DUMBEST PROGRESSIVE EVER: loves Saudi Arabia on YouTube #Feminism

From Al Arabiya: (EOZ) Here she is in all her ditzy glory:

Corissa Chantelle surprised her Youtube viewers when she donned a green T-shirt, a color similar to that of the Saudi flag, and sung in jubilation for the kingdom’s Independence Day anniversary. Chantelle, 22, who has a desire to meet King Abdullah, has a channel on YouTube, and nearly every Thursday she posts a video expressing her infatuation with Saudi Arabia and its culture. On the videos, which so far have attracted more than 2.8 million viewers, she speaks some Arabic words and sentences and tries to throw in some Saudi Arabian vernacular. ...She also an avid supporter of the Saudi Ettihad soccer club and would like to see them play in their stadium, but the kingdom’s conservative rules would not permit her to enter the stadium. However, she says she would not mind standing outside the grounds to support her team. In one of her YouTube videos, Chanetelle wore a black Abaya, which was a gift from a friend from Saudi.

wait a second... who does she remind me of? oh yeah! Lauren Booth! This could be her kid.

Is It the New Legal Marijuana or just "Pot-pourri"?

(kosmo) Gold Spice

Salvia divinorum

marijuana

A new marijuana-like substance has hit the market, creating a sensation among those adventurous enough to try it. The stuff is called K2, spice or “scary spice,” as some people have labeled it. K2 resembles herbs or potpourri and can be smoked just like marijuana. Apparently it gets some people high and doesn’t show up on drug tests.
Other users have tried mixtures with an impressive array of catchy names: Love Potion, Venom, Cloud 9, Magic XXX, Klimax and Xotic.
Unfortunately, these herbal mixtures have also given some users what could be called bad trips. Users have reported side effects such as fearsome hallucinations, nausea, vomiting or headaches. Moreover, in an article on the Web site, www.choosehelp.com, Dr. Ulrich S. Zimmermann, claims that a brand of herbal smoke named Spice Gold is addictive. Ulrich also says that many ingredients, including a synthetic cannabinoid, are not listed on the product’s package. (Cannabinoids are structurally similar to THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the main psychoactive compound found in marijuana.)
The advertising on some Web sites state that all herbal mixtures sold contain only legal ingredients (no marijuana) and are nicotine and tobacco free; in fact, some of the benefits of smoking such may include helping people quit smoking tobacco. However, judging from some of the product names – Wild Lettuce Opium Extract, Black Russian Herbal Hash, Panama Red Ball, Hard Core and Blueberry Haze – one might wonder what’s really in these products!
Some of these herbal concoctions may contain Salvia divinorum or diviner’s sage, a hallucinogen sometimes compared to LSD. Mazatec shamans in Mexico use it to facilitate a visionary state of consciousness. Not everybody has a good trip with this stuff, so beware. The substance is legal in most countries and states of the U.S.
Of course people should realize that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s wise for people to consume it. After all, alcohol and tobacco, legal in most parts of the world, have caused countless billions of dollars of damage to social structures for hundreds of years. For good reason, the United States tried to ban the use of alcohol back in 1920.
Anyway, the use of K2, developed in Europe, is completely unregulated and its effects mostly undocumented. People, in search of a cheap and legal buzz, might as well go into the nearby field and harvest whatever is out there. Try some Jimson weed, if you will. It’s got white flowers. White flowers couldn’t hurt you, right? Jimson weed, a.k.a. locoweed, will send you to a really freaky place and perhaps drive you into a psychotic state as well. But, hey, it’s legal. In fact, Jimson weed has so many bad side effects the authorities haven’t bothered to make it illegal!
Prefer to consume a spice of some kind? Ingesting common nutmeg can get one stoned - and it can be smoked. Taken in large amounts, nutmeg has a similar chemical composition to MDMA (ecstasy). But if taken in excess, nutmeg can produce numerous unpleasant side effects, including a sense of impending death!
Naturally, marijuana, at times considered the most popular drug in the world, is still available. It’s illegal is most of the United States, yet 16 states (counting D.C.) have legalized its use for medicinal purposes. For example, California, often considered the bellwether state, decriminalized the use of a small amount of marijuana (less than an ounce) in 1976. And in 1996 California became the second state to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana (Virginia was the first in 1979).
Since marijuana, by some stretch of the imagination, can be considered “medicine,” if people must smoke to get high, the use of marijuana may be preferable to substances such as K2. At least the effects of marijuana have been studied for years and it is not considered addictive, though there’s great disagreement on this subject. Only the individual should decide for certain if it's okay to smoke it. Nevertheless, if you live in states such as Oklahoma or Texas, where possession of small amounts of marijuana can be a felony, either move to another state or avoid smoking it entirely.
So, if you try smoking any of this herbal stuff, be very careful. Just smoke a little at first and see what happens. Then proceed with caution. Or perhaps you should try medicinal marijuana instead. But only if you must.
After all, nobody needs to smoke anything, do they?

