The question remains, however, why do women dress in hyper-sexualized ways on Halloween, a day meant to be “scary”?
The answer to sexy witches lies, perversely enough, in the virginal bride. Indeed, the point of being hyper-sexualized on Halloween is to be sexually pure the rest of the year.
In other words, certain women- particularly white, middle-class women- have been afforded the status of being sexually pure and innocent, real ladies. Other women- especially poor women and/or women of color- have been marked as hyper-sexualized and dirty.
Thus white, middle class women, especially college students and soccer moms, love to put on sexy, slutty costumes on Halloween. In this way, they mark themselves as sexual, but also sexually protected. No one would call your mom or daughter a “ho” on November 1st, but let’s face it, on October 31st she might just be dressed like one. In this way, being a Halloween Ho marks one as “really sexually pure” in the same way that men dressing up as women marks them as “really men.”M'kay. I would have said that the reason white, middle class chicks dress slutty on Halloween is because they want to feel sexy and recapture their lost youth in a safe, socially-acceptable way. But, hey, that's just me. (BTW, I'm a Halloween grinch. I loathe the macabre and the gruesome, and while I have a soft spot for teensy-weensy chocolate bars, they do not compensate for all the attendant grossness.)
It will be dark outside, so perhaps they’ll not notice the shower door — Roberge’s homage to the movie Psycho — that next greets them, as they prepare to venture through a dark and narrow corridor made of thick sheets of black plastic. It leads to the butcher’s room, where severed body parts, jars of eyeballs, and a body wrapped in bloody sheets — oh, and a butcher, too, one of 10 friends Roberge has enlisted to help animate the outdoor haunted house — all lie in wait.
PRISTINA, Kosovo – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is touring a Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo as she seeks to convince ethnic Serbs they have a home in Europe's youngest nation.
Clinton will visit St. Nicholas Church Wednesday with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. They're seeking to advance talks between Serbia and its former province so both can one day join the European Union.
One stumbling block is the fate of 60,000 Serbs in northern Kosovo. They reject Kosovo's authority and want independence or incorporation into Serbia.
Washington and Brussels say neither is possible. They're promoting economic cooperation between the countries and telling ethnic Serbs they'll be protected in Kosovo.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008. The church Clinton is visiting suffered during anti-Serb riots in 2004.My question: why hasn't the Obama administration made the same pitch to Palestinians? (That's rhetorical, of course. It never would or could ask Arabs to "settle" for anything less than statehood.)
rated by travelers as, “UZU is closed for maintinace” and “Could do with a facelift.” As well as, “Due to instability in the country at the time, the lobby was swarming with men clad in army fatigues” and “the smell is unbelievable – if your balcony faces the lake then just leave!”Greenfield summarizes the fraught situation--and Benghazi accommodations--with this droll advisory:
Discerning travelers are advised to avoid Benghazi as there is a high risk of being murdered either by Islamist terrorists, bandits or heavy odors– to be followed shortly by the obligatory cover-up.The obligatory cover-up smells, too.
LAST week, Twitter shut down a popular account for posting anti-Semitic messages in France. This came soon after the firing of blanks at a synagogue near Paris, the discovery of a network of radical Islamists who had thrown a hand grenade into a kosher restaurant, and the killing of a teacher and young pupils at a Jewish school in Toulouse earlier this year. The attacks were part of an escalating campaign of violence against Jews in France.
Today, a sizable section of the European left has been reluctant to take a clear stand when anti-Zionism spills over into anti-Semitism. Beginning in the 1990s, many on the European left began to view the growing Muslim minorities in their countries as a new proletariat and the Palestinian cause as a recruiting mechanism. The issue of Palestine was particularly seductive for the children of immigrants, marooned between identities.
Capitalism was depicted as undermining a perfect Islamic society while cultural imperialism corrupted Islam. The tactic has a distinguished revolutionary pedigree. Indeed, the cry, “Long live Soviet power, long live the Shariah,” was heard in Central Asia during the 1920s after Lenin tried to cultivate Muslim nationalists in the Soviet East once his attempt to spread revolution to Europe had failed. But the question remains: why do today’s European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?
