Going on a Lawsuit Hunt

The linked article details the trials and tribulations of three poor, misunderstood Jewish men who strapped duct-taped black boxes to their bodies, with what appeared to be wires running out of them, went into the lavatory together while the third stood guard outside, and began parying loudly, all while in flight.

It turns out that this was all part of a ceremony:

The men began praying out loud in Hebrew shortly after takeoff on Flight 241 from Mexico City. Flight attendants alerted the flight deck, which then called the tower and alerted law enforcement. When the plane arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, it was met by the FBI, Customs and Border Protection and airport police....

...During weekday prayers, some Orthodox Jewish men wear teflillin, or phylacteries - black leather straps wrapped around the left arm and around the forehead. The straps are connected to small boxes with tiny scrolls containing Jewish scriptures. Many Orthodox Jewish men also wear a prayer shawl called a tallit under their clothes, with knotted fringes at each of the four corners.

However, I can’t figure out what part of the ceremony requires them to go to the lavatory together while another man stands guard, anxiously glancing at the cockpit door and around the cabin.

This is not the first time that this has happened. The suspicious activities of these men, along with their unwillingness to go along with flight crew demands, leads me to believe that they were purposely in search of a religious discrimination lawsuit against the airline. I can develop no other reason why these men were dumb enough to do all of this, and why they felt like it couldn’t wait until they were safely on the ground.

Before you go there, I am not anti-Jewish or anti-religion. I am pro-common sense, and I just fail to see how these men could have reasoned their way into believing that this was a good idea. They are lucky as hell that some passenger didn’t straighten them out. I’m not sure what I would have done in the same situation, but I would certainly have been on a razor’s edge ready to dish out some ass-whoopin’ if I got any indication that their intent was anything other than honorable, I can tell you that much.

That being said, I can tell the difference between radical muslims and orthodox Jews, so I might not have been that worried, knowing that they were Jews and not Muslims.

I know, I totally just went off the PC reservation by suggesting that Muslims are more likely to commit terror attacks than Jews. Its just that, well…

THEY ARE.

Just Freedom Fighters, Fighting for Freedom and Such‏

The MSM has left this story unreported. It obviously does not forward the narrative tht israeli’s are bad and Palestinians are good, and that Palestinians are just poor, downtrodden but otherwise good souls who are being treated badly by the evil Jooooo oppressors.

I’ve linked to Borepatch for this story, because he tells it better than I could. I can’t type when I’m this upset and angry. My soul aches for these poor people.

It seems that they are celebrating in Gaza over this. I guess they really feel like infants are valid targets in their fight for freedom.

Of course, the reporting of this in the MSM, when it was even reported at all, ran the gamut of biased reporting – referring to the Jooos as “settlers” instead of as “the Fogel family” and not commenting on the fact that most of the evil Joooos killed in this were under 6 years old, one of them was only three months old. Real victory for the Palestinian cause, there, huh? There was also a general reluctance to comment on the race and breeding of the Paleoswinian bastards that did this.

The worst headline of all, thanks to Ace over at AOShq, was the following:

Israelis suspect Palestinians in settler killing.

Indicating that there was no proof that it was paleoswinians that did it, and that it was just the evil Zionists blaming Palestinians unfairly for the killing, and going on the offensive without proof. This, of course, ignores the reality, which is that the Muslim Brotherhood actually took responsibility for the killings and celebrated them - dancing and handing out candy in the streets of Jerusalem

The Alamo

Okay, random-ey randomness for today brought me to a discussion over on Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated, regarding the heroic last stand at the Alamo by a group of about 180 Texas Volunteers who fought to the last man against Santa Anna and Mexican oppression.

I do not want to minimize the sacrifice of those men. Most of us today would never even consider something to be worth dying over, and many men would see no problem with compromising their morality and their principles as long as it kept them from being slaughtered. The men in the Alamo were real, true men, who willingly died over what they thought was right.

That being said, I find a massive amount of fault in the concept of “dying for your country.” I could not put it better than the late, great George S. Patton, who stated bluntly that “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. The way that you win a war is by making the other poor bastard die for his country.”

The same great man also stated that “fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.”

And Fixed fortifications are exactly what the men at the Alamo fought and died for – and their deaths were exactly because of their decision to fight within a fixed fortification.

Consider this. David Crockett became famous for his early-in-life exploits with the Tennesee Volutneers, fighting Indians with a rag-tag group of other white volunteers and allied Indian Tribes. During his time as a Tennessee Volunteer, Mr. Crockett fought countless guerilla style campaigns and helped to win the war against the Indians. He knew the value of guerilla tactics. He understood the concepts of striking hard and fading away before your enemy could strike back. He knew that facing a superior force head-on was futile, and that a paltry number of men, appropriately trained and brutally motivated, could bring entire armies to their knees by attacking supply infrastructure and leaving the regular army alone.

