Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Sadness, American and British Versions

This is good.
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For all of the Twilight movie frenzy, with Twilight Moms and tweens camped out, and "You Go Girl" positivism from Oprah, every White woman's Black Best Friend(tm), women in today's society are beset with sadness. For they have very little to be happy about. The Huffington Post has an article about women divorcing in their twenties. The Daily Mail has an article about women drinking themselves into oblivion. Both reflect a cruel irony.

In no place or time, have women had more choices, more wealth, more power, and more opportunities to be whatever they want to be. To decide for themselves what their lives will be. And in no time, place, or society have women been left to themselves entirely, without guidance, help, or advice on what real life boundaries will limit their choices. You might even argue that women have only one fleeting chance, often, at happiness, and can see it go by without even realizing it. This is why vampires are so popular, real life men disappoint them, and like the male geeks retreating into dreams of hot Vulcan or other Alien babes, women retreat into a fantasy of hunky dominant, violent guys fighting over them and for them. But the reality is sad. Above all else.

The Daily Mail piece has such things as:

Year of the Vermin

Taki's Magazine
Verbatim Post

This has been the Year of the Vermin. With the Arab Spring, the black flash mobs, the London riots, and the OWS camper babies, we’ve had an eyeful of what “the people” really look like. It ain’t pretty. They don’t look nearly as glamorous in real life as they do in the revolutionary paintings.

America’s annual post-Thanksgiving Fatso Stampede known as Black Friday was more chaotic and violent than usual this holiday season, which doesn’t speak well for the notion that the nation’s huddled masses are wallowing in abject poverty. These weren’t food riots. They were toy riots. This wasn’t Wall Street. It was Main Street.

And for the most part, Walmart is the only store left on Main Street. Though there were no reported fatalities to match the Long Island Walmart employee who got trampled to death during a Black Friday mob crush in 2008, Walmarts this year were bursting with fracases, frenzies, fisticuffs, and imbroglios from coast to coast.

Around 10:20 last Thursday evening, a woman described as short, squat, and Hispanic—and reportedly accompanied with two children—pepper-sprayed a crowd of shoppers jostling one another in line for Xboxes at a Walmart in the San Fernando Valley. An LAPD sergeant said the woman sprayed the crowd “in order to get an advantage” in line. Another policeman called it “customer-versus-customer shopping rage.”

“These weren’t food riots. They were toy riots. This wasn’t Wall Street. It was Main Street.”

Early Friday morning, a man was shot outside a San Leandro, CA Walmart after leaving the store and refusing to surrender his goods to a pair of armed robbers who were bold enough to attempt a stickup in a bustling parking lot patrolled by multiple police cruisers. Later on Friday, robbers shot a woman in the foot after she left a Walmart in Myrtle Beach, SC.

A gun was reportedly waved during a dispute over a video game at a Walmart near Toledo, OH. There were brawls near the jewelry counter at a Florida Walmart and in the electronics section at a Walmart in upstate New York. A teenage girl was knocked down and trampled at a Michigan Walmart. A baby was punched in the face at a Texas Walmart.

A mini-riot erupted over $2 waffle-makers at a Walmart near Little Rock. If you have the stomach, watch that linked video and pay attention to the fat slob monster woman’s ass crack. Her ass crack summarizes America late in 2011. Her ass crack is the 99%.

The boys in blue kept busy pepper-spraying a crowd outside a North Carolina Walmart, foot-sweeping a suspected shoplifter at an Arizona Walmart (and knocking him unconscious in the process), tasering a man who threw punches while waiting in line for video games at a Connecticut Walmart, and stun-gunning a reportedly intoxicated shopper at an Alabama Walmart.

In the tiny realm still outside of Sam Walton’s Endless Empire, there was a riot between police and shoppers awaiting a PS3 sale at a Best Buy in Fresno, a smash-and-grab looting at a Hollister’s store in lower Manhattan, fistfights outside Westfield Culver City Mall in California, a gang-related stabbing outside a Macy’s in Sacramento, and gunfire inside a North Carolina mall.

