Isaac Schrödinger

An ugly fall

Grotesque.

Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

Fear, anger, hate ...

Ed Driscoll wrote about the Star Wars prequels. It seems that Episode 7 is on the horizon. This can only lead to, er, suffering.

Update
Vox Popoli: 

Not that George Lucas hasn't methodically gone about ruining his creation for decades, beginning with The Return of the Jedi and those damned Ewoks, but the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney pretty much guarantees that the franchise will never, ever, return to its erstwhile glory.

What terrible news for the younglings of today.

A trip through Middle Earth

I love how the lost shot is of misty mountains.

Two brave infidels

Scott on Cape Cod writes about Benghazi:

[...] due to their quick action and suppressive fire, twenty administrative personnel in the embassy were able to escape to safety. Eventually, these two courageous men were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers brought against them, an enemy force numbering between 100 to 200 attackers which came in two waves. But the stunning part of the story is that Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty killed 60 of the attacking force. Once the compound was overrun, the attackers were incensed to discover that just two men had inflicted so much death and destruction.

What a contrast. The Muslims have tremendous hatred but they're so thoroughly incompetent that they can't even manage to murder two men of the West without losing dozens of their own. Just goes to show how different and effective this war of civilization vs. barbarism would be if the West recognized its enemy.

Dynomite!

Yahoo Sports:

Oregon all-everything back De'Anthony Thomas has been mentioned as a Heisman candidate and the above play shows you why. It's hard to find a player this dynamic in college football.

His performance in the video is very impressive.

Sandy will blow hard

It is coming:

On its current projected track, Sandy could make U.S. landfall on Monday night or Tuesday anywhere between Maryland and southern New England, forecasters said. Rain accumulations of up to 12 inches and heavy snowfall inland are considered likely in some areas.

As it merges with an Arctic jet stream, forecasters said Sandy has all the ingredients to transform into a "super storm" unlike anything seen over the eastern United States in decades.

I blame George Bush.

Seriously, I hope people don't lose electricity for too long.

What was DC thinking? The movie title is way too long.

The last scene in the trailer is cute.

Don't be an intelligent fool

Vox Popoli:

[...] the goal should not be to try to make the retards normal or the normals brilliant, (such efforts are futile), but rather, to endeavor to teach each group of individuals wisdom and strong moral character to the best of their capacity to understand and apply it. Even one conscientious and confident normal individual of good character can do wonders for correcting the ills caused by a gaggle of highly intelligent, evil-minded fools.

This reminded me of what Galadriel said in The Fellowship of the Ring: "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

Faster skynet faster!

The end is near.

Not a popular tourist destination

Cricinfo:

The PCB governing board has sanctioned the purchase of bulletproof buses to ensure best security protocol for visiting teams, and thus address some of the security concerns that have prevented international teams from touring Pakistan over the last three and a half years.

Next: bulletproof vests for the international players while they play their matches? I see a lot of run outs!

Burnin'

Trey Ratcliff:

One morning I rode out to the main temple to watch the sunrise. Clouds are fairly rare out there, so I was hoping for some nice color situations, but I didn’t expect anything quite this colorful!

That's what I immediately noticed: lots of dynamic range.

The real Islam

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid has a few words for "moderate" Muslims:

Finding slaves or slave girls, repulsive; physically assaulting women, disgusting; cutting off hands for theft, inhuman; stoning people to death, beastly and then venerating the ideology that permits this at the same time is hypocrisy of the very highest order. You sit there, criticize and mock the Taliban that follow your religion in its true form while you live in oblivion with your extremely palatable, but simultaneously blatantly fallacious, brand of religion and then claim that the Taliban are misinterpreting and misapprehending your ideology? Oh, the irony.

Another article:

The Taliban have defended the attack on Malala Yousafzai according to their scriptures and history. Of course if you’re looking for a command that orders the killing of every 14-year-old school going girl who is inspired by the leader of Dar-ul-Harb, you won’t find one, but what you will find are quite a few historical precedents. Like for instance the case of Asma bint Marwan, a poetess whose murder was sanctioned in 2 AH after she conspired against Islam and the Holy Prophet, as narrated by Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa’d. And then there are Ibn Khatal’s two slave girls Fartana and Qaribah, who used to sing songs against the Holy Prophet and were among the ten shortlisted to be executed at the Conquest of Makkah in 8 AH – one of them was killed, the second managed to escape (Ibn Sa’d, Tabaqat- Vol 2). Women were ordered to be killed for conspiring against the religion by their ideological predecessors, and so is it entirely the Taliban’s fault for taking cue and attempting to kill a girl who criticised their fundamentals; the fundamentals emanating from their ‘authentic’ religious scriptures?

