By Debbie Schlussel
[NOTE: I did not screen “Monsters vs. Aliens,” though I may try to see it later and if so, will post my review after that.]
After other movies about scary possessed houses, like “The Amityville Horror” and even the bad 1981 Parker Stevenson TV movie, “This House Possessed,” “The Haunting in Connecticut” doesn’t seem that scary.
Yes, there are parts where I jumped or screamed, but mostly I alternately laughed out loud and was disgusted. “Haunting” relies more on morbid bodies, body parts, and visions of dead spirits to scare you. And while it half does, it also makes you wonder . . . about bad story lines with gaping holes.
Based on a true story, Virgina Madsen plays the mother of three kids, who is also raising her teen niece and has a reformed drunk for a husband. Her teen son is very sick with cancer. The constant hour-long drives from their distant home to take her son for cancer treatments is grinding on both herself and her son, and she looks for a rental home in the city where the hospital is located. The family is strapped for cash and she settles on a home which used to be a mortuary.

Soon, the cancer-stricken son begins to see ghosts and visions of spirits throughout the house. Some are scary, and others–walking charred bodies–are just laughable like from a zombie movie. The rest of the family thinks these visions are just the imagination of a kid sick with cancer. They can’t see these spirits, and a priest, who is also sick with cancer, tells the son that those dying of cancer are in a netherworld, where they can see the dead.
A major hole in the story, which glared out at me, is when the family finally starts seeing the haunting effects of bodies once embalmed in the house. Why don’t they just leave the house and check into a motel, instead of just cowering together on a bed? Well, then the movie would end.
A box of dried eyelids is just gross. Scenes and pictures of people with giant ectoplasmic emanations from haunted people’s faces simply made me laugh out loud endlessly. They were more silly than scary. Scenes featuring the relapsed drunken dad were stupid and irrelevant to the story. They felt like they were just thrown in for unnecessary extra melodrama.
If you want to get frightened, there are several parts of the movie that will make you jump. But, in the end, this movie wasn’t that scary.
If there’s one thing I liked about this movie, it’s the constant belief in G-d that’s evident in the mother’s character and the priest. In the end, that belief wins out.
There’s nothing offensive about “The Haunting in Connecticut.” There’s just nothing special or exciting about it, either. Definitely creepy, but more gratuitously so than scary. The movie was just okay. Not bad, but not great, either.
This movie is PG-13. It’s creepiness and gross-out factors are not for young kids. But for teens, it’s fine. It’s morbid, but not offensive in any way. Just kinda silly.
ONE REAGAN.

By Debbie Schlussel
**** SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATE ****
A top American military official sent me an article decrying an alleged “secret plan” by future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “expand Israeli settlements.”
The article goes on to talk about how Netanyahu supposedly plans to actually allow developers to build neighborhoods and housing in suburban Jerusalem. Yup, these so-called “settlements” are actually homes on Jewish-owned land in suburban Jerusalem, as they usually are–not some distant encroachment on land held by anyone else in the distant nomadic Arabian desert.
The nerve of those Jews actually wanting to live in and around their capital. You know, the capital that has that famous Temple envisioned by King Dawud? and ultimately built by King Suleman? for some religion that apparently must be anything but Judaism.
The military official asked for my response to the article, and here’s what I wrote. It echoes what I’ve repeatedly written on this site about this absurd apartheid-housing position that apparently the world believes must apply to the Jews and the Jews only:
Conventional Wisdom: This–BAD . . .

. . . This–GOOD, VERY GOOD:

Beware! There Are Jews in This Town!

