US states with the most liberal policies have the most income inequality

"Our leftist friends have decided that income inequality is a scourge that must be addressed. That might be a noble goal if they were motivated by a desire to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

Based on their policy proposals, though, it appears that the main goal is to punish the so-called rich. And they’re so fixated on that objective, Margaret Thatcher pointed out, that they’re willing to make the poor worse off.

And what’s especially bizarre is that rich leftists are among the biggest cheerleaders for these policies. Heck, I’ve even debated some of these limousine liberals, as you can see here and here. But maybe their feelings of self-loathing and guilt are justified. After all, it seems that statist policies are actually associated with higher degrees of income inequality.

Let’s see what Steve Moore and Rich Vedder discovered when they looked at evidence from the states. Here are excerpts from their column in the Wall Street Journal.

"Our state-by-state analysis finds that the more liberal states whose policies are supposed to promote fairness have a bigger gap between higher and lower incomes than do states that have more conservative, pro-growth policies…"

Ontario Human Rights Hilarity - Mississauga parking code alleged to discriminate against Muslims

[2]           The applicants identify themselves as Muslim and state that they attend Friday prayers at the ISNA Canada Centre (“ISNA”) located at 2200 South Sheridan Way in Mississauga. Salman Khalid received a parking ticket when he parked on nearby Finfar Court rather than the ISNA parking lot, which the applicants state can be difficult to get in and out of when it is busy. There is no dispute that parking is prohibited on Finfar Court between 12:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. The applicants assert that this prohibition discriminates against Muslims.

h/t SassyWire

Obama to free Gitmo terrorist ‘because he took up yoga’

If you thought President Obama’s release of five top Taliban commanders in exchange for POW Bowe Bergdahl was bad, wait until you see what his Gitmo parole board plans.

Desperate to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison by the end of his term, Obama quietly is giving “get out of jail free” cards for the flimsiest of excuses.

One al Qaeda suspect captured in Afghanistan is considered reformed because he took up yoga and read a biography of the Dalai Lama. Another is eligible for release because of his “positive attitude.”

And one longtime detainee, a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is now harmless because he’s going to start a “milk and honey farm.”...

Toronto School Trustee says the city can't afford alternative schools

These places where activist parents send their kids to learn to admire Che Guevara are financial wastes and intellectual wastelands 

Founder of France's racist National Front party says he'll put Jewish singer "in an oven"

(Jean-Marie) Le Pen, the founder of the National Front party and currently a legislator, said in a video posted on the party website that “next time we will put him in an oven” when asked about French singer Patrick Bruel’s criticisms of the party. Bruel is Jewish. 

...Le Pen, who has had multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and denying crimes against humanity, once described Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history. 

Le Pen has used similar wordplay in the past to make light of gas chambers used by the Nazis in World War II. In 1988, he referred to a Jewish minister named Michel Durafour as “Durafour-crematoire”. In French, the word “four-crematoire” means crematorium...

A woman displaying her vagina at Paris' Musee d'Orsay exposes ironies

Performance artists are the Rodney Dangerfields of the art world. They tend to get no respect from the general public, or even from a large measure of art connoisseurs.That's probably because for the most part, their "art" consists of doing stupid shit in public that doesn't suggest anything in the way of talent.

Section of Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World

Some of that happened last week at Paris' Musee d'Orsay, when Deborah de Robertis decided to plant herself in front of the Gustave Courbet painting, The Origin of the World, and show off her vagina. It went on for a few minutes as apparently bemused museum guards eventually managed to usher de Robertis out of the gallery (see video below).

Described by some as de Robertis 'recreating' Coubert's work, it wasn't really that. The Origin of the World depicts the nude torso of a model, whose head is unseen, but assumed to be Joanna Hiffernan, reclining on a bed. De Robertis sat upright in front of the painting, wearing a short, gold sequined party girl dress hiked up just above her hips, while holding her labia majora apart so that museum goers could get a better view of the interior of her vagina.

