Posts Tagged ‘Charlie Hebdo’

Hurricane/Flood Update for August 31, 2017

Thursday, August 31st, 2017

Welcome to a short, extra late Hurricane/flooding update, since I was busy much of the day working on this giant post about my library on my non-political blog.

The death toll from Harvey is now up to 38.

Some links:

  • Beaumont had their water supply knocked out by the flood.
  • Waters begin to recede in Port Arthur, but tons of homes and businesses are still flooded.
  • The BBC offers up a rainfall total map for Harvey. 40+ inches over five days is pretty hard to plan for…
  • Vice President Mike Pence and Governor Greg Abbott visit Rockport.
  • President Donald Trump has pledged $1 million of his own money for Hurricane relief.
  • Direct FEMA Assistance website.
  • Salvation Army disaster recovery.
  • JJ Watt has raised $10 million for flood relief so far, including $1 million from Wal-Mart. Update: over $12 million now, and headed for a new $15 million goal.
  • Charlie Hebdo brings the dumbeth. My reply:

  • LinkSwarm for May 5, 2015

    Tuesday, May 5th, 2015

    Happy Cinco de Mayo! My efforts to move the LinkSwarm back to it’s usual Friday position by posting early have failed, so I’m trying to get it there by letting it drift back one day later each time…

  • “Canadian Partnership Shielded Identities of Donors to Clinton Foundation.” Just in case you missed that. Because trying to keep up with all the sleazy bribery angles of the Clinton Foundation is like trying to drink from the firehose…
  • Speaking of which:

  • “Hillary may want to talk about inequality, but is there any better example of a couple who gorged at the trough of Wall Street and foreign autocrats, chose not to follow the rules, never could stop chasing more and more money and (in Hillary Clinton’s case) went to extraordinary lengths to destroy “personal” e-mails that might have pulled back the curtain on all that?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hillary hires Scott Hogan, an organizer of the failed “Everytown” gun-grabber astroturf to run her “Grassroots” campaign. Hopefully he’ll bring Hillary the same outstanding success he brought to gun control…
  • Russian stooges in Ukraine: “Soviet terror famine? No, that was all just a big misunderstanding!” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Islamic State murders 600 more Yezidis. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • The Islamic State also claimed post facto credit for the Garland attack.
  • Speaking of which, here’s an interview with Bosch Fawstin, the winner of the Draw Mohammed contest. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
  • Emergency room visits up under ObamaCare.
  • Lefty lawyer Laurence Tribe calls Obama’s “force everyone to use green energy without congressional approval” plan unconstitutional. “After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.”
  • Drug cartel violence heats up in Mexico: “Gunmen shot down a Mexican military helicopter Friday in the western state of Jalisco, killing three soldiers, and set fire to buses, blocked roads, and attacked banks and gas stations in a sharp escalation of violence against the government.” This is evidently the handiwork of the New Generation drug cartel.
  • Minimum wage hike hits San Francisco Comic Store.
  • When the Social Justice Warriors started attacking the company Protein World over their “Beach Ready” ad campaign, Protein World didn’t cave, they fought back. Result: They earned an additional $1 million in four days.
  • Not understanding that the Presidency is not an entry level job, and that the Republican field was already packed, Ben Carson joins the Presidential race.
  • Ditto Carly Fiorina, whose tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was not an unqualified success, and whose 2010 California Senate race lost to Barbara Boxer by 16 points.
  • And evidently Mike Huckabee is going to run as well.
  • Texas Democrats are furious that a new ethics bill might keep them from scratching each other’s backs. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
  • The Austin American Statesman is moving printing and packing operations to San Antonio and Houston, resulting in about a 100 jobs lost in Austin. Previously. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Social Justice Warriors can’t even win elections at UCLA.
  • Austin’s Highland Mall closed on April 30th.
  • 6 Writers Boycott PEN Award to Charlie Hebdo, Rushdie Strikes Back

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

    Six Writers have announced that they object to PEN giving a free speech award to Charlie Hebdo. The reason? Because Muslims are “disempowered.” Also known as “six writers whose work you should never buy”: Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)

    This received fierce pushback from the man who radical Muslims want to see suffer the same fate as Charlie Hebdo writers: Salman Rushdie. Mincing no words, he called the boycotting writers “pussies.”

    “The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”

    More:

    This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority.

    It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well-funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.

    These six writers have made themselves the fellow travelers of that project. Very, very bad move.

    I fully expect the Social Justice Warriors to be more incensed over Rushdie’s use of the word “pussies” than they were over radical Muslims gunning down Charlie Hebdo writers in the first place…

    #TangoDown: Anonymous vs. ISIS

    Saturday, March 7th, 2015

    Here’s something that falls into the category of “undernews,” i.e. potential significant events occurring below the detectable threshold of the mainstream media.

    Hacking group Anonymous (or a certain fraction thereof; things are always murky in the cyberunderground) have decided to purge Twitter of ISIS supporters in Operation #TangoDown.

    This follows ISIS threatening to kill Twitter employees over blocking ISIS-related accounts.