I see no problem with this [the building of these homes] whatsoever. I don’t believe in redlining Jews and telling them they can’t live in certain neighborhoods. That’s, as you know, against the law here in America. So now that these Palestinians are supposed to be such “democrats” and “liberals” with their “free elections,” why are they are allowed to tell Jews where they can and cannot live?
In most of history, to the winners of war go the spoils of victory. As a military man, I’m sure you know this. Apparently, there is an exception to this rule when the winners of the war are Jews, since Israel has been forced to constantly give up land it won when i’s neighbors started wars against it. I don’t see us telling non-Hispanics they can’t live in certain parts of Texas and California, etc. These “controversial West Bank settlements” are actually neighborhoods in suburban Jerusalem. I don’t recall us telling the White gentrifiers of the Georgetown and Adams Morgan areas of Washington, DC that they can’t live there b/c it’s Black and Hispanic land. These “settlements” are homes within a stone’s throw of the Jewish Temple/the Western Wall and a little farther away, the cave holding the bodies/graves of the Jewish patriarchs. It’s incredible that anyone would claim they are not allowed to live there or that it’s “not their land.” Eugene V. Rostow, who helped negotiate various UN partitions and resolutions regarding Israel ,crafted language specifically vague on the so-called “settlements” (which weren’t called that back then) because he was afraid of the redlining against Jews that is now attempted to be exercised with protestations such as that implied in this article. [There is nothing illegal–contrary to frequent public outrage–about Jewish so-called settlements.]
I look forward to the day when people like you send me articles about the redlining of Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, where those that are allowed to live there are forced to live in refugee camps and can’t own land anywhere else in those countries. (The same goes for Kuwait where there are so many Palestinians and they are discriminated against by their fellow Arabs.) That’s what we should be concerned about. It’s the real reason there is even a “Palestinian problem” to begin with–that and the fact that they can’t stand any non-Muslims having a country in their midst, esp. the Jews.
If Israel would have immediately annexed all of this land, built homes on it, and expelled the Palestinians (as the Arab Muslim countries all did with 1 million Jews), it wouldn’t have this festering problem in its midst and this exploding birth rate bomb which will eventually explode from this enemy within. The difference is that Israel absorbed many of the million Jews and their families who were expelled by the Muslim countries and the Muslim countries used their Palestinians (whom they refused to absorb) as a political football stuck in refugee camps. That is other than King Hussein, whose Jordan is the real Palestine. The late King Hussein murdered, as you should know, 10,000 Palestinians (you’ve heard of “Black September”?) rather than give them their land. And the world allowed this, unlike the way they won’t allow Jews to live in Jerusalem and its suburbs without hassling them about “settlements.”

When we as Americans support redlining in a country not our own, we support it anywhere, including our own country.
When we support Nazi-style policies restricting Jews to certain ghettos, telling them where they can and can’t live, we’re on the path to more such fascism.
**** UPDATE: I forgot to link, earlier today, to Eugene V. Rostow’s important 1991 New Republic article, “Resolved: Are the Settlements Legal? Israeli West Bank Policies,” documenting how the Israeli settlements are completely legal and why. It is an important read.

By Debbie Schlussel
**** SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES ****
As we know, many Muslim “wives” and their husbands retain separate and different surnames so that they can game the system–game security databases, game federal investigators, and game various welfare agencies and tax-funded entitlement programs. There is nothing in Islam preventing or requiring a wife from not taking on her husband’s last name . . . nothing, except cheating, deceiving, and ultimately destroying the “infidels.”
But an American wannabe big-time comic-book authoress and Muslima convert wants to turn legitimate security questions and other proper security measures into a victimhood propaganda comic book series. And she’s succeeded, getting DC Comics to make a whole comic book series out of her baseless “Islamophobia” whinings. She’s also succeeded in getting a Wall Street Journal “reporter” with a Muslim-sounding first-name to write a sympathetic, apologist article about it.

Muslima Convert & Comic Book Propagandist G. Willow Wilson
I’ve repeatedly written on this site how Marvel and DC–the two major comic book hero publishers–have repeatedly pandered to Muslims of the extremist variety (as if there’s any other kind) in storylines, characters, and even internships at movie studios.
But it keeps getting worse.

At an airport in Amsterdam several years ago, writer G. Willow Wilson ran into a problem on her way back to Denver. Ms. Wilson, a white woman and Muslim convert from New Jersey, was grilled by an official at the gate for the plane and had to defend why she had a different surname from her husband. “The situation was funny to me,” Ms. Willow says, so she decided to write a comic book about the not-so-friendly skies.
In her comic series “Air,” Ms. Wilson follows a flight attendant who gets drawn into a magical world of intrigue after encountering a mysterious secret agent. Ms. Wilson’s previous comic, “Cairo,” was a surrealistic jaunt through her favorite city and part-time home. She fell in love with the Egyptian capital after a trip there during college. “Nothing works, but everything works out,” she says about the city.
As a child, Ms. Wilson was attracted to comics for their conflicts. “X-Men” was a particular favorite. “[Comics] formed my ideas about heroism and they were more at my level than the bigger classic literatures,” she says.
“Air,” published by Vertigo (the adult imprint of DC Comics) and illustrated by M.K. Perker, is part of Ms. Wilson’s attempt to make sense of her life as a Muslim after 9/11. She says that in the wake of the terror attacks, “It was weird and strange to be a white convert.” She soon found that the very things that made her life difficult also provided great raw material for her comics.

