Alec Rawls, who has been working with Tom Burnett Sr. to stop the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93, explains the circumstances (related by Mr. Burnett in 2008, but not published until now).
Mr. Burnett had been telling his fellow design competition jurors that the crescent is a well known Islamic symbol. In addition to the giant central crescent (now called a broken circle) Tom also objected to the minaret-like Tower of Voices. "I made a point at that meeting," says Mr. Burnett, "to tell people that we have an Islamist design here that can't go forward, please, stay with me."
One of the left-wing design professionals on the jury, Tom Sokolowski (then director of Pittsburg's Andy Warhol Museum) thought that objecting to the crescent shape, just because it happens to be used by Muslims, was anti-Muslim bigotry. In a rude attempt to shut down criticism, Sokolowski actually called Mr. Burnett "asinine" for objecting to the huge Islamic-shaped Crescent. (Sokolowski would later repeat this performance to the press, calling a local preacher "asinine," "small minded," "bigoted," "repellant," and "disgusting" for protesting the Crescent design.)
It was in this atmosphere, charged with universal awareness amongst the jurors that the giant crescent was indeed a well-known Islamic symbol shape, but also charged with uncertainty as to whether people would be allowed to mention this fact, that another family member, Sandra Felt, started to explain what she liked about the Crescent design. She liked the "embracing" nature of it, says Mr. Burnett. She liked the way it "reached out..."
At which point another family member "lost it" (Mr. Burnett's description), screaming in agony: "I don't want to reach out to those people! THEY MURDERED MY DAUGHTER!"
The Park Service enlisted three outside consultants to assess whether the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 really can be seen as a giant mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. All three consultants, including two Islamic scholars, were blatantly and provably dishonest.
Consultant #1 (details below) confirmed to the Park Service that the giant crescent (now called a broken circle) does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca, then when asked about it by the press, denied that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca (insisting that "you can face any direction to face Mecca").
Consultant #2, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, lied about one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines, claiming that a legitimate mihrab must point exactly at Mecca. (The original Crescent of Embrace pointed less than 2° north of Mecca. The broken-circle "redesign" points less than 3° south of Mecca. Both highly accurate by Islamic standards.)
Consultant #3, a professor of sharia law at Indiana University (!), came up with an almost comically dishonest rationale for dismissing concern about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent: don't worry, no one has ever seen a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before. Not so funny is the Park Service's eagerness to embrace such a transparently ludicrous excuse.
The details are documented in a large advertisement that Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett Sr. are running this week in Somerset Pennsylvania as President Obama and the national press arrive in town for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
The press has so far been unwilling to check even the most basic facts about the memorial, like whether the giant crescent really does point to Mecca (takes about 2 minutes). Maybe charges that the Park Service and its consultants are telling easily verifiable lies will be more up their alley.
That's the hope, but a strong push might also make the difference. If you want to help, here are email addresses for the new Park Superintendent Keith Newlin and for a few Pennsylvania newspapers. You can write your own letter, or just copy the first four paragraphs above, and tell them that you want these charges checked!
That makes the broken-circle memorial to Flight 93 a memorial to the terrorists, who are depicted not only as smashing our circle of peace, but as leaving a giant Islamic crescent-and-star flag in its place:
They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace: a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, pointing to Mecca.
The damned thing is actually an al Qaeda victory mosque, with the Mecca-oriented crescent as its mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built.
That is the short version of an advertisement that started running in western Pennsylvania newspapers last week. Alec Rawls sends along this update on the effort to stop the crescent mosque.
10th anniversary ad campaign now underway
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently solicited Tom Burnett Senior's response to some new design images for the Flight 93 memorial. When he said that the so-called redesign leaves all of the terrorist memorializing features intact, editors instructed reporter Kari Andren to leave his remarks out. They preferred un-interrupted praise from the same few family members who always speak up for the broken-circle design.
The people of Pennsylvania deserve to see what their information gate-keepers don't want them to know, so Mr. Burnett and his backers decided to begin their 10th anniversary ad campaign a few weeks early. The first full-page color ad just ran in the Somerset Daily American and will appear in two other local papers next week.