I did notice that, Hasswipe. Why, if I didn't know that this is 2012, I would have thought it was 1933, and you were speaking as a Nazi in Germany.In recent years, there has been an increased blurring of the distinction between Jew, Zionist and Israeli. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant group Hezbollah, famously commented: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”...
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah yesterday urged the United Nations to adopt a resolution condemning those states and groups that abuse divine religions and Prophets (peace be upon them).
Addressing a reception given to prominent personalities and heads of foreign Haj missions at Mina Palace, he urged Muslims to strengthen their unity. “Haj is a symbol of Islamic unity and solidarity,” he said.
“From the vicinity of Grand Mosque in Makkah, I demand a UN resolution that condemns any country or group that insults religions and prophets,” he said. “It is our duty and that of every Muslim to protect Islam and defend the Prophets.”
The king’s statement comes after a low-budget film produced in the US, “Innocence of Muslims,” triggered a wave of deadly anti-American violence last month across the Muslim world targeting US symbols ranging from embassies and schools to fast-food chains...You mean those abject apologies from Barack and his obsequious minions didn't satisfy the regal custodian? My, he's hard to please.
Why do the French, Americans and Westerners think they can insult the most revered personalities of Islam but Muslims must put up with it because of this sacred cow called “free speech”? It appears the notion of “free speech” in the West means the freedom to insult, in foul language, the revered personalities of Islam.Dern tootin', cowboy. If you don't like it--and, going out on a limb here, I have a sense that you prefer the sharia way of arranging these matters--you could always relocate to, say, Iran, where such speech is not tolerated; where it is, in fact, dealt with in the harshest terms possible. The price of living here is having to put up with something that you find intolerable, but that we infidels revere.
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| One of the greenhouses destroyed during the Gaza "Kristallnacht" |
The Toronto District School Board could use a Plan B for getting its leaky school roofs fixed. Except that it’s got its back so far up against the financial wall, that may be near impossible.
The roofs were supposed to be repaired through a “landmark” solar panel project deal, announced a year ago last May.
School roof space was to be leased to a solar power developer —who would put solar panels up and generate money from them — in exchange for getting major repairs on 450 roofs over a 20-year period.
The first batch of panels was supposed to have started producing power last spring. The worst roofs were to be fixed within the first three years...Um, not to be low-tech and retrograde about it, but I hear that tar and shingles can work like a charm.
Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, "have that person arrested." And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock-on-the-door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall guy into custody.
This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional storyline, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it's probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes. Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.
Good Day Sir,Admiral General Ashraf Taysir Shaker Alqawasmi--wasn't that the name of Sasha Baron Cohen's character in The Dictator? ;)Thank you very much for your email, let me introduce myself again, I am Francis Yue-Cheong of (Shanghai Commercial Bank Ltd,Hong Kong) before the U.S and Iraqi war our client Mr.Ashraf Taysir Shaker Alqawasmi a business merchant made a fixed deposit of USD27.3m for 2Yrs where i was the only one that knew about his deposits. Upon maturity during the war in 2003, Ashraf, his wife and only daughter died in a bomb blast that hits His Residence. Investigations showed that he didn't declare any next of kin. As a foreigner,I want you to stand as the next of kin to claim the fund because according to the laws of my country at the expiration 8years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. I have an attorney that will prepare all the documents to back you up as the next of kin to Mr.Ashraf Taysir Shaker Alqawasmi. Please reach me only on my email with your full names, age, current occupation, Physical address, direct telep hone and fax numbers to enable thRegards,
Francic Yue-Cheong Wong
By then [January 1942], news of mass exterminations of Jews had already leaked out, and FDR was facing pressure to do something about it. He was disinclined to act, because he regarded the matter as a distraction from the larger project of winning the war. To the extent he regarded the murder of Jews as a problem, he saw it as a political issue to be managed, lest it affect the outcome of the 1944 campaign.
This is where Herbert Hoover comes in. No one ever described Hoover as haimish—Yiddish for down-to-earth, simpatico—let alone as a mensch. An Iowa-born Quaker, wealthy and self-made, he was stiff, formal, and bland, a living caricature of the sort Republican Jewish voters have long regarded with special scorn. But where their favorite Franklin Roosevelt, all jaunty bonhomie, brilliantly played at empathy, Hoover was a genuine humanitarian. Indeed, it was his remarkable record of saving millions of Europe’s destitute from starvation in the wake of the First World War that forged his political career. That career came crashing down, of course, with his failure as president to manage the Depression. But in the thirties and forties, from the political wilderness and in the face of isolationists in his own party, Hoover bravely took up the cause of Europe’s Jews.