Um, being asked why you have a different last name than your husband at an airport isn’t exactly a “difficult life.” Sounds like someone is very spoiled and very militant about every little thing.
Yeah, remember that BS from Muslims on 9/11 and 9/12 about how they want to help us?
Some of us knew this was pure fertilizer the minute it was uttered. Others are still buying the BS by the truckload. And it will be the slow death of us.
**** UPDATE: Here’s a comic-book pane from G. Willow Wilson’s Islamist propaganda comic book published by DC Comics. (I tried to scan it the best I could, but the original is not readable, and a scan is only as good as the original, at best.) It’s not even accurate, since airline officials long ago stopped being required to ask you who packed your bags. But it’s hardly “Islamophobic” to ask someone traveling on a one-way ticket to New York from an international destination, why they are doing so. That’s called being responsible and vigilant. It’s called security. Because, you know, no Islamic terrorist ever bought a one-way ticket to a U.S. destination, right? If that’s “Islamophobic,” we might as well just pack up and convert to Islam right now. But for these self-proclaimed victims, everything is victimhood for Muslims. Everything.

**** UPDATE #2: Looks like G. Willow Wilson is upset that I called her out on her ridiculous Islamic propaganda. But she’s even more upset that her comic book editors “are Jewish, gay or atheist.”

Thanks to David Lunde/Lundesigns for this JPEG
Yeah, time for one of your religion’s ritual “theo-cleansing” jihads on the comic book industry, right Willow?

By Debbie Schlussel
You know the four Oakland police officers who were murdered by Lovelle Mixon over the weekend?
Well, apparently, according to a mob of Mixon supporters from the largely Black neighborhood where he gunned down the cops, these men who were just doing their job–and got brutally murdered for it–are “terrorists” and this Mixon creep is a hero.
Sickening:

About 60 people marched and rallied in Oakland on Wednesday to condemn the police and honor Lovelle Mixon, who was killed by Oakland police after he fatally shot four officers Saturday.
“OPD you can’t hide – we charge you with genocide,” chanted the demonstrators as they marched along MacArthur Boulevard, near the intersection with 74th Avenue where Mixon, 26, a fugitive parolee, gunned down two motorcycle officers who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He killed two more officers who tried to capture him where he was hiding in his sister’s apartment nearby.

The protest was organized by the Oakland branch of the Uhuru Movement, whose flyers for the march declared, “Stop Police Terror.” Many marchers wore T-shirts featuring Mixon’s photo, including a woman identified by march organizers as Mixon’s mother. The woman declined to comment and gave her name only as Athena.
Lolo Darnell, one of Mixon’s cousins at the demonstration, said, “He needs sympathy too. If he’s a criminal, everybody’s a criminal.”
Asked about police allegations that Mixon was suspected in several rapes, including that of a 12-year-old girl, marcher Mandingo Hayes said, “He wasn’t a rapist. I don’t believe that.”
Bystanders had mixed reactions. Nicole Brown said that she can’t condone murder but that police don’t respect residents of the area. Daria Belt said she had no sympathy for the protesters but sympathized for Mixon’s family.

Here’s a little reality check. Mixon gunned these men down, even after they were down on the ground and injured. One of them was put on life support, so that his organs could be donated, per his wishes. Yup, they sound like real “terrorists” to me. And here’s a tiny irrelevant detail: Mixon was a parolee on the lam, whose DNA had just been linked to teen rape.

