Patterico's Pontifications

12/20/2010

Janet Napolitano Works 23/6 to Keep You Safe

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:35 pm



364 days a year!

Update by Aaron Worthing: Video!

Harry Potter and the Honor Beating

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 8:41 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

This is Afshan Azad.  You might recognize her.  She is a Pakistani actress who appeared in some of the Harry Potter movies as Padma Patil.

She has also been beaten by her brother, called a prostitute and threatened with murder by her father.  Why?  Because she dared to date a Hindu.

A Harry Potter actress fled her home after her father and brother threatened to kill her for going out with a Hindu man, a court heard yesterday.

Afshan Azad, 22, who appeared in the blockbuster movies as Padma Patil, was attacked and branded a ‘slag’ when Muslim relatives found out about her boyfriend.

The actress was so scared that she escaped out of her bedroom window and later fled her home city.

Police were called and her father, Abul Azad, 54, and brother, Ashraf, 28, were arrested and charged with making threats to kill her. The actress’s brother was also charged with assault.

But Miss Azad refused to testify and yesterday failed to turn up at their trial at Manchester Crown Court.

The account of the assault is pretty frightening, too:

Richard Vardon QC, prosecuting, said the actress was ‘the victim of an unpleasant assault by her brother’ at the family home in Longsight, Manchester, in May.

He added: ‘The reason for the assault, apparently her association with a Hindu man, that apparently being disapproved of by her family who are Muslim.’

Mr Vardon said Abul Azad had been woken up by his son, Ashraf, shouting: ‘Sort out your daughter! She’s a slag.’

He went on: ‘He continued to further assault her, shouting, “Just kill her!”’

Reading from the victim’s statement, the prosecutor added: ‘My father began saying he would do it, a reference to kill her, as he did not want his sons to have her blood on their hands and he would do time for it. Then she began to feel very scared.’

Her father was said to have threatened to take her to Bangladesh and force her into an arranged marriage.

She has fled to London, so she looks like she will be physically safe.  But it is stunning that this level of intolerance exists in the world.  On the other hand, it appears to be par for the course in Pakistan where blasphemy against Mohammed (pedophilia be upon him) will earn you the death sentence.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Update: Gateway Pundit covers the story, offers a few choice words for father and brother, and provides this additional picture of the young woman:

These men are emotionally deformed.

Update (II): I mistated the facts slightly, and have edited the post to reflect it.  Thanks to “Anon Y. Mous.”

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Let’s Make a Christmas Miracle (Update: The Pastor Responds)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 4:57 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Let me propose we do something.  I was watching on the news when I heard someone mention this story:

The pastor of Earthen Vessels in Kings Mountain found eight bikes and boxes of toys stolen Saturday morning.

Pastor Roger Woodard said he visited the group’s storage facility this morning and found the door partially open.

“This empty area you see right here was full of toys and bicycles,” Woodard said.

Earthen Vessels expected to help more than 300 needy families. Because of the theft, the group could not help them all.

“It comes at a very bad time. It came right before the distribution, so it’s kind of disheartening,” Woodard said.

Police said they do not have any suspects.

Volunteers hope to round up enough bikes and toys in the coming days to get them to families that were expecting them.

If you would like to help you can get in touch with Earthen Vessels at: Earthen Vessels PO Box 396 Kings Mountain, NC 28086 704-739-4520

[Update: The youth minister wrote back, gave this address: 1818 Shelby Rd., Kings mountain NC  28086]

Now the good news so far is that a lot of toys have poured in—apparently more than had been stolen.  But I say why not send them a few more?  They seem like nice people, helping out people in need.  So please consider a donation.

I imagine that with this sort of thing, you want to send a pre-manufactured toy, unwrapped.  And indeed, you might even use the information on this contact page to ask them, what do you need that you don’t have?  I’ll actually email them tonight and let you know what the response is.

But do consider it.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that if you like this site, Patterico could always use a donation, nice and sweet on the side.

Update: Got an email from the pastor, here’s his response:

Thank you for your contact.  It is heartening that you would think of us to assist.  Thanks to the area news media, individuals and entities in surrounding communities have responded and we have recouped our losses.  We are now busy preparing a second distribution and contacting families we were unable to add to our list before the theft.  We distribute food every 3rd Sat & have for over nine years.  At Christmas we include toys and we also respond to disasters (i.e. Haiti, Katrina etc.)and local needs through out the year.

Should anyone wish to donate , “Earthen Vessels”, P.O. Box 396, Kings Mountain, NC 28086     Phone 704-739-4520.

Of course, we will be happy to accept toy gifts etc. & will see that they get into the hands of children that need them.  Though FWC administers this charity, EV is a stand alone charity with separate bank account.  Their is no commingling of funds & not one cent is spent for administration costs.

Everything goes to the charity.

God bless you & yours & have a Merry Christmas,

Roger R. Woodard
Senior Pastor
Family Worship Center
Kings Mountain, NC

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

“And the Dark Night Has the Strongest Pull”

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 1:56 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Update: Thanks to the other Aaron and others who point out that the timing of the eclipse is sooner than I realized.  It’s tonight, meaning early, early in the morning on the East coast, moderately late on the west.

