All NGOs are prone to corruption

The longer NGOs stay in business, the more corrupt they seem to become. The main problem is that NGOs shield themselves from accountability; they provide ways for unqualified and self-serving people to acquire money, influence, and power; and their income depends upon manipulating public opinion, which means garnering support from politicians, other bureaucracies, and the elite.

The Ground Reality blog suggests, “If you are an NGO, it’s time to laugh at yourself.” (Translation appears below the cartoon.) Perhaps it’d be funnier if it weren’t so tragic.

Here we go again…

The jihadi-collaborators in the Netherlands are using the kangaroo-court judicial system in an attempt to silence the heroic Geert Wilders.

Check these news sites for the latest information:

English and Nederlands: Geert Wilders Official Website

English: Wilders on trial: A sledgehammer blow to the freedom of speech

Nederlands: Het Wilders proces: Aanslag op de vrijheid van meningsuiting

What to do?

Read this article and see where to write your letters:

Gates of Vienna: Charlie, Winston, and Geert

Also see:

• Articles about Geert Wilders at EuropeNews
• Articles about Geert Wilders at JihadWatch
• More articles are available at Gates of Vienna

Subject: Banned from BoingBoing with NO notice or explanation?

Dear Mark Frauenfelder,

For all your supposed interest in getting rid of onerous censorship, there seems to be some of it taking place on BoingBoing itself.

I created an account for the purpose of posting a comment on the BoingBoing article having to do with what was purportedly a kid’s lingerie line being sold by Noah Cyrus (but was actually no such thing). I roundly criticized BoingBoing for having run what I deemed to be a hysterically-worded and error-riddled article in the first place. I used NO vulgar language, NO bigoted comments, NO threats, NO libelous accusations, nothing that should have gotten me banned from your site.

My comment was posted for maybe half an hour or so. Then the comment vanished. I saw a notice that my logon had expired, so I tried to log on again to see what had happened. I simply got a message saying “Permission denied.” Then I went to check my email. There was NO notification that my comment had been taken down or that I had been banned from BoingBoing. But apparently that is what happened.

It seems awfully hypocritical that someone at BoingBoing is banning people, WITHOUT notice or explanation, simply for criticizing BoingBoing itself.

It looks as though I need to go back to blogging about censorship issues, as tired of that topic as I am by now, simply because sites such as BoingBoing are failing to do their job. Obviously, just because a site CLAIMS to be in favor of free expression of ideas, does not mean that it actually IS. And in my experience, no site that employs, or is run by, persons of a left-wing bent, ever truly goes to bat for free expression for anybody who DISAGREES with material on the site itself. In other words…it’s always free speech for me, but not for thee!

For obvious reasons, I see no reason to identify myself to you any further. If you don’t trust me to comment on your site, why should I trust you with my personal information?

1389AD

“Hey, it’s their site, and they can do what they want!”

That’s true.

It’s also completely irrelevant.

“Why?”

Here’s why:

If BoingBoing and Mark Frauenfelder want to posture as defenders of free expression on the Internet and everywhere else, that’s their privilege.

If BoingBoing and Mark Frauenfelder want to ban me for making a comment that criticizes them for having run a deeply flawed article on their own website, that’s also their privilege.

But if they choose to do both at once, they’re going to look like a bunch of fools, and it’s MY privilege to point that out!

Oh, and by the way, whether you agree with me or not, you can contact Mark Frauenfelder at mark@boingboing.net and let him know what you think!

Yes, we’re still around…

As I have mentioned elsewhere, we unfortunately no longer have the time, energy, or resources to devote to blogging that we once had in the past. Political blogging takes a heavy, and often a truly staggering, personal and professional toll on anybody who does it. Moreover, I have had some severe health issues and have had to cut back on certain activities, so it is a matter of priorities. Thus, in recent months, we have been blogging on a very infrequent basis.

When the 2008 US presidential election came down to Hillary, McCain, and Obama, followed by the worldwide economic collapse, it became clear to us that there was not much more that we could contribute by blogging at the same rate as we had previously been doing. Fortunately, we had reached the point where all of the points that we have been trying to make are also being made by many other bloggers, and even by a few conservative journalists and other public figures. We do not aspire to be acknowledged as the leaders of any particular movement.

Therefore, at this point, we have decided to post an article only when we have something to say that nobody else is already saying.

