Isaac Schrödinger

The Spider Sith?

This is bad. The good bad, not bad bad.

More amazing work here.

Also, check out a fly from the Navi world.

The Master Lives

CNN:

Rick Norsigian kept two boxes he bought at a garage sale under his pool table for four years before realizing they may be too valuable to store at home.

The Fresno, California, commercial painter learned this week that what was in those boxes he paid $45 dollars for a decade ago could be worth more than $200 million.

Holy Schnikes!

The Joys of Marriage

Planet Iran via IBA:

In order to elevate the spiritual atmosphere, create proper psychological conditions and tranquility of mind, the Province of the Quds’eh-Razavi of Khorassan has created centers for temporary marriage (just next door to the shrine) for those brothers who are on pilgrimage to the shrine of our eighth Imam, Imam Reza, and who are far away from their spouses.

Ah, temporary marriage. For a second there, I thought it was prostitution.

The period of each temporary marriage can be anywhere between 5 hours to 10 days. The prices are as follows:

* 5 hour temporary marriage – 50,000 Tomans ($50 US)
* One day temporary marriage – 75,000 Tomans ($75 US)
* Two day temporary marriage – 100,000 Tomans ($100 US)
* Three day temporary marriage – 150,000 Tomans ($150 US)
* Between 4 and 10 day temporary marriage – 300,000 Tomans ($300 US)

I wonder if they take AMEX?

Poor Precious Princess

This whole "event" is quite a teaching moment for future parents.

the whole episode was well worth it simply for bringing us the epic phrase "Consequences will never be the same!"

That's just gold.

I couldn't stop laughing when the tiny brat started to bawl in this remix video. Americans sitcoms can't manufacture such wondrous drama.

Patience and Technique

It's a single shot.

Moderate Uncle Murders Niece

Business Day via Jihad Watch:

A Jordanian man confessed to killing his 16-year-old niece to save his family’s “honour” after she was sexually assaulted, a judicial official said today.

The 43-year-old fired 30 machine-gun rounds in the direction of the girl yesterday, killing her instantly, at Deir Alla, west of the capital Amman, said the official who requested anonymity.

That was her punishment for getting raped. The rapist, presumably, lives.

Death To Blasphemy

The Christian Post:

The leader of the World Council of Churches is urging Pakistan’s president and prime minister to initiate measures toward the repeal of their controversial blasphemy laws, which critics say are often abused by extremists.

Sometimes, a malicious accusation is enough for those who want to do "the good deed".

Tveit’s letter comes four days after two Christians accused of blasphemy in Pakistan were killed as they left a courthouse.

On Monday, masked gunmen opened fire on Pastor Rashid Emmanuel and his brother, Sajid Emmanuel, as police were transporting them from the court in Faisalabad to jail.

According to Compass Direct News, the brothers were expected to be exonerated soon after handwriting experts on July 14 notified police that signatures on papers denigrating Islam’s Prophet Muhammad did not match those of the accused.

These Christians were accused of dissing Muhammad. The police got evidence to prove that they had done no such thing. Still, they were murdered.

“We also urge Your Excellency to initiate measures towards the repeal of the Blasphemy Laws and to secure the rights and dignity of all individuals in Pakistan society,” Tveit added before concluding.

That will do little good. It isn't the Blasphemy Law which is the problem but the Blasphemy Mindset. As is clear, the Pakistani state did not kill those Christians. The Blasphemy Law could be repealed today and we'll still have Christians, and other non-Muslims, getting slaughtered because of accusations from wicked Pakistanis.

Not Rape Rape?

Andy McCarthy blogs about a case in New Jersey:

A Muslim woman was raped by her Muslim husband (who was about to divorce her). However, a state judge refused to find that there had been a sexual assault or any kind of criminal sexual misconduct because, under sharia principles, a wife may not refuse her husband's requests for sex. As the man told the crying woman, "This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I c[an] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do."

Who needs Jihad when you have the American judiciary doing the job for free!

Fortunately, this mental malaise hasn't consumed the entire US legal system; an appellate court has reversed this utterly dumb ruling.

An Important Battle

A small part of one of Ibn Warraq's answers:

One must get away from this absurd thought that only an Islamist can criticize Islamism. It leads to an absurd situation, where only a Fascist can criticize Fascism. Of course, Islamists are the first to criticize, for example, Christianity. So we must not fall into this power scheme. We must look at the evidence and weigh the validity of the arguments. This is, in effect, throwing out charges of Islamophobia. Anytime that anyone criticizes Islam, he is considered an Islamophobe. This is just a way of silencing criticism. We must keep on criticizing.

