Entries from November 2007 ↓

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Aussie Election Post-Mortem

By Gramfan

I confess. I never voted for John Howard and his party until Paul Keating gave us “the recession we had to have”. After all, we were a working family, which is what Labor was supposed to be representative of.

Australian Prime Ministers? Skeletons in the closet

Times became tough paying 17% interest on a mortgage, and bringing up (raising) two young children. I had first hand experience of what the Labor party was capable of, and some details are in the link above. Most of the time they put Australia heavily in debt.

In my previous piece I predicted the Kevin Rudd would win. Secretly I hoped I was wrong as all the polls consistently predicted a Rudd landslide and they were correct.

Howard couldn’t put a foot right and Rudd couldn’t put one wrong.

Now all the commentators here and around the world are looking at the entrails. People in overseas countries are divided over why this happened as much as people here are.

I am going to make it easier for you and save you the trouble.

Of course, these are MY opinions and I am merely a citizen, not a political scientist.

John Howard spent almost twelve years as prime Minister. This is quite an achievement. (We do not have 2 fixed terms like in the USA. As long as people want you, you can stay in power).

Kevin Rudd was politically active both in his home state of Queensland as well as federally, but his political experience didn’t come close to Howard’s.

Australia was doing well, “why jump ship”? How did this happen?

Welcome to the newest version of “image politics” Downunder

Kevin Rudd and his party ran a slick and managed campaign and the Howard government never saw it coming. Rudd , his party and the unions had almost twelve years to get their act together and that is exactly what they did.

It became “new and fresh” versus “old and stale”.

Buzzwords like “education revolution”, “Kyoto”, “working families”, “WorkChoices” and more seemed to be subliminally planted in the minds of the electorate.

Most people didn’t fully comprehend what this really meant, and many still don’t.

WorkChoices was a very confusing issue with many people better off as a result of them, and some not.

What the work place laws achieved were very, very low unemployment. They were also designed to limit the power of the trade unions, who in fact, were down to 15% membership at the time of the election. I wonder why??

Climate Change, Global Warming and Kyoto were also not fully understood.

See A Cool Look at Global Warming. The Economics and politics of Climate Change and My Nobel Moment. I believe we should always follow the money trail. Mr Gore is indeed doing remarkably well!!

As for “working families”,yes it sounds good, but unless you are retired you are part of a working family, even if you are a multi-millionaire like Kevin Rudd’s wife, Therese Rein! Somehow this wasn’t noticed by many.

“Education Revolution” essentially meant faster broadband, and a laptop for every child in their last four years of high school. (Almost all children here have computer access both at home and at school. Broadband could be cheaper and a bit faster but that isn’t going to make a child smarter!)

The leaders or agencies behind the Rudd win packaged Labor into the perfect box, and by doing so made the Howard government look very bad.

This was a campaign of slogans and no substance.

Since many voters are lazy, and some want a change for change’s sake, it was too easy.

Add to that the fact that in the past eleven years there was a new generation of younger voters who had no idea what not being able to get a job was like, no idea of high interest rates, and no idea that a government could ruin a country financially, as EX-PM Whitlam had done.

Then there was the media.

Every television station was behind Rudd. Almost every journalist was behind him also. He was given such an easy ride that many Liberal supporters emailed their concerns to all the above. The bias of the media was palpable and frustrating.

Hardly anyone queried a thing he said, yet Liberals were grilled by the media as if they were on trial. They were treated as “almost criminals” by some slick celebrity lawyer. It was rather appalling. I felt the media were out to prove just how powerful they really were, and that is exactly what they did. The price was of no concern: the future of the country really didn’t matter. They wanted Rudd to win at any cost.

I hold many of them responsible and just hope they will grill Rudd should he start to put a foot wrong, and I believe he already has. We shall see…..

I also want to mention the fact that we now have Labor in power in every state, and federally also. This is a first. This cannot be good for democracy. The normal checks and balances have been eroded significantly.

Former journalist Maxine McKew claims Bennelong

It now appears that John Howard will lose his seat of Bennelong in NSW to Maxine McKew – a former ABC TV anchorwoman whose husband is a powerbroker in the Labor party. . She used to be a typist for the BBC and I know that readers of this ‘blog will immediately know the implications of this. The ABC has never been kind to the Liberal party either. They are unashamedly left-wing.