For a PDF of the ad copy, click on the thumbnail below, or scroll down for the same content formatted for browsing. If anyone wants to help fund additional advertising, a very generous soul has offered to match all donations up to a total of $5000.
More explicit than a giant Islamic crescent-and-star flag?
As the ad-headline notes, the Circle of Embrace "redesign" only accentuates the circle-breaking crescent-creating theme of the original Crescent of Embrace. Mr. Burnett's full remarks explain:
The only visible change is the addition of an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace: a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.
People also need to know that a Mecca-direction indicator is the central feature around which every mosque is built. It is called a "mihrab," and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.
So the terrorists broke our circle of peace on 9/11, and all that remains standing is the central feature of a mosque. The inclusion of a broken-off part of the circle only accentuates this terrorist-memorializing symbolism. It bastardizes what my son Tom and the other heroes of Flight 93 accomplished. The crescent/broken-circle design is a desecration of sacred ground.
Tom Burnett Sr. Northfield MN
Park Service calls the circle "broken"
A proper newspaper would ask the Park Service if the extra arc of trees really does represent a broken-off part of the circle. Still, people can easily verify this crucial fact for themselves. It is right on the Park Service's own website. Their "questions about the design" page asks "Is this circle 'broken' at all?" Their answer is yes:
... the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.
The locations of these two breaks in the "circle of embrace" are spelled out:
...first, where the flight path of the plane went overhead (which is the location of the planned memorial overlook and visitor center), and second, where the plane crashed at the Sacred Ground (depicted by a ceremonial gate and pathway into the Sacred Ground).
These are the two ends of the extra arc of trees, which starts near the original upper crescent tip and continues down to the crash site. So Mr. Burnett is right. Both ends of the new arc of trees are explicitly broken off. The unbroken part of the circle—what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11—is just the original Islamic-shaped Crescent of Embrace that the Park Service promised to change.
To illustrate, the ad includes a side-bar of graphics, showing just what is changed and what is not changed in the memorial. This is slightly complicated by the fact that the Park Service pretended that they were going to make one very big cosmetic change that they are not actually making, but a few pictures easily tell the tale.
The Park Service pretended the outside of the crescent would be filled in with a forest of trees
A publicity shot of the original Crescent of Embrace design shows what appears to be a bare-naked Islamic crescent-and-star flag planted atop the crash site:
When this blatant Islamic symbolism caused an uproar, architect Paul Murdoch re-worked his mock-up to show a forest of additional trees surrounding the outside of the original Crescent:
Only the inner arc of the crescent remains visible, making the new Circle of Embrace name seem reasonable. But none of these surrounding trees made it into the actual Circle of Embrace design drawings. (The "Stage 1" drawings, encompassing the area seen in these images, were released in 2009.)
The Park Service may eventually let the bare field grow in with trees, but this is not a change in the design. The only actual change is the extra arc of trees, seen below in orange. It explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:
What the Circle of Embrace actually looks like. The original giant crescent still sits naked on an open field and the flight path still "breaks the circle" at the upper crescent tip.
Remove the explicitly broken off part of the circle (in orange), and what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11 is the same giant Mecca-oriented crescent the Park Service promised to change. It constitutes a classic "mihrab," the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, and will form the centerpiece for the world’s largest mosque.
Who broke the circle of peace on 9/11?
When the "Crescent of Embrace" was unveiled as the winning design, architect Paul Murdoch explained the crescent name and the crescent shape by saying that the circle was broken on 9/11, leaving only a part of the circle still standing: the giant crescent. The fact that this circle-breaking crescent-creating theme remains completely intact in the broken-circle design demands the question of WHO is being depicted as breaking the circle of peace on 9/11.
The final section of the ad points out that there can only be one answer. We all know who broke the peace on 9/11. Thus the memorial can only be depicting the actions of the terrorists, who are seen not only as smashing our circle of peace, but as replacing it with their own crescent and star flag.