The day before Lovelle Mixon unleashed a barrage of gunfire that killed four Oakland police officers, the department’s investigators learned that DNA evidence had linked the fugitive parolee to an unsolved rape this year, authorities said Monday.
The possibility that Mixon feared being arrested for rape is a key factor for investigators trying to understand why the 26-year-old Oakland man opened fire on two motorcycle officers who pulled him over for a traffic stop Saturday afternoon at 74th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard.
Witnesses said Mixon stood over the wounded officers, Sgt. Mark Dunakin, 40, and Officer John Hege, 41, and fired at least one round into each with a handgun before fleeing on foot to his sister’s apartment half a block down 74th, acting Police Chief Howard Jordan said.
Although the reason for the traffic stop isn’t known, Jordan said witness accounts indicate that Dunakin, possibly suspicious of what turned out to be a fake driver’s license, motioned to Hege to remove Mixon from his car just before Mixon opened fire.
When SWAT officers, acting on a tip, later stormed the nearby apartment, Mixon opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing Sgt. Ervin Romans, 43, and Sgt. Daniel Sakai, 35, and wounding Sgt. Pat Gonzales before other officers shot him to death.
At first, police suggested that Mixon might have shot the motorcycle officers because he knew he was being sought for skipping a meeting with his parole officer in February, something that would have resulted in a prison sentence of no more than six months.
Had he been convicted of rape, however, Mixon could have been looking at a state prison sentence of several years.
Officials at a state laboratory reported to police Friday that DNA from a rape that happened in late January or early February matched Mixon’s, said Lt. Kevin Wiley, who oversees the police sex crimes unit.
Mixon’s DNA was on file because of his conviction in 2002 for assault with a deadly weapon in an attempted carjacking in San Francisco, for which he served six years in prison. The state lab’s match was reported Friday afternoon to an Oakland police sex crimes investigator, Officer Herb Webber, Wiley said.
Webber got the news shortly before leaving work at his scheduled time, Wiley said. Police could not have issued an arrest warrant immediately for Mixon because investigators first would have needed to gather another sample of his DNA for comparison purposes, the lieutenant said. . . .
Given a few more days, investigators could have followed up on the match and might have been able to take Mixon off the streets, Wiley said. “Without a doubt, it’s disturbing,” he said, referring to the timing of the information. . . .
Police are investigating a second, similar rape to determine whether Mixon might be a suspect, said Officer Jeff Thomason, a department spokesman. “We’re looking to see if there’s more,” he said.
Oakland investigators have suspected Mixon of being involved in other crimes but were never able to produce enough evidence to bring charges.
Police had been searching for Mixon since he was declared a parolee at large in February, authorities said Monday.

Yes, this Mixon sounds like a real hero. Real worthy of protests in the streets. It’s bad enough he killed four cops. Now their families have to watch this disgusting hero-worship of their killer.
Pray for the souls and families of Police Officer John Hege and Police Sgts. Ervin Romans, Mark Dunakin, and Daniel Sakai. May they rest in peace while this outrage is going on in support of their murderer.
They gave their lives trying to keep the ungrateful people of Oakland safe.

Oakland Police Officer John Hege and Sgts. Daniel Sakai, Mark Dunakin, and Ervin Romans
Rest in Peace

By Debbie Schlussel
Now this is a “stimulus plan” I can believe in. And it’s a case I’ve written about before.
NBA thug-in-chief and, unfortunately, Detroit Piston Allen Iverson had his bodyguard beat up some guy who wouldn’t leave the VIP room of a Washington bar, and he stood idly by. He was sued, and he lost in court, with a $260,000 verdict against him. That’s the breaks when you act like a thug and pay another thug to carry out your own violent desires.
But major scumbag Allen Iverson wants a special form of justice where his repeated thuggishness gets a special break.
And fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals told him where to go.

NBA star Allen Iverson must pay $260,000 for standing idly by and watching his bodyguard beat up another man in a 2005 bar fight, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the Detroit Pistons guard’s attempt to throw out the verdict decided by a jury in 2007.
Bar patron Marlin Godfrey accused Iverson’s bodyguard, Jason Kane, of punching, kicking and hitting him with a bottle because he refused to vacate the VIP section at Washington club Eyebar to make way for the basketball star and his entourage. Godfrey suffered a concussion, a ruptured eardrum, a burst blood vessel in his eye, a torn rotator cuff, cuts and bruises, and emotional injuries.
A three-judge appeals court panel wrote that Iverson stayed out of the fray in the back corner of the VIP area, standing on a couch or bench and observing.
“The evidence in this case supported the jury’s finding that Kane attacked Godfrey in a fight that lasted several minutes, and that Iverson stood and watched without attempting to do anything to stop the beating,” the decision said.
Godfrey and another patron, David Anthony Kittrell, sued Iverson for $20 million, but the jury decided not to award punitive damages and only compensate Godfrey $10,000 for his medical bills and $250,000 for pain and suffering. The jury did not find either of the men liable for assaulting Kittrell.

Was it an excessive verdict? Judging from the injuries suffered by the man who was beaten up by Iverson’s henchmen, he was pretty badly torn up. In this rarest of cases, the judgment actually sounds very conservative.
Iverson got off easy here. And he’s had a pattern of violence and advocating violence, including this, which I wrote about back in 2004:

In 2000, Allen Iverson–the Philadelphia ’76ers star whose basketball skills helped him get away with a life of violence that included maiming others–made a rap CD, “Non Fiction,” urging the murder of gays and Black women.
Calling Black women “f—[ing] b—-es” and tramps, Iverson urged “Everybody stay fly; Get money, kill and f— b—-es.” His lyrics for gays was equally non-imaginative: “Get murdered in the second and first degree; Come to me with faggot tendencies; You be sleeping where the maggots be.” (I’m sure this hoops-Einstein spent all night trying to find a word that rhymes with “faggot.”)