MPs set for massive superannuation payouts, free travel

Many parliamentarians will be out of a job but most will be just fine. Australia is very generous to its politicians.

Although Labor has a large number of seats in parliament, and as I write some are still in doubt, it is sobering to look at the actual number of who voted and how. The Australian Electoral Commission’s Virtual Tally Room, reveals the following:

4,710,134 – Liberal/National Coalition (Howard)
5,373,089 – Australian Labor Party (Rudd)

These figures clearly show that a great many Australians have not turned their backs on Howard or the Coalition. This equates to approximately 47% of the voting population supporting the Coalition.

(I won’t bother with minor parties such as the Greens, although they did help Labor because of our Preferential Voting System.)

Doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? Yet Rudd believes he has a huge mandate. He claims he will govern for all. I can’t see how. He has to repay the unions for their support and $30million contribution to his election. They will want their pound of flesh. He also owes the Greens.

Love him or hate him, Howard’s legacy to Australia is enormous.

The most remarkable politician of our lifetime

He has left the country in good shape and the envy of many others (most recent figures below):
Unemployment rate: 4.3 per cent
Interest rate: 6.75 per cent
Economic growth: 4.3 per cent
Stock market: 6390 points
Australian dollar: US87.5 cents
Surplus 2007 Budget: $10.6 billion
Growth in real net national disposable income per head over the past five years: 16 per cent
Days lost in industrial strikes/action: Lowest since 1913
National greenhouse gas emissions: 559 million tonnes (2005)

Will Rudd be able to better that? Not in the opinion of this citizen.

Gramfan adds…

• Howard routed by Australia’s ‘Tony Blair’ and ex-BBC typist
• Vic Fingerhut Campaigns
  

  “Since I wrote that piece, information has been brought to my attention. I am putting it here because it could affect all of us.I think this guy was the brains behind Labor’s win.

  Have a look at the Newt Gingrich clip. I think you may find it quite interesting and relevant. I felt the whole campaign was something we had not seen the like of here before.”

• Geoffrey Blainey: From triumph to a tragic
• Harper dubs Kyoto accord a mistake at end of Commonwealth summit
• Slip of the tongue more power to the Maxine McKew
• A loss for civilisation
• Andrew Bolt: Beware those whackers
• Howard only 1.5% from being PM again

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Mary Bomar’s fraudulent investigation

In April 2006, Park Service Director Mary Bomar ordered an internal investigation into claims that the planned Flight 93 Memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, built abound a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Bomar’s investigation was a total fraud, concluding, for instance, that it isn’t possible to calculate the orientation of the crescent because the site-plan has not been geo-referenced. (Page 2, PP2 of September 2006 summary report. Page 1 here.)

In fact, the original Crescent of Embrace site-plan was drawn on a topo map that the Memorial Project provided to all participants in the design competition. A topo map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map. North marked on a topo map is true north, which is the only piece of information needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent. Just connect the tips of the crescent, form the perpendicular bisector, and calculate how many degrees it points from north (53.4).

Also known are the crash-site coordinates, which is all that is needed to calculate the direction to Mecca (55.2° clockwise from north). All of this is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to get a graphic of the direction to Mecca from the crash site and place it over the crescent site plan:

Somerset PA is ten miles from the crash-site. The “qibla” is the direction to Mecca. Red lines show the orientation of the crescent. The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca. (Click for larger image.)

A request for oversight

Because it is the director’s office that has been covering up the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, oversight can only come from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne himself. Several people sent letters to Secretary Kempthorne two weeks ago, showing how the giant Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact in the so called redesign.

But Mr. Kempthorne also needs to know that he is getting bad information from his subordinates in the Park Service.

Thus a request for all readers of this post: if you have a minute, please copy and paste this entire post into an email for Secretary Kempthorne.

We don’t need for the secretary to understand all the terrorist memorializing features in the design, or the numerous proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included so that his accomplishment will be undeniable once it is a fait accompli. It is enough that he be concerned about features that can be readily interpreted as terrorist memorializing, whether they are intended or not. As Congressman Tancredo put it: we need “a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.”

