Really. Good article here.

The two most widely recognized symbols of Islam are the crescent and the sword. Kind of amusing that Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo can be seen to feature both a crescent and a curved Islamic scimitar:

The crescent shape in Obama’s logo has the round part on top, just like a traditional crescent shaped mihrab (the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The animation shows the two most famous mihrabs in the world: the mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba, and the Prophet’s mihrab in Medina.

The lighter vertical column in the center-bottom of the logo, presumably meant to indicate reflected light, even conveys the full vertical shape of a traditional mihrab. The scimitar in the animation is from the flag of the Bosnian regiment of the Nazi SS.

If Obama himself had come up with this crescent logo, one might suspect Islamic intent, given his Islamic heritage. But the logo was not designed by Obama. It was designed by a Chicago based branding firm named Sender, which claims credit for coming up with: “a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a landscape implied by red and white stripes.”

Obama definitely deserves to be made fun of for having a fairly obvious crescent shape in his logo, given his efforts to convince the public that he is not Muslim. This is already an uphill climb, when both his grandmother and his cousin are telling documented lies about their religion, claiming to be Christian in one venue while professing themselves Muslim in another. Lying about being Christian: it’s an Obama family tradition!

Still, there is no indication that the crescent and scimitar shapes in Obama’s logo are intended to convey any Islamic meaning. A genuine coincidence apparently. At the opposite pole is the Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial:

Contrast 1: Architect Paul Murdoch CALLS his crescent shaped memorial a crescent

The Crescent of Embrace name proves that the Flight 93 crescent was and is intended to be seen as a crescent. Only very reluctantly did the Memorial Project change the name, and the changes they made to the design are purely cosmetic. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

Contrast 2: The Islamic symbolism is overt

It is not plausible that an architect, designing a memorial to people murdered by Islamic terrorists, could be oblivious to the fact that his memorial design is laid out in the shape of a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag, readily identifiable as a crescent and star flag to airliners like Flight 93 passing overhead.

The Memorial Project simply assumes that the Islamic symbol shapes CAN’T be intentional, which is about like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and assuming it CAN’T be intentional. Do these people even remember the day they are supposed to be memorializing?

Contrast 3: The Flight 93 crescent contains still further Islamic symbolism

It turns out that the giant crescent points to Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is a well known structure in the Islamic world. It is a mihrab (as seen in the above animation), which gives the direction that Muslims are to face for prayer.

Everyone at the Memorial Project is fully aware that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. This according to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird. Again, they all just assume that this MUST be an innocent mistake (the equivalent of seeing as SECOND airliner fly into the Trade Center, and STILL assuming it can’t POSSIBLY be intentional).

Contrast 4: Proof of intent

Paul Murdoch PROVES that the Mecca orientation is intentional by repeating it in the crescents of trees that surround the minaret like Tower of Voices. Below is an animated run-through of the repeated Mecca-orientations (2 minutes).

You can restart the animation by refreshing the page:

Animated GIF: copy and paste. You can email it! (Animation restarts each time email is opened.) Click image for larger animation, if your connection is fast enough (1MB).

Crescent of Embrace site-plan, showing both the central crescent and the Tower of Voices, here.

Contrast 5: the designer’s own thematic description is clearly terrorist memorializing

The designers of Obama’s logo offer a clearly innocent thematic description of their creation. You can tell just by looking at it what it is MEANT to signify: a white sun coming up into a blue sky over red and white rows of fruited plain. Even the uncanny intimation of the vertical sides of a traditional mihrab are fully explained by the “sun” reflecting off the red and white “landscape.”

In contrast, Paul Murdoch’s thematic account of his design is as nakedly pro-terrorist as his crescent and star layout. Murdoch says that the crescent comes from the terrorists breaking the circle. That is, they broke our liberty-loving circle, and turn it into a giant Islamic-shaped Mecca-oriented crescent.

As Tom Burnett Sr. put it in his letter to American people, asking for help with our petition to keep the crescent design off of his murdered son’s gravesite:

I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat.

And lest anyone thinks that the giant crescent is no longer present, the Park Service website makes clear that, while the redesign looks more like a circle, the circle is still broken:

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site.

The breaks are in the exact same places as before and the unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely unchanged. It it still points to Mecca. It is still the world’s largest mihrab by a factor of a hundred. The only difference is that now a chunk of the broken off part of the circle is included in the design, which is perfectly consistent with its original terrorist memorializing theme. The terrorists still break our liberty-loving circle and still turn it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent.

So there you have it. Dueling crescents! Obama’s crescent logo exemplifies innocent coincidence (however guilty Obama may be of lying about his religion). In contrast, the Flight 93 crescent exemplifies proven intent. (More of architect Paul Murdoch’s endless proofs of intent here and here.)

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I’m not sure if she meant THIS guy though…

Uugh.

ELKTON, Md. (AP) - Starting next year across the country, rape victims too afraid or too ashamed to go to police can undergo an emergency-room forensic rape exam, and the evidence gathered will be kept on file in a sealed envelope in case they decide to press charges.

Things you do on a date can come back to bite you years later now. I suggest everyone start videotaping sexual encounters to provide a way to prove a rape didn’t occur. Or something like it anyway.

Read this.