We do welcome your comments and feedback.

The American media, once again, is proving that it is nothing more then the propaganda arm of the tyrannical dictatorship in Washington, D.C. True, you do get an election to choose the dictatorship’s figurehead for the next four years, and to pick the 535 power-mad flunkies who have let the real governance of the United States fall into the hands of thousands of unelected federal bureaucrats who are accountable to nobody.

Let’s examine the facts. Nidal Malik Hasan, the shooter, is a radical Muslim. He has been an outspoken supporter of radical Islamic causes. He has been in the US Army for a long period of time and knows the system well. He used that knowledge to kill a number of US troops and wound others. To wear a US uniform and support an enemy cause is a clear act of espionage. Of course, in the heavily controlled US press, no one would dare to point out this obvious fact.

Radical Islam is has been openly at war with the US since 1979, if not before. Yes, it has been thirty years since radical Muslims invaded US soil, namely the US Embassy in Iran, and took over 400 Americans hostage. President Jimmy Carter, one of the most clueless men ever to hold that office in US history, pussy-footed around, so that many of those Americans were not released until Ronald Reagan took office.

Reagan, with his hands firmly on the nuclear trigger, kept radical Islam at bay, but in radical Islamic circles, the hatred of America never ended. Reagan focused on “winning the Cold War.” He did so, but instead of using direct conflict, he pressured and cajoled the Soviets into slowly giving up Communism, thus freeing Eastern Europe from the clutches of left-wing tyranny. (On behalf of all non-Communist Slavic people, Mr. Reagan, please accept a “thank you” from this Czech-American.)

From then on, our position with radical Islam went downhill. The supposed “Third Reagan Term” was a dismal failure. Bush 41, sided with Islamic forces, and chose to help “break up the former Yugoslavia.” What that really meant was that after considerable Islamic violence, which he quietly but wholeheartedly supported, many Christians are now living under Islamic tyranny in the Balkans. Of course, the clueless American media, the abysmally corrupt US State Department, and many gullible Americans still believe that the Christian people of Serbian heritage did some horrible things to these “poor defenseless Muslims.” Nearly two decades of State Department and mainstream media efforts to dig up dirt against the Serbs have unearthed no credible evidence. On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence that radical Islam and other outside influences not only set up this conflict in the Balkans, but also kept it going until they gained a jihadist stronghold in Europe. Thus, while the Roosevelt Administration helped liberate Europe from the Nazis, and the Reagan Administration helped liberate Eastern Europe from the Communists, the first Bush Administration helped the Muslim terrorists get a foothold in re-conquering the Balkans.

The Clinton Administration continued to coddle radical Islam, going so far as to use the US Air Force to aid and abet the radical Muslim terrorists in Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. In addition, the Clinton Administration suckered and arm-twisted other nations to contribute their own air forces to aid in the terror-bombing of those who opposed the spread of radical Islam in the Balkans. While the controversy raged about the Clinton Administration’s eagerness to populate the US military with out-of-the-closet homosexuals, the public eye was distracted from the fact that radical Muslims were infiltrating the US armed forces. Of course, during the entire eight years of the Clinton Administration, reports of Islamic attacks on the US, and reports of attempted attacks, continued to trickle into the news.

It is likely that the most successful Islamic attack during the Clinton regime was the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building. On the day of the bombing, the US media at first focused the blame on Islamic terrorists. But then, the memo must have gone out to the closely government-controlled US media, so that the blame immediately shifted to US patriots who abide by the original intentions of the Framers of the United States Constitution and support their independent state militia. (No, the Framers were NOT referring to the state police or the National Guard.)

So, what was the payoff for twelve years of coddling radical Islam? What was the real legacy of both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton? The 911 attack, of course! By then, the Muslims had another oilman ally back in the White House, but jihadists have a habit of biting the hands that feed them. Bush 43, being both a former governor of the oil-rich state of Texas, and a close friend of the Saudi royal family and even of the bin Laden family, was not about to admit that we were at war with radical Islam. Instead, he declared war on “terrorism.” At the time, one commentator suggested that this would have been as silly as FDR asking Congress for a declaration of war against aircraft carriers on December 8, 1941. Terrorism is a weapon of war, not an enemy that one can declare war against. Radical Islam has declared war on the US several times during the last 30 years. A fatwa, after all, is an open declaration of war that is also an immediate and ongoing mobilization order. If the Muslim jihadists thought they could fight and win a conventional war against the US, they would do just that. Because they cannot, they use terrorism as their weapon instead.