As a point of reference, the lunar eclipse December 2010 time will occur on the East Coast somewhere between 1:29am and 5:00am.

The lunar eclipse December 2010 will last for 72 minutes, and will make the moon completely red. An estimated 1.5 billion people around the world should be able to see it, but considering how late it is happening in the United States, most kids and worn-out parents will probably miss it, as they will be fast asleep!

(Source.)  Sorry for (my) mixup.

That’s a line from the very excellent Matthew Sweet, in Smog Moon, from his album 100% Fun, which like most of his music is a hummable song about bitterness and depression (yes, really).  And I thought of that when reading that tomorrow  tonight is the Winter Solstice which is all kinds of important to hippies and Wiccans Witches, and on the same night we are going to have a lunar eclipse—the first combo like that in about 500 years:

This year’s winter solstice — an event that will occur [this] Tuesday — will coincide with a full lunar eclipse in a union that hasn’t been seen in 456 years.

And lay on me that hippie/witch talk:

The celestial eccentricity holds special significance for spiritualities that tap into the energy of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and a time that is associated with the rebirth of the sun.

Wow.  That…  that has to be the most nonsensical paragraph committed to writing since, well, this:

The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.

Anyway back to the hippie/wiccan talk:

“It’s a ritual of transformation from darkness into light,” says Christine O’Donnell, a high priestess at Toronto’s Wiccan Church of Canada. “It’s the idea that when things seem really bleak, (it) is often our biggest opportunity for personal transformation.

“The idea that the sun and the moon are almost at their darkest at this point in time really only further goes to hammer that home.”

Oh, wait, did I get the wrong name for that hippie/wiccan?

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Fox News Presents Both Sides of the Climate Debate; LA Times Says They Are Not Fair and BALANCED

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 12:20 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Buckle up, because this is a long one. But stick around to the end, to see a funny video.

The other day I noted that Media Mutters complained about Fox News accurately describing the public option as the government option, based on an internal memo they obtained.  (Unlike the cheeseball apologists on Climategate, I don’t care that it might have been stolen, so long as we are reasonably certain it is authentic.)  So Media Mutters released a new memo, shockingly demonstrating that when reporting on claims of global warming, Fox news personalities were instructed to inform people that there were other people who disputed the claims.  Now of course Media Mutters calls them biased for that, but that is old hat by now.

But then the LA Times stepped into it.  They explain:

Love it or hate it, Fox News has shaken up the media establishment and achieved financial success by airing the views of strident conservative pundits.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they don’t “love it.”

Yet while the network has never made any bones about the political slant of opinion shows hosted by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly, executives often claim that its news coverage is “fair and balanced.” A memo revealed this week by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters calls that into question.

They go on to discuss government-option-gate basically declaring that this complaint was too lame for their blood.  But they decided that questioning global warming is the last straw!

“We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,” read an e-mail sent by Sammon to news reporters on Dec. 8, 2009, and revealed this week by Media Matters. The memo went out 15 minutes after a Fox News reporter accurately explained to viewers that United Nations scientists had issued a report saying 2000 to 2009 was shaping up to be the warmest decade on record — even warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s.

Such data aren’t in serious dispute among climate scientists.

Well, gee, what might have been happening right around then that might have been relevant to the issue?  Let’s see here…  why it turns out that a small scandal known as Climategate was exploding all over the place.  For instance, on November 20, 2009, James Delingpole wrote a blog post at the UK’s Telegraph entitled “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?”  So as a matter of fact there was a very serious dispute right at that time about the veracity of the data itself, with the hiding of the decline and the like.  One might debate just how much damage Climategate rightfully did to the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, but there can be no debate that there was a debate, and a very serious one at that.  And if evidence of bad science, destruction of evidence, obstruction of FOIA requests, massaging and outright fakery of data doesn’t lead those scientists to at least debate the veracity of their data, that is an indictment on the scientists, not on their critics.

The LA Times continues:

(more…)

The Grand Ol’ Gang and the True Blues

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 5:55 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

This weekend we wrapped up Holiday Christmas shopping and as I was leaving the mall, I went past one of those paintings shops.  You know, the kind.  The kind that takes stills from movies, you know, really classy ones like Scarface, and turns them into paintings.  That kind of store.  And I was struck by this painting, called The Grand Ol’ Gang:

You know, I am a Rockwell fan, but even that is a bit corny for my blood.  And in case you are wondering, the corniness is bi-partisan.  I present to you, True Blues:

And is that Bill O’Reilly on the right, leaning over?  (Joke.)  But wow that is so bad…  I suspect that they were responsible for the Bill Clinton portrait at the Yale Law School (trust me, if you have seen it, you will get the joke).

I suppose the creator of this stuff deserves a link, just for providing that entertainment value.  But to everyone in my family reading this right now, don’t get me any of these for Christmas.

Incidentally, if you can name all of the presidents in both pics, you will get a valuable prize: respect.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]


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