USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA

Fucking idiots. Glad there are people out there looking out for me and my interests. We would all be in Saddam Gorbachev's iron fist were it not for these wonderful patriots, just in time for Memorial Day:

MANALAPAN — More than 20 people, some carrying American flags, showed up at the Turkish American Community Center Tuesday to protest that an American flag had been hung upside down in front of the site.

The flag hung upturned next to flags of Northern Cyprus and Turkey, a largely Muslim nation – an insult to America, protesters said. Center President Mehmet Reyhan said he did not know who had incorrectly hung the flag; he only learned of it when a member notified him of protesters outside the Route 33 building this morning.

“Livid – I was livid that (someone) desecrated our flag and hung it upside down,” said Betty Bailey, a Millstone farm owner who helped organize the protest.

“You need people out there to watch these things going on, because we can’t just stand by and let our country be put down…I just think people are getting lax about (patriotism and vigilance),” Bailey said. “We’re standing up for our country.”

The reason the flag had been hung upside down – and by whom – remains unclear: Some questioned whether recent headlines about the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden triggered it, or whether it had simply been an incident of vandalism or an accident.

Protesters said they believed the flag had been hung outside the site since Sunday night or Monday morning. They said the flag also had been tattered and incorrectly displayed in relation to the other two flags.

Reyhan said he didn’t believe a center member would have turned the flag upside-down. Two current members have to vouch for new members in order for them to join, he said, “and I don’t think any of our members would do anything like that.”

“I think every nation is very proud of their flag; if someone puts it upside-down, I look at it as an insult to the nation,” Reyhan said. “We are Americans. We love this country. We are here for 25 years and those flags are always flying in the correct way. This is the first time I have seen something like this.”

According to federal statute, the American flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of distress. The flag has beenflown upside down as a form of protest in the United States, according to published reports.

Reyhan said he reported the incident to township police and the Turkish consulate. He said he had all the flags taken down Tuesday morning because he’s afraid they could be rearranged again and cause problems for the center.

Bailey said she still had concerns.

“It was in front of their building and I really think if it’s your building, you should really kind of notice that the flag was hanging wrong,” Bailey said. “People have to start taking a stand, so we did. Hopefully, it won’t happen again.”

Reyhan said the center, in the township for 25 years, serves as a celebration hall for Turkish, American and Muslim religious holidays. He said the center also hosts Turkish language classes for youths and provides networking, employment assistance, transportation and translation services for Turkish immigrants.

The center has about 350 members from as far as New York and Pennsylvania, but with many in Monmouth County from Manalapan, Englishtown and the surrounding area, Reyhan said. None reported noticing the flag, he said.

As for bin Laden, Reyhan said Turkey, too, has been living with the horrors of terrorist groups, “So we don’t want any terrorists in this world. We want nothing to do with them.”

I like how people just started "protesting" instead of making any attempt to contact someone in the building. There was no attempt at discussion. Just some patriotic circle jerk, stimulating one another's hatred for Muslims. I also like how this passes for "vigilance." The Turkish are known for nothing if not their deep anti-American views and radical Islamic philosophy. Someone has to keep tabs on them.

I'm going with the bin Laden suspicion. Everyone knows that Muslims are plotting a secret overthrow of the government, in the interest of establishing a Western Caliphate. This should definitely be viewed as nothing else than the second phase of what began on 9/11. Now that this flag has been flown upside down, there is no turning back. We will all be worshipping Allah in a matter of months, no doubt. Christmas is canceled.

Fox shoots man

Not the TV empire, but the animal. This shit is real, and brilliant.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A wounded fox shot its would be killer in Belarus by pulling the trigger on the hunter's gun as the pair scuffled after the man tried to finish the animal off with the butt of the rifle, media said Thursday.

The unnamed hunter, who had approached the fox after wounding it from a distance, was in hospital with a leg wound, while the fox made its escape, media said, citing prosecutors from the Grodno region.

"The animal fiercely resisted and in the struggle accidentally pulled the trigger with its paw," one prosecutor was quoted as saying.

Fox-hunting is popular in the picturesque farming region of northwestern Belarus which borders Poland.

Wow. Just wow.

Leadership

Here is Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona and the country's leading anti-immigration politician, giving a public address on television as to why people should reelect her:




Yup.

I guess her groomers/coaches tell her to never stop smiling, no matter what.

The only people who have justification to act like this are the senile and the very high.

Obviously bad ideas

Man, so flights in/out/around Europe have basically been grounded since Wednesday, due to a massive ash cloud taking up about 20,000 vertical feet or so of airspace over most of the continent. The idea is that the ash will fuck up jet engines and cause them to stall out. It turns out, though, that business is much smarter than science. Who needs knowledge when you have/need money? Not people running airlines, that's for sure:

Several major airlines safely flew test flights without passengers over Europe on Sunday despite official warnings about the dangers of a volcanic ash plume, fueling a corporate push to end an economically devastating ban on commercial air traffic...

The announcement prompted some airline officials to wonder whether authorities had overreacted to concerns that the tiny particles of volcanic ash could jam up the engines of passenger jets. The possibility that the ash had thinned or dispersed over parts of Europe heightened pressure from airline officials losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day to end a flight stoppage that has thrown global travel into chaos and left millions stranded far from home.

Here we can see an excellent example of (I am about to hijack a phrase from Bad Religion and insert my own concept into it) the voracious march of capital. This is obviously a fucking dangerous situation, and the people running these companies are plainly declaring their will to chew up bodies in their relentless pursuit of money.

I don't really understand how the airline companies could spin this one. What could they possibly say, that the aviation authorities across the continent are too cautious? Like that's a bad thing? They don't want to send many thousands of people a day into conditions that are patently hazardous? If it were America, a bunch of right wing fucks would be crying about how the people in charge of aviation regulation are freedom-hating, socialists/communists who wish to stop capitalism. Maybe that's going on in places over there, too. Don't know.

Anyway, yeah, the people running these airlines don't really give much of a fuck. They want/need their money and are willing to risk just about anything for it. They are saying now that there is no danger, all because they flew a couple of planes around without crashing them. Assuming that they really did fly the planes and there really were no problems, a couple of flights is absolutely no indication of what would come if all flights were to resume.

How deliberately shortsighted. What a shitty, evil attempt to fool people into false comfort. You can't run an experiment ten times and accurately cite it as representative of the results of performing it thousands of times a day.