Truth in Advertising

(gatesofvienna.blogspot.com) As reported in the live-blog earlier today, the high-court judge in Vienna actually quoted an authoritative hadith in the courtroom: “Muhammad’s wife Aisha entered the marriage at age 6, which was consummated at the age of 9.” He then acknowledged that the passage was already public knowledge, and thus repeating it could not be punishable under the law.
He upheld Elisabeth’s conviction, however, based on a somewhat peculiar interpretation of Austrian law: to say “Mohammed had a thing for little girls” is an “excess of opinion” that cannot be tolerated. It constitutes ridicule, and is not justifiable.
An interesting and useful corollary can be derived from today’s ruling: it is now completely legal to quote in public the authoritative hadith about Mohammed’s sex acts with a nine-year-old girl. A precedent was established today — at least in Austria.
The judge’s decision gave one of our Austrian contacts a brilliant idea: rent space on a billboard and blazon that (legally acceptable) statement in four-foot-high letters where everyone in Vienna can read it!
With that notion in mind, I took the liberty of placing the relevant virtual text on an existing billboard in the city of Vienna:


“Muhammad’s wife Aisha entered the marriage at age 6, which was consummated at the age of 9.”— Higher Court of Vienna, decision Dec 20, 2011
An image with the same text in German is below the jump:

„Mohammeds Frau Aischa wurde mit 6 Jahren verheiratet. Die Ehe wurde vollzogen, als sie 9 Jahre alt war.“ — Laut OLG Wien, Urteil vom 20.12.2011
Once again, bear this fact in mind: displaying these words is now completely legal in Austria.
The high court has ruled. It’s on the record. An Austrian can publicly utter, write, chant, print, sing, or declaim those sentences without fear of legal retribution.
This means that Austrians who have enough money and initiative can recover at least a small measure of their freedom of speech, and at the same time educate their fellow citizens about the authoritative teachings of Islam.
It’s truth in advertising.

I've had a similar issue dealing with the first Amendment in America. I got the right to post the truth on the web, but commenting was libel. This had nothing to do with a world ideology, but a person... but this is the way the present generation of judges are ruling. It's quite threatening to those who believe in free expression... sadly people are just not alarmed. This really has little to do with Mohammad and Islam and has more to do with liberal culture.

Europes's Universities Are Slowly Being Made Judenrein

...Najwan Darwish...

...Moshe Sakal...

(Daled Amos) As Giulio Meotti writes in Arutz Sheva that Jews are being expelled from European universities in a way reminiscent of the 1930's:

Several days ago the Israeli leftist author Moshe Sakal was booted from an academic conference in Marseilles at the request of Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish.
The director of the conference, French-Jewish author Pierre Assouline, succumbed to the Arab pressure and said Sakal’s participation “was not crucial”.

