Flim Made After 911

911

The Great Dennis Miller

Helping Citizen Gets Ticket

Below is an article by CBS LA about a citizen helping direct traffic during a black out. He alleviated a mile long back up within 15 minutes. He got rewarded by being ticketed by the police. Not only that, after being ticketed, the police did not take it upon themselves to direct traffic.

When the news showed the black out in San Diego, I mentioned to my wife that you don't see any police officers directing traffic. But let someone not make a complete stop and there would be an officer at the ready to give a ticket. Their motto should be changed from "Protect and Serve" to "Let me write this bullshit ticket to help pay for my bloated retirement".

Here's part of the article below:

When a major traffic light in the area went out Thursday morning, Alan Ehrlich took matters into his own hands, directing traffic at Fair Oaks and Huntington avenues.

“I grabbed a bright orange shirt that I have and a couple of orange safety flags. I took it upon myself to help get motorists through that intersection faster,” said Ehrlich.

Before Ehrlich stepped in, traffic was backed up for more than a mile and it took more than 30 minutes to get through the busy intersection.

Ehrlich said the Sept. 8 incident wasn’t the first and that the light goes out regularly.

“It was just kind of chaos of cars . . . there were stop signs up. But people were challenging each other to get through the intersection,” said Richard Gerrish who works at an office located at the intersection.


Gerrish said Ehrlich cleared up the mess in 10 minutes. After 15 minutes, South Pasadena police say they finally received a call about their newest traffic officer.

Police responded to the scene and told Ehrlich to stop and issued him a ticket, but never stepped into direct traffic themselves.

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The 3 Stages of Man

Every now and then I read a book that is so profound, so full of truth, and so full of looking at something in a fresh way, that I wish I could put this book in everyone's hands to read. I guess that's a reason why we have so many blogs. The book I'm talking about is The Pleasure Trap, and what follows is directly taken from the book.

Man has gone through 3 stages of life. The first stage was pre 8500BC when what killed man were other predators and starvation. Two huge inventions propelled man into the second stage: language and agriculture. From hunter/gatherer we learned to grow seeds and civilization was born. Via domesticating animals, it no longer was large predators that man must defend against, but micro predators such as measles and small pox.

Now we're in the thrid stage and what is killing us is not anything from stage one or two, but what are known as the diseases of kings. We are dying from our own affluence. The foods that nature tells us that we want and desire, is causing us to suffer from diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

If you want to read a book that is eye opening and full of wisdom, take a look at The Pleasure Trap.

Simply Evil

This article by Christopher Hitchens tells how we over intellectualize reality, instead of just looking at the facts as they're displayed.

Simply Evil
A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Sept. 5, 2011, at 10:12 AM ET

The World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001
The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.


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To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce "complexity" into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts[MN1] to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)
Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or—to recall the contemporary comments of the "Reverends" Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. (The two ways of thinking, one of them ostensibly "left" and the other "right," are in fact more or less identical.) That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some "intellectual," however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the "root cause" of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.
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So, although the official tone of this month's pious commemorations will stress the victims and their families (to the pathetically masochistic extent of continuing to forbid much of the graphic footage of the actual atrocities, lest "feelings" and susceptibilities be wounded), it is quite probable that those who accept the conventional "narrative" are, at least globally, in a minority. It is not only in the Muslim world that it is commonplace to hear that the events of 9/11 were part of a Jewish or U.S. government plot. And it is not only on the demented fringe that such fantasies circulate in "the West." A book alleging that the Pentagon rocketed the Pentagon with a cruise missile—somehow managing to dispose of the craft and crew and passengers of the still-missing Flight 77, including my slight friend Barbara Olson—was a best-seller in France, while another book about another 9/11 conspiracy theory was published in the United States by the publishing arm of the Nation magazine. Westminster John Knox Press, a respected house long associated with American Presbyterianism, published Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, which asserted that the events of that day were planned in order to furnish a pretext for intervention in the Middle East. More explicitly on the Left, my old publishing house Verso—offshoot of the New Left Review—published an anthology of Osama Bin Laden's sermonizing rants in which the editors compared the leader of al-Qaida explicitly, and in the context not unfavorably, to Che Guevara.
So, for me at any rate, the experience of engaging in the 9/11 politico-cultural wars was a vertiginous one in at least two ways. To begin with, I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known "no fly" names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!).
My solidarity with soldiers, cops, and other "responders" didn't make me a full convert to the police mentality. I was a named plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the National Security Agency, for its practice of warrantless wiretapping. I found a way of having myself "waterboarded" by former professionals, in order to satisfy my readers that the process does indeed constitute torture. I have visited Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, those two grotesque hellholes of American panic-reaction, and written very critically from both. And I was and remain unreconciled to the stupid, wasteful, oppressive collective punishment of Americans who try to use our civil aviation, or who want to be able to get into their own offices without showing ID to a guard who has no database against which to check it. But I had also seen Abu Ghraib shortly after it was first broken open in 2003, and could have no truck with the moral defectives who talked glibly as if that mini-Auschwitz and mass grave was no worse. When Amnesty International described Guantanamo as "the Gulag of our time," I felt a collapse of seriousness that I have felt many times since.
One reason for opposing excesses and stupidities on "our" side (actually, why do I defensively lob in those quotation marks? Please consider them as optional) was my conviction that the defeat of Bin-Ladenism was ultimately certain. Al-Qaida demands the impossible—worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia—and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means. (This combination, by the way, would make a reasonable definition of "terrorism.") It follows that the resort to panicky or degrading tactics in order to combat terrorism is, as well as immoral, self-defeating.
Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and—because it has no means of generating self-criticism—would begin to implode. The trove recovered from Bin Laden's rather dismal Abbottabad hideaway appears to confirm that this fate has indeed, with much labor on the part of unsung heroes, begun to engulf al-Qaida. I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of "our" civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of "faith."
The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.
In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any "simple" solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Pres Clinton Goes Vegan