Like the mob-instinct insect army that they are, the leftist press—make that the corporate leftist press—blamed it all on “the corporations” rather than the corporations’ consumers. The Daily Beast spoke of “grotesque social engineering” by a mercantile class attempting to “enslave American minds.” The Huffington Post pinned it on “Social Darwinism,” alleging that the “heads of these corporations” were “joyfully watching those rocked by the recession pummel each other to death” and counseling readers not to “be corporate America’s bitch.” Salon upbraided “corporate America” for “encouraging” this behavior. On Eric Boehlert’s Twitter feed, the editor of George Orwell’s favorite website (Media Matters) linked to a story about the Black Friday brawls, adding, “great job corporate America.”

To hear the apologists making themselves dizzy trying to spin things, the violent shoppers weren’t being “greedy” to the best of their limited abilities and opportunities—somehow they were bullied and brainwashed and hornswoggled and socially engineered into acting this way. They weren’t simply acquisitive pigs with perhaps significantly lower cognitive capacity and laughably paltry organizational skills compared to most corporate CEOs—even as they punched babies in the face while scuffling for cheap toys, somehow they maintained their victims-of-capitalism status through all the mayhem. Even when pepper-spraying a screeching mob of co-proles to snag a cheaper Xbox, they remained angels with dirty faces.

Sigh.

Listen.

It’s really quite simple.

Walmart sent its jobs to China because the workers are cheaper. And Walmart’s fat, sweatpants-swaddled American patrons elbowed one another for toys because they were cheaper. Notice a pattern? Corporate robber barons and minimum-wage mall-shoppers are both “humans” and therefore are subject to “human nature.” Like squirrels dreading the winter, they tend to hoard resources and will stuff their faces and load their arms with as much garbage as they can get away with until they’re forcibly restrained.

Not that I can relate. I don’t tend to judge myself by what I own, or else my self-esteem would be even lower than it is. It’s not that I think there’s anything innately unethical with wanting to be rich or to live in luxury, but it’s obviously never been a priority of mine, or else I would have kept my mouth shut and pretended I really wanted to be a member of society. I don’t think this makes me better than most people, only different. So speaking as someone who is perhaps congenitally tone-deaf and color-blind to this thing called “greed,” perhaps I can accurately assess the situation as an outsider.

No one’s forcing these slovenly idiot hairballs to club one another over the heads for flat-screen TVs. I’ve been exposed to the supposedly irresistible allure of capitalist advertising for five decades now, yet it never compelled me to knee someone in the groin for a cheaper iPad. If any of these baseball-cap-wearing ass-sores clawing over one another at midnight to score a discounted toaster oven using their nearly tapped-out credit card had the slightest chance to be a despised villainous oligarch, they’d cannibalize every peasant within a hundred miles and then go out for lobster puffs with champagne. This isn’t to say that greed is inherently good, only to point out that it’s not confined to those who’ve been successful at it. Much of this recent robotic class-war fist-pumping can be summarized with the popular ghetto term “player-hating.”

This is why the currently meme-tastic fantasy fable that the wealthy are innately evil while the poor are misunderstood saints is unmitigated horseshit. They’re all homo sapiens, meaning that despite the tax bracket, 99% of them will suck.

NC: Surveillance video shows the moment a store clerk shoots an armed robber twice... and his boss still says he's too SOFT

Via The Dorkfish Express

Mark Headstrong had never fired a gun before. But, when a robber pointed a pistol at him, the Wilmington, North Carolina, convenience store clerk acted fast and shot his assailant twice.

Surveillance video captures the moment Mr Headstrong pulled out his weapon and fired, dropping 30-year-old Joseph Ryan Anderson to the floor with bullet wounds to his leg and his finger.

But Mr Headstrong's boss, store owner Musa Agil said his employee should have shot the robber dead: 'He should have killed him and this guy was soft on him.'