So there is no excuse for his decision to hole up behind some adobe bricks and wait for Santa Anna to surround him and his crew, leaving them no escape but surrender, victory, or death. You cannot limit your options like that and call it a tactically sound maneuver, and fighting from within a fixed fortification does just exactly that. It was monumentally stupid, and I say that despite the fact that I have the utmost respect for David Crockett and his men. I understand that I am criticizing the national heroes of Texas, and that that is offensive as hell – but I cannot help but wonder what 184 dedicated, dangerous men like those men at the Alamo could have done if they’d shed themselves of their cannon, traveled light and fast and with the goal of making Santa Anna’s life as miserable as possible for as long as they could. I’ll bet that they could have delayed him longer than they did behind the walls of the Alamo, and I’ll bet there would have been a damn sight more of them available to help Houston at the final battle (if that battle even happened at all – an unfed army cannot fight).

Anti-Gunner Logic

See, the thing I don’t understand is that when these anti-gun folks get themselves in a bind, the first thing that they do is call 911 so that they can have a man – with a gun – come out and fix their problem for them. They seem to fail to realize that in that situation, the evil gun is actually protecting them. All I am saying is why not just be a man with a gun yourself and cut out the middle man instead of waiting in fear for the 15 minutes it will take your knight in shining armor to show up and save your butt?

Update on MLK Parade Bomber - Spokane, WA

So after my long-winded rant about jumping to conclusions, it turns out that the news’ conclusion that the perp was a white supremacist was correct after all. It still doesn’t change my opinion that jumping to that conclusion was the wrong thing to do, because it doesn’t change the fact that the entire suspicion was based on speculation (and hope that it wasn’t another Muslim thing).

It is sort of like how I do not really respect Sherlock Holmes as being a great intellectual, as so many are wont to do, because he doesn’t really solve his cases by logic or deduction, he just makes assumptions based on very little evidence, sticks by those assumptions, and then invariably finds out that he was right all along. That isn’t reason or logic – that is luck. Same thing goes here. Just because they ended up being right does not mean that they did the right thing.

Most Recent "Oh Noes!" Moment in Education‏

I read an article the other day in which the author had gone into “the sky is falling” mode because schools are no longer teaching cursive writing. in her words, “the teachers are so busy with high class loads, unrelenting testing demands caused by “no Child Left Behind”, and the changing world into which these kids will be living that they no longer have time to teach things like cursive writing…”

I also understand that they have stopped teaching children how to use a type-writer, too. In fact, I heard just yesterday that there isn’t a single kid in our local graduating class that knows Morse Code, much less the fine art of telegraphy.

The world is coming to an end and the sky is quite obviously falling.

We are all. Going. To. Die…

…or not.

To those that do not know, cursive writing was invented as a way to hand-write a lot, more quickly, and with less hand fatigue caused by lifting the instrument off of the paper with every letter. In a time when the only real way to write something was by hand, cursive writing allowed people to write longer and faster, and it was invaluable.

Think hard now – when was the last time that you wrote anything other than a quick jot on a post-it note? A complete sentence? A few sentences maybe?

How long has it been since you filled up a piece of paper with your handwriting?

In the current day of portable typing devices like laptops and even smart phones, writing by hand is becoming more and more obsolete. Printing in standard letter form, by hand, is literally something people only do to write quick reminders and thank-you notes to other people. I spent months of my childhood learning cursive writing – months which could have been better used learning how to program a computer or plan a proper diet for myself once mom was no longer around to cook for me. It has rarely come in handy (if ever) and all of that time would have been much better spent learning to type on a QWERTY keyboard – something that was not in the curriculum of my grade-school days, apparently having been superseded by more important things - like learning to write cursive.

This reminds me of the constant cries that places like China and Japan are leaving us behind in terms of general education of our young people. Technically, yes, their kids have a better knowledge base, when only pure facts are considered, than ours do at graduation. Yet, it is Americans who continue to out-produce, out-think, and out-earn every other people on the planet, despite this, and I think that this is in large part due to the fact that we spend a lot less time learning stupid facts about things that we don’t need to know*, and a lot less time learning useless things like cursive writing.

*What I mean by this is that yes, they outscore us in Astrophysics at High School Graduation, but who gives a shit? 98% of Americans will never need to know or learn Astrophysics, so why waste time with it? Why not do exactly what we do, and reserve it for specialized higher education for people that actually want to go into a career in Astrophysics instead of teaching it to everyone, including the majority of people who won’t ever need to know these things, will never use them, and could give a shit less about them?

Ponder of the Day - War Crimes

So if President Bush’s decision to incarcerate the detainees at Guantanamo indefinitely without trial made him a war criminal, then what about President Obama’s decision to continue that policy, and to even take it a step further and allow the continued incarceration of folks that have been acquitted? How much do you want to bet that the “fair” and “intellectual” left won’t even pay mention to the cognitive dissonance that had them branding one President a War Criminal for doing exactly the same thing that another President is doing, and yet President #2 is the light bringer and purveyor of hope.

As I’ve said since day one of this debacle; if you have enough evidence to convict them of a crime, then try them that convict. If you do not have enough evidence to convict them of a crime, then how do you have enough evidence to detain them indefinitely? It is either there, or it isn’t. Di they, or didn’t they?

Try them or release them, because if you can’t try them, how can you be sure that they even deserve to be incarcerated?