A year ago, Marseilles’ university was the site of another anti-Jewish boycott, when the septuagenarian Israeli novelist Esther Orner, who is also a Holocaust survivor, was banned from the University of Provence after a group of Arab writers objected to her presence.
For the first time since Vichy’s collaborators, French faculties have been cleansed of the Jewish presence.
From the outside, European universities appear to many as genteel, cultured and tranquil oases of wisdom. In truth, European institutions of higher education are now brutal offsprings of anti-Jew hatred.

The list goes further than just kicking an Israeli off of a conference--other incidents include:

• Last spring, Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz was banned from Trondheim and Oslo universities because of his views on the Jewish state.
• Last September, Israeli professor from Ariel University, Ronen Cohen, was expelled from a German academic conference in Berlin (he was later reinstated after a storm of protest).

• Palestinian militants violently attacked Solon Solomon, a former Knesset staffer, at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

• Benny Morris, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was assaulted by a group of Muslims before a conference at the London School of Economics.

Then there more general expressions of antisemitism in European universities:

• The Spanish Housing Ministry disqualified Ariel University from competing in the international competition between university architecture departments to design and build a self-sufficient house using solar power.
  
• Rotterdam’s Erasmus University’s International Institute of Social Studies just hosted UE funded events in which Israel was equated with the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
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• Recently, Europe’s largest student union, the University Of London Union, joined the worldwide boycott of all Israeli products.
  
• The Cambridge University Students Union voted to call on the University to cut ties with Veolia, a company involved in “infrastructure projects in Israeli settlements”, and employed by the University on a waste disposal contract.

• In Italy, where a Parliamentary committee published the first report on anti-Semitism (one-fourth of Italians surveyed agreed with the statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews”), an Italian website called for the “blacklisting” of more than 160 Jewish professors who teach at Italian universities. The website accused the Jewish professors of “manipulating the minds of students” and “seeking to control Italian universities”.

Meotti concludes:

Will the European Union, many of whose prominent members either participated or acquiesced in the destruction of European Jewry 70 years ago, put a stop to the obscurantist conspiracy of the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich famously called “Hitler’s Professors” to expel the Jews (again) from the family of nations?

Can we really rely on the EU, which allowed matters to come this far to begin with?

Art Critic Takes on 'Noxious Vibes Emanating' from the Ultra-Rich '1 Percent'

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University and chairman of the Federal Reserve (left), presents the 2009 Criticism prize to Holland Cotter of The New York Times. via pulitzer.org

(mrc.org) New York Times art critic Holland Cotter’s year in review piece on Sunday opened with an awkward metaphorical shout-out to the lefty park-squatters of Occupy Wall Street and an excoriation of the “noxious” 1 percent: “Complacency Butts Up Against Game Changers.”

There was a lot of painting on view in Zuccotti Park this fall, in the form of Occupy Wall Street protest posters, free for the taking. And there was a lot of painting on the walls of New York art galleries, most of it post-M.F.A. eye candy with hefty price tags. The physical distance between Lower Manhattan and the Chelsea art zone is short, but the mental and moral gap felt immeasurable. The park was about light-on-its-feet, change-the-game politics. Chelsea -- leaden and inbred -- was about cash and caution.

True, art-worldlings did at least adopt one thing from the Occupy Wall Street movement: a new identifying label for the source of particularly noxious vibes emanating from art fairs, V.I.P. galas and museum boardrooms: namely the 1 percent. But why, you’ll ask, dis the ultrarich? Haven’t they historically been the primary bankrollers of great art?

Sure, except we’re not getting great art. By and large we’re getting high-polish mediocrity. You had really, truly, desperately need to believe in the perpetual wondrous newness value of contemporary work to conclude that the New York gallery season just past was anything more than a long flat line, with month after month of young artists rehashing yesteryear’s trends and veterans cannibalizing their own careers.