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Day by Day

Ride:DaybyDayCartoon

Wow, just wow.


Could well be a new Ao Dai design.
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Untitled by R'zley theshOOts (rzleytheshoots)) on 500px.com
Clickable X2

Link

A Brief History of the Transatlantic Counterjihad, Part III(b)

This is the fourth of an eight-part history of the Transatlantic Counterjihad. Links to the first thre parts are at the bottom of this post. The section on Counterjihad participation at OSCE “Human Dimension” meetings had to be split into two posts, and this is the second of those posts.

A debt of gratitude is owed to the Counterjihad Collective for its efforts in this project.



Counterjihad Collective

III. The Transatlantic Counterjihad at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (continued)

Speaking in plenary sessions:

Session I:

From Commitments to Implementation: Freedom of Religion or Belief in the OSCE Area

Re-post: Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration

Via The Dorkfish Express


SWAT team's shooting of Marine causes outrage

Via Don

The last I heard, he had not pointed his rifle at them. Story change?
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Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons.

An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family's driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.

They were a sheriff's department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a "boom" and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.

A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle.

What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.

The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting "Police!" in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.

And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet.

"Hurry up, he's bleeding," Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. "I don't know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance."

When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor.

But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a drug-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a gun. The county prosecutor's office says the shooting was justified.

But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a family's life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A family lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff's office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff's 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views.

The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:

"Why, why, why was he killed?"

The Civil War (sic) is Over. Let the Battle Flag Be.

Via SHNV

Over the past several months, the NAACP has launched a campaign against the Confederate Battle Flag by protesting its presence at the South Carolina statehouse. Governor Nikki Haley did not respond to the demands of the NAACP to remove it. In a similar matter, black protesters have called for the removal of the Battle Flag from a Georgian cemetery that happens to have interred the bones of Confederate soldiers. And now, most recently, Republican presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry of Texas has become the newest target of the NAACP over whether the Battle Flag should appear on license plates. In the end, Perry decided against the idea.

Facts remain: there was indeed a Civil War, and one cannot just simply wish it -- or its symbols -- away. Yet it seems that the NAACP and their friends wish to delete a symbol that, while controversial and complex in what it does or does not stand for, is still seen by many Southerners as a cultural symbol with no racial overtones.

Do the NAACP and their allies also wish to blacklist Robert E. Lee and everyone else who, from the standpoint of the South, fought for the rights of Southern states to be free from a federal government that they saw as tyrannical, and that transcended just the issue of slavery? And if the Battle Flag is deemed as a "Southern Swastika" that should be banned, will Stone Mountain -- the memorial for Confederate war veterans -- be the next symbol removed?

It is hard not to see the battle to do away with Southern symbols from the Civil War as nothing more than the first step in an all-out deconstruction of America in toto. It should be remembered that it was under the Stars and Stripes that Africans were taken here as slaves -- not the 1861-1865 Southern flags. Perhaps we should ban "Old Glory" as a racist symbol as well?

The destruction of Stone Mountain, should it come to pass -- and it should not be unthinkable in today's America -- would be no different from the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues ten years ago at Bamiyan.

Protesters want Confederate flag returned to Richmond 's Confederate Veteran's Chapel

Via SHNV

VIDEO




We like white meat, because we are prejudiced or something........

Via Conservative Heritage Times
When dawn broke and we arrived in Watts, they guided me to a place called Ray's Redwood City, an all-night, almost all-black joint where the ladies of Saturday night dined with the ministers of Sunday morning (not at the same tables), and my fellow travelers ordered me a dish called "high on the hog," a mountain of scrambled eggs topped by a fried pork chop.

It was then I learned the etymology of the phrase in America. It hails from the plantation days, when the white slave owners dined on choice pork chops cut from "high on the hog" while the slaves made do with the lower parts of the pig—the ham hocks, the pigs feet, the pork bellies, and the innards. White meat was high on the hog, but not higher on flavor than other (often darker) cuts. Indeed the "other white meat" now available most frequently in lean and tasteless pork chops and cutlets has little more taste than white meat turkey.

