I just saw this on Reddit and had to share it. A company issued a report of the death of a man at O’Hare airport, but it turns out that the company was using the death as a hook for more business. The company notes “[t]here could be many reasons for the cause of this man’s death but based on the story one possible reason could be stress. The process of arriving to the airport and boarding the plane can be very stressful.” The solution? The company of course. ParkSleepFly, which appears to be working on a new slogan: “Use Us Or Die.”
While the outgoing Afghan President continues to denounce the United States and praise China and Iran, the Obama Administration has been pressuring Afghanis to allow it to keep roughly 10,000 troops in the country with the obvious commitment to spend billions and billions more on the war. The agreement has now bee signed. This is being heralded as a long-awaited success for the Administration – a curious achievement for those who want us out of the country and money spent on badly needed domestic programs of education, science, and infrastructure.
Iraqi pilots are rechecking their coordinate calculations after they mistakenly dropped food, water and ammunition to Islamic State militants rather than besieged Iraqi forces fighting the militants. It is the latest blunder by a military that, despite billions and billions in U.S. training and equipment, continues to face regular desertions and defeats in the field.
These pictures from NASA are being called “the quiet Chernobyl.” It is the Aral Sea as seen in 2000 and as seen this year. The massive decline of water levels is particularly evident from the black line showing the shoreline in the 1960s. In the United States and other cities, the world is facing a water crisis that is being given relatively low amount of attention. However, pictures like these show vividly our self-destructive impact on the environment.
Continue reading “The Quiet Chernobyl: NASA Releases Shocking Pictures Of The Loss Of The Aral Sea”
Over international protests, according to some new sites, Iran has already executed Rayhaneh Jabbari, 26. However, Fox News is reporting that the execution has been delayed. Jabbari claimed that a former Iranian Intelligence Ministry employee tried to rape her and that she stabbed in him the shoulder to escape. Despite the fact that a drink given to her was found to contain a date rape drug, the Iranian officials still wanted her hanged and they have now carried out their intent. As she was being led away to be hanged, a guard showed mercy and gave her his phone to type a final message to her mother. Her reported message below is poignant and tragic as a final goodbye to her mother. [Update: there are both reports that the execution has occurred and that the execution has been delayed. Amnesty is reporting that the execution is “imminent.”]
Continue reading ““Goodbye, Dear Mum”: Rayhaneh Jabbari Prepares For Execution (Updated)”
We have been discussing the alarming and baffling migration of Muslim men and women from the West to join the blood-soaked Islamic State or ISIS forces as they behead and murder their way through captured territories. While the vast majority of Muslims are disgusted by ISIS, the chilling reality is that there is a large portion of people who do not just support but long to behead and torture other people. Oklahoma is facing precisely that reality in two cases involving Muslim men who appear to identify with ISIS and relish the concept of beheading people in the name of Islam. It is a fatal attraction that may explain the thousands flocking from the West to the ranks of the Islamic State.
Stacey Dean Rambold, 55, is heading back to jail after his resentencing as a sex offender. After a light sentence of just 31 days in jail for the statutory rape of Cherice Moralez, 14, Rambold was given a sentence of 15 years in prison. Moralez committed suicide in 2010 before the case went to trial.
Various media outlets are reporting the latest outrage from Sharia courts. Iranian authorities have reportedly executed Mohsen Amir-Aslani, 37, for allegedly “insulting” the prophet Jonah and accused him of committing adultery. For that exercise of free speech and freedom of religion, a Sharia court had him hanged.
Continue reading “Iran Executes Man For “Innovations” On Religion And Insulting Job”
It appears that the Uber Taxi driver discussed today is not the only person who is reportedly using the “she asked for it” defense to sexual assault. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office is blaming a former state prison clerk for her own rape in litigation against the prison. The 24-year-old typist was working at the state prison at Rockview in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 2013 when she was choked unconscious and raped for 27 minutes by Omar Best, an image convicted three times previously of sex-related crimes. Worse yet, Best had been transferred from a different state prison for assaulting a female assistant but the prison still allowed him unsupervised visits with female employees.
Continue reading “The Best Defense? Pennsylvania Blames Prison Employee For Her Own Rape By Inmate”
There is an interesting protest growing on the campus of Brigham Young University where students are opposing a rule imposed by the school. The subject of the protests is rather unique. No it is not a war protest or some other usual campus cause. It is facial hair. The university has banned beards, a curious rule to be sure for a school named after Brigham Young who would have been banned from campus due to his facial hair.
Continue reading “Forever Young: Student Protest BYU Ban on Beards”
Uber taxi driver Ramy Botros has a curious defense after he allegedly put his hand down the shirt of a 25-year-old female customer: she was asking for it and in Egypt such assaults are considered justified for women wearing such outfits. This of course was in Orlando, but that did not seem to matter in this rather curious use of the cultural defense, something that I have discussed earlier.
It appears that Christopher Walken’s advice of “more cow bell” works more for Blue Öyster Cult is no longer good for diary farmers in Switzerland. The iconic sounds of cows in the pasture with bells around their necks could soon be banned due to research showing that it is harming the hearing of the bovine. The choice is curtailing a pleasant tourist experience or herds of deaf cows.
Continue reading “Needs More Cow Bell? Not In Switzerland Apparently”
By Mike Appleton, Weekend Contributor
“All governments are theocracies. We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.”
-Gary DeMar (quoted in John Sugg, “A Nation Under God,” Mother Jones (December, 2005)
When I started first grade in 1951, each school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. We recited “one nation, indivisible,” because people understood that fidelity to one’s country is not a religious virtue. The National Prayer Breakfast was not on anyone’s calendar because it didn’t exist. Politicians felt no compulsion to invoke God’s blessings on the United States at the conclusion of every speech. Protestants opposed every effort to secure public funding of Catholic parochial schools in order to preserve the “wall of separation” between church and state. The corner grocer didn’t care whether a customer was gay or had been born again. Textbooks were not reviewed by religious committees for conformity with the King James Version. No serious person had yet suggested that insentient, artificial commercial entities could magically channel the religious beliefs of their shareholders. And no one complained that a war was being waged against religion.
But following some of the events at this year’s Values Voter Summit, I have become nostalgic for 1951.
Continue reading “Religious Freedom and the Values Voter Summit”
Submitted By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
The LGBT community and Facebook are in the midst of a great controversy for Facebook requiring anonymous or aliased members of the Drag Queen community to provide their legal names for their user accounts. The community is concerned that the forced use of their “real” names could lead to discrimination, harassment and hate crimes and that their Drag names are an essential component of their personal identity. Facebook counters that its policy has been in place since the beginning and these policies are necessary to protect the integrity of its service and to bring accountability to its users by requiring actual names within the users’ profiles.
The controversy raised important questions about the role of privacy, anonymity, and free speech in an increasingly public world along with balancing the needs of different segments of our society, and individual choices.
b>Submitted by Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
We previously reported HERE and HERE what many believe to be a grave miscarriage of justice where Montana School Teacher Stacey Dean Rambold was sentenced to Fifteen Years in prison with all but thirty one days suspended after being convicted of the child rape of a fourteen year old student. The victim later committed suicide.
After a public outcry and pressure placed upon the former judge and the prosecutor’s office Judge Randal Spaulding resentenced Rambold, this time to 15 years in prison, with five years of suspended, according to a prosecutor in the case. The court remanded Rambold to custody. He will receive credit for time served under his original sentence.