The current Administration is an abomination. (Perhaps that should be spelled O-b-a-m-a-N-a-t-i-o-n.) A foreign-born immigrant from Africa serves as the United States President, illegally. He is allowed to hide behind his dark skin because all his critics are automatically accused of “racism.” So if you dare criticize his social agenda that is somewhere to the left of Karl Marx, or if you question his coddling of radical Islam, or even if you could not in good conscience vote for him because of his position on abortion, you run the risk of being labeled “racist.” (Note that the author of this article has been much harsher on Obama’s three white processors in this piece, but nevertheless, liberal propagandists with their “bigot” label will be complaining about this article).

Of course, all four of these administrations have used these Islamic attacks as just another pretext to restrict the freedoms of US citizens. Recently, I took my first airline flight since the 911 attack. The way I was treated was totally unbecoming a citizen of the US. Being disabled and unable to walk through metal detectors, I was made to balance precariously while being publicly patted down like a common criminal. The search was so invasive that the lady travelers in my party were aghast.

So, expect more Muslims in the US military to “go postal.” After all, this Nidal Malik Hasan is being passed off as a crazy man who lost control because he was being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Expect the US media to continue to pass off these Islamic attacks on US soil as “random acts of violence.” Expect the US military forces to fight in Islamic countries, supporting one group of Muslims over another. Expect the US media and US government to continue side with Muslim terrorists in Eastern Europe, as they have in both Russia and the Balkans. And, of course, if you are a US citizen, expect to lose more of your rights and freedoms.

The US people should be demanding the following actions:

1. That the United State Congress declare war on radical Islam;
2. That a Constitutional Amendment be ratified declaring that Islam is not a religion, but an enemy ideology, and that it is not to enjoy the protection of the First Amendment or of any other law guaranteeing unabated religious freedom;
3. That no Muslim immigration into the US be allowed until the war against radical Islam has been won;
4. That all Muslims in the US military should be investigated intensively and be required to state publicly that their belief in Islam shall never be used to disobey any order or to commit any act against the US, and that they be required to renounce all individuals, by name, such as Osama bin Laden, who oppose the non-Islamic world and all organizations, such as al-Qaeda and Hamas, who support violence against non-Islamic countries (anyone refusing to do so is obviously a danger to the US military);
5. That dangerous radical Muslims be interned, similar to the detainment of radical Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans who openly declared their loyalty to the Emperor of Japan over that of the US during World War II;
6. That the rights and freedoms of non-Muslim US citizens be restored;
7. That their respective States each declare its sovereignty; or declare independence from the US federal government.

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

Matthew 15:11 KJV

Dark art

As those who follow me on deviantART may have noticed, I seldom upload dark art, but there are times when I feel the need to communicate something about the dark side of life.

This is one of those times.

Perhaps it is because of the commercialization of Valentine’s Day and the desperation that some people feel as a result of past and present romantic deception. Perhaps it is merely because of my ongoing frustration at the nonsense that seems to pervade so much of the media.

Or perhaps it is because I saw the movie “Sophie’s Choice” last night before going to sleep.

The machinery of evil

There is a reason why lying is deemed to be a sin, a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. Lying is the lubricant that keeps the machinery of evil in motion, and the lubricant that allows it to start. How far would evildoers get without the opportunity to lie to themselves and to others?

A relationship in which one or both parties is a liar, is no relationship at all. If someone lies to you, how much do you really know about that person, other than the fact that they have lied to you?

But there’s more.

As Homer Simpson said, “It takes two people to lie. One to lie, and one to believe.”

After the fashion of Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel, Homer Simpson conveys a truth, seen from an unusual angle. If the rest of us would be less gullible, if we would stop being so ready to believe gossip, slander, propaganda, and politically correct cant, then the liars who bedevil this world would get far less traction.

One can only hope.

Tech notes:

• To see a full-size rendition of the above image, please click on the image once to get to the gallery page on deviantART, and then click on the thumbnail again.
• Thanks to cavia for suggestions made on my previous attempt on this theme, Pierced Lips.
• Image was rendered in Apophysis 2.08 3D Hack using GlynnSim plugin by eralex61.
• Black background and signature added in GIMP.

