Discrimination alert!

Once again discrimination rears its ugly head ...

Kudos to BB.

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Well, it is final now

Or, at least it will be final soon. Andrew Ian Dodge, he of Dodgeblogium, of Growing Old Disgracefully heavy metal band, the faithful historian of Cthulhu, the author (here are more of his books, and you can part with some of your simoleons for a good book once in a while, you know), anyway, where was I?

Yes, Andrew Ian Dodge. The best way to try and understand all his occupations, interests and other activities is to immerse yourself in this quote:

He is a writer, author, novelist, blogger, computer games consultant (his full time work) and the lyricist/frontman for Growing Old Disgracefully. He has been writing myths stories for many years and has written an Idiots Guide to the Mythos.

Tough, innit? Sounds like a description of a fairly active group of people to me...

Anyhow, Andrew Ian Dodge is going to do IT. To take the plunge. To get hitched. To tie the knot. And he is doing it in Maine, sometime on May 18, if my records are in order. Anyhow, 18 is a very lucky number in Hebrew, I shall have you know, and whether it is an end of an era or not - we shall see. Some skeptics are betting that some of the above mentioned activities will be curtailed, but where there is a will, there is a way.

More festivities as the date gets closer. Meanwhile: full steam forward, Andrew!

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Sandmonkey calls it quits

One of the most original voices in the Middle East blogosphere feels that the decision to quit is overdue.

One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me since that day.

But there are other, no less valid reasons, so read the entire post. It is a sad day indeed.

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Israel boycott con?

I have borrowed this headline from a remarkable (aren't they all?) article by Ami Isseroff. In the article Ami states and proves the main point: that in many, if not all, cases the boycott initiative has a hidden goal - cheap advertisement, and in most situations this goal is reached.

Vote to spend more money on hospital missions in Africa and you might merit a back page notice in the religion section of a newspaper. Vote to ask for better pension plans for your members and your union might get a notice in a trade newspaper. Vote to boycott Israel and you are instantly an international celebrity. You and your union are front page news.

There is more proof there in the article, and it is an excellent reading anyway, so do yourself a favor. Without going into psychology (or psychiatry) of the various initiators of all these boycotts, which is a separate issue and clearly a subject for the experts, I would say that my personal attitude to these cases was more or less the same. I have even tried, in my own humble way, to coin a term "doing a Gibson" for cases and people like these boycotters.

However lately I have started to feel that we dismiss the boycott flare-ups too easily. Indeed, in most cases a boycott is a result of a micro-putsch organized in the best tradition of the genre. In most cases the result does not reflect the opinion of majority of the members in whose name the voting was undertaken, and in majority of the cases the practical side of the matter is close to nil.

The final push that changed my opinion was a remark made by Jon Ihle, quoted below:

Don't be fooled, Snoopy. These guys are playing a long game and they are making incremental progress on the boycott front, which serves to normalise and institutionalise a characterisation of Israel as uniquely disgraceful.

I think that Jon hit the bull's eye here. It is not an individual boycott as such that matters, it is the whole picture of slow, gradual erosion of public opinion, having its ultimate goal to delegitimize everything Israel stands for. And we should be wary of the whole business, even if it is being carried out by small groups of Israel-haters, even if they are more shrill and hysterical than significant.

And now I can easily agree with the closing paragraph of Ami's post:

Pro-active vigilance can stop the boycotters however. It has nipped a few of them in the bud, before they got started. It is only necessary in most cases to be attentive, to note the published agenda of board meetings and to marshal the forces needed to quash the initiatives before it is too late.

That too...

Cross-posted on Yourish.com.

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Hebonics, shmebonics...

Eitan aka Greg, he of the mournful template, made my day with this.

Now I want to ask you: a good Jewish bucher like this one - can't he change that template to something more readable, like simple black text on a bright background?

Tsures on my head...

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Hamas Warns of Palestine "Explosion"

Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal has warned against pursuing the economic and political blockade of the Palestinians, who are "on the verge of exploding".

Is the text in bold meant in a literal sense? Link.

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Onset of self-awareness

Are we a banana republic?

Apparently, but with a twist: even our bananas are taught to be aggressive.

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Weekend laze - unfinished questions

Having a good lazy weekend means, between other things, not necessarily having to finish your thoughts. So you will have to...

A 116-year-old Ukrainian goat herd claims his long life is down to never having had sex with a woman. Grigoriy Nestor, from the village of Stariy Yarichev, close to capital Kiev, said: "According to my Christian beliefs there is no sex before marriage, so I never had a wife. I believe that's why I have lived so long, that and the fact I have never been curious."

He told local newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda he had only been to school twice when he had visited his local primary school for two days and learned to write his name. He added: "The less you know, the longer you live. Ignorance is long life and happiness."