On July 22 Cotter revealed his suspicions of free-market capitalism in his review of an exhibit of Soviet and post-Soviet art: “Free-market capitalism brought its suppressions and exclusions, as artists discovered. Among other things, some felt, it undermined the purpose and value of art.”

I would agree... large public works are done best by totalitarian structures... and this is what is considered to be art. These same totalitarian structures have such contempt for Hollywood or Theme Parks, but that is where capitalism's expression comes from and if you step away from the academic egos you might realize that the majority of great 20th century culture (THE CINEMA YOU ART FAG! ...and maybe COMIC BOOKS) comes from Capitalism and not movements of large populations dedicated to a structure like a Pyramid or Murals on Ghetto walls.

Pepsico scraps '9/11 skyline' can design

(Pepsico)"We understand from some of our consumers that a Diet Pepsi can designed and sold in the Middle East portraying the growth of active regional cities has been misinterpreted. We are sorry that some people found this design insensitive, which was never our intention as the graphics on this can were inspired by the Dubai skyline. As soon as this matter was brought to our attention in October, we immediately stopped production of the can and took action to change the design. The new can, which features an abstract design, is already in the Middle East market. All old designs will be replaced over the next few weeks."

Another controversy was faced by Pepsico in 1990, when a limited run of "cool cans" included one design that would spell out the world "sex" if you stacked two cans on top of one another and turned them. Like with the Diet Pepsi "Urban Life" can, the offending image was much easier to see if you already knew what you were looking for.

From Bare Naked Islam via ibloga: Those Pepsi cans were manufactured in Dubai. Is the image a rendering of the Twin Towers? Evaluations on that matter have been mixed. Excerpt from Bare Naked Islam (citing this source):

So yesterday I was in the chow hall on my Forward Operating Base here in Afghanistan, and, as usual, I grabbed a diet cola to go with my meal. The Diet Pepsi served in our chow hall is not from the United States. It is manufactured in Dubai by Pepsi Arabia and says so right on the can.Yesterday, for some odd reason I looked–I mean I really LOOKED–at the subtle “clip art” on the background of the can.And I did a double take. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing… I examined the can for several minutes while my food grew cold, wondering if my eyes were deceiving me.
But there was no getting around it. To either side of the Pepsi logo, there was an image of a jet airliner over tall buildings. Looking at the image, I couldn’t help but think it alluded to 9/11.Three other soldiers were sitting with me at my table. One of the other soldiers asked what I was looking at so hard. Instead of answering, I handed him the can and said, “Look at the artwork on this can. Do you see what I see?”
He looked. His eyes grew wide. He turned the can from side to side. The other soldiers at the table looked, too. None of us said anything. The phrase “9/11″ never passed from our lips. We could LOOK at each other and understand we all saw the same thing, a “sneaky allusion to 9/11.”

Rabbinical assembly decries settler violence in W. Bank

(jpost.com) The Rabbinical Assembly decried Tuesday the series of violent acts carried out by "extremist Israeli Jews" this past week, and applauded Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's efforts to curb such incidents from taking place. According to the assembly, an international consortium of rabbis from the conservative movement, the right-wing activists "have greatly dishonored those with whom they disagree."  The assembly said it appreciated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's accepting of a plan to stop the actions of such activists, including a mandate to bring perpetrators of activist violence to court, increasing investigative units and tasking the IDF to detain demonstrators. (time.com) Israeli police officers scuffle with Jewish settlers during the evacuation of a disputed house in the West Bank city of Hebron, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008

it would be nice if this could be detailed as to what supposed wrong has been done. The law in Israel has wronged the settlers. It'd be nice if we knew what violence is being claimed so that an outsider can garner if it is worthy of state reprimanding. Personally my differences with the government are enough that I don't want to go to my homeland... even if I could afford it... and frankly I'd like a job offer and I find it annoying that the state of Israel has not made any offers... merely insults to Jews in the Galut.