What a tragic irony!

In case you haven’t heard, Satyam was the fourth-largest IT outsourcing company in India, with 55,000 employees (or so they claimed). The CEO, Ramalinga Raju, recently resigned after admitting massive financial fraud. As of this writing, the company is almost out of cash.

Here we go again…

Satyam has done business with companies and governments in over 60 countries, including the U.S. This scandal appears to be even larger in scope than the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal of late 2001. Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is facing close scrutiny over having signed off on Satyam’s audits.

Obviously, the much-touted Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle did nothing to prevent the recent collapse of the U.S. real estate, stock market, and financial sector. The take-home lesson is that once any corporation becomes multinational in scope, and politically well-connected, no laws, no regulations, no bureaucratic restructuring can possibly keep it honest if its management chooses to do otherwise.

Another reason why outsourcing is wrong

Outsourcing and offshoring are always and everywhere the enemies of accountability. The further away one’s trading partners are located, the harder it is to comprehend what they are up to, and that will never change.

Why corporate cheating is contagious

Whenever one major company in an industry has been “cooking the books” to promote or exaggerate its own success, what effect do you suppose that has? Think about it! Every other executive, every other company in that industry will be pressured to match or exceed the cheater’s inflated results, by fair means or foul, or face the wrath of board members and stockholders.

Some news links and other sources:

• Business Standard: Regulators, government tighten noose around Satyam
• Business Standard: Government supersedes Satyam board
• Wikipedia: Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
• NYT: Satyam Chief Admits Huge Fraud
• IHT: India hears calls for Satyam bailout
• IHT: Auditor in cross hairs over fraud at Satyam
• The Australian: Police arrest Satyam founder, Government sacks board
• Information Week Blog: Satyam And Its 8-Year Ban from World Bank
• Bloomberg.com: Satyam U.S. Investors File Actions Alleging Fraud (Update2)
• TheDeal.com: Enron went bankrupt, but what of Satyam’s future?

Perhaps some of this would be funny if it were not so sad.

Note: The screen capture was taken by 1389AD from www.satyam.com, shortly after the announcement. The pixelated area was blurred in the original.

Click on the above image to view the original.

When the image gallery page appears, click again on the thumbnail to see the full-size image.

1389ad.deviantart.com

A large collection of art by 1389, including photography, digital art, and some new fractal images, is available at my online gallery.

Look for free desktop wallpaper, and free tools and textures for Photoshop and GIMP!

As you already know, I had little to say about the 2008 US presidential election because, then as now, I regarded both of the candidates, and all their pomps and all their works, as beneath comment.

Even before the election, it was obvious to me that the winning candidate would someday deeply regret having run for that office. Let me go on record that I stand by that prediction.

It has often been claimed that no one can win a thermonuclear war. Be that as it may, there is no question that it is easy enough to lose one! In similar fashion, becoming president of the US at this time is just as clearly a no-win scenario for the perpetrator and all his retinue.

Despite all the empty promises from both sides, there is simply nothing that any US president could do at this point to effect a recovery. A recovery would have to happen on its own, and every day that goes by, it seems that we have less and less to build on, in terms of civil and industrial infrastructure, a functioning civil society, and an informed citizenry.

The mass media and what we call our educational system seem to be doing everything they can to keep the citizenry from figuring out what their supposed betters are about. Oh, and by the way, everything I have just said about the plight of the US goes double for the EU.

The scope of the problem

See for yourself what already happened to a part of the US that lost its productive capacity:

• detroitfunk.com
• detroitblog
• The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
• The Motor(less) City

With trees growing up through abandoned buildings, large parts of Detroit have already come to resemble scenes from the grim speculative documentary Life After People.

By now, the US economic decline has spread far beyond Detroit and the Rust Belt.

Think about it: When was the last time you saw the label “Made in USA” on any product, good or bad?

And no, it is not possible to sustain a “service economy” without a viable manufacturing infrastructure. Not that there is a service economy to sustain - the real estate bubble has already burst, the remains of our financial sector are being artificially propped up with money that we do not have and cannot earn, and much of our service sector employment has already been outsourced! It should surprise no one that the unemployment picture is considerably worse than the official figures would lead us to believe (see The really, really bad news about the unemployment rate). Newspapers throughout the US report that state and local tax revenues are shrinking due to declining income and property values.