Taliban translated in English means students. These wretched beings have studied and learned nothing but Islam. It's, of course, the Islamic "moderates" who are the religious extremists.

Thanks to Tambi Dude for emailing me the above links.

Leave the economy alone

Nick Gillespie via Instapundit:

Having sunk most of his savings into the venture, it went belly up, he said, partly because of a bad economy but also due to “federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc.”

Lamenting his lack of business experience while he was a legislator and presidential contender, McGovern concluded that “ ‘one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignored the reality of the marketplace.”

As he explained, “setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels -- for example, 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales -- takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics.”

Too many people don't understand the stress businessmen deal with. Most businesses, like the above example, lose money. McGovern's policies were in the abstract, theoretical realm but once he saw the ugly reality he realized just how out of touch and idiotic politicians are. 

Infidels be crazy

The Telegraph via Vox Popoli:

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people's courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

The hammer and sickle was used to crush humanity and here it sits at the top. The cross to hammer+sickle ratio is 3 to 5. It would have been more honest if the symbols formed a swatsika instead of a star.

So many contradictions

The Telegraph:

The core values of women’s education, emancipation and entitlement to respect must endure: but some of the wilder shores of Western feminism are ridiculous.

[Emphasis mine.]

Entitlement to respect? Why would anyone, man or woman, be entitled to respect? The author writes that in the context of female babies who get aborted before birth because of their gender.

But don't we then have a conflict? A pregnant woman only has a right to abort her unborn child if she's completely unaware of the sex of the baby. However, as soon as that knowledge becomes available, then the baby ought to be respected if the baby is a she.

Some "value" that.

More:

Great that women’s earnings have risen: but it’s a little worrying that, in the United States, the family wage has simultaneously fallen, and sometimes more than a little worrying that it now usually takes two salaries to raise a family. Where is the “choice” in that? No easy answers!

One of the reasons that the average wage is falling is that women are entering the labor force in large numbers. So much so that today in the US most of the workers are women! When supply of something increases, it's price decreases. More workers, lower wages. It's surprising that the author isn't aware of such a simple fact.

I guess women's education doesn't include basic economics.

Atkinson speaks up

The Monty Python crew would have been all put behind bars if Britain had such draconian laws on the books back then.

Some are more equal

Feminism explained.

Master of the yorker

Cricinfo interviews one of the greatest fast bowlers in Pakistani history:

Getting swing while bowling fast - Waqar Younis knew how to do that. He talks us through the art and science of it.

Are you upon the mission!

Do you want to know what Muslims truly believe?

Just listen to what they have to say.

Like Tolkien

Vox Popoli:

Umberto Eco once said that he wrote The Name of the Rose because he wanted to murder a monk. I decided to do him one better and begin by killing the Holy Father.

Holy Schnikes! Though, I'm hoping the protagonist won't get into a crazy maze of books or bones. I've read Summa Elvetica and felt that it was too short. I saw glimpses of some fascinating characters in a cool world and then ... it's over!

A Throne of Bones will be on my reading list for 2013. 

Not apple juice

Eeeww.

Allah's perverts

The Daily Mail:

At age 11, Ghulam was married off to 40-year-old Jaiz in a rural Afghan village, making her only one of more than 10 million young girls who are being forced to wed men old enough to be their fathers or grandfather every year.

But opposing such practices would be Islamophobic.

One comment that boils it down:

How can any society respect a culture such as this? This is pedophillia disguised by a 'marriage'.

Indeed. However, it logically follows that their beloved prophet was also a pedophile who, therefore, is not even close to being a perfect man. Saying such a simple truth in an Islamic society is suicidal.

Guess the religion

Joe O'Connor:

Randjida Khairi was stabbed five times in her chest and back. She had her throat cut, a wound so ugly and deep that it sliced through her neck muscles, voicebox and windpipe — stopping only at her spine.