From the video, it seems like a ridiculous episode made more so by the continual applause of pretentious art gallery patrons, as if Ms de Robertis was demonstrating some particular artistic achievement.

In what would have been a great Monty Python parody of the pomposity of untalented artists trying to hype the atrocious garbage they produce with preposterous gibberish, Ms De Robertis, apparently in all seriousness, told Luxemburger Wort:

“There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.”

It's not that I'm against attractive women showing off their vaginas. In fact, I'm all for it under most circumstances, and I would have probably been as happy as the next guy at the grand exposure that day.  And in her favor, as well as for the obvious, de Robertis did manage to demonstrate a odd societal irony in that a realistic painting of a nude woman is considered art and something that should be admired in public, however when a real woman actually does that, she could get arrested.

But another irony, or maybe it's just a question, is that if by showing off her vagina in public, Ms De Robertis is being an artist, doesn't that also make every stripper an artist, and transform the saddos who spend all their time in strip clubs into art connoisseurs?


Une artiste expose son sexe sous «L'origine du... by quoi2news

Weakling American President must learn to Putincize

If this video of Obama's wimpy workout had been around in 2008, John McCain would probably be President now

Politically Correct Indoctrination and Censorship at York University

University education is supposed to be about exploring and discussing ideas. At York University, it's about suppressing them if they don't conform to their hypocritical concepts of political correctness:

Blogwrath gets Chairman Chow's Soccer Pitch

 ...You can be sure that the good-hearted Olivia, if elected, will force you to finance every lesbian lacrosse team; she may build a tranny field hockey stadium or an Al-Qaeda cricket field.

It’s all about spending other people’s money. That horrible NDP family has done more than enough damage to Toronto...

Kathleen Wynne's press agency, The Toronto Star, is "desperate" to prop up the most corrupt government in Ontario's history

Either the Progressive Conservatives or the NDP would be a better choice than Wynne's corrupt and incompetent Liberal party. If Wynne gets reelected after a litany of corruption and disastrous fiscal mismanagement her and her predecessor Liberal government inflicted on Ontario, it would send the message that they can act with impunity.

But in Wynne's corner is The Toronto Star which, having lost a half million in subscriptions due to its histrionic, obsessive vendetta against Rob Ford, has stopped bothering to pretend to be anything but a press agency for the leftist candidates it wants in power.

Psychedelic Flashback - Atomic Rooster

After living all these years, somehow the fantastic psychedelic rock group Atomic Rooster, which has been around since 1969, has only recently come to my attention. My path to the Rooster came through the other psychedelic group of which I'm now a big fan, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, which I discovered only because they are responsible for the incredible opening theme music for Boardwalk Empire.

Atomic Rooster's music is reminiscent of a combination of blues rock and ELP's progressive sound, which makes sense since Carl Palmer was with the group for a time.





Check out the lineup of not very-well coordinated, but somehow strangely appropriate go-go dancers in this video of Tomorrow Night:

Calgary-based terrorist who went "boom" fit the profile

The myth that leftist terror-apologists try to perpetrate, that terrorists are driven by desperation, usually unravels upon examination. They are more often privileged fanatics driven by ideology and the hard-core, murderous version of Islam that is so prevalent in Pakistan, as was the Calgary-based terrorist who blew himself up in Iraq:

A suicide bomber who attacked an Iraqi army base last November was a Calgary business analyst who disappeared after his wife divorced him, friends said Wednesday amid rising concerns about the flow of Canadians to overseas terror groups.

Those who knew Salman Ashrafi in Calgary said they had lost all contact with him after he left Canada in late 2012. And now they know why: He apparently died seven months ago after detonating a car bomb north of Baghdad.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria posted his photo online in March, calling him Abu Abdullah Al Khorasani, but a Calgary Muslim community leader said the man was Ashrafi, a privileged Pakistani-Canadian.

"He seemed like a regular guy and he was one of those guys that actually had a career, had a wife," the man said.