As I’ve asked when I previously discussed this case,

If Allen Iverson–who has a history of violence and crime–is really “the Answer,” [his self-chosen appellation] I have to wonder what the heck the question was.

***
PREVIOUS:
* David Stern Created Thuggery, Inc.
* Jury to Iverson: If You Don’t Control Your Posse Thugs, You Must Pay (But Only a Little)

By Debbie Schlussel
As many of us know, Barack Obama plagiarized his speeches on the campaign trail from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Joe Biden, years ago, plagiarized a speech from British labor leader Neil Kinnock.
That’s old news.
But Sean Hannity, apparently his usual empty self with nothing he understood enough from today’s Rush Limbaugh show to regurgitate, rehashed both those stories at the beginning of his hackneyed nationally syndicated radio show, today.
That’s not the point here, since Vannity repeatedly rehashes old, irrelevant news. The point is that he continues to attack others for plagiarism, when he continues to plagiarize myself and others.
He repeated his attack, today, that Barack Obama said it was okay to plagiarize Patrick because Patrick gave permission. It wasn’t relevant, but he couldn’t think of anything insightful, so he rehashed it.

Well, guess what? I never gave permission to Sean Vannity to repeatedly rip off my work on Imam Husham Al-Husainy or my breaking story on the Muslim footbaths at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, which he read from this site–completely without credit–word for word on his radio show the day after I broke the story and before any other news organization covered it a few days later.
Look in the mirror, Vannity. And try coming up with something new, something that you’re actually in a position to speak on without being a hypocrite.

By Debbie Schlussel
**** SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATE ****
Sometimes, select American Jews with too much money and too little brains do a lot of harm with their money. An example of this is Shari Arison, daughter of the late billionaire Miami Heat owner and Israeli-American cruise line magnate, Ted Arison.
“Hard times” for her is putting her $100 million yacht up for sale.
Yesterday, Arison funded the performance of a group of Palestinian Muslim youth violinists from Jenin for Holocaust survivors in Holon, a Tel Aviv suburb. And she misused and abused elderly Holocaust survivors, ambushing them, to do it. But, hey, this kind of outrage is okay because she has to feel good about herself and stage a Palestinian-Holocaust moral equivalency concert.

Thanks, Shari Arison:
Holocaust Survivors Ambushed
with Palestinian Moral Equivalency Violin Concert
While Israel’s economy continues to suffer and Palestinians continue to terrorize Israel, it’s really a travesty that she chose to host this event portrayed in the media as a moral equivalency event. And idiotic Israeli playwright, Dan Almagor, and the Mormon University in Jerusalem–both of whom apparently found it too loathesome to donate violins to the poor Israeli kids of Sderot–donated violins to the Jenin kids. They actually believe the baloney that giving Palestinians violins will make them hate Jews less. Tell it to the Jewish billionaire who gave ’em the Gaza greenhouse.
The event–a misplaced liberal Jewish guilt minstrel show–was for Israel’s national Day of Good Deeds. Apparently, Ms. Arison doesn’t know the difference between a good deed and a sin. A good deed and sheer stupidity. I guarantee you, HAMAS and Fatah won’t be inviting Israelis to play violin for them in some stupid minstrel show to make them feel good. They know they are at war against the Jews and Israel. Maybe one day–far too late–people like Shari Arison will figure that out, too.
In case you don’t get it, the moral equivalency presented was the Holocaust and the Israeli “treatment” of Palestinians. Here’s the Associated Press report:

Most of the Holocaust survivors did not know the youths were Palestinians from the West Bank, a rare sight in Israel these days. And the youths had no idea they were performing for people who lived through Nazi genocide – or even what the Holocaust was.
“I feel sympathy for them,” Ali Zeid, an 18-year-old keyboard player who said he was shocked by what he learned about the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in their campaign to wipe out European Jewry.
“Only people who have been through suffering understand each other,” said Zeid, who said his grandparents were Palestinian refugees forced to flee the northern city of Haifa during the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948.