[Italics mine.]

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

800 Test Scalps

Murali, the great Sri Lankan bowler, has retired from the game.

On the last day of his last test match, Sri Lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan picked up his 800th test wicket, an unprecedented feat.

Of course, he's been so far ahead of the field for so long that unprecedented doesn't mean much, but it's a nice round number to end the brilliant career of one of the most fun players to watch in cricket, whether he was batting or bowling.

True. Statistically, he was by far the most destructive bowler of his era. Unfortunately, he played the game when the Australians showcased a better team. So, he leaves with one World Cup trophy instead of two.

Let The Healing Begin!

Who knew that hope and change could be so orgasmic and emotional?

And oh-so-comical.

Riding The Carousel

News of the world:

The university-educated brunette longed to be as confident in bed as Sex And The City maneater Samantha.

So she set herself a 10-year challenge - to get a thousand notches on her bedpost.

I'm sure she oozes confidence now.

Last month she bedded her Mr 1,000th at a friend's party. "He was gorgeous, blond and fantastic in bed."

Now the challenge is over Christina does have regrets. "Good friends stuck by me but others accused me of being a slut. I took things too far. Now all I want to do is settle down. I just hope I haven't put men off."

Mr. 1001 is going to be one lucky bloke!

A Most Powerful Delusion

Code Monkey Ramblings:

What a lot of conservatives miss about mainstream liberalism is that it is the epitome of a system built on unsustainable contradictions.

True. An example:

It is highly intolerant toward intolerance and is often willing to eschew science altogether when scientific inquiry might reveal truths about the human condition that are staggeringly illiberal (like undermining or even destroying egalitarianism and demonstrating conclusively that men and woman are mentally wired very different).

It's so odd to hear people, who're often decades older than me, say that men and women are equal. Didn't these people have brothers or sisters? Didn't they notice just how different boys and girls and later men and women behave?

Though, it could be worse. One time, a co-worker of mine offered her opinion: Women are superior! I couldn't resist a reply. More back and forth followed. I'll write in detail about it soon.

Prime No Smash

Those crazy Chinese!

Just because the second movie was awful and the third movie won't even have Megan Fox, that doesn’t mean we should lose all faith in Transformers. Optimus Prime is still as cool as Chuck Norris roundhouse kicking a facepalming Patrick Stewart. It's likely that with this precise simile in mind, Beijing got itself a 40-foot Optimus Prime to encourage green thinking.

They should have gone with the Hulk.

Stunning Portrait

I wonder what kind of post processing was done to the eyes.

The Obama Strategery

Obama pumps up his base for the war:

In a last-ditch effort to find a moral justification for a war that his radical leftist base could accept, President Barack Obama attributed recent bombings in Africa to al-Qaeda’s bigotry, describing the terrorist masterminds as racist radicals. Accompanied by a somber Rev. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and NAACP President Ben Jealous, President Obama read a joint declaration denouncing al-Qaeda’s bigoted practice of “sacrificing innocent African life” as a means to hit a legitimate Western target. To cover all possible bases, the declaration included a list of other random offenses, such as: the terrorist group’s failure to embrace the local LGBT community, their complete lack of interest in environmental activism and in raising awareness about climate change, turning a blind eye to the existence of a “glass ceiling” for female suicide bombers, and a few documented instances of not separating paper from plastic.

I can't even imagine anything more evil than that.

What we need is quotas for female suicide bombers. Why should it be only the guys who get to enjoy 72 raisins in hell?

Link via IBA.

The Bolt Incentive

The Telegraph:

Since April, foreign sports stars competing in Britain are liable for a top rate of income tax of 50 per cent but, controversially, the tax is charged not just on the money they earn in Britain but on a proportion of their worldwide sponsorship income.

That is utterly insane. Think about the math: It's possible for the British government to levy an effective tax rate of over 100% on the earnings made by a foreign athlete in Britain!

HM Revenue & Customs bases its charge on what proportion of an athlete's competitions take place in Britain. An athlete competing in 10 events globally with one of them held in Britain could be charged one 10th of his worldwide earnings at a top rate of 50 per cent.