Things you'll never see on the CBC

h/t Small Dead Animals

D-Day's 70th Anniversary

The allied landings at Normandy were the beginning of the end for Hitler's Germany.

I grew up with and around people who had lived through and fought in World War 2. Sadly, most of them are gone now, but their bravery, and in particular that of those who didn't make it back home from the fight against the evils of Nazism, should never be forgotten.

Fox News reports Bergdahl declared jihad in captivity, secret documents show

U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl at one point during his captivity converted to Islam, fraternized openly with his captors and declared himself a "mujahid," or warrior for Islam, according to secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account and obtained by Fox News.

The reports indicate that Bergdahl's relations with his Haqqani captors morphed over time, from periods of hostility, where he was treated very much like a hostage, to periods where, as one source told Fox News, "he became much more of an accepted fellow" than is popularly understood. He even reportedly was allowed to carry a gun at times...

Update on the Kiddie Porn Case of Kathleen Wynne's Deputy and Mentor, Ben Levin

Kathleen Wynne's former Deputy Education Minister Ben Levin has been out of the news for a long time now. He was arrested last summer for a slew of charges related to child pornography but the case has not yet come to trail.

Among the bizarre and shocking elements of the scandal is that Levin, who remained an adviser to Wynne's government, was responsible for introducing a controversial curriculum which was condemned for including overtly sexualized material to children at an inappropriately early age. The public backlash against that proposed curriculum was was so severe that then-Premier Dalton McGuinty withdrew it. Although Kathleen Wynne, who was Education Minister and Levin's boss when the curriculum was created, has said that she would re-introduce it as Premier.  At the time of his arrest, Levin was serving as a senior professor at the radical Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which also promoted the hyper-sexualized curriculum.

There was a publication ban imposed by the judge on matters discussed at Levin's July 2013 bail hearing, but that ban only applied to matters discussed in court on that date. Most of Toronto's media  has been extremely sympathetic to Kathleen Wynne, and by extension has been shy about reporting extensively on the Levin matter. Perhaps that is why they have neglected to report anything about the fact that Levin has had about five subsequent hearings or what happened at them. The most recent was just a couple of months ago, with another to take place in a few weeks and a trial date yet to be set.

The charges against Levin, which have yet to be proved in court, are listed below:

For a more recent update, see HERE

JAN 16, 2015: LEVIN TO PLEAD GUILTY! 

Bergdahl backlash surprises an inept Obama administration

...What came as a surprise to White House aides, one official says, was the barrage of harsh personal attacks aimed at Bergdahl and even his family.

Critics of the prisoner exchange have suggested the U.S. received the short end of the deal, in part, because of the questions about the still murky events that led to Bergdahl's initial capture.

"It's very interesting to me that they would be willing to release five extraordinarily dangerous Taliban members in exchange for this soldier who apparently left his post. We don't know all the details," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in an interview on CNN's "Out Front."...

Plus:  Bergdahl's coming home party cancelled

Guess what? According to the Criminal Code of Canada, Frank Miller's "Sin City" and just about every other violent graphic novel is illegal

I don't have a strong opinion on legalized prostitution one way or another. Victimless crimes are not something that I spend much time worrying about. So as long as the prostitute isn't underage, or a victim of sex traffickers or an abusive pimp (the punishment for whom I think spending decades in jail would be appropriate), and it's done in private and not on my street corner, I couldn't care less.

Having said that, the federal government has just proposed a bill to regulate prostitution that must be the most ridiculous and confusing crime bill in the history of Canada.

It makes the selling of sexual services legal, but not in public places where it remains illegal, and it makes all advertising and communication for the sale of sex illegal. But wait, it gets more confusing by making all purchasing of sexual services illegal.

So what that means is that the only way sex can legally be sold in Canada, other than the traditional way of marrying a rich husband, is if a prostitute, in a private location, telepathically realizes that the person they are with wants to buy sex, and removes the money from that client's wallet or purse without their knowledge.