But even getting to the most basic facts about what is in the present design requires getting past Mary Bomar’s fraudulent report, which tries to pretend that there is nothing that can even be interpreted as untoward.

Mary Bomar’s intellectually dishonest “experts”

In addition to claiming that topo maps are not geo referenced, Mary Bomar’s internal investigation cites a small number of academic experts, all of whom spout nothing but the most absurd non sequiturs. One is Dr. Daniel Griffith, professor of “geo-spatial information” at the University of Texas. About Alec Rawls’ analysis of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Dr. Griffith writes:

… Mr. Rawls’s arithmetic calculations appear to be correct … [but] … just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful.

Dr. Griffith’s point, it seems, is that the mere fact of Mecca orientation does not imply intent. Who said it did? The way Murdoch proves intent is by repeating his Mecca orientations (scroll down to the last section here). But intent is not the only thing that matters. Even without terrorist memorializing intent, it is inappropriate to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site.

The Memorial Project knows this, but it is committed to defending the crescent design, so it keeps using its doubts about intent as an excuse for denying the facts. Dr. Griffith, for instance, is telling every reporter who will listen that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca. “Anything can point toward Mecca,” he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “because the earth is round.” One billion Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray, and Griffith pretends there is no such thing as facing Mecca!

Of course he knows better. The first thing that Griffith’s report does is calculate the direction to Mecca:

I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.

Bomar expert #2

Dr. Kevin Jaques, specialist in Islamic sharia law from the University of Indiana, acknowledges that the Mecca-oriented crescent is similar to the mihrab around which every mosque is built, but says:

…just because something is ‘similar to’ something else does not make it the ‘same’.

Yes, well, similar–very, very similar–is exactly the problem.

Like Daniel Griffith, Mr. Jaques is trying to make hay of the fact that Mecca orientation does not by itself imply intent. So what? Intentional or not, it is unacceptable for the central feature of the Flight 93 memorial to be a geometric match for the central feature of a mosque. Jaques is pretending that the questions he raises about intent somehow make the facts irrelevant.

Professor Jaques also dismisses the likeness between the Mecca-oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab by noting that lots of religious structures have prayer-direction indicators, not just mosques:

The biggest hole in [Rawls'] argument is that all of the elements he points to are common architectural features that one would find in a church or synagogue. The mihrab originated in pre-Islamic buildings and can be found in temples, churches, and synagogues around the Mediterranean.

This is logic? Because Christian churches are often oriented to the east, that somehow makes it okay to build the Flight 93 memorial around a half-mile wide Mecca oriented crescent? If this is “the biggest hole in [Rawls'] argument,” then there are no holes in Rawls’ argument.

Project spokesmen know the truth, and are lying about it

Memorial Project spokesmen have followed the lead of these academic frauds, using doubts about intent as a pretext for denying the facts. Asked about Rawls’ Mecca orientation claim, Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, denied it:

Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”

In fact, Patrick White is fully aware of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. At the Memorial Project’s public meeting in July he argued that the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

Joanne Hanley has done the same:

“Alec Rawls bases all of his conclusions on faulty assumptions,” said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial. “In addition, the facts are twisted and people are misquoted, all to serve his intended purpose.”

But she too has admitted the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, telling Mr. Rawls in a 2006 conference call that she wasn’t concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent because: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, page 145.)

These are your subordinates, Mr. Kempthorne. Please do not let them get away with this fraud. Congressman Tancredo is demanding answers from Director Bomar and many of us are hoping that you will do the same. There is not much time. Construction on Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque is about to begin.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

– Come and see Cao’s Blog and The Wide Awakes.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46673/cao.html

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All-Too-Revealing Comments

Before we get started on this story, let us remind our readers of some of our policies regarding comments on 1389 Blog. We do not post ad hominem attacks. We do not post repetitive messages. If your grammar is so poor that we can hardly understand what you are trying to say, we may let it go up just for laughs, but don’t count on it. On the other hand, we may let you keep your dignity rather than post your comment for all to see.

Now, we know that we have created quite a stir at LGF because we have gotten more than a few hits off their site recently. But we are surprised to find that Charles Johnson has been unable to locate anybody capable of making a coherent reply to our blog post. It seems as though the recent Stalinesque purges at LGF seem to have caused Charles Johnson to run low on henchmen who can write in the English language. With just about all of the reasonable and intelligent people already banned from LGF, and the rest of them disappearing fast, LGF is scrambling to find someone who can try to answer us.

