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July 2011
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September 2011

Facts about Islam

Vlad Tepes:

Bill Warner’s most excellent site, Political Islam, produces regular reports on persecution of women, Christians, and other groups that Muslims like to intimidate and ethnically cleanse periodically out of lands they control. I try and republish when I can but often his emails get buried. It is well worth going over to his site and subscribing to those mail outs. For those who do not know of Bill Warner check out this truly stellar speech he gave in Tennessee with German subtitles.

Bill Warner talks about Banu Quraiza -- a Jewish tribe which was annihilated by Muhammad. I wrote about this over five years ago: Banu Quraiza or How the Prophet Muhammed Momentarily Forgot the Peaceful Nature of Islam.


Who decides how much is allowed?

Sam Harris: How Rich is Too Rich?

even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others.

[Emphasis mine.]

Vox Popoli:

And the inevitable atheist tendency towards totalitarianism finally shows through. Rich people aren't "allowed to keep money". They have it. It's theirs. As in, not yours, Sam. This is called the principle of private property, and upon it all the wealth of the Western world is founded. Or rather, was founded before it was turned into collateral in a ponzi scheme.


Submit or die

Christian convert threatened and assaulted in Norway:

At Hå asylmum centre, "Ali" had boiling water poured over him after converting to Christianity and not fasting during Ramadan. Now he and other converts fear for their lives.

"If you do not return to Islam, we kill you," was the message "Ali" got from other Muslims at the Hå asylum centre. He does not wish to have his face or real name published, out of fear of the Muslims at the centre. If Afghan authorities come to know about his conversion, he risks the death penalty by stoning if he is sent back to his home country.


Still standing

Badass of the Week is definitely a badass.

Gelman's eyes don't blink, move, or register any kind of emotion at all. They're dead, black holes. Gelman calmly reaches into his coat, eyes still fixed on Lozito's gaze, and smoothly draws an eight-inch-long, razor-sharp kitchen knife from his waistband. Lozito then suddenly realizes the man is muttering to himself. No, worse. He's chanting. "You're going to die. You're going to die."

Vox Popoli:

As my sensei always taught us, "when you go, you go!" In other words, once the moment for action arrives, commit 100 percent. Lozito appears to have had little idea what he was doing - a simple arm bar and break would have been significantly safer than a takedown - but that only emphasizes his courage and heroism.


Coolpix overload

Nikon goes crazy with their coolpix lineup. So far this year they've released over a dozen coolpix cameras! I was thinking that they'll announce their new generation DSLRs today but that was not the case:

There were many Nikon press events all over the world today and I was able to gather some new information. There will probably be two more Nikon announcements in September.

It's likely that the earthquake earlier this year has messed up their release schedule. We probably won't see the new DSLRs in the market till 2012.


Is God pissed?

Maybe.

I felt the earthquake at work. I knew within a second that it was an earthquake because I had felt a similar sensation in the summer of last year when we had another tremor. I was sitting in a chair and it felt like someone was slowly and methodically moving me around in a small circle. Last time it was utterly confusing, now ... meh.


The new kings

England crushed the depleted Australians in their own country and now the Brits have done the same to India at the home of cricket. It was twelve years ago when India were defeated in every match of the series. The major difference now is that they started the first match while being ranked as the best team on Earth.

Now, they're down to the third position. It has been a hard, humiliating four matches. The only man unscathed is the legendary Rahul Dravid and Tendulkar still waits for his 100th 100.

Interestingly, a senior Indian cricketer once pin-pointed what differentiated Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid from the rest. "They will murder you when they are on top of the game and score big hundreds with ease. But it is when they are down and things are not going well, even then they can last for three hours. The rest just wilt without a spine." That is the difference.

So true. The stunning loss of seven wickets at the end is proof enough.


Not so colorful villains

Kathy Shaidle:

Kersey notes, “If you watch the 2002 Spider-Man film, all of the people that he apprehends are white. Never mind that between 2003 and 2009, 89 percent of the murderers in New York City were Hispanic or black.” He isn’t sure the “Disingenuous White Liberals” (DWLs, as he calls them) who run the comic-book industry have thought that matter through.

On a related note, in the upcoming Superman movie, Perry White is not going to be, er, white.


Transactions in the SMP

Alpha Game:

In the majority of the blogs I have read, the dating scene is always referred to as the Sexual Market Place (SMP). This analogy is an apt one, but I never really considered its deeper significance. It makes sense as there is an exchange of goods between two people but it can be taken much further. During last night's discussion the implications of treating dating as a marketplace gained a great deal of weight.

Indeed. Having studied economics, many aspects of life make a lot more sense.


Lucifer's torture

Vox Popoli:

I've mentioned this before, but I still laugh every time I think of my father's summary of a dinner in which he was seated between two well-known social butterflies. "Now I know what Hell is like."

About a year ago there was a department meeting at my workplace. It was supposed to be "brief". The relevant part of it was approximately five minutes long but the meeting was stretched to an hour.