Yeah, it's that preposterous.

But more worrisome, while reading through the proposed bill, was something I'd never heard of before with its references to the illegality of "crime comics."

The new prostitution bill refers to them as part of Section 163 of the Criminal Code, so I went and looked it up and here is the relevant section:

Corrupting morals

• 163. (1) Every one commits an offence who
  • (a) makes, prints, publishes, distributes, circulates, or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation any obscene written matter, picture, model, phonograph record or other thing whatever; or
  • (b) makes, prints, publishes, distributes, sells or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation a crime comic...

• Motives irrelevant

  (5) For the purposes of this section, the motives of an accused are irrelevant.
• (6) [Repealed, 1993, c. 46, s. 1]
• Definition of “crime comic”
  (7) In this section, “crime comic” means a magazine, periodical or book that exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially
  • (a) the commission of crimes, real or fictitious; or
  • (b) events connected with the commission of crimes, real or fictitious, whether occurring before or after the commission of the crime.

• Marginal note:Obscene publication

  (8) For the purposes of this Act, any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex, or of sex and any one or more of the following subjects, namely, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, shall be deemed to be obscene.

That is just about the most subjective, preposterous and unenforcable law I've ever read.

What exactly is "undue" exploitation of sex, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, as opposed to say, the amount that the government and courts would consider "due"???

This law seemingly makes graphic novels like Frank Miller's Sin City series, which is both brilliantly creative and rife with all those elements in extreme and egregious amounts, illegal in Canada. The same might be said for HBO's wildly popular Game of Thrones. Are we going to see RCMP raids on Chapters/Indigo bookstores now? The library at my son's high school is filled with Japanese Manga graphic novels which would easily be considered illegal by the Criminal Code's definition. Does that mean that we can expect a mass arrest of the leadership of the Toronto District School Board?  As appealing as that prospect may be considering the other forms of child abuse the TDSB perpetrates, jailing them for stocking school libraries with "crime comics" is absurd.

It's understandable, and even laudable that the government would want to discourage prostitution. But the new bill by which it is attempting to achieve that goal is obviously a predestined failure. Even more significantly, the silly new bill highlights an urgent need to get rid of the deadwood in Canada's legal system.

Man arrested for applying for job as head of Toronto District School Board

Toronto police say that they were called to investigate a "suspicious incident" at the Agincourt library branch over the weekend.

When they arrived at the Bonis Avenue building on Saturday morning, they were directed to a man who was "sitting in the library holding a cucumber," according to a news release.

Police say the man was allegedly recognized from an incident that occurred at the same library in April.

It is alleged that on the evening of April 7, a man approached a woman, sat down next to her and opened a laptop computer. Police say the man "then began to commit an indecent act while holding a cucumber."

He was probably just getting ready to apply as the new Director of the TDSB.

Gilbert Gottfried, New York Punk

When he's at his best, Gilbert Gottfried is as good as contemporary comedy gets. This article about him at The Lowbrow Reader (with that name and articles by people like Gottfried and Rick Moranis, it's definitely something I'll have to check out more often) is a great read:

In 1987, Gilbert Gottfried made his debut appearance on Howard Stern’s radio program. Although it went unspoken, the host and his guest had somewhat overlapping lives. Both men were in their early 30s and clinging to the fringes of show business. Both were Jewish nerds who had come of age as outsiders in rough patches of New York: Stern in a predominantly black area of Long Island; Gottfried in pre-chic Brooklyn and the East Village of burning tenements and open-air heroin bazaars. They found escape and salvation through the junky pop culture of monster movies, super heroes, rock & roll, and comedy. And while both performers’ acts had roots in the ’70s, their entry to comedy’s major leagues began at the dawn of the ’80s, when Stern paired with his invaluable on-air foil Robin Quivers and Gottfried started his short-lived—and little-remembered—tenure on Saturday Night Live...