Returning from a visit to Germany and a meeting with Hitler in early 1938, Hoover denounced the Nazi state in the harshest possible terms, speaking out about concentration camps and the country’s “darkest picture . . . the heart-breaking persecution of helpless Jews.” Already he was pushing for the lifting of immigration restrictions favored by the Roosevelt administration, as later he would futilely urge decisive action to rescue those who still might have been saved. Moreover, along with such other leading Republicans as Wendell Willkie and Clare Boothe Luce, he embraced the cause of Jewish statehood, resulting in a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform.
Meanwhile, with cover unfailingly provided by America’s most prominent Jewish spokesman—the American Jewish Congress’s Rabbi Stephen Wise, who referred to FDR as “The Chief” and “The All Highest”—Roosevelt did nothing. Only when the still-vibrant Jewish press began making an issue of the administration’s inaction in response to the tragedy of Europe’s Jews did Roosevelt, fearing a potential backlash at the polls, even make the gesture of getting a similar plank inserted into the Democratic platform. Not that he had any cause for concern: in 1944, 90 percent of Jewish voters went for FDR.
A post previously published in this space regarding a study about how hormones may influence voting choices has been removed.
After further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN.Well, that just makes me want to read up on the study.
Thomas Carlyle, who wrote on the same subject...a century and a half ago, declared that there was "no nobler feeling" than hero worship. "Heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest god-like Form of Man...it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man's life." I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfillment, which they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it "the germ...of all religion hitherto known," but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.In other words, hero-worship is a kind of laziness. So get off your duffs, Americans, and don't elect the guy who thinks he's Jesus H. Christ (and who somehow managed to persuade you of the same). Hand the reigns to the guy who has no delusions of grandeur, and who actually knows how to run things.
BAKU, AZERBAIJAN—The latest weapon in this country’s ideological war with Iran arrived in an armada of jets from California, accompanied by a private security force, dazzling pyrotechnics and a wardrobe that consisted of sequins and not much else.
A crowd of nearly 30,000 gathered to watch as the leader of this mini-invasion pranced onto a stage built on the edge of the Caspian Sea. With a shout of “Hello, lovers!” Jennifer Lopez wiggled out of her skirt and launched into a throbbing disco anthem, delighting her Azerbaijani fans and — it was hoped — infuriating the turbaned ayatollahs who live just across the water.
“You could almost feel the Iranians seething,” said an Azerbaijani official who attended the U.S. pop star’s first concert in this predominantly Shiite Muslim country of 9 million.
“This stuff makes them crazy.”Um, I'm pretty sure they'd be crazy even without the American bombshell. Nonetheless, this one's for you, Ayatollah-breath:
Re: Eerie resemblance, Letters, Oct. 22.Well, maybe not once and for all, for the following questions remain: Why does a "human rights" edifice resemble any military chapeau? Isn't that what might be described as a glaring design flaw?
The helmets that Cindy Eaglesham refers to looking like Nazi helmets were actually German/Prussian First World War helmets. They do not represent an image of the Nazi’s as the Nazi party was not formed until after the end of the First World War by unemployed German soldiers. The Nazis did not form a government until 1933. There is no connection between the design of the human rights museum and the Nazi party as implied in her letter.
Bill Parkes
[T]he international Left has long had it in for what it regards as a Zionist gadfly that has the temerity to assert a strong sense of national purpose in opposition to the post-democratic utopian doctrine of transnational progressivism and the chutzpah to resist the encroachment of the Left’s Islamic friends and allies. Many of the Protestant churches are busy divesting from companies that do business with Israel on the meretricious grounds that it is an apartheid state; indeed, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has added his authority to this latest cargo of anti-Israeli archrubbish, asserting that the Israeli security fence, built “ostensibly for keeping out the terrorists,” is contributing to the decline of the Christian community in the Holy Land” (italics mine). The mainstream media have done their utmost to render Israel a pariah state—“render” in both senses of the term—as has the corrupt and partisan United Nations. And then, of course, there is the rump Israeli Left, the so-called “peace parties,” the foreign funded NGOs, the activist Supreme Court, and the brain-dead academics that inhabit the festering swamps of institutional decrepitude like Ben-Gurion University, all of whom will not rest content until Henry Kissinger is proven right.
