Saturday, June 9, 2012

Rebels Responsible for Houla Massacre

It was, in the words of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, the “tipping point” in the Syria conflict: a savage massacre of over 90 people, predominantly women and children, for which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed by virtually the entirety of the Western media. Within days of the first reports of the Houla massacre, the U.S., France, Great Britain, Germany, and several other Western countries announced that they were expelling Syria’s ambassadors in protest.

But according to a new report in Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad. For its account of the massacre, the report cites opponents of Assad, who, however, declined to have their names appear in print out of fear of reprisals from armed opposition groups.

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

More @ NRO

1989 Tiananmen Square

Via NC Renegade

I didn't know there was a video of this until tonight. I had the still picture on my kitchen wall in Can Tho.



Fear That Kills

Via III Percent Patriots

I have been around guns all my life. Growing up they were nearly a daily part of life. I have a healthy respect for firearms, but I don’t fear them. We have friends, mostly females, that have an unnatural fear of firearms. But they have little fear of me, they think me harmless. What they don’t comprehend is that I am far more dangerous than the firearm that I carry. The firearm in my pocket or holster is harmless, but put it in my hand it becomes deadly. I am not bragging, it is the simple fact that the gun cannot discharge its self, I must pull the trigger.

Jeff Knox commentary on the Rick Scott murder.

Mr. Knox is far more polite than I’ll be.

12 Southern Pictures 1905 - 1940

Parade Rest: 1938
October 1938. Crowley, Louisiana. "Children in buggy at National Rice Festival."

More @ NamSouth

Free E-Book: None Dare Call It Conspiracy, by Gary Allen



(This is the book that got my butt in gear. I've been a steadfast kook ever since!)

Title: None Dare Call It Conspiracy
Author: Gary Allen
Date: 1971
LINKS: Read in PDF or Read Online

Buy a hard copy of “None Dare Call It Conspiracy”

Excerpt: “When you think about it, there are really only two theories of history. Either things happen by accident neither planned nor caused by anybody, or they happen because they are planned and somebody causes them to happen . . . Why does every recent Administration make the same mistakes as the previous ones? Why do they repeat the errors of the past which produce inflation, depressions and war? Why does our State Department ‘stumble’ from one Communist-aiding ‘blunder’ to another? If you believe it is all an accident or the result of mysterious and unexplainable tides of history, you will be regarded as an ‘intellectual’ who understands that we live in a complex world. If you believe that something like 32,496 consecutive coincidences over the past forty years stretches the law of averages a bit, you are a kook!”

The 5 Most Humiliating Ways the Wilderness Can Kill You

Via ruusso

Like any relationship between parents and their grown offspring, Mother Nature and humanity get along best when they don't have to see each other very often. Weekend visits and the occasional longer holiday trip seem to be enough for people to appreciate the majesty of nature while still avoiding the inherent guilt of not doing enough for their Mother in her old age. On the other hand, the biggest difference between your real mother and Mother Nature is that if you overstay your welcome in the wilderness, it will murder you.


Probably. I won't pretend to know what your family dynamic is like.

Each year, due to ill-preparedness or accidents, scores of people get lost for days in the outdoors, and many of them end up dead, because nature is full of terrible things like sharp rocks, snow and indifference. Even the most knowledgeable outdoorsman can die while lost in the woods, because he is surrounded by circumstances beyond his control. That's why, instead of preparing you to survive on your own in the wild, I want to at least help you avoid dying in the most embarrassing ways possible. There are a handful of mortal threats in the outdoors that no one talks about and that are wildly humiliating. So if you ever find yourself lost in the middle of nowhere, you may not survive, but you can certainly avoid having your last sensation be utter shame. Here are five deaths to avoid if you can help it.

#5. Killed by Constipation

More @ Cracked

Support Chick-fil-A: A Christian Business in the Left’s Crosshairs

Via SF Medic

http://www.picturesdepot.com/tags/1/chick-fil-a+waffle+fries.html

Here’s a modest proposal for liberals who say they support job creation: Stop smearing successful, law-abiding private companies whose values don’t comport with yours. I’m looking at you, New York Times.

