."

I'll say. Hating President Bush and siding with Al Qaeda are not political positions. They are symptoms of liberal mental illness.

Breakthrough in JonBenet Ramsey Murder Case

Denver law authorities have made an arrest in the long standing cold case regarding the murder of six year old JonBenet Ramsey. According to FOX News John Karr, a 41 year old schoolteacher, is currently being held in Bangkok, Thailand on separate sex charges.

I hope this is the beginning of the end of the nightmare that the Ramsey family endured for so long. It's terrible enough to have a child brutally murdered the way young JonBenet was, but to be falsely accused of the crime, and to suffer the suspicions and cruel speculations over the years must have been excruciating.

When the murder first became public I recall having my own suspicions against the family, but after seeing a documentary on Court TV a few years ago I was persuaded otherwise. This documentary, (I think it was an episode of Cold Case Files), had an investigator, well known for his high success rate in solving cold cases, present overwhelming evidence that the murderer was an intruder outside of the family circle. Ever since I have had nothing but sympathy for the Ramseys.

In light of Patsy Ramsey's recent death after fighting ovarian cancer, I can only pray that she may rest in peace.

UPDATE

WWB at Blog PI posed an interesting observation that conservative bloggers jump on the story, while liberal bloggers ignore it. Why?

Ultimately, for the liberals, justice for the little guy does not matter. In this case, a helpless 6 year old girl. She is not a blip on their radar. Neither are the children who perished on 9/11 and 7/7. Even less do they care for the unborn. Their only relentless drive is to obstruct and destroy authority in all of its forms... the focus of their hate being George W. Bush.

It's a form of fanaticism, its adherents defined by Winston Churchill as "one who won't change his mind and won't change the subject."

A Whisper is a Whisper and a Shout is a Shout and a Heresy is a .. well, just plain old Sloth

Patrick at It’s a Matter of Opinion wrote a post on why he is not religious. He cites the children’s game “Chinese Whispers” (aka “Telephone” when I was a kid) as the reason why. According to his theory, over the years the message got garbled just like how rumors and gossip do. Therefore, according to his idea Jesus was not the Son of God, just a good man who preached a wonderful feel good message. It’s interesting to note that conveniently, the message didn’t get garbled, just the true identity of the messenger did.

Now I don’t have a problem with people if they don’t want to believe due to a myriad of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual differences as long as they are honest in their reasons. But don’t insult my intelligence by using that facile excuse not to believe in Christ’s divinity. Don’t say “They made that part up”, but not the rest of it. And if you really subscribe to the Chinese Whispers conspiracy, then ALL OF HISTORY IS SUSPECT. That’s the logical conclusion of such a theory.

Another reason why the Chinese Whispers Theory is faulty is that the game is WHISPERED. It’s so much easier to garble the message when it’s whispered than when it’s spoken loudly, or shouted. Even when I was 8 years old and played that game I noticed that the main reason why the message was twisted was because the whisperer didn’t want others to overhear the message and spoke too quickly or was laughing while conveying the message in my ear. However, when a message is spoken loudly and clearly to a number of people, it’s much less liable to be misconstrued.

Thirdly, the comment section of the post indicates support of the works of the Torah as factual, yet dismisses the main message (Christ is God) of the Gospels as false. I don’t know why one part of the Bible is subject to error when another part isn’t. I guess it’s either a matter of pick and choose according to one’s personal preference or bias. Hardly objective.

Fourthly, one cannot entirely dismiss a culture’s oral tradition as inexact. Many pre-literate societies have incredibly accurate memory and generation after generation can recite long epics and stories by heart without stumbling or error. My Dad used to say that the brain is like a muscle, and the exercise of memorization strengthens it. Within many of the Gospels are examples of mnemonic devices (the parables, the stories of healings…) which are commonly used with great success in oral tradition societies. The fact that they are used within each respective Gospel INDEPENDENTLY of each other (i.e., the authors did not consult each other for the source) indicates that there is historical and textual accuracy.

Fifthly, the first written Gospel occurred about 40 years after Christ’s death and resurrection by Mark, who was a disciple of Peter. Therefore we have an account recorded by someone whose source was a living eyewitness of Christ’s words and actions. Luke was a disciple of Paul of Tarsus. John IS one of the twelve disciples and eyewitnesses of Jesus, and Matthew drew his sources from Mark and “Q” which is also the same source for Luke and Mark (called the Synoptic Gospels) Hardly enough room to use the Chinese Whisper theory, which relies on too many distant and multiple sources.

Lastly, the belief that Jesus was just a good man rather than the Son of God is nothing new. The heresy of Arianism is probably the oldest among those which sprang from Christianity, and it will always be with us. It’s very common nowadays for people to subscribe to it. I think they are erroneous in their belief, and I can be tolerant of them. But what gets me is the use of faulty reasoning to excuse intellectual and spiritual laziness.

The West's Malaise

Victor Davis Hanson writes a comparison of the West's indifference to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism to the apathy of Europe and America of the 1930's towards the rise of fascism in their midst:

" There is no need to mention Europe , an entire continent now returning to the cowardice of the 1930s. Its cartoonists are terrified of offending Muslim sensibilities, so they now portray the Jews as Nazis, secure that no offended Israeli terrorist might chop off their heads. The French foreign minister meets with the Iranians to show solidarity with the terrorists who promise to wipe Israel off the map (“In the region there is of course a country such as Iran — a great country, a great people and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region”) — and manages to outdo Chamberlain at Munich. One wonders only whether the prime catalyst for such French debasement is worry over oil, terrorists, nukes, unassimilated Arab minorities at home, or the old Gallic Jew-hatred."

Hanson attributes the West's weakness to a moral vicissitude:

And finally examine here at home reaction to Hezbollah — which has butchered Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia — from a prominent Democratic Congressman, John Dingell: “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah.” And isn’t that the point, after all: the amoral Westerner cannot exercise moral judgment because he no longer has any?

Well if one shrinks from moral judgment then he cannot be judged, can he? Isn't that the real reason why so many (i.e. the Left) refuse to pass judgment on people's acts, no matter how heinous? Unless it's smoking, wearing furs, and cutting down trees, the Left will not pass judgment on anything - not even against murderers, terrorists and tyranny.

Hanson notes what the real story is:

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more.

But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

It seems the theme of this post touches again what a previous post (See "Trivialization of Western Society" below) did: that the West can no longer distinguish what is truly good and what is truly evil. When you have a society which can ferociously condemn misdemeanors such as eating too much beef and playing with toy guns, yet wink at decapitation and torture, you have a sick and feeble society indeed.

Wow, it's been a whole year!!!

Well I took a year off and did lots of stuff. Not exciting stuff, well a little exciting, but nothing major. I've been reading other people's blogs and have been inspired to write my own again. I think.

Gotta go and visit everyone now and see if they are still around and if they remember me, lol.