So maybe it is really the lack of edu... ?

His entire life has been spent tending his goats, he said.

And how about the... ?

Thousands of rich Japanese women were conned into believing lambs were valuable miniature poodles. Flocks were imported from the UK and Australia to be sold by an internet company as the latest "must have" pet.

The scam was rumbled when movie star Maiko Kawakami complained on a talk show that her new poodle refused to bark or eat dog food. She showed photos of the animal and was devastated when told that it was a lamb, reports the Sun.

Does anyone know how her hubby... ?

A Croat footballer turned up for work to find a flock of sheep waiting for him.

Defender Ivica Supe scored 16 times this season for third division Zagora FC unaware that the club's sponsor, Josko Bralic, a local shepherd, had promised a sheep for every goal scored by a defender.

Surely you know a few other teams that could bene... ?

A German man has admitted living in the woods near Berlin for 28 years after his girlfriend threw him out of their flat. Konrad Schmidt, now 60, said: "My fiancee threw me out and so I came here and have been here ever since. I don't want any contact with people, I get a bit of money collecting bottles people leave in the woods and that is all I need."

Unbelievable! Do Germans really throw away bo... ?

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Bird Flu: Another Israeli weapon?

In fact, the full headline of the Al Jazeera (the .com variety, not to be mixed with the .net one) is:

Bird Flu: Another Israeli weapon against its “enemies”?

It is quite a long time since we have dealt with a good juicy (Joocy) conspiracy theory. While the idea of the article is not new, it must be said that the author has done a good job of compiling the assorted rumors into a solid scientific medley. Very impressive for a person who is not a member of the Elders' organization.

The Gulf emirate of Dubai has decided to check air passengers before being allowed entry on suspicion of carrying the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu and Saudi Arabia declared an emergency aimed at preventing the outbreak of the virus, after it has reportedly killed more than 160 people all over the world, according to the World Health Organization, with many cases uncovered in Arab and Middle East countries.

Indeed, the case described above happened in reality. However, the Dubai's decision to check the passengers and to prevent the carrier of H5N1 (we have trained both the carrier and the virus, of course) from entering the country was based on our own last minute phone call. It appeared that 99% of Dubai population are Jewish! The inattentive field officer was severely punished.

An article published earlier on the state-run Syrian daily al-Thawra drew suspicion that Israel may have developed the bird flu virus as a new weapon to avenge Arabs and harm the genes of its Arab neighbors.

Indeed that is the ultimate goal. The wily virus, however, was developed with a IQ that is too high for a mere military device, and part of its quirks is a burning desire for travel. This is why the virus declared that China, Vietnam and Thailand are to become its first operational ground. Because of a programming error, the virus initially refused to have anything to do with people of Semitic persuasion, and only an urgent re-education effort brought a change in its negative attitude.

The Syrian paper cited a report released in 1998 by the Sunday Times alleging that Israel is developing a biological “ethnic bomb” that would kill Arabs and not Jews. The Times report said that Israeli scientists were doing experiments at the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tsiona near Tel Aviv to identify genes characteristic to Arabs so as to develop viruses that attack these genes.

That was a tough one indeed, after all, being cousins, we have a lot of identical genes. The ingenious solution the boffins came up with was a talking virus. If, upon addressing you, the virus hears "salaam aleikum" in response - you are as good as dead. Only urgent study of a foreign language (Hebrew preferably) can save you from the monster.

The same report published by the Syrian paper accused Israel of poisoning the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat using biological viruses. “We recall that the assassination of Yasser Arafat was done using a biologically engineered virus to which only the Zionists had a remedy,” the paper wrote.

Oh, well. You see, Arafat has a secret weakness known only to Mossad: chicken fajita, and the rest was relatively easy. Of course, the linked recipe does not tell how to slice and marinate the virus, we have decided not to publish that part for a while.

Another way to spread the bird flu is to program it into a live chicken:

Our operative, caught in that picture from the Al Jazeera article, by an almost imperceptible movement of his right hand, clicks a button that will transform a regular, peaceful chicken into a homicidal carrier of the deadly virus.

The last and the most dramatic sentence of the article:

Could the deadly virus, which has so far killed 24 Egyptians, mostly women or girls, be another weapon used by the Israelis to achieve strategic goals, instead of pursuing diplomatic means, that would require direct talks with rivals in Iran, Syria and Palestine?

After a series of prolonged meetings in the Elders' HQ, an answer was formulated, agreed upon and approved for publication. And this answer is:

Yes.

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How do you call this?

This short and succinct post Farewell, Sweet Prince by gnotalex reminded me of an old joke:

Q: How do you call a boy who killed and ate his parents?
A: An orphan.