Despite its superior taste, dark meat has dark undertones for some. Dark meat evokes the color of earth, soil. Dark meat seems to summon up ancient fears of contamination and miscegenation as opposed to the supposed superior purity of white meat. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that white meat remains the choice of a holiday that celebrates Puritans.

The French in Algeria

Slave Trading New England

Slaver Captain Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine and his ship, the Erie, was captured at the mouth of the Congo River by the USS Mohican in 1860. Loaded with nearly 900 slaves, the Erie was built in Swansea, Massachusetts about 1850, and owned by a New York City partnership.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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Slave Trading New England:

“Ironically, an opportunity for strict enforcement of the slave trade laws was available to the United States almost from the beginning, but it meant collaborating with the British. [In 1807] England, the world’s largest slaving nation, outlawed its own slave trade. Britain’s motives were not especially altruistic [and] in reality, the British were trying to protect the commerce of their colonies by denying slave labor to their competitors, chiefly Spain, France, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States.

Had the United States cooperated with Britain at any point, the slave trade would certainly have ended earlier. As it was, the trade flourished throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, as Yankee captains continued to fit out their ships in Providence; New York City; Portland, Maine; Rio; or any of a dozen other sympathetic ports, and sail to the west coast of Africa for slaves. The Brazilian and Cuban markets were strong, the risks low, and the potential for profits enormous.

Meanwhile, the record of convictions in the courts was as poor as that of seizures at sea. In New York City, where most of the prosecutions took place, only one-sixth of those indicted were convicted. The rest were either acquitted, forfeited bail, escaped from custody, or were released because of hung juries or the court’s unwillingness to prosecute.

From 1837 to 1861 (when Captain [Nathaniel] Gordon alone made at least four slaving voyages), around 125 accused slave traders – officers and crewmen – were prosecuted in New York City; only 20 were given prison sentences, averaging two years apiece. Of these men, 10 received presidential pardons, and 3 more – indicted for capital crimes under the piracy act of 1820 – were allowed to plead to lesser charges. One was briefly convicted of piracy, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality. Clearly, no one in power wanted to hang a man for trafficking in slaves.

[In 1846, the] USS Boxer seized the Malaga, a ship fitted out with all the obvious goods and accoutrements for slaving and chartered to a known Brazilian slave trader. A New England judge ruled that there was nothing illegal about selling goods to a slaver, the charges were dropped, and the Malaga immediately left port on another slaving voyage.

New York had been a slaving city from its inception as a small Dutch settlement. The West India Company delivered eleven Brazilian slaves to tiny New Amsterdam in 1626…New York saw its first slave revolt in 1712, when an armed group of slaves murdered nine whites. Retribution was swift and savage: the gallows claimed thirteen, while three were burned at the stake, one was broken at the wheel, one was starved to death, and another was cooked over a slow fire for an entire day. Whether in the Caribbean, West Africa, or Madagascar trade, there were always New York slave ships, financed by New York capital. The slave traders were well known to the city’s business community; some ranked among the city’s most prominent members of society, frequently meeting at such places as the Astor House hotel to plan their voyages. The money behind their expeditions was provided secretly by many of New York’s most respected merchants.’

(Hanging Captain Gordon, The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader, Ron Soodalter, Atria Books, 2006, pp. 7-9; 43; 70-71)
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Slave Trading New England

Immortal Six Hundred

Via Cousin John


Immortal 600 Monument "Ceremony"
October 27, 2012
Make plans now, to attend!



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World's Oldest Fish Hooks Show Early Humans Fished Deep Sea

The world's earliest known fish hooks reveal that humans fished the open sea for much longer than previously thought.