Charles Johnson’s Quasi-Literate Stooge

To avoid further embarrassment to this bewildered soul, we won’t mention the handle he used. Suffice it to say that he has considerable difficulty with the English language, but he certainly does love Charles Johnson. Let’s look at some of the goofiness that this individual tried to post and you will soon see why it is not displayed on the 1389 Blog.

He began by referring to our primary admin as “Mr. 1389.” 1389 has made it fairly clear, on multiple occasions, that she is a woman. But then, it’s to be expected that an individual who is such a poor writer would also be a poor reader.

Like a typical leftist, he called 1389 and the commenters various names, but he didn’t bother to bring up any evidence or logic to justify his moral posturing.

He accused me of misspelling the word “Czech.” You can check any English-language dictionary and find that the letters C-Z-E-C-H refers to a Slavic people who live mostly in central Europe. The county is now called the Czech Republic. Formerly, it was part of Czechoslovakia. (While you have your dictionary handy, you might want to see that I also know how to spell “Czechoslovakia.”)

The Czech people have made a number of contributions to the fight against totalitarianism, which includes both Nazism and Communism. (See Never Knew that the Church was Orthodox, regarding the Reinhard Heydrich assassination and its grim aftermath.) Hitler referred to Czechoslovakia as a “dagger in the heart of Germany” and infamously demanded that it be given to Germany before the outbreak of World War II.

Going Off the Deep End

The tone of LGF has been changing for months, as many have pointed out. First we saw a sudden interest in searching for cryptic signs of “racism” and “pro-Nazi” sentiments.

Finding cryptic signs of racism is all the rage these days. When I was a boy, an individual who expressed the opinion that a Confederate flag was a symbol of racism would have been deemed fit for the loony bin. It was considered a symbol of heritage and bravery. It carried the message that the federal government was going too far. It was a benign symbol of the South. Seeing a Confederate flag was like hearing “welcome home, ya’ll.” In the 1970s, some very radical elements of the civil rights movement started to express misgivings about the flag’s meaning, although this didn’t really take hold until the 1990s. (Note that the radical elements who came up with this canard all seemed to live in the North.)

Today, even some reasonably intelligent people try to associate the flag with racial tensions. But this is rooted in modern-day leftist political correctness–not in historical fact. Against such a backdrop, it is no surprise that Charles Johnson-or anyone who is equally ill-informed about a topic-might read cryptic racial messages into just about anything.

Merely owning and/or displaying a symbol does not mean that the individual doing so endorses what the symbol stands for. For example, my daughter recently inherited a belt that dates back to World War I. One of her great-grandfathers decorated the belt with medals that he had removed from the bodies of dead German soldiers. My daughter is very proud of the belt and plans to display it in her home. That does not mean that she admires the German military or endorses the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II; it means she is proud of her family’s heritage, including three great-grandfathers who fought for the Allies during World War I.

Yet, Charles Johnson points to a photo of a man with a Celtic cross on his bookshelf and calls it “proof” of the man’s fascist leanings. Of course, Celtic crosses were around long before fascism. Many Irish people were buried under them centuries ago. Nonetheless, anyone who relates to their Celtic heritage and displays the traditional Celtic cross is a proven fascist in Charles Johnson’s mind-because he wants to see it that way. And Charles holds the same opinion of anybody who has been seen with such a “proven fascist,” or seen with any of that person’s acquaintances, and so ad infinitum. There is a ridiculously long chain of “contamination” here, which reminds us of children passing along imaginary “cooties” on a playground, along with other, much less benign, imagery.

Loyalty and the War on Censorship

We are proud to say that 1389 Blog has been in the forefront of the war against censorship of conservative and antijihadist blogs. When “censorware” firms such as SonicWALL, banned LGF and other blogs, 1389 Blog helped lead the charge to lift the ban.

What has LGF ever done for 1389 Blog? Oh, it banned 1389 without even the courtesy of giving a reason.

So, Charles Johnson can be no friend to anyone. He repays favors with stabs in the back.