The United Nations can save Burma

THE MILITARY junta in Burma is failing the most basic responsibility of any government to take care of its citizens. In the wake of the devastating typhoon that killed at least 28,000 people and left many thousands more destitute, the international community has marshaled a large-scale humanitarian response to help the millions affected by the deadly storm.
[…]
If not the national government, who can protect the people? The question has long been raised in the context of genocide and large-scale crimes against humanity, and three years ago all the members of the UN provided a solemn answer: the international community. The members agreed that governments have a responsibility to protect their people, and the international community had to assume that responsibility if a government cannot or will not do so.

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France suggested that the United Nations invoke this collective responsibility to protect the people of Burma. Kouchner knows better than most what is really at stake here, having been the founder and leader of the humanitarian relief group Doctors Without Borders.

I’m humored by the blissful ignorance of the writers of this Op/Ed. They live in the world of Tinker Bell and Puff the Magic Dragon…and if the French want to DO something about Burma, let them show they have the balls to DO it. We all know where it will lead (no where). The US has offered help; we have planes and ships full of supplies, medicine, food and other items. We’re not going to deliver this without permission simply because, we know the people of Burma will not see the stuff. Even with the blessing of the junta, we know the hurt and suffering will never see benefit.

Stupid people have their dreams of the UN Saving the World. It makes for good public relations, but it’s nothing more than a dream. If we really want to save those people the world would stand up, beat the junta out of existence and take over that small country. That isn’t going to happen. And the UN and the French will never lead such an adventure.

Here uncensored (and unauthorized) are the collected replies of the management here at ARS:

Duncan

He heard me loading my M-4 and realized if he didn’t move out of range right away, he’d be my next dinner.

Raven

He was a dickless liberal wimp without any balls who decided to get out of the way because he knew he couldn’t handle an encounter with a real woman. If only he’d joined the Marines, he’d have learned how to be a man rooster instead of a capon. What’s the opposite of **THUD**…?

civil truth

That’s a very deep riddle that has puzzled the great philosophers down through the ages.

In the earliest known historical allusion, it was recorded that Aristotle posed this question to Archimedes at an alpha prayer breakfast. That same afternoon, while taking his daily bath, Archimedes in a flash of insight, leapt from his tub, and rushed through the streets of Syracuse towards Aristotle’s house, brandishing a sword and shouting Μολὼν λαβέ. Fortunately for the latter, the local gendarmerie arrived first and promptly hauled Archimedes off to a padded cell (after relieving him of possession of his weapon). After calming down a bit, Archimedes turned his attention to pondering how he could manage to displace the prison walls from his path (which later gave rise to his famous boast that he would move the earth if someone could provide him with a place to stand).

The great Roman philosopher Seneca, in response to the badgerings of his students, posted this famous quatrain as a response:

Obile heres ago,
Fortibus est in aro.
Nobile deis dux,
Summa causen, summa trux.

After these verses were brought to the attention of the Emperor Nero, Seneca received his just reward: an imperial sentence of death by poison.

Centuries later, when Voltaire was asked this question, he immediately leapt to his feet and shouted: Vivre libre ou mourir!, which historians have later memorialized as the opening salvo of the French Revolution.

Scholars have since spilled much ink (including at least eleven books and six Ph.D. theses) attempting to decipher the origins of this astounding declaration. However, recent unpublished memoires of Voltaire found at a yard sale in Yardley, Pennsylvania in 2005 have revealed a more pedestrian explanation: Voltaire, as he confessed later to his landlord, simply had misheard the question and thought that his wife was demanding that he put out the garbage across the street. Indeed, he was quite miffed that this phrase of his should have sparked the overthrow of the hated French monarchy, whereas his learned treatises had evoked scarcely a ripple on the lake of history.

* * * * * * * * * *

With all due to respect to the great masters who have gone before me, I would humbly reply:

Because he knew where his next meal was coming from.

The President: C’mon, let me nuke that bastard.
Commander Gilmour: Are you suggesting that we blow up the moon?
The President: Would you miss it?
[looks around the table]
The President: Would you miss it?

Well, after reading these two news stories ’bout the People’s Democratic Republic of California …

Members of the anti-war group Code Pink gathered Friday with a cauldron of flowers outside a controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center in Berkeley, Calif., to use witchcraft to rally against the Iraq war.

Code Pink members unfurled a pink banner reading “Troops Home Now” and waved signs as they began the protest, which they promised would include incantations and pointy hats for a “witches, crones and sirens” day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

A few women stood outside the recruiting center Friday with signs that read “Peace” and “Warmongers — Eating Our Children for Profit.”

A group called the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco has launched a ballot initiative that would rename a city sewage treatment plant the “George W. Bush Sewage Plant.”

A petition is being circulated that would put the measure up for a vote in November. If it passes, it will rename the city’s Oceanside Treatment Plant for the 43rd president of the United States.

Republican Party spokesman Leo Lacayo said it’s just another move from the “hate Bush crowd.”

“First of all, it’s insulting,” Lacayo said. “Second of all, it demonstrates to what lows some people will reach in order to oppose this president and the policies that have kept this country safe during his mandate.”

Virginia-born activist and ordained minister John Rinaldi, a co-sponsor of the petition who ran unsuccessfully for mayor last year under his nickname “Chicken John,” said the initiative would turn “every toilet in San Francisco into basically a shrine for George W. Bush and all his great achievements in his eight years as our commander in chief.”

I ask you, if California were to fall into the Pacific, would you miss it… would you? Honestly.