Hmmm . . . Jews being rounded up into ovens because they have even a few drops of Jewish blood is the same “suffering” as Muslims going to war against Israel, Israel telling them they could stay, and the Muslims choosing to leave anyway, and then their grandchildren getting violins and money from dumb Israelis and Jewish Americans?
Only an idiot–like Shari Arison–would not predict that hosting Palestinians to play violin for Holocaust survivors would invite this usual, ridiculous, hackneyed Holocaust-Palestinian comparison. Hey, I have an idea: Arison and pro-Palestinian/Al-Qaeda Vanessa Redgrave can get together and do a remake of Redgrave’s star-vehicle “Playing for Time,” starring the Palestinians as the concentration camp inmates with the Israelis as the Nazis. I mean, that’s essentially what’s going on with this.

Billionairess Heiress Shari Arison’s Politics
Are Even Uglier Than Her Jewelry & Clothes
And then there’s the fact that HAMAS denies that the Holocaust ever even happened, that it is as openly anti-Semitic as Hitler, actually more. The same goes, sub-rosa for Fatah, which controls Jenin. That’s the reason these Palestinian kids don’t know about the Holocaust. To pretend that doesn’t happen and go ahead and host this event is disgusting. That’s actually the major reason why this staged use and abuse of Holocaust survivors as a duped audience for these Palestinian kids is such a travesty and an outrage. Had they been told before, I doubt they’d want to participate. But instead, these aging survivors–mostly in their eighties and nineties and not likely of full mind and spirit–were used and put on the spot by Shari Arison and her friends. They are the forced performers in this minstrel show, not the Palestinian kids.
It’s just sickening.
One of these so-called survivors, is a little young to be one, and it figures that she’s the one who tells us she’s taken “their land.”

“Inshallah,” said Sarah Glickman, 68, using the Arabic term for “God willing.” . . .
“They think we are strangers, because we came from abroad,” Glickman said. “I agree: It’s their land, also. But there was no other option for us after the Holocaust.”

Um, looks like early Alzheimer’s has set in for Ms. Glickman. And FYI, the Holocaust ended with the end of World War II in 1945. That means she was four when the Holocaust ended about 64 years ago. I doubt a four-year-old would have lived and survived in the camps.
And here’s a reality check for her: Jews have lived in Israel, including Jerusalem for 2000 years. They didn’t just arrive after the Holocaust, like she did. I guess she never heard of King David or King Solomon, etc.
And then there’s the reporting on Jenin, the home of these Muslim Palestinian kids. In case you forgot, Jenin was home to Palestinian homicide bomb building and the “site” of alleged massacre that never happened–even the United Nations investigation determined that the Palestinians lied when they claimed that Israelis killed 500 Palestinian civilians in Jenin; in fact, 25 people died, many of them at the hands of Palestinians and some of natural causes, including heart attacks.
But none of this is noted in press reports, instead the New York HAMAS/Fatah Times reports that

The Jenin camp strikes a particular note of discord.
The capital of suicide bombers to the Israelis and a symbol of resistance to the Palestinians, it was the scene of a bloody battle between advancing Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen in 2002. Four years later, a young Israeli man from Holon was killed in one of the last suicide attacks in Israel, when a Palestinian from Jenin blew himself up in a restaurant in Tel Aviv.

Oh, I get it. The Israelis committed “a bloody battle” (that never happened, and that they never committed, even according to the anti-Israel U.N.) on the Palestinians, and therefore, four years later, an innocent Israeli from Holon deserved to be blown up by the Palestinians. Thanks, New York HAMAS/Fatah Times for explaining it.
Yup, this is what happens when empty-headed heiresses of billionaires, like Shari Arison, can’t spend their money fast enough.
**** UPDATE, 03/27/09: My friend, Harry Onickel, wrote this letter to the editor to the Detroit Free Press, which ran this propaganda story.

Are the Associated Press and the Free Press trying to insult Jews? Palestinians in the West Bank have been suffering on the dole for the past 60 years, ever since the surrounding Arab/Muslim nations failed in their attempt to drive the nascent Jewish state into the sea. They’ve suffered from a lack of humanity from their leaders and surrounding Muslim nations, who have kept them miserable and angry, raising the past three generations to value the murdering of Jews over their own lives. Remember the numerous Palestinian suicide bombings before Israel separated itself from the West Bank? That’s why these youngsters have only met Israeli soldiers.
They suffer from a lack of education and opportunity. Rather than learning useful skills, Palestinian students are taught that there was no Holocaust, which his why the fact of the Holocaust came as such a surprise to these youths.
To equate that with the suffering of Jews, who were tortured and murdered in the sickest ways imaginable on an industrial scale, some of whom are the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust, is obscene. To give any kind of moral equivalence between the Jews of Israel, and Palestinians, the latest in a line of tormentors of Jews, stretching back thousands of years, is hateful.
I hope none of these young musicians suffers blisters from playing their instruments. The Free Press might run an AP article claiming that their suffering is now greater than the Holocaust.
Respectfully,
Harry Onickel

Right on, Harry.