Interview with my hero, Dr Caldwell Esselstyn.

Recall how Dr Esselstyn says heart disease is nothing more than a paper tiger. Think about that. Heart disease is something that no one ever needs to worry about or fear. But yet in US 50% will die of either heart disease or a stroke. There can be no middle ground. Either Dr Esselstyn is wrong or he's right. And science proves him right.

Here's a video where Dr Esselstyn talks about what actually causes a heart attack:



If you want to read a great book about nutrition, Dr Esselstyn's "How to prevent and reverse heart disease".

Vacation in New England

My wife and I just got back from vacation in New England. I'd like to write some thoughts while fresh in my mind. My mentor Dennis Prager will always talk about his travels when he's back on the radio, and I find him fresh and invigorating.

We visited Boston, Newport and Providence RI, drove up the Maine coast to a town called Whiting, visited friends in southern NH, and ended our stay renting a place on Lake Winnisquam in New Hampshire. It was the best vacation I've ever had.

First I realize I have a great family, both on my mother's side and father's side. We lunched with my Dad's sister Juanita. In a short time, I got to know her more than I ever knew her before. My dad and dad's brother are funny, but my Aunt Nita was really funny. I really loved being in her presence.

We spent one night with my cousin Brad. He has a wonderful property in which he grows Christmas trees and he also has a spring fed large pond on his property. We played wiffle ball with his grandchild, swam, and took a tractor ride through the woods. Brad would show me deer tracks, and where deer would scrape the bark off trees with their horns. Sitting on his porch drinking a few beers, telling a few stories, and sharing laughs, well it don't get much better than that.

What I take with me most is that it's not money that buys happiness. Or things. Since I live in CA I'm removed from all my family. Being with them, being loved, laughing, sharing stories, that is what brings the most joy in life. I don't have friends in CA. When I went out with my Aunt Ouis, or Brad, wherever they went, there were people they knew and they were always saying hi. It's a bit odd, but here I'm surrounded by 22 million people but my New England relatives have many more connections than I do here.

Also, they experience life a lot more. Perhaps I'm glamorizing, maybe not. I spend a lot of time on the computer. My New England family doesn't know what a computer is. There's some bad to that, but there's some good to it too. My cousin golfs, hunts, fishes, enjoys taking care of his property, spending time with the grand kids, family and friends. His life to me is full. And New England people live for their New England teams. There is no way the Patriots would be sold to another city like the LA Rams or LA Raiders. Those people live and die their sporting teams.

Maybe because I take so few vacations my mind is opened to a life different than what I lead. Perhaps it's because I'm now more open to simple truths. I enjoyed being with my family, and I loved our cottage we had right on the lake. I wanted to fish right off my patio. I asked Brad if he'd lend me a fishing pole but set it up so that I wouldn't be able to catch any fish (since I'm vegetarian) and he got a good laugh out of that.

Hopefully we can do it again. Next time I'd like to rent a boat to go skiing and a motorcycle too.

Global Warming BS

Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting—it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.

But the validity of the science behind the image—presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth—is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge.

Special agents from the Interior Department’s inspector general's office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died, and the department is eyeing another study currently underway on bear populations.

Biologist Charles Monnett, the lead scientist on the paper, was placed on administrative leave July 18. Fellow biologist Jeffrey Gleason, who also contributed to the study, is being questioned, but has not been suspended.