    Within seconds of Anonymous-related accounts @CtrlSec, @CtrlSec0, @CtrlSec1 or @CtrlSec2 designating a Twitter account as an ISIS-supporting account, those accounts are getting suspended.

    This follows previous pro-Islamic website hacking attacks, and resulting Anonymous counterattacks, following the Charlie Hebdo attack.

    One need not approve of all Anonymous’ actions (they’ve targeted Israel over Gaza) to see the elimination of the accounts of several thousand (my estimate) supporters of a designated terrorist irganization as a good thing.

    If members of the Islamic State really want to live in the 7th century, they should just step away from Twitter (and computers, and cell phones, and indoor plumbing) entirely…

    (Hat tip: @ColorMeRed’s Twitter Feed.)

    Still More Charlie Hebdo Fallout

    Wednesday, January 14th, 2015

    Will the Charlie Hebdo killings be a turning point in how Europe deals with Jihadism? Color me skeptical, as Europe’s elites seem to have an infinite capacity to keep hitting the snooze button, and left-wing political parties need Muslim votes too badly to speaking honestly about jihad. But for now the furor over Charlie Hebdo killings refuses to die down:

  • Who do you think some Muslims blamed for the Charlie Hebdo attack? Go ahead, guess.
  • Obama’s Harriet Miers.
  • A rundown of which media outlets are and aren’t brave enough to publish the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons.
  • Obama didn’t attend the Paris rally because he didn’t want to be there. “If George Clooney can draw Hollywood applause for saying ‘we will not walk in fear’ of terrorists, he must realize that standing up to them means more than ‘Je Suis Charlie’ lapel pins. It means militarily defeating them on a global scale. That concept is kryptonite to President Obama, which is why he will never attend a rally that could remotely lead to that conclusion.”
  • Indeed, the Obama Administration admits it will push media outlets to supress anti-jihad articles. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born Mayor on Muslims who do not appreciate western freedoms: “Fuck off.”
  • The American Freedom Defense Initiative will protest the Charlie Hebdo killings outside an “Islamophobia” conference in Garland, Texas on Saturday.
  • The supercut of media outlets slamming Obama for not attending the Paris march:

  • Blogroll Addition: Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage

    Tuesday, January 13th, 2015

    Today’s blogroll addition is Will Shetterly’s Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage blog (or SJWar for short).

    Will is fellow science fiction writer, and not only is he a leftist, he’s an actual socialist. But he’s done a fine job documenting and opposing the ant-free-speech agenda of the SJW set, especially in the realm of science fiction.

    I kept meaning to add SJWar to the blogroll for a while, but every time I was about to, Will would go “That’s it, I quit, blog’s over!” only to start it up again a few days later to document the latest SJW offense logic or the principles of a free society. Here’s a bon mot on the Charlie Hebdo killings today: “Saying the speech of someone who was murdered went too far is like saying the clothes of a rape victim were too provocative.”

    I’ve created a new Victimhood Identity Politics category to list SJWar under, and have moved The Other McCain (which has featured R. S. McCain’s masterful dissections of core feminist texts and dogmas for quite a while) there as well.

    More Charlie Hebdo Fallout

    Saturday, January 10th, 2015

    So the Charlie Hebdo killers are dead, but the manhunt for a female accomplice implicated in the deaths of four people during the siege of a Kosher food store in Paris continues. Here are various reactions and pieces on the Charlie Hebdo attack:

  • Good news! Despite the many deaths, Charlie Hebdo is putting together their next issue. “It must come out next Wednesday, with 1 million copies to be printed, about 20 times their usual circulation.”

    A journalist explains that a crowdfunding campaign, spontaneously created on the Internet by strangers, has already collected 98,000 euros in less than 24 hours. Charlie’s survivors are inundated with subscription requests that they can’t handle at the moment. Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, speaks. “There’s money arriving from everywhere. Assistance, space, personnel to deal with requests …” “We have received support from lots of media sources,” echoes Christophe Thévenet, another lawyer for the newspaper. “There are donations, already 250,000 euros from the Press and Pluralism Association, the million euros pledged by Fleur Pellerin [the French Minister of Culture and Communication]. … You are going to have finances like never before at Charlie!”

  • “One of the spontaneous social-media reactions to the Charlie Hebdo massacre today was the Twitter hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie”). It’s an admirable sentiment, resonant with the classic post-9/11 Le Monde cover ‘Nous sommes tous Americains.’ It’s also totally inaccurate.”

    So no, we’re all not Charlie—few of us are that good, and none of us are that brave. If more of us were brave, and refused to yield to the bomber’s veto, and maybe reacted to these eternally recurring moments not by, say, deleting all your previously published Muhammad images, as the Associated Press is reportedly doing today, but rather by routinely posting newsworthy images in service both to readers and the commitment to a diverse and diffuse marketplace of speech, then just maybe Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t have stuck out so much like a sore thumb. It’s harder, and ultimately less rewarding to the fanatical mind, to hit a thousand small targets than one large one.

  • Mark Steyn elaborates on the theme in “#JeSuisCharlie – But You’re Not.”