By Debbie Schlussel
For new readers, if you’re not familiar with “Jake Byrd,” he’s Anthony “Tony” Barbieri–the hilarious actor, comedian, and writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” who poses as a superfan of O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, etc. at various press conferences. (Past “Jake Byrd” videos that will make you laugh your butt off are here.)
This one isn’t as funny, but it’s funny enough. I take special joy in it since I once debated (and wiped the floor with) Gloria Allred on CNN’s “Crossfire” over the issue of Augusta National not having male members. (On the show, she bragged how she once successfully sued and forced a women’s health club to allow male members, to which I responded, “What a great service to America, Gloria!” Everyone–including host James Carville laughed.)

By Debbie Schlussel
I’ve written about this ludicrous priority of Barack Obama and two Republicans, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, before. And before that, it was John Kerry holding hearings about Major League Baseball’s cable and free TV broadcasting schedule. And who can forget the waste of time Congressional hearings on baseball and steroids? Who cares? We really don’t need Big Brother overseeing the sports world, especially now. And not ever.
But elected officials interested in getting headlines don’t seem to let this get in the way. While more and more Americans lose their jobs, the price of gas is rising, and times are tough, Congress is addressing THE important issue of our time.

Everyone from President Barack Obama on down to fans has criticized how college football determines its top team. Now senators are getting off the sidelines to examine antitrust issues involving the Bowl Champion Series.
The current system “leaves nearly half of all the teams in college football at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to qualifying for the millions of dollars paid out every year,” the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights said in a statement Wednesday announcing the hearings.
Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate in series, while others do not.
Obama and some members of Congress favor a playoff-type system to determine the national champion. The BCS features a championship game between the two top teams in the BCS standings, based on two polls and six computer ratings.
Behind the push for the hearings is the subcommittee’s top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. People there were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season.
The title game pitted No. 1 Florida (12-1) against No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1); Florida won 24-14 and claimed the title.
The subcommittee’s statement said Hatch would introduce legislation “to rectify this situation.” No details were offered and Hatch’s office declined to provide any.
Hatch said in a statement that the BCS system “has proven itself to be inadequate, not only for those of us who are fans of college football, but for anyone who believes that competition and fair play should have a role in collegiate sports.”
In the House, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, has sponsored legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a football game a “national championship” unless the game culminates from a playoff system.

Yeah, that’s important right now–telling a business what it can and can’t say in advertising and promotions.
If I lived in Utah or Congressman Barton’s district, I’d think real hard about voting for either Hatch or Barton again.
It’s like they’re just living in a vacuum, if they think this needs their involvement (or that of anyone in the government).
You know who’s laughing at Hatch’s, Barton’s, and Obama’s endless pontificating about the BCS?
They are . . .

Congressional Sports Nannies be gone.

By Debbie Schlussel
You gotta love the story of Arakawa and Madeline Gins and what they were spending their Mad(off) Money on before the Madoff bubble burst.
It’s a great example of New Age nuttiness at its, well, nuttiest. The Village Voice calls my ridicule “Madenfreude” (a combination of Madoff and schadenfreude). Cute.
So, am I gleeful that nuts like those lost their money because they couldn’t see the real world. No. Well, kind of. I just think these people epitomize the fantasy world and myopic views of so many Madoff investors. Look at this slideshow of their house. It’s like a mad scientist’s carnival fun house on steroids. I call it, “New Age Psychobabble, The Building.”

Madoff Investors Madeline Gins & Arakawa in Their Kitchen

Of all the dreams that were crushed by Mr. Madoff’s crime, perhaps none was more unusual than this duo’s of achieving everlasting life through architecture. Mr. Arakawa (he uses only his last name) and Ms. Gins design structures they say can enable inhabitants to “counteract the usual human destiny of having to die.”
The income from their investments with Mr. Madoff helped fund their research and experimental work. Now, Mr. Arakawa, 72 years old, and Ms. Gins, 67, are strapped for cash. They closed their Manhattan office and laid off five employees.
The pair’s work, based loosely on a movement known as “transhumanism,” is premised on the idea that people degenerate and die in part because they live in spaces that are too comfortable. The artists’ solution: construct abodes that leave people disoriented, challenged and feeling anything but comfortable.
They build buildings with no doors inside. They place rooms far apart. They put windows near the ceiling or near the floor. Between rooms are sloping, bumpy moonscape-like floors designed to throw occupants off balance. These features, they argue, stimulate the body and mind, thus prolonging life. “You become like a baby,” says Mr. Arakawa. . . .
“Their research is a milestone in the history of conceptual art,” says Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at the main Guggenheim Museum, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the couple’s work is currently on display. She says many of their supporters don’t literally accept the couple’s message on immortality but appreciate it in a “metaphorical” way.