The disputed paper was published by the journal Polar Biology in 2006, and suggests that the “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues.” More

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I wonder how many people watched the movie "2012" and really thought that is going to happen next year like the movie's scenario.

Al Sharpton Sharp As Ever

We've Figured Him Out

By Ben Stein

Why was President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized medicine bill passed? Because he and his cunning circle realize some basic truths:

The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a pig in a poke in 2008.
(Pig in a poke means: an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted without being examined first. A poke means sack.)

They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith.

They ignored his anti-white writings in his books.

They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes by his minister, Jeremiah Wright.

They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a student.

They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois state legislator, and Senator.

The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being touted as a scholar.

Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack Obama is a super likeable super leftist, and not a fan of this country.

The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat interest groups, and in no way helped all Americans.

The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health costs while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of something that never was and never can be --
"a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society." Either the costs go up or the free society goes away... an historical truth.

These are perilous times. Mrs. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, has given Iran the go-ahead to have nuclear weapons, an unqualified betrayal of the nation. Now, we face a devastating loss of freedom at home in health care. It will be joined by controls on our lives to "protect us" from global warming, itself largely a fraud, if believed to be caused by man. She has also signed on to a Small Firearms Treaty at the U.N. This is a back door gun control move. This is approved by the Senate and a 2nd Amendment majority doesn't exist in the Senate now. It will supersede all U.S. Law and the 2nd Amendment. All citizen possession will be eliminated through confiscation. Just Like Great Britain and Australia .

Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays at all in taking away our freedoms. There is his urgency and our opportunity. Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America .

Ben Stein is a writer, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu . He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator.

Golfing at Rio Hondo

Went golfing with some friends today. The golf course is in Downey, it's called Rio Hondo. For the price, it's one of the best golf courses in SoCal.

I had a great time. How can you not golfing with good guys?

Best Sandwich Deal in SoCal

Sandwich at Sprouts. $3.99. I don't know if there's a better sandwich buy in Southern CA. Hurry before it goes to $4.99. BTW, that's only half a sandwich I'm holding in my hand (one bite removed).

Isn't it time we all grew Up?

On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.

It's Still All Bush's Fault

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POSTED ON AUGUST 3, 2011 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
THIS CAN’T POSSIBLY WORK

This, I submit, is an iron law of American politics: a president cannot run for re-election against his predecessor. It is remarkable that, in defiance of this principle, Barack Obama, midway through the third year of his four-year term, still wants to talk about all of the problems that (like every other president) he inherited when he took office. Today at a campaign rally he said:

[W]e have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much as good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we’re not even halfway there yet.

Not even halfway to where? An 11% unemployment rate? $6 a gallon gasoline? $2.8 trillion deficits? Zero economic growth? A political environment so poisonous that those who want the federal government to waste less money are something twice as bad as “terrorists?” What a way to send voters scurrying for the exits!

If the Democrats seriously think they can re-elect Obama by running against George Bush and reminding voters how tough things were in 2008–which, at the moment, seems almost like a golden age–they are delusional.

Civility in Public Discourse

Peter Wehner

In the last few days, it seems every third liberal columnist and commentator has taken to libeling the Tea Party Movement, referring to it as (take your pick) terrorists, suicide bombers, hostage takers, the Hezbollah faction of the GOP, traitors, nihilists, anarchists and people suffering from halitosis. (The last reference is made up; the rest of the descriptions are real.) Even a few politicians are getting into the act.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” Representative Mike Doyle said in a recent meeting between Democrats in Congress and Vice President Biden. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” And according to several sources in the room, Biden added his two cents, saying, “They have acted like terrorists.” (Biden denied using the “terrorism word” to CBS’s Scott Pelley. His role was to act as group psychiatrist. “I just let them vent,” Biden claims.)


All of this is terribly confusing to me. After all, during President Obama’s Tucson speech-qua-sermon, he told us that in the aftermath of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords it was important that “we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” We need to “sharpen our instincts for empathy.” And then there was this: “We can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country.”

I don’t know about you, but it’s not quite clear to me how accusing one’s (law-abiding) fellow citizens of being terrorists and part of the “Hezbollah faction of the GOP” helps us to heal and sharpens our instincts for empathy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say those words are meant to wound. You might even conclude from what liberals are saying the Tea Party Movement is comprised of people who aren’t simply wrong but who don’t love their country.

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From me below:

What gets me is that the shooter in the Fort Hood massacre, Nidal Malik Hasan, was a muslim. And the reason he committed these murderous acts was because of his islamic beliefs. But go back to the major media leftest publications such as New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, LA Times, and see if you see anything about him being a terrorist.

So the real terrorist gets protection from the Left, but Americans who would like to see our spending brought under control are called terrorists by the Left.