LGF and Charles Johnson Refuse to Fight Real Nazis Who Preach Hate and Murder

Not long ago, 1389 Blog exposed a Croatian Nazi rock singer named “Thompson” who had been scheduled to tour the US and Canada. Too bad Little Green Footballs never bothered to publish anything about it. No doubt about this rock singer’s Nazi identity-he was, and is, an open and notorious proponent of murdering some of the very same people that Hitler had tried to exterminate sixty years ago. To put icing on the cake, just like his predecessors back in the day, this “Thompson” was all buddy-buddy with Muslims and never even hinted about doing them any harm.

Given the readership that LGF enjoys (at least until recently), Charles Johnson could have put some real obstacles in the path of this thug. But Charles Johnson and LGF sat on their hands, letting “Thompson” tour America and Canada preaching hate and violence without a word of reproach. So, don’t ever think that Charles Johnson actually feels that real, live Nazis are “repugnant.” In fact, through his silence, and even through his banning of 1389, he is enabling the nefarious efforts of those Nazis.

Links:

• Category Link: Articles by CzechRebel on 1389 Blog
  (Note: To page back through the archive of older articles in a category link, please scroll down and click
  the ← Previous Entries link at the bottom of the page.)
• Category Link: Articles on LGF
• Category Link: Articles on blog censorship
• Category Link: Articles on censorware
• Category Link: Articles on censorship in general

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Added 11/27/2007:
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1389 was banned from Little Green Footballs as of November 24, 2007

No explanation was given, nor is any explanation needed

I could read the handwriting on the wall. Since the onset of the huge feud that Charles Johnson deliberately started with Gates of Vienna and the rest of the antijihadist blogosphere, which involved Charles hurling very thinly substantiated accusations of fascist links to European antijihadist organizations, I could see that LGF had changed, and not for the better.

Six or more degrees of politically incorrect = BANNED

Ever since then, no one has been free to speak his or her mind as a commenter on LGF without fear of being viciously ridiculed and then banned. Nor could anyone feel free to post links to other sites without having to worry about being banned for linking to something that is “six degrees of politically incorrect.”

Anybody who reads the comment threads can observe what the remaining members of LGF feel that they must do to prove their loyalty. They search constantly for any evidence of LGF members or ex-members expressing any support for, linking to, or communicating with anyone on Dear Leader’s ever-growing disapproved list.

The old sense of camaraderie at LGF has long since vanished, along with most of the people with whom I would have wanted to exchange messages. There is nothing left but paranoia and a competition for who can launch the most mean-spirited ridicule against Charles Johnson’s latest batch of officially-designated enemies.

Everyone who wants to remain an active member of LGF must fall in line, because if they don’t, sooner or later they’ll be banned too!

No Stalinist purges for 1389 Blog

I do a great deal of blogging and commenting that has nothing to do with LGF. Just for starters, I am primary admin for 1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech and for 1389 Message Blog. I post occasionally on Fort Hard Knox* and Screw the UN. I am a content creator on IMVU and am fairly active on Twitter. I have a gallery at deviantART. I comment regularly on many other sites.

To remain a member of LGF, I would have had to drop all of the officially designated “nonpersons,” especially banned former LGF members, from the blogrolls and link lists on my own blogs. I would have had to be careful not to link to news stories from any proscribed persons or organizations in my own blog posts. I would not have been able to review those stories or mention them on Twitter or other sites I frequent.

In other words, I would have had to surrender my own freedom of expression and association. This I was unwilling to do. True, I miss what LGF once was, or perhaps could have been, but I am realistic enough to see it for what it is. And it’s none of Charles Johnson’s business who else I cite or associate with.

Why send LGF any more traffic?

The conflict still continues at LGF. The last few remaining dissenters on LGF are speaking up, though not for long. After this blog post has been up for a little while, no doubt someone will post snarky comments on LGF about the infamous banned user 1389, same as they do with everyone else. But I have no intention of lurking on LGF to ego-surf for remarks about me. I have also removed the LGF news feed reader widget from the sidebar. If you still want it, you can get it directly from them. But why send LGF that extra little bit of traffic?