What is left?

I recently heard yet another self-styled pundit of the US employment scene recommending three areas where there still seem to be some jobs for Americans. The only available jobs are in health care, education, and government work - because they cannot be outsourced.

Wow.

Will someone please explain to me who is going to pay for this health care, education, and government work? Does anyone care to predict what will happen after we go into debt to educate the next generation, knowing that there will be no jobs for them after they finish school?

Where do we go from here?

Good question.

And yes, I do have an answer! My point in posting this is that we need to understand exactly what our problems are, and the true extent of our difficulties, before we can even begin to address them.

What’s the next step? We need to stop wasting tax dollars on bailing out Wall Street. Instead, we need to bring our industrial base back to the US. We need to repeal the tax laws and ever-proliferating regulations that have been strangling US businesses or driving them overseas. We need to make it much simpler and more cost-effective for businesses, especially smaller businesses, to provide jobs for US citizens. That’s the only government “stimulus package” that will work.

No, it is not all under our control. But we can keep the faith and do our best to help each other. As Bishop Antoun of the Antiochian Orthodox Church recently told us, “The Lord will provide.”

Click on any of the above thumbnail images to view the original.

When the image gallery page appears, click again on the thumbnail to see the full-size image.

1389ad.deviantart.com

A large collection of art by 1389, including photography, digital art, and some new fractal images, is available at my online gallery.

Look for free desktop wallpaper, and free tools and textures for Photoshop and GIMP!

Blogrolling.com still experiencing outages

Problems being worked on as of 9:30pm EST 10/16/08

1389 Blog reported earlier that the popular Blogrolling.com link list server site was hacked by Islamists. Since that time, the site’s home page has gone offline repeatedly, and the blogrolls hosted on the site are being served only intermittently.

Status updates from blogrolling on Twitter

Because Blogrolling obviously can’t use its own site to provide status updates, the Blogrolling staff has set up a blogrolling user ID on Twitter. As long as the main Blogrolling.com site is down, it will redirect automatically to the Twitter page, which will display status updates. You can follow it from your own Twitter user ID if you wish.

H/T to Texas Fred for this information.

Obama’s Truth Squads Censor Free Speech on BlogTalkRadio

Earlier today, I accessed Blogrolling to add some entries to “1389’s Links.” This list appears in the 1389 Blog sidebar, and it offers a whole variety of links to sites that I find interesting, informative, or entertaining, and that readers might like to see also.

This is what came up:

Needless to say, I made no effort to contact ejder2121@windowslive.com.

What is Blogrolling anyway?

How you can use it

Many bloggers and blog readers have seen lists of links to other blogs that are hosted and maintained through a service called Blogrolling. This service offers a home page that lets you open an account, set up and populate your own blogrolls and link lists, and generate Javascript code to display the link lists on your blog or website. You can distribute this Javascript code so that others can display shared blogrolls on their sites. For example, 1389 Blog maintains a shared blogroll for the Stop Blog Censorship campaign, which you can see in the sidebar.

Advantages and disadvantages

Blogrolling has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, I’m a big fan of it, because of its convenience, stability, and ease of use. It has features for sorting blogrolls by most recent blog update, for searching blogrolls, for finding out who has blogrolled you, and for backing up blogroll links. On the other hand, because Blogrolling uses Javascript to build the link lists for display on your page, Google will not index the the links, and will not use the links to raise the page rank of the blogs on the list. And if you put too many blogrolls on the same page, it will introduce delays in loading the page, especially for readers without broadband service. That is why most of our blogrolls have been moved to the Links resource page.

Why would anybody hack Blogrolling?

That’s a good question.

Blogrolling is simply a hosting service for link lists, open to both commercial and noncommercial sites. To the best of my knowledge, Blogrolling takes no political, religious, or ideological stance.

Yes, it’s true that some conservative, antijihadist, pro-Christian, and pro-Jewish blogs and blog groups use Blogrolling - to name a few: Center for Vigilant Freedom, Bear Flag League, The Hillbilly Ecosystem, Screw the UN, International Zionist Web, The Tennessee ConserVOLiance, Christian Blogosphere, Right Truth, and the Crescent of Betrayal Blogburst.