She was stabbed with two different knives. She drowned in her own blood; a process a pathologist would later determine took between five and 10 minutes. Police discovered Ms. Khairi’s body lying on a bloody cot in her family home, a 16th floor apartment in the northwest corner of Toronto, otherwise all tidy and neat, with a kitchen full of pots.

The victim was the mother of six. The victim was married to her killer for 30 years.

Link via Jihad Watch.

Mmmmm

The first presidential debate was more amusing than I had thought.

The center of evil

It seems that Saruman is the grand mufti in Saudi Arabia.

Witnessing sharia

How long will the French tolerate the intolerant?

Just devastating

Andrew Sullivan via Vox Popoli:

I'm trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it's hard to see how a president and his party recover.

Flaming Obama? So gay.

RACISSS!

The Big Zero provides the answers.

Gimme more!

Heartiste:

I swim among single women — mostly white, mostly educated and/or intelligent, in their 20s and 30s — and I can assure you they have a rock hard clit boner for Obama and leftie policies in general. Romney may as well be the anti-Christ when he’s not some buffoon at whom they happily lob insipid snark bombs. I can count on three fingers the number of unmarried girls I know who aren’t reflexively pro-O-face. And even among those women who might have some sympathies for anti-Gimmedat viewpoints, any hint that you were against eternally welcoming open borders to the third world would send them spinning into point and sputter orbit.

This is the reality we live in. It’s status whoring and self-righteous hypocritical white girl preening all the way down. The people have suckled on the Big Daddy Government teat for too long, and they ain’t giving it up.

It ain't going to be pretty when the money runs out.

Chivalry is dead

Feminists killed it. Check out this video; the part at 00:32 is awesome.

I kan haz sharia!

Of course, it's not just Ikea bowing to sharia. The Starbucks example is even worse; they changed their infidelicious logo to appease the savages.

T20I no. 288

It's so rare to see the Australian cricket team get annihilated.

So lopsided was West Indies' obliteration of Australia in the second semi-final of the World Twenty20, the victors had near enough to 13 overs to bask in their looming progress to the final against Sri Lanka. Matthew Wade's departure in the eighth over of Australia's reply to 205 for 4 left George Bailey's team at a forlorn 43 for 6.

Can Sri Lanka stop Gayle on Sunday? They won't be victorious if they don't.

Not Big Bird!

The video linked here is awesome. Romney, in the end, breaking into the now-famous dance routine is simply gold.

DOF ownage

The third photo here is quite something. My eyes bounced around initially to see what I ought to be looking at. Then, I realized that an object or a figure is not the subject matter.

Magic

One of the greatest movies ever made, and one of my favorites, will be released on the big screen for only one day. Watch it if you have the chance.

No other movie director comes close to making the epics that were crafted by David Lean. It's incredible what he did: not having the benefit of computer special effects, he shot at real locations. His movies took years to make and one could see the hard work that went into making them.

Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

World Twenty20 2012

What is so surprising: Just a few weeks ago, South Africa were ranked the #1 team in the world. Yet, they somehow managed to lose all three matches in the group stage of the current global tournament. The South Africans have yet to make it to a World Cup final. For a team that has an awesome win-loss ratio in the last two decades, that's quite disappointing.

Not-so-surprising: Pakistan proving my prediction wrong by winning against Australia. Pakistan have now managed to make it to the semi-finals of all four World Twenty20 tournaments. They are not even close to having the best team in the Test arena but in the shorter game, they have been quite impressive.

Strange: India won the first tournament in 2007 but they haven't managed even a semi-final spot since then. They've got big hitters but, it seems, their bowlers can't contain the opposition. That extremely heavy defeat against Australia a few days ago hurt their chances.

Anyway, a paragraph describing the cluelessness of the Australians:

Australia had secret camps, brought in spinners from across their country, ventured into the desert and took on the beast of Ajmal, all so that they could be ready for this tournament and the wily mystery spinners they would have to handle. They handled the 18 overs of Pakistan spin (it would have been 20 if not for Shoaib Malik getting Mike Hussey treatment) much the same way you would a chest bursting alien popping out.

Ouch.

Reynolds 2016

Glenn Reynolds provides his platform. I can't find much fault in it except that point #3 should be more aggressive: more departments / agencies need to be abolished.