Past studies have revealed that early humans were capable of crossing the open ocean as far back as 50,000 years ago, such as they did to colonize Australia. Until now, however, evidence that such mariners could fish while in the open sea dated back only to 12,000 years ago.

"In most areas of the world, evidence for our early ancestors' coastal exploitation is now submerged — it was drowned by rising sea levels," researcher Sue O'Connor, an archaeologist at Australian National University in Canberra, told LiveScience.

Now O'Connor and her colleagues have found evidence of prehistoric fishing gear and the remains of large fish such as tuna at a cave shelter known as Jerimalai, located in the Southeast Asian island nation of East Timor.

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Occupy CAIR?: You won’t believe Islamic group’s ties to anti-Wall Street movement

The recent executive director of the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations’ South Florida chapter is a founder and spokesperson of Occupy Miami, KleinOnline has learned.

Mohammad Malik currently serves as an activist with several other Islamic groups.

He has led hate-filled anti-Israel protests in which participants were filmed wearing Hamas paraphernalia while chanting “Nuke Israel” and “Go back to the oven” – a reference to Jews being killed in the Holocaust.

Malik has been widely quoted in the Florida news media in recent weeks speaking for Occupy Miami.

The Miami Herald identified Malik as one of the organizers of Occupy Miami’s downtown campsite headquarters.

“We’ve established that we can be here,” Malik told the Herald, speaking as one of the first Occupy Miami organizers. “People said we were stupid amateurs who don’t know what we’re doing…But we did it. We’ve survived and we’re growing.”

Last week, the Florida Independent reported Miami police had asked Occupy activists to temporarily leave their camp digs.

The Independent quoted Malik, identified as protesting with the group since the beginning, as stating there were “a lot of cops” in the area, but protesters were “trying to figure out the situation so that it doesn’t escalate.”

The Independent previously quoted Malik as an “unemployed Miami native who has worked with the ACLU and is the current spokesperson for Occupy Miami.”

In September 2010, Malik was appointed as the director of CAIR’s South Florida chapter, covering the region of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

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Time to stock up on light bulbs

Within four weeks, it will be a crime to manufacture a 100-watt version of Thomas A. Edison’s brilliant invention. Thanks to a Democratic Congress and the signature of President George W. Bush in 2007, anti-industrial zealots at the Energy Department received authority to blot out one of the greatest achievements of the industrial age. They’re coming for our light bulbs.

Know-it-all bureaucrats insist that foisting millions of mercury-laden fluorescent tubes on the public is going to be good for the planet. The public obviously does not agree. Voting with their wallets, people have overwhelming favored warm, nontoxic lighting options over their pale curlicue imitators. Beginning Jan. 1, Obama administration extremists will impose massive financial penalties on any company daring to produce a lighting product that fully satisfies ordinary Americans.

The Republican House hasn’t done enough to stop this.

How A Charlie Brown Christmas almost didn’t happen

Via The Battle of Atlanta

Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: “Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up ‘Peanuts’ Specials Through 2015.” The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for at least another five years for all of us to see and enjoy.

What people don’t know is that the Christmas special almost didn’t happen, because some not-so-smart television executives almost didn’t let it air. You see, Charles Schulz had some ideas that challenged the way of thinking of those executives 46 years ago, and one of them had to do with the inclusion in his Christmas cartoon of a reading from the King James Bible’s version of the Gospel of Luke.

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Backlash against Obama's rifle ban to target Congress

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars

Until I became an officer in military school, I got to clean this thing too many times to remember and also received my obligatory "M-1 thumb!" I've never met anyone who got more than one.:)



'These were made in America, by Americans, for Americans'

A stealth plan by the Obama administration to classify hundreds of thousands of workhorse rifles used by the U.S. military and public alike as dangerous has prompted a grass-roots campaign to save the weapons, and a key U.S. senator has lent his voice to the effort.

"If we're going to reverse President Obama's Million Rifle Ban, gun owners have to turn the heat up on Congress now before it's too late," writes Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in a campaign launched by National Association for Gun Rights.