Chick-fil-A is an American success story. Founded by Georgian entrepreneur Truett Cathy in 1946, the family-owned chicken-sandwich chain is one of the country’s largest fast-food businesses. It employs some 50,000 workers across the country at 1,500 outlets in nearly 40 states and the District of Columbia. The company generates more than $2 billion in revenue and serves millions of happy customers with trademark Southern hospitality.

So, what’s the problem? Well, Chick-fil-A is run by devout Christians who believe in strong marriages, devoted families, and the highest standards of character for their workers. The restaurant chain’s official corporate mission is to “glorify God” and “enrich the lives of everyone we touch.” The company’s community-service initiatives, funded through its WinShape Foundation, support foster-care, scholarship, summer-camp, and marriage-enrichment programs. On Sunday, all Chick-fil-A stores close so workers can spend the day at worship and rest.

For the Left, these Biblically based corporate principles constitute social-justice high crimes and misdemeanors. Democrats are always ready to invoke religion to support their big-government, taxpayer-funded initiatives (Obamacare, illegal-alien amnesty, increased education spending, and FCC regulatory expansion, for starters). But when an independent company — thriving on its own merits in the marketplace — wears its soul on its sleeve, suddenly it’s a theocratic crisis.

Over the past month, several progressive-activist blogs have waged an ugly war against Chick-fil-A. The company’s alleged atrocity: One of its independent outlets in Pennsylvania donated some sandwiches and brownies to a marriage seminar run by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which happens to oppose same-sex marriage.

In the name of tolerance, the anti-Chick-fil-A hawks sneered at the company’s main product as “Jesus Chicken,” derided its no-Sunday-work policy, and attacked its operators as “anti-gay.” Michael Jones, who describes himself as having “worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School,” launched an online petition drive at www.change.org “demanding” that the company disavow “extreme anti-gay groups.” Facebook users dutifully organized witch hunts against the company on college campuses.

Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Kim Severson gave the Chick-fil-A bashers a coveted Sunday A-section megaphone — repeatedly parroting the “Chick-fil-A is anti-gay” slur and raising fears of “evangelical Christianity’s muscle flexing” with only the thinnest veneer of journalistic objectivity. Severson, you see, is an openly gay advocate of same-sex-marriage equality herself and the former vice president of the identity-politics–mongering National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association.

More @ NRO

A Gunny speaks

Via safetalker


"When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional and now it's legal. I'm getting out before Obama makes it mandatory."

-- Gunnery Sgt Harry Berres, USMC

Four men charged in Twiggs County home invasion, torture

Via Occidental Dissent


A Twiggs County man tortured Saturday morning during a home invasion robbery was burned with hot scissors an estimated 40 times, according to the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigator Robert Rodgers said the assailants took apart a pair of scissors and heated one of the blades on a gas stove.

Robert Luce, 61, was burned on his neck and back while the men demanded to know where he kept money in his home, on Lettie Way off Sgoda Road just west of Interstate 16.

Paul Stafford, 41, of Laurens County, is accused of burning Luce during the torture, which also included beating Luce while he was bound with duct tape, Rodgers said.

Stafford, a registered sex offender, had been released from prison in November. Since 1999, he’s served three stints on charges ranging from escape and aggravated assault to attempted aggravated sodomy, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Denis Jones, 42, of Twiggs County, was on bond at the time of the home invasion at Luce’s home in connection with allegations that he robbed Luce in 2011, Rodgers said.

More @ The Telegraph

Another Apparent Thrill Killing – Two Black Teens Stab Female Pizza Delivery Driver More Than 50 Times

Via The Last Refuge



Investigators say Elizabeth Hutcheson was stabbed more than 50 times while delivering pizza at a home in Cedartown on Thursday night.
Investigators say Elizabeth Hutcheson was stabbed more than 50 times while delivering pizza at a home in Cedartown on Thursday night.