Why? Because the head of the department is a female idiot. There are scores of other words I can use to describe her but that's for a post in the future. She simply kept on repeating how she tried to accomplish X but she can't because of Y and also because Z is such an ass ...

After fifty minutes of the brief meeting I looked in the direction of a male coworker. Our eyes met and we silently communicated, "WTF!"


A democratic path to totalitarianism

Bruce Thornton:

A few days ago Islamist demonstrators filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, chanting “Islamic, Islamic, neither secular nor liberal,” while a few dozen secular activists cowered in a tent until they were driven away. One Islamist student made a simple point lost on many Western idealizers of democracy: “If democracy is the voice of the majority and we as Islamists are the majority, why do they want to impose on us the views of minorities — the liberals and the secularists?” Why indeed.


Iran terrified of freedom

Asia News via Vlad Tepes:

Two Iranian women jailed in Iran's notorious Evin prison for converting from Islam to Christianity may be executed for apostasy, Radio Farda reported. Amir Javadzadeh, a broadcaster for a London-based Christian radio station, said that the two women could be put to death even though "they were not politically active at all." They “just wanted to serve people according to the Bible,” he said.

More:

As part of a crackdown, some 6,500 copies of the Bible were seized, said Majid Abhari, advisor to the Social Issues Committee of the Iranian parliament.


MPAI

An Instapundit reader writes in:

New Hampshire used to be a pretty conservative place – no state income tax, ‘live free or die’ on the license plates, etc. A flood of refugees from Taxachusetts over the past 20 years has changed that. And just as you described, the newcomers seem to have no clue that the policies they support are the very same ones that ruined the state they fled.

This reminds me of a conversation from 2003. I knew this Pakistani family living in Saudi Arabia. Somehow they got green cards for themselves. They eventually wanted to settle in the United States. Oddly enough, the head of the family supported the Taliban because they were "true Muslims"!

So, he verbally supported hardcore sharia but ran as far away as possible from its wretched consequences. I wonder if he's still as big of an idiot today as he was eight years ago ...


Not enough value

Hardocp:

It looks as though Intel is hauling out that $50 upgrade service again for its low-end processors.

Cnet:

According to the company, the upgrade will deliver better application, video, and photo performance, along with improved "responsiveness for everyday PC activities." In benchmark testing, the Core i3-2513 delivered performance that was 11 percent faster on applications and 15 percent faster on digital-media creation, Intel said.

So, one has to pay just over a $100 to buy this processor and then later one can decide to pay a further $50 to get a maximum 15% boost in performance. Well, that's lame.


Cook roasts the Indians

Alastair Cook scored a combined 20 runs in the two Tests before this match. It seemed that the Indians had neutralized the biggest threat from England.

Cook has just scored an epic 266 runs in Test no. 2003 and he's still not out! By Sunday, England will be ranked as the number one team in Test cricket. After crushing the Australians in the last Ashes series, this achievement doesn't come as a surprise.

Update
The poor fellow fell painfully short of a triple-century. No matter. India are not going to dig themselves out from under the pile of runs that England have so patiently accumulated.

What a sorry contrast it makes with Sehwag. He'll want to forget this match even before it's over.


Fast and flaky

Tom's Hardware:

SandForce said on Tuesday that it's currently demonstrating the use of its latest SF-2000 series SSD controller with Toshiba’s new 24-nm MLC Toggle Flash memory in a 2.5-inch SSD form factor. The union is producing balanced read and write speeds up to 500 MB/s and up to 60,000 IOPS with Toshiba's memory operating at 166 MT/s.

I read in a forum that one guy ordered two hundred solid state disks from OCZ which used the SandForce controller. Twenty were DOA! That 10% failure rate is way too high for such a premium product.

Let's see what Intel will release in the near future for their drives are known to have the best reliability.


Youths be trippin'

Kathy Shaidle:

Let’s consider ourselves fortunate that Canada’s Somali settlers—the word “immigrant” is so 20th century—seem more or less content with killing each other.

On the last day of July, the Edmonton Journal devoted not two, not three, but seven articles to the latest spate of intra-Somali murders in Alberta’s capital.

(Nicknamed “Deadmonton,” that city leads Canada in homicides this year, with 29 so far—four of those victims being Somali “youths.”)


The pretty assault

Rosario Dawson via The Honest Courtesan:

"I remember everyone asking when I was doing press for the movie, 'What did you do to look so thin? You looked great' and I'm like, 'I looked emaciated' ... It's a form of violence, in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be — for what sake? Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life but just so you could look pretty.

I guess I've been violent with women all my life.


Slavery in Canada

A story from earlier this year:

A West Vancouver woman has been charged with human trafficking in connection with a case in which a young woman was allegedly brought over from Africa and forced to work in demeaning and slave-like conditions in a lavish West Vancouver home.