The Howard Stern Show in its modern-day incarnation is deliberately paced and nearly intellectual in its majestic pursuit of idiocy. Whether involving showbiz royalty (Jay Z, Jerry Seinfeld) or side-show freaks (an oddly well-spoken man with a 132-pound scrotum), interviews unravel methodically—deep probes with a therapeutic air. Yet in its adolescence, before Stern had his in-built satellite audience or the mantle of celebrity, his show was hyperactive and tense, like New York City. The maiden Gottfried interview is particularly berserk. To hear it is to tumble into the pages of an old MAD magazine or the dinner table of Minnie Marx.

Although at the time of the appearance Gottfried seemed to be living with his mother, he was nonetheless a larger national star than Stern, who was still gaining a foothold in New York. As the comedian, who appears unfamiliar with the show, enters the room, the radio host confesses to nerves. Gottfried is “so wacky,” Stern notes, “I’m really wondering how this interview’s gonna go.” As a straight interview, it flops. Like many comedians, Gottfried seems unwilling—and possibly unable—to advance a conversation in the manner traditionally favored by human beings. Instead, he cracks wise at any available opening. At one point, Quivers attempts to lure the comic into discussing his life away from his mother’s television set. “Tell us what a person who has a life does,” Gottfried says. “You drink, you’re at an amusement park, and you puke. This is the fun life.”

The segment achieves its virtuosity near its midpoint, as Stern begins taking calls from listeners. Instinctively, the host and his guest turn on every dupe with the gall to phone them. In a surreal stretch reminiscent of a Marx Brothers routine, they place caller after caller on hold. (“You holding?” “Yep.” “Hold on!”) Finally, Stern lets a caller through...

 Read the rest HERE

The Ontario Leaders Debate

The bad news is that it's pretentious, amateurish and profoundly stupid; the good news is that it has naked college chicks

An awful, pretentious student film that looks like a typical student film was produced at Columbia University and seeks to parody college initiation rites. "According to creators Coco Young and Karley Sciortino, “Initiation explores the rituals of American Ivy League secret societies, to the point of hysteria, highlighting our culture’s perception of female desire.”

The film is so ridiculously dreadful that it could conceivably be a joke that parodies the awfulness of student films. Speaking of parody, the silly, university-oriented London Tab 's art critic Matt McDonald tried to outdo the terrible short film in nonsensical, masturbatory pretentiousness with his comment that it is  “Reminiscent of the pioneering shorts from the feminist avant garde movement, Young presents a Bacchanalian dystopia encased within an academic framework. The motif of hairless birds is particularly powerful in conveying bourgeois approaches to intellectual fertility."

But on the plus side, it has some semi-naked college girls in it.

Court to decide if Indian guru is dead or meditating

His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj was determined to be clinically dead by physicians in January 2014, but his followers insist he is in a state of deep meditation. The Punjab High Court is set to decide his state and therefore what will happen to his $170 million estate.

Jewish Defense League head says Canadian correspondent for Iran's Press TV lied about receiving a threat from his organization

He has the appearance of someone who does his hair by dipping his head into a vat of sulfuric acid,  but his looks aren't the only thing about Iran's man in Canada, Joshua Blakeney, that has 'crazy' written all over it.

Blakeney is the Canadian correspondent for Iran's English-language propaganda service, Press TV, as well as the Canadian Bureau Chief for the antisemtic, Holocaust-denying website Veterans Today, and a sometime contributor to the Canadian left-wing hotbed for antisemitism, rabble.ca.

Today, Blakeney is trying to make a splash for himself by claiming he received a "threatening" email from the Jewish Defense League and his employers at Press TV have plastered it on the Internet.

Except that Meir Weinstein, in an email exchange with me, has explicitly denied that the JDL sent the email in question to Blakeney.

Blakeney alleges that the email purportedly from the JDL contains the sentence, "When we are attacked by hate-filled antisemites like you, we respond with all the resources at our disposal, and with extreme prejudice."