So is that why the Blogrolling site was hacked? Most unlikely! Not only are there plenty of sites on Blogrolling that hold views that oppose ours, but also, it is clear that the vast majority of sites that use Blogrolling are commercial blogs that express no particular point of view either for or against the Islamist agenda.

So what would be the point of hacking Blogrolling?

Maybe there was no real point, or at least no point that would make any sense. Maybe the miscreant(s) were motivated simply by a desire to prove that they have the ability to make nuisances of themselves by interfering with a site that many people use. To be sure, that’s not much of an accomplishment. It takes a lot less talent and ability to break in and mess up a web page than it takes to create and run a good site. Blogrolling will most likely notify the authorities and then get their site up and running again with enhanced security. And what will people think who happen to see the hacked site? They’ll most likely be inclined to feel more negatively toward jihadism, Islam, and Muslims in general than they already do.

Being on the receiving end of anger and hate seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition. At any moment, somebody out there may harbor ill will toward us. Sometimes it is for reasons we can understand, sometimes not.

I remember a classmate in college telling me that he had sat down at a table to study, and a girl, with whom he was not acquainted, had scowled at him and moved away. His complaint was that he wanted everybody to like him, and he was bothered by the fact that a complete stranger had turned up her nose at him. I told him, “Well, that’s too bad, but it’s impossible to get everyone in the whole world to like you. That’s just the way life is!”

Sometimes the hostility is expected. We got a death threat or two from the articles about Geert Wilders’ Fitna movie, but we figure that just goes with the territory. Anybody who expresses an opinion or takes a stand is liable to stir up some anger and hatred. On the other hand, those who never express an opinion may be accused of spinelessness, sloth, or stupidity. So it’s impossible to make a favorable impression on everybody.

Enemies versus the human spirit

We cannot afford to let our enemies define who we are.

Whether we choose our enemies or they choose us, we can still be in a boatload of spiritual trouble, often without realizing it. I was unable to determine where the following quotation comes from; it may perhaps be from Lao Tzu. Be that as it may, its truth is all too often borne out by the record of human history:

Choose your enemies carefully, because you will become more and more like them.

Spiritual survival

This may surprise many readers, but the traditions of the Orthodox Christian Church include prayer “for those who hate us.” The following is from page 23 of A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 1991.

Prayers for Our Enemies

Troparion
Thou who didst pray for them that crucified thee, O Lord, lover of the souls of men, and who didst command thy servants to pray for their enemies, forgive those who hate and maltreat us, and turn our lives from all harm and evil to brotherly love and good works: for this we humbly bring our prayer, that with one accord and one heart we may glorify thee who alone lovest mankind.

Kontakion
As thy first martyr Stephen prayed to thee for his murderers, O Lord, so we fall before thee and pray: forgive all who hate and maltreat us and let not one of them perish because of us, but all be saved by thy grace, O God the all-bountiful.

Just for starters, I have become convinced that the primary elections for the Republican Party, and probably also the Democratic Party, came out the way they did on account of massive and widespread vote fraud. In other words, there is no possibility that the United States of America will ever again have a legitimate government that reflects the consent of the governed. If you disagree with me, I will not argue with you. The passage of time will reveal whether I am correct.

To deny a mandate to the evildoers in both parties, I suggest that U.S. citizens who read this blog consider voting for the Constitution Party.

Both major parties have totally destroyed the US economy. Everything has been outsourced and off-shored… manufacturing, energy, services, information processing… the only thing left here is large-scale agribusiness, health care (with fewer and fewer US-born professionals) and corruption.

There is nothing left to base a recovery on.

Both parties have utterly betrayed the American people, and have hollowed out our economy to the extent that we can no longer defend ourselves. At the same time, both parties are headed by blustering egomaniacs who are intent on starting a senseless war with Russia.

I do not know whether I will resume blogging again. If I do, it will no longer be a political blog focused on the consequences of US and EU policies. This topic exposes me to too much temptation to the sin of despair.

God willing, I am making plans to leave the US and establish myself elsewhere. Should I achieve that goal, I never intend to return, not even to visit.