LGF has joined the dark side

LGF is no longer an antijihadist site, if it ever was. Whether Charles Johnson is consciously aware of it or not, LGF has gone over to the other side, or perhaps it has always been there. It is covertly helping our enemies by sowing dissention and by muzzling genuine antijihadist voices everywhere.

LGF takes no part in activism against jihadism. Nor does it make any effort to help any other antijihadist sites or organizations. I have become convinced that LGF never had any intention of doing anything effective to begin with, and that this was the real reason for its boycott of Counterjihad Brussels 2007. LGF merely wishes to appear to be an antijihadist site, and to that end, it posts a sprinkling of terrorist news stories to draw readership. In other words, LGF is nothing more than a disguised version of Daily Kos or the ACLU. I don’t know who has bought out LGF, and I don’t even care at this point. Their declining traffic figures are already rendering them irrelevant.

Tragic irony: the censored has become the censor

The saddest thing of all is that, some months ago, I helped LGF by launching a campaign to get them, and other sites, unbanned from various “censorware” blacklists. Before that, I had worked hard to promote LGF stories on Digg, against the efforts of the infamous “Bury Brigade.” Now LGF has retaliated, if that’s the proper word, by banning me.

It is time to punt littlegreenfootballs, once and for all.

Addenda

Looking for former LGF members? Check out 2.0 The Blogmocracy.

We get hate mail! See Little Green Footballs – Hitting New Lows, One After Another.

*Update 11/26/07, by Jenn Sierra who is an author here and admin of the Ft. Hard Knox project, with the permission of 1389:

The opinions of our authors, expressed in their posts on FHK or elsewhere on the web, do not necessarily reflect the opinion of FHK. We do, however, thank our authors for their contributions and their widely-varying perspectives on an impressive variety of topics.

Just a little fun for the holiday. Have a very Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

(Click here or on the image to play.)

(Other cool animated greetings at FHK, JS, GG, iWSF, CoA)

No reply to Tancredo’s request

No comment from the Park Service yet on Congressman Tancredo’s request for a new Flight 93 Memorial. We did a little better with last week’s blogburst letters. Some emailers got a response from Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley, answering Mr. Tancredo’s contention that the original giant crescent is still present in the redesign. Interestingly, her description of the redesign actually admits that the giant crescent IS still present, both geometrically and thematically.

Crash site becomes Islamic star

In 2005, architect Paul Murdoch explained his original Crescent of Embrace design in terms of the flight path: as the hijacked airliner came over the ridgeline above the crash site, its flight path symbolically broke the circle, turning it into a giant crescent. In the original design, the broken off part of the circle was removed entirely:

Flight 93 came down from the Northwest (the upper left). The flight path breaks the circle at the upper crescent tip, says Paul Murdoch, then continues down to the crash site, which is located between the crescent tips (roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag).

In describing the barely altered redesign, Superintendent Hanley uses the exact same “breaking the circle” language that Paul Murdoch used to describe the original design, only now the broken off part of the circle is not completely removed. A broken chunk of it remains, so that the design now includes “two breaks” instead of one:

The most prominent refinement was in the treatment of the naturally occurring bowl-shaped landscape feature. The design now surrounds that area with a circle of trees which is broken in two places – the location which marks the flight path as it breaks the circular continuity of the bowl edge, and the Sacred Ground where the crash occurred. The locations of the two breaks in the circle are based on the flight path and crash site of Flight 93.

The site plan graphic for the redesign was dramatically re-colored, making the crescent LOOK more like a circle. You have to examine closely to see that the original break in the crescent is still there, along with the new “second break.” But as Superintendent Hanley admits, the original break IS still there, and it is still intended to be seen as being there. Hanley is directly admitting what Congressman Tancredo is complaining about, that the original crescent has only been disguised.

A side-by-side comparison of the Crescent of Embrace site-plan and the redesign site-plan confirms that the only change was to include a chunk of the symbolically broken off part of the imaginary full circle:

Ignoring the re-coloring of the image, the only change is the additional arc of trees to the left side of the crescent. (Click pic for larger view.)

Including a chunk of the broken off part of the circle does nothing to remove the original crescent, but on the contrary is perfectly consistent with it, both geometrically and thematically. The terrorists are still depicted as breaking our humanitarian circle and turning it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent.