This is a formidable axis of annihilationist forces that even a superpower might regard with trepidation. Additionally, Israel has made many crucial mistakes, such as being signatory to the Oslo Accords, which led to the repatriation and the terrorist initiatives of Yasser Arafat, the surrendering of the oil-rich and buffering Sinai Peninsula in the interests of a cold peace with Egypt that is now being piecemeal abrogated, and the disengagement from Lebanon and Gaza which resulted in over 10,000 rockets being launched against its civilian communities.
Nevertheless, Israel is a tough, resilient and indefatigable little nation, able to withstand adversity and capable of triumphing in the long run. Admittedly, it must show more resolve in countering the subversive elements within its own population, for the gravest threat to the integrity of the Jewish state is its own fifth column. Israel’s democracy has been remarkably flexible in accommodating those who work against its sovereignty and strength; yet the political direction of the country has been gradually but tenaciously shifting toward a more realistic stance regarding the dissident agenda of its internal assailants. Indeed, Israel has the extraordinary capacity to survive itself, a considerable accomplishment when compared to the interior divisions afflicting most Western nations whose geopolitical situations are far less critical.It will even, I suggest, survive those who seek to rewrite its "narrative" (for their own entirely selfless purposes, of course).
In France and Sweden -- and in the UN -- authorities fail to acknowledge that Europe's Jewish communities are under attack by Muslims who have formed insular, radical and often criminal enclaves. They are attacked NOT because of what they do or do not do; NOT because of what Israel does or does not do, and NOT because their tormentors face discrimination in Europe, but because they are Jews.'Twas ever thus.
On Sunday, October 14, 2012, thousands of Muslims stormed the London Headquarters of Google, the parent company of YouTube. They were protesting the notorious anti-Islam video clip, titled “Innocence of Muslims,” a 14-minute, amateurish, low-budget trailer that portrays Mohammad in a negative light. The video had been falsely blamed by administration officials for the murders of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomats in Benghazi, Libya.
Barricades were erected around the building, and numerous streets in England’s capital were blocked off near the Queen’s palace. Those in protest were demanding that YouTube pull down the video.
The Muslim Action Forum organized the event and approximately 800 imams from mosques across the UK assisted. Muslims from Manchester, Blackburn, and Luton attended. Others came from as far away as Glasgow.
The Birmingham Mosque told its attendees that it was important to attend the event in honor of the Prophet, and warned participants to refrain from violence in order to prove to the world that Islam is a religion of peace. The mosque provided buses to transport crowds to the event.
Though police reported that only approximately 3000 people attended, the Muslim Action Forum insists that attendance was closer to 10,000. At a glance, the irate mob appeared to consist primarily of men, but in fact, a smaller gathering of women joined them, as is often the case, in the back of the crowd. They were fully covered from head to toe in hijabs and chadors.Wow, it sounds like those scenes in Argo (which I caught at the local multiplex last night). Plus ca change, eh? In a similarly nostalgic vein, the affronted gave their protest a decidedly 1984-ish moniker:
The name of the campaign was “The Campaign for Global Civility.” Demonstrators carried signs that demanded civility from others, even as they intimidated those with whom they disagreed. Others signs proclaimed “Islam is a religion of peace,” even as an implied threat of violence filled the air. And some even had the audacity to wave signs that read, “Prophet Muhammad is the founder of freedom of speech” despite the fact that the entire purpose of the protest was to shut people up. Additional signs read that “Google is a worldwide terrorist” and “[H]ow dare you insult the blessed Prophet.”...To paraphrase another blessed prophet: All free speech is equal, but some is more equal than others.
In the 1967 film "A Guide for the Married Man," a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule:
"Deny! Deny! Deny!"—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he's shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.
"What are you doing," she wails, "who is that woman?"
"What woman, where?" the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.
So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, "What woman?" Confused by her spouse's unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she's asking him what he'd like for dinner.
For much of the past four years, the Obama administration's propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script...