Wow, I’ve never heard so much well-packaged bullcrap in my life.

To the artists, eternal life is a real possibility. “This is a great chance for the human race,” says Ms. Gins.
Things appeared to be going well for the couple before Mr. Madoff’s arrest in December. They completed a park, an office building and nine “reversible destiny” lofts in Japan. The lofts, finished in 2005, cost about $6 million to build. Five of the nine lofts, which rent for $1,700 to $2,300 a month, have tenants.
A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.
At least one tenant says he feels a little younger already.

Quick, book me a roundtrip ticket to New York so I can sell him some land under the Hudson River and some bottled snake oil as a house-warming gift.

Nobutaka Yamaoka, who moved in with his wife and two children about two years ago, says he has lost more than 20 pounds and no longer suffers from hay fever, though he isn’t sure whether it was cured by the loft.

A-ha! See Bernard Madoff actually saved lives!

There is no closet, and Mr. Yamaoka can’t buy furniture for the living room or kitchen because the floor is too uneven, but he relishes the lifestyle. “I feel a completely different kind of comfort here,” says the 43-year-old video director. His wife, however, complains that the apartment is too cold. Also, the window to the balcony is near the floor, and she keeps bumping her head against the frame when she crawls out to hang up laundry, he says. (“That’s one of the exercises,” says Ms. Gins.)
Last year, Mr. Arakawa and Ms. Gins’s first U.S. home, which resembles the Tokyo lofts, was completed in East Hampton, N.Y. It took $2 million and eight years to construct, and has a listing price of $5.5 million.
Many scientists see the couple’s work as part of a futile, age-old human aspiration to live forever. “Longevity salesman is the second-oldest profession,” says S. Jay Olshansky, a researcher on aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “This would be the worst possible house you could build for an older person,” he says. To prolong life, he recommends building spaces that “lower the probability of falls,” plus a healthy diet and exercise.
Some transhumanists dismiss the couple’s architectural solution. “Human life has enough challenges in terms of our work and daily lives that we don’t need to invent new physical challenges for our bodies,” says Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist figure in the U.S. In the future, humans will have microscopic robots in their bodies which will be able to regenerate cells, he says.

Yup, everyone in this “transhumanist” movement is transcrazy.

The couple’s destiny intersected with the Madoffs’ in 1994, when Ms. Gins met Mr. Madoff’s wife, Ruth, at an art gallery. Ms. Gins recalls that she later met the Madoffs at one of her art shows, and Mr. Madoff said he could help her by investing the couple’s savings in his firm. Lawyers for Mr. and Mrs. Madoff declined to comment.

Declined to comment because he carried out the largest Ponzi scheme ever in U.S. history . . . or because he’s embarrassed to have the wackiest clients ever in U.S. history.

Since Mr. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme came to light, the couple have been trying to sell their seminal work, the “Mechanism of Meaning,” a series of 84 8-foot-tall panels that took them 10 years to complete, for about $17 million.
“Museums in the U.S. and Germany would be the best candidates,” says Lisa Dennison, an executive at Sotheby’s who is trying to line up a buyer. “It’s an amazing work, but there are not many possible customers for it.”

Um, yeah, good luck with that.

Barring a sell-off of their collection, the couple fear they won’t realize their dream of building a “reversible destiny” village with homes and parks that would combine their theories of life into one community.

Tragedy.

“Here was someone we thought was a supporter of ours,” says Ms. Gins of Mr. Madoff, “and he pulled the rug out from under us.”

You’ll excuse me if I’m not shedding tears over this great tragedy of this fantastic idea in architecture denied to America and the world.
Yes, it’s not wrong to say that some people’s loss through the Madoff swindle was a form of financial natural selection.
Oh, and one other thing. If you want to live uncomfortably to make your body adjust and live longer, they already invented a building that does that. It’s called a gym. Go work out, and you’ll likely feel uncomfortable and live longer.
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