In the case of Bolt, that would mean a potentially colossal tax bill that could outweigh any prize money or appearance fee he earns from racing in Britain.

Link via Michelle Malkin.

Superinfidel

I write like
Mario Puzo

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Wow.

Mental note: Stay away from oranges.

Not Quite Sauron

Not even close!

What Women Value

Vox Popoli on "The Double Standard":

It is perfectly clear that women are attracted to men with sexual experience and actively dislike men who don't have it. It is primarily women who make fun of men who don't have success with women, they are the ones who label such men losers. Indeed, as has often been seen right here on this blog, attacking a man's sexual history and implying its brevity is a favored form of female insult.

Read it all.

Prince Who?

Samizdata:

I had a brief conversation with a decidedly winsome 20-something young lady, elegant yet edgy (she was a cut glass accented thoroughbred Sloane Ranger wearing 'All Saints'). She was sitting in a sandwich shop in a well-heeled part of town... expensive Apple laptop open as she availed herself of the free WiFi whilst having luncheon...

The dialogue that follows is comedy gold.

Excuses

I've had a sore throat and I've been coughing for the past week. The weather has been extremely hot and I've been drinking super chilled liquids.

Maybe that's why. Or maybe I got it from someone else.

The Fate of a Dhimmi

Asia News:

Recently, the Punjab government decided to offer a free meal service called "dastar Khwan" for the poor, inviting entrepreneurs and philanthropists of every state to finance the project, built largely with public money. The authorities have opened canteens in different areas and villages in the province where every day from 13.00 to 15:00 lunch is served for poor people at a cost of only 9 cents.

Some poor people are more equal than others:

20 year old Christian Naqash Gill said: "I went to one of the stalls with some friends for a meal. There were four of us and we paid for the meal token. When food was being served, suddenly a security guard came out waving a gun, shouting, 'Hey, you Christians, you have to leave here. The meals are not for you'." "We tried to speak to the manager, – he added - but the gunman continued to point his weapon at us and ordered us to shut up".

Link via Jihad Watch.

Hiding The Public

NPR has changed its name to, er, NPR. Mark Krikorian has a good explanation for this behavior.

At the end:

And then there are funny examples, like the Wisconsin Tourism Federation, which had to change its name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin because the abbreviation had acquired a new meaning.

The memo hasn't reached the Moro Islamic Liberation Front yet.

Wasted Opportunity

The New York Times:

After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

It's tough.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Doh!, what an idiot.

Karl Denninger takes apart the whole thing.

53 Flavors of Loyalty

Such is the case in one of the most evil regimes on Earth.

One Avada Kedavra Coming Up

Just horrible:

A Harry Potter actress whose father and brother are accused of threatening to kill her has pleaded with the courts to drop the charges.

The whole situation is convoluted.

They live in a society with infidel laws. Azad, the actress, loved the Harry Potter books which were written by an infidel. She got involved with the movies where she worked with dozens of infidels. She got paid with money which, I'm sure the parents thought, was so infidelicious.

Now, after being in the company of so many infidels, Azad wants to date one. Instead of asking this adult woman to reconsider her choice, her brother and father go Achmed the Terrorist on her: I KILL YOU!

Why is Azad defending the people who wanted to end her? And why of all places in a free society where she can comfortably survive without them?

I just don't understand women.

Fireworks!

I used to buy rockets and firecrackers in Saudi Arabia during Ramadan. This, however, beats them all.

When I was ten, I had a firecracker in my right hand and a lighter in the left. I kept on lighting it on and off and bringing it closer to the firecracker.

Of course, soon, the firecracker lit and almost instantaneously went off. The pain registered after a few seconds of shock. Can't believe I was so stupid.

Dell Fell

My first two computers were from Dell -- a laptop and then a desktop. The desktop came with the lovely Deathstar hard drive which, er, exploded after a few months. Dell replaced it ... with another Deathstar which also died a few months later.

Dell, again, sent a new hard drive. Fortunately, it was a 100GB beast from Western Digital. My computer was under warranty. So, Dell provided the new drives without charge.

After that, I decided to custom build my own computers. I've heard and read that the quality of Dell offerings has declined. Their reputation in the late 90s was stellar but now it's so-so.

It Uses Jiggawatts!

And I bet it's heavy.

Atypical Hike

Rick Lee makes nice photos. The fifth in the set is utterly gorgeous.