    The French establishment is co-opting these brave men’s deaths for their own purposes, and for the most part the world’s media are helping them get away with it. I spent much of Thursday on TV and radio, and my irritation with the dismal #JeSuisCharlie campaign increased as the day wore on. The self-flattering evasiveness of all those cartoonists around the world offering lame variations of “the pen is mightier than the sword” was especially feeble.

    Steyn also offers this sad, telling point:

    I can’t claim to have known Georges Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist among the dead on Wednesday, but I met him briefly, a few years ago. Via Laura Rosen Cohen, I learn of the strange, circular journey of his life and death. His father was a Polish Jew who fled to Tunisia to lead a life free of pogroms. Georges was born there in 1934. Two years later, his dad was murdered, and the family moved again, this time to France.

    And on Wednesday, like his father, the son was killed.

    Wolinski père fled Jew-hate in Europe to be murdered in the Muslim world.

    Wolinski fils fled Jew-hate in the Muslim world to be murdered in Europe, by Muslims.

  • Anyone who really wants to say “I Am Charlie” should participate in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
  • Richard Littlejohn expounds on how Social Justice Warriors and Victimhood Identity Politics help enable radical Islam:

    however. When it comes to appeasing militant Islam, my own trade is equally culpable.

    So is the entire apparatus of the State. We pussy-foot around anything which may cause offence to Muslims, partly out of good manners but primarily because we are worried about the potential backlash.

    The reason most of the media in the Western world steered clear of republishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed wasn’t because they were not newsworthy but because of fears that men in balaclavas with machine-guns might march into the front office and start firing at random.

    Snip.

    Islam is just one of the New Establishment’s favoured client groups. Exciting ‘hate crime’ laws have been invented to grant them special privileges and punish their critics.

    So mad mullahs in Midlands madrassas can call for homosexuals to be stoned to death. But a Christian preacher who objects to gay marriage can expect to be arrested and given a criminal record.

    We have also created a ‘victim’ culture, which allows minority groups to justify any kind of bad behaviour on the grounds that they are being oppressed.

    You didn’t have to look far yesterday to find allegedly ‘respected’ voices prepared to blame the staff of Charlie Hebdo for bringing the wrath of the Islamists down on themselves. They shouldn’t have been so ‘provocative’.

  • “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.”
  • A couple of years old, but quite relevant:

    (Hat tip: The Jawa Report.)

  • Some tweets:

  • Bill Maher on the Charlie Hebdo Killings

    Friday, January 9th, 2015

    Bill Maher once again states the obvious to those unwilling to listen, harkening back to the days when liberals believed in free speech rather than labeling it “hate crimes.”

    A few quotes:

  • “In 10 Muslim countries, you can get the death penalty just for being gay. They chop heads off in the square in Mecca. Mecca is their Vatican City. If they were chopping the heads off of Catholic gay people, wouldn’t there be a bigger outcry among liberals?”
  • “There are certain people in the world who want waivers on free speech.”
  • “Hundreds of millions of [Muslims] applaud an attack like this.”
  • The second half of the interview is Maher on the Bill Cosby accusations. But at least watch the first six minutes.

    (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)

    Problem: That “Tiny Minority” Of Muslim Extremists Isn’t

    Thursday, January 8th, 2015

    In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the MSM has trotted out the usual talking points that such extremists views and actions are “not about Islam” and represent “only a tiny percentage” of all Muslims.

    There’s just one tiny problem with this theory: It isn’t true.

    Polls show that something like 20% of Muslim populations worldwide agree with terrorists, and far more agree with their aims as far as the imposition of Sharia law. Other findings from Pew (which is rarely accused of a right-wing bias):

  • Muslim support for stoning as a punishment for adultery is more than 20% in all countries surveyed.
  • Support for the death penalty for apostasy ranges from 4% of Muslims in Kazakhstan to 86% in Egypt.
  • Fully 99% of Afghan Muslims want Sharia law, which makes it hard to regard our long-term intervention there as anything but a failure.
  • In the UK, in another poll from 2006, 20% of surveyed Muslims supported the 2005 7/7 suicide attacks, and 40% supported the imposition of Sharia law.

    So: Not a “small minority.” And, as Brigitte Gabriel notes in the video below, so what if “most” Muslims are peaceful? The “mostly peaceful” citizens of Germany, Japan, China and the Soviet Union didn’t prevent those who controlled their governments from murdering millions:

    One of the first steps toward dealing with the problem of radical Islam is to stop repeating comforting lies about it.

    Jihadists Kill 10+ at Satirical French Newspaper

    Wednesday, January 7th, 2015

    Again.

    Masked gunmen opened fire in the offices of a French satirical newspaper on Wednesday in Paris, the police said, with initial reports saying that as many as 12 people had been killed and 10 wounded.

    And here’s the reason the New York Times buries ten paragraphs deep:

    The newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, has been attacked in the past for satirizing Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Its offices were firebombed in 2011 after publishing a cartoon of the prophet on its cover promising “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing!”

    Obviously it’s time to bring back Everyone Draw Mohammed Day. So mark your calendars for May 20th.