Police say they captured two teens who they believe brutally stabbed a pizza delivery woman. Investigators say Elizabeth Hutcheson was stabbed more than 50 times while delivering pizza at a home in Cedartown on Thursday night.

The stabbing happened just after 9 p.m. at a home on Thompson Street. Investigators say Hutcheson's attackers ran away after stabbing her.

Officers who were conducting a traffic stop nearby heard Hutcheson's screams and rushed to help her.

Police say Hutcheson was a 27-year-old mother who worked at Domino's Pizza. They have identified one of the suspects as 18-year-old Cadedra Cook. The other suspect is a 15-year-old boy whose name is not being released.

More @ My Fox

Vietnam Vet doesn't back down from gunman

Via What BUbba Knows



A 67-year-old Chattanooga man didn't back down when someone tried to rob him in a grocery store parking lot. His response sent the suspect running, but he didn't make it far.

Napoleon Rutledge is a Vietnam veteran who says he has a couple dozen confirmed kills in war. He's not proud of it, but says he did what he had to do. He fought for freedom, and when that freedom was tested on Wednesday he reacted the only way he knew how.

"What I faced in Vietnam...no, it didn't shake me! It made me mad," said Rutledge.

Wednesday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. in a packed Bi-Lo parking lot on Highway 58, Rutledge was walking back to his car with $600 in money orders.

"This guy came up behind me and said, ‘Hey sir I want your money!' I turned around and looked, and he cocked his 9mm."

The gunman didn't realize he was looking for a freebie from a man not willing to back down.

More @ WRCB

Kim Phuc: I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers.

Via What BUbba Knows

http://kevishere.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/reconciliation-2nd-indochina-war/

If you are of a certain age, you almost certainly remember Kim Phuc vividly, even though you may not know her name. She was the nine-year-old South Vietnamese girl who was burned by napalm on June 8, 1972, and whose image in a prize-winning photo taken by South Vietnamese AP photographer Nick Ut became an iconic and influential force that helped end the war.

The picture of Kim running down a road near the village of Trang Bang screaming in agony and terror, her clothes torn off and her body badly burned, shocked and outraged an America that had become profoundly weary of the war and its horrors. The photo was Picasso’s Guernica come to life, even more horrific because it was not just an artist’s imaginative and stylized rendition of the bombing’s effects, but the real thing.

As familiar as the photo has become, the story behind it is less so. For example, if the introductory paragraph of this essay had read: “She was the nine-year-old girl who was burned by napalm dropped by American forces in South Vietnam,” how many readers would have caught the error?

In fact, it was the South Vietnamese who were doing the bombing, but the idea that Kim was burned at the hands of Americans persists. That is only one of several common misconceptions about the attack, because the incident has been widely misrepresented and misunderstood through errors of omission and commission.In many accounts — up to and including this recent AP story in honor of the photo’s 40th anniversary — the crucial role of the North Vietnamese is downplayed. The AP article’s only mention of their role in the battle is in a sentence that states Kim and her family had taken shelter in a temple for three days “as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.”The phrase almost makes it sound as though the claims of the two sides were about equal. But in reality those North Vietnamese forces were invading the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang that Kim and her family called home, and the South Vietnamese forces were defending it from them (by 1972, the vast majority of Communist forces fighting in the South were Northerners).

More @ PJ Media

Boeing‘s ’Ginormous, Hydrogen-Powered Uber-Drone’ Takes First Flight

Via Don

Boeings Phantom Eye Makes First Test Flight

It may have had a rocky landing, but the new Boeing unmanned drone with technology enabling it to stay airborne for days has completed its first autonomous flight at Edwards Air Force Base.

The Phantom Eye is a piece of equipment described by Wired as a “ginormous, hydrogen-powered uber-drone.” It earned this name for its 150-foot wingspan and its 450-pound carrying capacity. Not to mention the fact that it is powered by liquid-hydrogen, allowing it to go four days in the air without refueling.