But bolstering JDL Director Weinstein's denial of the email originating with his group is the fact Blakeney has produced neither a name nor an email address associated with the supposed threat he claims to have received.

Along with his detestation of Israel, Blakeney is a well-known figure among Canadian 9-11 conspiracy theorists. If that isn't enough of an indication of Blakeney's challenges with rational thought, there is the line from his own website in which he brags his "work has been quoted and referred to in media venues including The National Post. "

What suggests there may be something very odd about Joshua Blakeney is that it doesn't require too subtle a reading of the National Post's articles referencing him to see they imply that the Canadian Press TV correspondent is a raving mental case. But I guess when you're as apparently detached from reality as Blakeney, there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

In an interview that Blakeney did with his bosses at Press TV, Blakeney claims he takes the JDL threat seriously. The reason being because a "German historian" had his house bombed, and Blakeney implies the JDL was involved with that.

The "German historian" to whom Blakeney referred was the notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel. Describing Zundel as "German historian" would be akin to describing that neo-Nazi as a "human rights activist." For anyone who thinks that comparison is far-fetched, they have only to look at Blakeney's other employer, Veterans Today, which publishes pro-Nazi articles by Zundel's wife Ingrid and refers to Ernst Zundel, who served time in a German prison for promoting hate, as a "human rights activist."

JDL head Weinstein informed me that a writer for another of the websites for which Blakeney wrote, rabble.ca, contacted him in order to request an interview. However, Weinstein declined because he was concerned that the biases that guide everything written in rabble, which he also described as "an enabler of antisemitism," would make a fair report unlikely.

In response to that, the rabble.ca writer expressed umbrage and claimed such a statement is "potentially defamatory." It would be interesting to hear how a Canadian citizen is being 'defamatory' by taking the same view as the Canadian government.

Not only is rabble.ca an "enabler of antisemitism" but it promotes what the Canadian government defines as actual antisemitism with its sponsorship of antisemitic boycotts of Israel and the so-called "Israeli Apartheid Week," as well as articles in which it implies Canadian Jews' first loyalty is to Israel.

In his self-promoting article, Blakeney asserts that "academicians and law experts have advised me to take this threatening email to the authorities here in Canada. However, I am intuitively averse to having the state decide which emails are good and which are bad. I’d rather engage in debate and dialogue with my interlocutors." 

Among those encouraging Blakeney to take his email to the authorities is JDL Director Meir Weinstein.

The result of that could be almost as embarrassing for the Press TV correspondent as Blakeney proved for his alma mater, the University of Lethbridge. At Blakeney's behest, his school offered a pro forma congratulation to its oddball alumnus on getting a post at Veteran Today, then upon learning about the insane bigotry it promotes, they publicly retracted it. 

UPDATE (June 4): Jim Fetzer, an editor at Veterans Today,  the online home for deranged 9-11 conspiracy nuts, mindless Jew-haters, and suck-ups to Iran's dictatorship, has helpfully produced the email that Blakeney claims came from the Jewish Defense League. The email address on it is JDL.org@usa.com. That email address, I am informed, has absolutely nothing to do with the Jewish Defense League of Canada. USA.com is a free webmail service like hotmail, and anyone can take out an email account on it in any name they like.

The notorious "threatening" email (via Veterans Today)

The FBI in the United States has listed the Jewish Defense League as a banned terrorist organization in that country. The Jewish Defense League of Canada is peaceful, law-abiding organization has no affiliation with the banned US group, though the Veterans Today and Press TV "journalist" Blakeney and his editor evidently have no idea of that.

In response to this information, the Jewish Defense League of Canada's Director, Meir Weinstein, reiterated that if Joshua Blakeney has received a threat from any one or group, particularly one that purports, even as implausibly as in this case, to be from a representative of a listed terrorist group in the US, he should contact the relevant authorities so they can investigate it.

So it would appear that Blakeney received an anonymous threat and demonstrating his usual comical ineptitude, without even bothering to contact the Jewish Defense League of Canada, leaped to and publicized his erroneous assumption that they had threatened him.