About 20/30 years ago this joke was just funny (well, for most of us). Today, in our advanced stage of political correctness, many will not consider it a joke at all - rather a part of that all-inclusive manual of political correctness. Says gnotalex:

Leave it to the moonbats at Daily Kos to come up with this weepy eulogy for theVirginia Tech shooter:

Cho lived in shadows, deep and dark. He attended classes at a prestigious University. He was a scholar, a writer.

Read the rest of gnotalex's post. Then read the eulogy, it is a must.

And then decide for yourself how you want to call this, cause I am not telling.

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Do we live in fictitious times?

No, it is rather that we choose what kind of fiction we prefer to live in, when we decide what is "our" newspaper, what is "our" TV channel, who is "our" guru of the day. Of course, the moment we make each of these decisions, we make another one - what will be the newspaper, the TV channel, the guru we'll dismiss offhand.

Still, there is some hope. Like, for example, here:

In a world like that, there's little use for proper journalism. In a world like that, documentaries have little value except to entrench pre-ordained narratives and affirm political identities. Advocacy journalism becomes the work of telling your side what it wants to hear instead of what it might actually need to know.

It's all perfectly democratic, of course, and tailor-made for the marketplace. You get to pick the propaganda you want. You'll find demagogues like Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly down one aisle, and the equally fatuous and shrill Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell down the other aisle. Take your pick.

More in Terry Glavin's article here.

One just cannot fight lies by lies, period.

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Yes, he has it coming, I say...

Isaac Shrodinger analyzes here the Richard Gere Indian mishap.

I say, folks, let's put aside all these cultural - shmultural issues for now. Let's talk as real red-blooded, beer-bellied, couch potatoed men.

Doesn't it make your blood boil when all of your nearest and dearest people of female persuasion without exception (yes, including SWMBO) start swooning the moment his name is mentioned? Making you feel like... like... a beer-bellied... I have already been there, I think.

So, I say, the sooner Indians put their mitts on him the better. A few months in the nick and let's petition them, as a special favor to all males on this planet, to give him a nice head shave.

Yeah. That will learn him...

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Quiz of the week

Why does Deborah Fink in all her fire and brimstone articles, like this one, insist that boycott of Israeli goods and Israel in general must be a grassroot action?

Hint: v.s.b.l.t.

Another hint: in this Engage article you can see a picture where Deborah was supposed to appear, but doesn't...

Right guess will entitle the correspondent to a membership card* of JFJFP, PSC, J-BIG or UKSPCA. Availability limited.

(*) No returns, no refunds.

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I am afraid Akaky is right... again

The Eternity Road Colloquium #1 post is worth reading in its entirety. Curmudgeon has asked a few questions that are being asked lately with growing frequency:

What are the prospects for an Islamic Reformation that would allow Europe to live in peace with its Muslim immigrants? Is it possible to imagine such a development in the next few decades? If not, what's the most likely outcome of the Old World's current social strife?

There are several contributors to this post, you are bound to disagree with some of them. I have chosen (well, as usual) to quote here the response to the last question by Akaky Akakyevich:

3. The most likely outcome of today's social strife is even more social strife. If Europe's history is any guide to its future, sooner or later Jean Marie Le Pen and men like him will eventually be swept into office by frightened European voters who wonder what ever happened to their countries. What happens next? I dont predict a repeat of the events of 1942-45, but a repeat of 1492 seems entirely possible. It's not like the Europeans havent done this sort of thing before, you know.

Aside of saying that I am very afraid that Akaky Akakyevich is right and wisely nodding my noggin, the last thing I wish for is having an opportunity to announce "but we said so, remember".

But saying "never again" is much easier than confess that this slogan has lost any meaning almost as soon as it was aired...

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Help us to save Hugo

While valiantly defeating the continuous efforts by CIA, Mossad, MI5/6/7 to assassinate him, taking all these efforts in his stride and laughing at the darn imperialists, Hugo Chavez a.k.a Comical Hugo is afraid of one man only on our planet: the arch-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said Venezuela will lodge a protest in the United Nations over the release of Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles from a US jail, accusing Washington of letting a terrorist go free. Venezuela has asked the US to extradite the 79-year-old former CIA agent to be tried on charges that he plotted the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger plane in which 73 people were killed.Chavez also charged that Posada has been plotting to assassinate him for years, and accused US President George W. Bush of complicity in failing to bring Posada to justice.

Here is a recent picture of Carriles (doubtlessly a man one wouldn't want to meet in a dark place):

Just look at that homicidal stare and the bulging muscles of Comical Hugo's enemy number one. Clearly, poor underfed Hugo, as you can see in the picture below (the red feathered chap, not to be confused with the green-feathered partner):

does not stand a chance against a murderous assault by Carriles.

I say, let's pass a hat around and ensure that Carriles is placed in a most secure environment and that his motorized wheelchair batteries are not charged. Otherwise it will end in tears.

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