Just to make sure people get it, Paul Murdoch has placed a huge glass block at the spot where this circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat takes place. It is the 44th translucent block emplaced along the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) and is inscribed: “a field of honor forever.”

Earlier admissions that the redesign retains the crescent and star configuration of an Islamic flag

An August 18th article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette quoted Superintendent Hanley denying the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent:

“The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,” she said.

Mr. Murdoch reinforced that idea.

“It’s oriented toward the Sacred Ground,” he said. “It just couldn’t be clearer.”

The symbolism of the memorial, he continued, is representative of the geography of the crash site, an idea that predates Islam or any other major religion.

They are not calling it a crescent and star configuration, but that is what they are describing, and what they are talking about here is the redesign. They are admitting that the design still has the arms of the crescent reaching out towards the crash site, which sits between the crescent tips, in the position of the star on an Islamic flag. “It just couldn’t be clearer.”

Connect a line from the lower crescent tip to the thematic upper crescent tip (the 44th glass block, commemorating the spot where the flight path breaks the circle) and a perpendicular to this line (the direction of a person facing directly into the giant crescent) points exactly to Mecca. Thus does Paul Murdoch tie the Islamic features and the terrorist memorializing features of his design into a perfect bin Ladenist embrace. The 44th block defines the exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent.

The bottom line…

Very simply, we hosted an open design competition in time of war. Of course the enemy would enter. The only thing that is hard to understand is why the Memorial Project is willfully blind to this ploy.

Technorati : Flight 93, Islam, Murdoch, September 11, Tancredo, activism, blogburst, enemy propaganda
Del.icio.us : Flight 93, Islam, Murdoch, September 11, Tancredo, activism, blogburst, enemy propaganda
Ice Rocket : Flight 93, Islam, Murdoch, September 11, Tancredo, activism, blogburst, enemy propaganda

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Stolen vehicles may go where we cannot follow them

1389′s SUV was recently stolen, from a parking deck that happened to be in a river port city in the US. The police came up with nothing, so we eventually started looking to purchase a replacement vehicle. When we mentioned our predicament to a car salesman, he told us, “That was a diesel, so it probably ended up being shipped in a container to Saudi Arabia.”

Ouch. It had been a good vehicle, and not one that could easily be replaced.

As a practical matter, there was little, if anything, that we ourselves could have done to prevent the theft. Systems such as LoJack are generally a good idea, but that wouldn’t have helped in this instance, because the vehicle was stolen in an area where it wasn’t available. The police can help only when the vehicle turns up either in their own jurisdiction, or in another jurisdiction that shares information with them.

Stolen vehicles and jihadist terrorism

Considering that we don’t want any more vehicles stolen, I figured that it was time to do some more research.

Everything I found confirmed my suspicion that there is indeed a strong connection between stolen vehicles and jihadist terrorism.

• Once a vehicle has reached the Middle East, it’s gone

  Except in Iraq, the U.S. and other western nations do not have the option to use their own police or military to trace and retrieve stolen vehicles from the Muslim Middle East. Nor do the local or national authorities offer any real cooperation. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the current regimes in Kuwait or Yemen or Dubai, are not all that terribly concerned about protecting the property rights of infidels living overseas.

• Stolen vehicles are used to commit other crimes

  Stolen vehicles are less traceable than rental cars and the like. They are used as getaway cars, for smuggling persons as well as contraband goods, you name it.

• The profits from selling stolen vehicles and parts go to fund more terrorist violence

  Stolen vehicles and parts get good prices from overseas buyers.

• A stolen vehicle may be used as a car or truck bomb

  The last place you would want to see your car is on the news, being used as a car or truck bomb to attack U.S. or coalition troops, or perhaps Israelis or other innocent civilians. One source says that the Chevy Suburban is a particular favorite for this purpose. If this happens, your vehicle’s demise may be featured on YouTube as a scene in a jihadist recruitment video. True, you might never see enough of the vehicle in one piece to identify it as yours, but still…

What can be done?

Never mind political correctness – use the clues that we have

Criminals involved in any form of illicit international trade, including stolen vehicles, don’t sell their products randomly all over the world. They network with relatives or friends who are located in one or two specific countries, generally the home countries of the people involved. Catching the perpetrators means tracing the pathway back from the destination, while resolutely ignoring any false accusations of “racial profiling” and so forth.