“This day ushers in a new era of persistent Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) where an unmanned aircraft will remain on station for days at a time providing critical information and services,” Darryl Davis, president, Boeing Phantom Works, said in a statement. “This flight puts Boeing on a path to accomplish another aerospace first — the capability of four days of unrefueled, autonomous flight.”

Boeing said Monday that the 28-minute flight of the Phantom Eye began at 6:22 a.m. Friday and the aircraft reached an altitude of 4,080 feet and a cruising speed of 62 knots before landing at the California desert base. Boeing said after touching down, the drone was damaged when the landing gear dug into a lakebed and broke.

Watch the test flight:

More @ The Blaze


'You're Not Special': High School Teacher Gives the Most Blunt Commencement Address Ever


Dr. Wong, Dr. Keough, Mrs. Novogroski, Ms. Curran, members of the board of education, family and friends of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen of the Wellesley High School class of 2012, for the privilege of speaking to you this afternoon, I am honored and grateful. Thank you.

So here we are… commencement… life’s great forward-looking ceremony. (And don’t say, “What about weddings?” Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there’s the frequency of failure: statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)

But this ceremony… commencement… a commencement works every time. From this day forward… truly… in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, you will stay forever graduated from high school, you and your diploma as one, ‘til death do you part.

No, commencement is life’s great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

More @ Fox

Somali Islamists offer 10 camels as bounty for Obama

Via Billy

http://www.deshow.net/animal/camels-pictures-444.html

The United States offers millions for information leading to the capture of the world's most wanted terrorists.

A Somali militant group has purportedly countered with an offer of camels for U.S. officials.

Al-Shabaab has placed a bounty of 10 camels for President Barack Obama and two camels for information on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

An audio statement posted on jihadist websites purportedly from Al-Shabaab jeered news that the United States is offering millions of dollars for information on seven key members of al-Shabaab through its Rewards for Justice program.

The man on the audio claimed to be Fuad Mohamed Khalaf, considered by the State Department to be Al-Shabaab's leading fundraiser. The United States has offered $5 million for information of his whereabouts.

"Whoever brings the mujahidin information about the whereabouts of infidel Obama and the lady of Bill Clinton, the woman named Hillary Clinton, I will give a reward," the man said.

A study by Galkayo University, which looked at the effects of drought on livestock, said the average cost of a camel in Somalia is $700.

More @ CNN

Uncle Drew plays basketball:)

Via Cousin Colby



Kyrie Irving (rookie of the year from Cleveland who played at Duke last year).

They dress him up in movie make up to make him look like an 80 year old man and he goes to the street basketball courts in New Jersey and gets in a pickup basketball game with all these young guys.. at the beginning playing terrible and then starts playing for real and its great.

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After spending four hours in makeup, 2012 NBA Rookie of the Year Kyrie Irving heads to the courts of New Jersey to devour some young bloods in a pick-up game.

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Pepsi MAX went to a pick-up game in Bloomfield, NJ pretending to shoot a documentary on a basketball player named "Kevin." When his Uncle Drew came into the game, some magical things happened.

Video mashup honors Mister Rogers, imagination



Mister Rogers is making it a beautiful day in the neighborhood again.

Fred Rogers, the late host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," is featured in a PBS Digital Studios video mashup that celebrates the power of imagination. The piece posted online Friday turns clips from Rogers' PBS show into a sweetly inspiring music video, "Garden of Your Mind."

"Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind? You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind," Rogers says, his autotuned voice given a gentle backbeat.

The salute to the treasured children's TV host drew reaction from the public and celebrities, with Neil Patrick Harris calling it a "groovy" tribute in a Twitter posting, and Alyssa Milano tweeting that the mashup will "make you cry tears of joy."

Rogers' widow, Joanne, is among the video's "biggest fans," said Kevin Morrison, COO of the Fred Rogers Company.

More @ Yahoo