Mumtaz Ladha, 55, is wanted on a warrant for hiring the 21-year-old African woman, police said Monday afternoon.

I'm sure her religious views had no bearing on her decision to own a slave.

Link via Vlad Tepes.


Perverse incentives

Ah, it's seems a Muslim teacher was practicing the Islamic values of peace, tolerance and understanding again:

A mosque teacher assaulted four pupils, including one with learning difficulties, with a two-foot long pipe because they were misbehaving in class.

What better way to understand the true meaning of the Quran.

Philippa White, prosecuting, said part of the incident at the Grimshaw Street mosque had been captured on CCTV, which showed Yusuf striking two of the boys, aged 11.

Busted.

One boy was clearly upset when his mum collected him at 7pm and he had a red mark on his back.


Shaming the losers

The Poverty Brand via Instapundit:

Food stamp recipients should be given a plastic debit card that is orange and about three times as large as a credit card, so it is real conspicuous. When they check out at the grocery store, an orange light should go off (like the K-Mart “blue light specials” of yore). The PA could announce, “poor person checking out register 3″ and then the jingle could be played.

Genius.


Micro Surrender

An incident from Toronto via Jihad Watch:

I was at Yonge-Dundas Square with my nine-year-old son. We ate pizza. We drank bubble tea. And I used my new Canon camera to take photos of this neon shrine.

Suddenly, a woman wearing a hijab ran toward me. She was part of a group that included two women wearing full face-covering burkas. She was screaming: “We are Muslim! You do not take pictures of us!” (Odd. I can’t find the “no photos” rule in the Qur’an.)

I informed the lady I was in a public square in a democracy. I can actually take pictures of whomever I please. And then: Ka-pow! Her fist collided with my face. Worse, she almost knocked my new camera from my hands.

What happens later is far worse.

Update
Gates of Vienna has a link to a video interview of the fellow.


Fear and Fantasy

Dr. Helen: Do you ever wonder what your dreams mean?

Yes, I do. I had two strange dreams last month. They seemed like tiny parts of a much larger story. Make of them what you will.

1st dream:

I am a boy in a suburb with my kid friends and we hear news that a dragon is loose in the neighborhood. Yes, a fire breathing creature is burning up the area where I live. We're all scared. My friends run back to their homes. I stand there thinking: How does one fight a spawn of Smaug?

An old man dressed like a wizard approaches me and says that there's a way to stop the beast. He shows me a tablet which is the size of a small diary. It has the look of wood and clay. He tells me that displaying the magical tablet to the dragon will terrify him and he'll go away. However, the magic can only work if the maker of the tablet were to use it.

Then he hands me the tablet. I'm like, "Whaaaa".

"You made the tablet when you were very young."

Then, like a freaking movie, there's a flashback in which I see myself as a few months old and I'm having fun making this strange little wood-clay item.

"I then kept it. Today, you have to use it."

I'm so confused and terrified. The roar of the dragon gets near. I hide behind a wall of some house. I can feel the fire getting closer and apparently only I have the power to stop it.

I summon up the courage. I take my first step from behind the wall to face the music.

Then I wake up.

2nd dream:

1st point-of-view: I'm sleeping in a room of a giant building -- kinda like the White House -- and the noise of people outside the room wakes me up. I'm pissed. A few diplomats in sharp suits have just arrived and they're discussing an alarming security situation: A dirty bomb has been smuggled into the country.

Then, there's a strange noise that makes everyone shut up. Nobody knows where it's coming from. It's like a fluttering sound.

2nd point-of-view: There are many guards outside this building who notice this sound as well. They all look up. A huge wooden cube is falling very slowly. It has a parachute attached and that's the source of the noise. Suddenly the parachute bursts and the cube falls violently onto the lawn. It splinters and compresses but one still can't see what's inside.

The crash sends out this barely visible shockwave and when it reaches the guard, he's dead.

3rd point-of-view: A few kilometers away from the building a little girl is walking in a shopping district with her mother. All of a sudden they hear terrible screaming and screeching. In front of them dozens of people are running in a direction away from that building but they can't avoid this slow and somewhat visible shockwave as it passes through them.

The confused girl focuses on a young woman in the crowd. All she sees is a zoomed in image of the face of this woman. Slowly, hundreds of invisible scalpels are elegantly tearing up her face. The skin on her face seems to be dissolving away. She won't live long.

4th point-of-view: There is chaos in the city as thousands must have died. A band of uruk-hais are viewing the city from the top of a skyscraper and would you believe it, there's a machine gun mounted there! One of them grabs the gun, aims it practically straight down into the street below and starts shooting regular orcs.

Then I wake up and go, "What the hell!?"


Test no. 2001 - 4th day

Cricinfo:

England win by 319 runs. From a first innings where England were 124 for 8 and India 267 for 4, England have ended up winning by a distance. Staggering performance, really.

Yup. England came back from a miserable first day to clobber India. Let's see if Sehwag can light up the series in the next game.