For example, suppose people in Saudi are seen driving SUVs that have Florida license tags or dealer plaques. The SUVs probably are going out through the busiest port, which would be Miami. The likeliest perpetrators would be Saudi Arabians, or people with ties to Saudi Arabia, in south Florida, who buy and sell vehicles, or who export vehicles and parts. One or more of the people involved, perhaps container truck drivers, must have access to the port facilities. Of course, following the money will show where the proceeds are going.

Better inspection of outgoing containers

Because this aspect of vehicle theft has to do with international trade in stolen goods, some responsibility for stemming the tide falls upon the federal or national governments of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the EU. Everybody has been worried about dirty bombs, loose nukes, bioweapons, and other WMDs coming into the U.S. and other countries via container ships, and rightfully so! The U.S. has stepped up its efforts to inspect incoming shipping containers and other cargo. But the same effort needs to be made to inspect outgoing shipping containers and cargo, to stop al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations from smuggling stolen goods and other contraband out of the U.S. and other western countries.

Fellow 1389 Blog team admin CzechRebel points out that this is like a stage magic trick: the bad guys let everybody focus on just one aspect of the problem (in this case, incoming freight); meanwhile, nobody notices that they’re pulling a fast one in some other quarter (namely, outbound smuggling). We need to monitor every major potential security vulnerability, not just the obvious ones.

States, provinces, and localities need to work harder to share stolen vehicle identification data

While I’d be the first to say that there’s plenty of room for improvement at the federal or national level, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, the fact is that most of the job of stopping vehicle theft has to be done locally. States, provinces, counties, and cities must streamline the task of sharing stolen vehicle identification data, even across national boundaries. This problem is by no means limited to the U.S.!

Private companies might even start making it their business to collect “hot sheet” data from all over the world. For a reasonable fee, they could offer it not only to governmental bodies, but also to everyone else who needs that information, including prospective purchasers who want to be sure that they are getting good title.

Stolen U.S. vehicles end up as bombs in Iraq, FBI says

WASHINGTON: Fifteen years after U.S. states were directed to share motor vehicle information in a national database, only nine states have done so, making it nearly impossible to identify hundreds of thousands of stolen vehicles – including a small but steady number that end up as car bombs in Iraq.

FBI officials said they believe the database could help break up far-flung terrorist networks, which are using vehicles stolen and smuggled from the United States.

Bought and sold on the international black market, cars and trucks help fund criminal operations and can be turned into the terrorist weapon of choice against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians: vehicles packed with explosives. The FBI declined to estimate how many stolen U.S. cars have turned up as car bombs in Iraq but said the number is believed to be at least in the dozens [more]…

More Information:

• Category Link: Articles by CzechRebel on 1389 Blog
  (Note: To page back through the archive of older articles in a category link, please scroll down and click
  the ← Previous Entries link at the bottom of the page.)
• Category Link: Articles on vehicle theft
• Category Link: Articles on vehicles in general
• Category Link: Articles on crime
• Category Link: Articles on Saudi Arabia
• Interpol: Vehicle crime
• TheAge.com (Australia): Police struggle to put brake on stolen car traffic
• Halifax, The Daily News: 16 top-end cars stolen in two weeks
• NPR: Analysis: License Plates For Stolen Cars in Gaza
• Boston.com: US car theft rings probed for ties to Iraq bombings
• An Englishman In Saudi Arabia: Western Myths #8: There Is No Crime In Saudi Arabia
• Atlas Shrugs: The Stolen Cars of Al Qaeda
• Atlas Shrugs: UPDATE: Al Qaeda’s Stolen Cars
• Iraqi National News Agency: The Iraqi Coast Guard seizes four tankers carrying smuggled cars

Technorati : IED, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia, WMD, al Qaeda, crime, fraud, jihadism, suicide bombers, terrorism, transportation, truck bomb, vehicles
Del.icio.us : IED, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia, WMD, al Qaeda, crime, fraud, jihadism, suicide bombers, terrorism, transportation, truck bomb, vehicles
Ice Rocket : IED, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia, WMD, al Qaeda, crime, fraud, jihadism, suicide bombers, terrorism, transportation, truck bomb, vehicles

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