Postscript:

Those wishing to keep informed on issues pertaining to the European and worldwide counterjihad, and on issues pertaining to Serbia, the Balkans, and the Orthodox Christian Church, may wish to subscribe to these blogs:

• deconstruct 1.0 eZine for political decontamination
• Gates of Vienna

On Saturday, the conflict over Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial got its first international news coverage. One highlight is the conversation that Leonard Doyle, U.S editor of the UK Independent, had with Tom Burnett Sr.:

Tom Burnett, whose son Tom Jnr died in the crash, said of the design that it is “aesthetically wonderful,” but “a lot of it contains Islamic symbols”. He added: “We ought to just throw the design out and start anew because it really dishonours those who died.”

Towards the end, Doyle moseys around to the bombshell, reporting the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a fact. The bad news is that Doyle immediately tries to dismiss this explosive information by making a completely irrelevant and factually preposterous counterclaim:

Part of the blame must lie with Paul Murdoch, architect of the winning design who initially described it as a “Crescent of Embrace”. The title caused the internet to erupt with conspiracy theories. Then someone noticed that the arc actually pointed towards Mecca. The fact that this was also the direction to Washington DC was lost on the conspiracy theorists.

No, the direction to Mecca is NOT the direction to Washington. The shortest-distance direction to Mecca (the way that Muslims calculate the direction to Mecca) heads northeast from the western Pennsylvania crash-site. Some people find that counterintuitive, but Pennsylvania and Mecca are both in the northern hemisphere, with Mecca being about 2/3rds of the way around the hemisphere. Thus the direction to Mecca takes a shortcut towards the north pole. D.C., in contrast, lies southeast from the Shanksville crash site.

The errant claim that D.C. and Mecca lie in the same direction is a red herring anyway. what difference would it make if people facing into the giant crescent were facing Washington? Is there a religion of facing Washington five times a day for prayer? Were the hijackers of Flight 93 followers of such a religion. No. They faced MECCA five times a day for prayer. That is why the Mecca direction matters.

A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a “mihrab,” and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The memorial now being built in Shanksville will be the world’s largest mosque by a factor of about fifty (and there are some really big mosques).

Doyle is not the first person to try to dismiss the Mecca orientation of the Flight 93 crescent by claiming that the crescent also points to something else. Of course it DOES point to a host of other places. It points to everything on the line between the crash site and Mecca. Earlier this year the crazy Dr. Daniel Griffith noted that one of those points turns out to be the Vatican. So what? There is no religion of facing the Vatican for prayer.

The Independent should issue a correction

Given that Doyle’s attempt to dismiss the Mecca orientation of the crescent was based on an absurdly wrong factual claim (that the direction to Mecca is the same as the direction to Washington), the Independent ought to issue a correction, especially given the importance of this error to Doyle’s reporting. Without the factual error, his illogical pretense that the Mecca orientation would not matter if the crescent happened to also point to Washington simply disappears. The Mecca orientation would then stand in naked disgrace before the Independent’s international readership. Is that enough of a prize to make a serious push for?

Doyle has already been asked for a correction, without reply. Our petition, however, gives us a new tool for dealing with such recalcitrant parties. We are up to about four hundred signees after one week, and over half say they are willing to engage in activist measures like forwarding emails. Maybe this is a good opportunity to fire a test shot, and unload a minor deluge of correction requests on the Independent.

If you want to pitch in, just copy and paste the following short note into an email:

To the Editors of the Independent:

Please correct a glaring factual error in Leonard Doyle’s article on the Flight 93 Memorial (”Conspiracy or coincidence? Flight 93 memorial attacked over crescent shape,” March 29, 2008). Doyle’s reporting of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent is much appreciated, but he then tries to dismiss the significance of this orientation by making the factually ridiculous assertion that the direction to Mecca from the Shanksville Pennsylvania crash-site is also the direction to Washington:

… someone noticed that the arc actually pointed towards Mecca. The fact that this was also the direction to Washington DC was lost on the conspiracy theorists.

The shortest distance direction to Mecca is to the northeast from Shanksville. Washington is to the southeast.

It is important to correct Mr. Doyle’s errant excuse for dismissing the Mecca orientation of the crescent because orientation on Mecca is actually very significant. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a “mihrab” and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world’s largest mosque. Please include this significance of the Mecca orientation in your correction.

Respectfully yours,

If you haven’t yet signed our online petition, please give it a look. Also, Tom Burnett Sr. just released a public appeal for people to spread the word about our petition effort. If anyone wants to forward or post Tom’s letter, it is available for copy and paste here (scroll to bottom for HTML format).