With the media censoring all criticism, people who don't like all this blatant Islamic symbolism need a way to signal each other directly, so the ad finishes with a handy dandy flyer that readers can post on windows, walls, bulletin boards etcetera:
If you want to put a few up yourself, click the image above for a printable PDF, complete with urls for our petition to stop the memorial and for more information. And here is an ad-copy version that anyone can run in their own local paper (the free weeklies can be pretty reasonable).
As Flight 93 showed, just because the hijacker has control of the cockpit doesn't mean he can't still be stopped.
Conservative hero Alan Keyes is asking whether there is a pattern of submission surrounding the nation's 9/11 sites. Apparently he has seen our video expose of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the crescent memorial to Flight 93 (now called a broken circle). Like any straight-thinker, he doesn't like what he sees. The Flight 93 crash site is no place for a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, no matter what it is called.
On this point, Keyes cites Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo's 2005 objection to the newly unveiled Crescent of Embrace design:
Back in 2005, then-Rep. Tom Tancredo was reported to have sent a letter to the National Park Service "asking the Interior Department to reconsider the crescent-shaped design of the memorial to those aboard a plane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because some may think it honors the terrorists." Tancredo quite sensibly argues that "regardless of whether 'the invocation of a Muslim Symbol' was intentional, 'it seems that such a symbol is unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam.'"
Keyes notes our claim that the design is still replete with terrorist memorializing features and he seems to find it credible. Why shouldn't he? The damning features are all right there in architect Paul Murdoch's design drawings. Thank you Doctor Keyes!
"It’s not just embarrassing. It is a dangerous willful blindness, spurning the woken vigilance of Flight 93."
That's the last line of the full-page advertisement that Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls will be running in the Somerset Daily American this Friday and Saturday (when the two first ladies will be in town for the 9/11 anniversary):
Click for legible image. Full ad-copy PDF here (large file warning).
We are hoping that visitors will hold onto our ad, maybe even tape it to their car windows, and most especially, show it to any press people they come across. Hey, if the Park Service can use 9/11 to plant the world's largest mosque on the Flight 93 crash site, we can use 9/11 to object.
To join our blogburst against the crescent mosque, just send your blog's url.
Anyone live within driving distance of Somerset Pennsylvania? It's a beautiful place to visit and a group of motorcyclists from Indianapolis is already going.
Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls are buying full page color ads in the Somerset Daily American for both Friday the 10th and Saturday the 11th, so anyone who makes the trip will have a ready made protest sign waiting for them. Just buy a newspaper, tape the ad to a piece of cardboard, and let the massed national media know what side you are on.
That's right. With Laura Bush and Michelle Obama both attending, it's going to be a media circus, and a rare opportunity to force coverage of our issue. Just self-organize. Ad-holders will show a core of united opposition (and the media might even be forced to read our brief expose).
A PDF of the ad will be posted in another blogburst next week for anyone who wants to make signs ahead of time. There is also a set of small posters that were put together for a previous talk by Mr. Burnett. Just print with tiling to make the finished product as large or small as you want:
If you haven't been to Shanksville before, there really is no lovelier place on earth than an open field in that sprawling Sherwood Forest that is Western Pennsylvania. Drink it in. There is something in the air at that patriots' grave.
To join our blogburst against the crescent mosque, just send your blog's url.
Pamela Geller, who is leading the fight against the ground zero mosque in New York, has posted the following letter from Tom Burnett Senior.
To our fellow 9/11 families and to all who are concerned about the Ground Zero mega-mosque in New York:
We want everyone to know that the Park Service is right now building an even larger Islamic victory mosque atop the Flight 93 crash site. Many of you were outraged in 2005 when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled to be a half-mile wide Islamic shaped crescent:
Left: 2005 publicity shot of the Crescent of Embrace design. Right: typical Islamic crescent and star, viewed from a similar angle.
Few people know that this giant crescent actually points to Mecca, or understand the religious significance of this orientation. A crescent that points the direction to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Because Muslims face Mecca for prayer, every mosque is built around a Mecca direction indicator called a mihrab. The classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Here are the two most famous mihrabs in the world:
Left: the Mihrab of the Prophet, at the Prophet's mosque in Medina. Right: the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain.