"Please sign your Firearms Freedom Survey and put yourself squarely against President Obama's Million Rifle Ban."

The effort urges taxpayers to commit to voting against any senator who "votes to maintain Barack Obama's M1 Garand Rifle Ban."

The controversy developed, as WND reported in 2010, when the Korean government requested the transfer of hundreds of thousands of the rifles to U.S. private entities for subsequent commercial resale.

The weapons, however, suddenly were classified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as a "threat to the public safety in the U.S." The State Department then canceled plans by the Republic of Korea to return the weapons, totaling a little short of a million.

At the time, David Codrea, who writes as the Gun Rights Examiner, said, "If I read this right, what they're saying is, every gun poses a threat to public safety in the U.S. This is the same rationale used in model-specific 'assault weapons' bans – the type of gun is somehow deemed relevant, even though untold numbers of such firearms are already peaceably owned in this country, and even though no supporting evidence for this conclusion exists beyond agenda-promoting speculation."

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Lieberman Wants Google to Flag Terrorist Activity on Its Blog Site

Just as you can flag inappropriate material on YouTube and content that could be related to terrorism is banned, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has asked Google for the same policy on its blogging platform Blogger.

Talking Points Memo obtained Lieberman’s letter to Google that expresses his “disappointment” that Blogger doesn’t “expressly ban terrorist material” or provide a “flag feature.” The drive for making this request seems to be the recent arrest of Jose Pimentel, who built a pipe bomb to be used against military members and posted bomb making instructions and extremist positions on his blogsite hosted by Google. Here’s some content from his site that Lieberman called out in his letter:

“People have to understand that America and its allies are legitimate targets in warfare. This includes facilities such as army bases, police stations, political facilities, embassies, FBI and CIA buildings, private and public airports, all kinds of buildings where money is being made to help fund the war.”

Lieberman makes his case to Google that many blog sites are hosting material of “homegrown terrorists.”

As of Tuesday this week, Talking Points Memo notes that Pimentel’s site (www.trueislam1.com) was still active, although as of today, Friday, it has been taken down. But The Verge reports that as of Thursday, Google had not responded to Lieberman’s overall request for the “Blogger kill switch.”

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Iran & Syria


Top U.S. Aid Recipients Back Iran at U.N.

Of the 10 nations that received the most American foreign aid in fiscal 2011, only one voted for a U.S.-backed draft resolution condemning Iran for human rights abuses.

The resolution, introduced by Canada, cited Iran for abuses including torture, excessive use of the death penalty — including public executions and the executions of minors —violent suppression of political opponents, and discrimination against women and religious minorities.

The resolution passed by a vote of 86 to 32. But among the top 10 recipients of U.S. aid, only Israel voted in favor of the resolution.

Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two biggest aid recipients this year, voted against the resolution. Six other big recipients – Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa — abstained, and Iraq did not vote.

Some countries that declined to support the resolution indicated that they did so due to their opposition to “country-specific” resolutions — critical resolutions focusing on a single country.

But Hillel Neuer, executive director of the monitoring group U.N. Watch, accused those nations of double standards, CNS News reported.

“These countries are being completely hypocritical because they are the same ones who annually sponsor or support 20 one-sided resolutions against Israel in the U.N. General Assembly, having made a virtual cottage industry of passing ‘country-specific’ resolutions against the Jewish state,” he said.

Arab and Muslim countries generally did not support the resolution. But interestingly, Libya and Tunisia — which have new administrations following uprisings in the Arab Spring — both voted in favor of the resolution.

Among the countries opposing it were Russia, China, and India.

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Syria,

under fire for a brutal suppression of anti-government protesters that has cost more than 3,500 lives, nevertheless has been reappointed to a United Nations committee dealing with — incredibly — human rights.

Syria remains a member of the 29-member Committee on Conventions and Recommendations, which examines human rights violations within UNESCO’s areas of concern, including education, science, and communications.