John Bolton: ‘The Biggest Threat to National Security is in the White House’

transcript HERE

Obama traded dangerous terrorists for a deserter according to Bowe Bergdahl's platoon members

(CNN) -- The sense of pride expressed by officials of the Obama administration at the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is not shared by many of those who served with him, veterans and soldiers who call him a deserter whose "selfish act" ended up costing the lives of better men.

"I was pissed off then, and I am even more so now with everything going on," said former Sgt. Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl's platoon when he went missing on June 30, 2009. "Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war, and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him."

Vierkant said Bergdahl needs to not only acknowledge his actions publicly but face a military trial for desertion under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

More HERE

Egyptian court justifies mass death sentances by claiming accused are demons who follow Jewish scripture

For an Egyptian, which is rife with fanatical antisemitsim, the worst thing you can call someone is "a Jew." The current justification of mass death sentences by the Egyptian junta's court is bizarre to say the least.  There will probably be more episodes like this in the ongoing battle between the bad guys of Egypt's military dictatorship versus the even worse bad guys of the Muslim Brotherhood.

CAIRO (AFP) -- An Egyptian court that sentenced to death 37 Islamists and handed life terms to 492 others defended its verdict on Sunday, saying the men were "demons" who followed Jewish scripture.

The court in the central city of Minya had triggered international outrage earlier this year for sentencing to death hundreds of alleged supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in two separate mass trials which only lasted minutes.

In one trial in March 529 were sentenced to death for the killing of a police officer but the court later upheld the sentencing against only 37 of them, while the rest were jailed for life.

In a statement Sunday to justify its decision, the court said: "The accused came out of the depths of hell... to plunder Egypt's wealth, tyrannise its people and they killed the deputy commissioner."

It described the men as "enemies of the nation" who used mosques to promote the teachings of "their holy book, the Talmud," the central scripture of Judaism.

Today's Tel Aviv has become San Francisco in 1968

The wise and lovely Miranda Frum used to be a Chase Producer for the wise but not quite as lovely Micheal Coren at Sun News Network.  It was always a joy to speak with her prior to my semi-frequent appearances with Michael. Now Miranda is in Tel Aviv, doing some very different work as both a model and a writer. Her new piece for Tower Magazine describes how Tel Aviv has, at least from the description she provides, morphed into California in the late 1960's:

I'm sitting in a small room with a very high ceiling. There isn’t much light or natural air, the one window surrounded by the corpses of out-of-date electronics. There isn’t much of anything, really, just a few couches and an obtrusive square coffee table. The couches are filthy, covered with sad, dusty-looking quilted blankets. On the walls: a few ugly paintings made by the apartment’s previous inhabitants, which remained up because the new renters felt guilty throwing “art” in the trash.

I’m with a guy named Dave—not entirely sure where he is from. Some mix of English speaker and Israeli heritage. Maybe his parents are Israeli and he was born in the UK. Point is: now he lives in Tel Aviv. Dave dresses like a Tel Avivian—a t-shirt with the original sleeves and collars cut off, made into a tank top. Levis jeans, also altered, now shorts. No shoes. Lots of rope bracelets—souvenirs from a spiritual quest in India.

Dave has just come back from a nature party—Israeli kids love nature parties. A nature party is exactly what it sounds like, a party in nature. Israelis and their friends carpool out to some remote location (which is discovered only by calling a certain number and following instructions from one of the event planners) in either the desert or a forest. They arrive and construct a small city of tents, and then the party begins. DJs play for hours, MDMA and acid are dropped, peyote and marijuana are sparked. The sounds of trance music mixes with excited shrieks and yells and dissolves into the air. Sometimes a party is just 24 hours, sometimes three days. Adults paint their faces to look like fairies, new friendships are formed, and peace, love and magic enter the physical realm.

These parties aren’t my scene—the one time I went to a nature party someone accidentally broke my Jawbone speakers. I never recovered. I also hate trance music....