Glaring omissions in Doyle’s report, amounting to cover up

If the Independent’s correction policy extends to dishonest reporting by omission, there are two other key facts, fully known to Mr. Doyle, that the Independent should publish. While he was driving to Shanksville, Mr. Doyle talked to Alec Rawls by telephone for almost a half an hour, mostly about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent.

Doyle was fully apprised of the double dealing of Memorial Project spokesmen who in private conversation admit the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent and make excuses for it (basically, they all assume it is coincidental), while in the newspapers they deny that the crescent points to Mecca. For example, when Superintendent Hanley was asked directly about the Mecca orientation by a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette last summer, she claimed that:

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

Thus Doyle was fully aware of the controversial nature of the Mecca orientation claim, yet he did not report it as a matter of contention. He reported it as an fact. That means one of two things. When Doyle talked to Hanley (who is quoted in his article), she may have acknowledged the Mecca orientation of the crescent to him. Alternatively, Doyle could have checked the Mecca orientation of the crescent for himself. (Alec Rawls told him how. It takes literally 2 minutes to verify.)

Which is it Mr. Doyle? Either is explosive and should be reported. If a reporter for a major newspaper verifies for himself that the Flight 93 crescent points to Mecca, he damned well ought to say so! If Memorial Project personnel admitted the Mecca orientation of the crescent, after a long history of denying it in to the press, that is newsworthy!

Why is Doyle holding back? This is cover-up, just like his attempt to dismiss the Mecca orientation with the red herring about the direction to Mecca also being the direction to Washington.

A perverted concept of “balance”?

Doyle’s behavior is a puzzle. If he wanted to cover up the Mecca orientation of the crescent, why did he report it at all? In two and a half years, only one other reporter bothered to fact-check and report the orientation of the crescent. (Kirk Swauger at the Johnstown Tribune Democrat wrote last summer that: “[The Mecca orientation claims] seem to be backed up by coordinates for the direction of qibla from Somerset that can be found on Islam.com. When superimposed over the crescent in the memorial design, the midpoint points over the Arctic Circle, through Europe toward Mecca.”)

One possibility is that Doyle may be pursuing a perverted concept of balance, akin to the left wing preference for equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity. The facts tilt in favor of the critics of the crescent, so in order to write a story that presents the two sides as equally valid, Doyle buries the facts, not completely, but enough to write a story that does not advantage either side. Of course if the facts went against critics of the crescent, this concept of balance would go out the window (as it should). But when the facts support conservative voices, this perverted concept of balance seems to be a second mode that the West’s left wing media falls into.

That’s just a theory. Perhaps Mr. Doyle can offer a better explanation. His article is in many ways quite a nice one, telling the story of Flight 93, and of Tom Burnett Jr.’s decision to do something to stop the hijackers. Give Doyle credit also for reporting the most explosive fact (the Mecca orientation). Then he dismisses the Mecca orientation with a completely fraudulent dodge, and omits how the Project has been denying the Mecca orientation for years. Very odd.

Doyle also fails to mention that every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign.

In contrast to his fabricated grounds for dismissing the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, Doyle simply repeats without comment the Memorial Project’s claim that the design was changed to remove “any perceptions relating to Islamic symbolism”:

The crescent became a circle, with two symbolic breaks, one where visitors will walk along the flight path, the other at the crash scene.

Would it have been too much to note, as was clearly explained to Mr. Doyle, how every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only added a few irrelevant trees to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent.

The circle is still “broken” in the exact same spots, creating the exact same crescent. This is even how architect Paul Murdoch explains the crescent design: the terrorists broke the circle, turning it into a giant (Mecca-oriented) crescent. The only change in the “redesign” was to include a broken off chunk of the circle, which now floats out behind the mouth of the crescent.

After long conversations with Tom Burnett, Alec Rawls and Bill Steiner (who has been organizing opposition on the ground in Pennsylvania for two years) Doyle actually knows more about the Islamic symbolism in the crescent design than any other reporter who has covered this story. If he would just report the truth, he could do some real good, and advance his own career at the same time, by breaking the story of a lifetime. Instead, he has decided to hide the truth, even using blatant disinformation to do it. Sure looks like ideological bias.

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