Face into the crescent to face Mecca
As with the Medina and Cordoba mihrabs, a person facing into the Crescent of Embrace will be facing Mecca. In the image below, superimposed red lines show the orientation of the Flight 93 crescent. The green qibla circle is from an online Mecca-direction calculator:
A person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing almost exactly in "qibla" direction (the Muslim prayer direction). You can verify the qibla direction from Somerset PA using any number of on-line Mecca-direction calculators.
To be precise, the Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± a tenth of a degree. The final construction drawings alter this orientation slightly, so that instead of pointing a little less than two degrees north of Mecca, the actual crescent will point less than three degrees south of Mecca. Such small deviations from Mecca are insignificant by Islamic standards, which developed over a period of more than a thousand years during which far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca.
The Park Service does not call the Crescent of Embrace a crescent anymore. Now they call it Circle of Embrace, but the only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees (planted to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing at Mecca.
This is the Park Service's official explanation for the design: the terrorist attacks are depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant crescent. A clearer depiction of Islamic victory is hard to imagine, so no one should be too surprised that the damned thing points to Mecca, and actually turns out to be a mosque.
Other mosque features
Mosque design is based on a dozen typical mosque features, every one of which is realized in the Crescent/Circle design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide crescent-mihrab. Note, for instance, that the 93 foot tall minaret-like Tower of Voices is topped with another Islamic-shaped crescent, akin to the crescent-topped minarets seen in many Islamic countries:
An Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes, which literally dangle down below. In Islam, there is only heaven and hell. Symbolic damnation?
The Flight 93 mosque needs to be stopped, along with the Islamic victory mosque at ground zero in Manhattan. May the fight against these two desecrations strengthen each other.
Sincerely,
Tom Burnett Senior
Loving father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior
Pamela's Atlas Shrugs post includes a second letter from Mr. Burnett, thanking her for her help and passing on some information about the design selection process. (The vote for was 9 to 6 from a judging panel where family members were outnumbered 8-7 by left wing design professionals.)
Want to join our blogburst against the crescent mosque?
As Obama's solicitor general, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan urged the Court to dismiss the suit that our 9/11 families have been pressing against the Saudi government and several Saudi princes for their extensive funding of al Qaeda. The families sued under the domestic tort exception to sovereign immunity, which according to Kagan's Supreme Court brief (at p. 14):
requires not merely that the foreign state’s extraterritorial conduct have some causal connection to tortious injury in the United States, but that “the tortious act or omission of that foreign state or of any official or employee” be committed within the United States. 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(5).
The "tortious act or omission" is the wrongful act (the tort) that leads to the injury. Thus she is claiming that for Saudi funding of al Qaeda to be actionable, the funding itself has to have been transacted within the United States. Compare this with the actual wording of 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(5):
(a) A foreign state shall not be immune from the jurisdiction of courts of the United States or of the States in any case – ... (5) ... in which money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death, or damage to or loss of property, occurring in the United States and caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state or of any official or employee of that foreign state while acting within the scope of his office or employment..."
Contrary to Kagan's assertion, the law only specifies that the injury has to have occurred within the United States. Not a word about the wrongful act that leads to domestic injury also having to have taken place within the United. Kagan flat lied about the clear wording of a law that goes to the very heart of our ability to use the courts to combat Islamic terrorism, and thanks to the Court's failure to review this crucial case, the simple wording and intent of Congress—that foreign states whose actions do injury in the United States can be sued for those injuries—has now been undone, as if the law had never been passed.
Kagan proves that her lie was self conscious by also lying about the relevant Supreme Court precedent, claiming (again at p. 14):
In Amerada Hess the Court considered and rejected the argument that domestic effects of a foreign state’s conduct abroad satisfy the exception. 488 U.S. at 441.
In fact, the Court in Amerada never considered "the domestic effects of a foreign state's conduct abroad" at all, for the simple reason that there were no domestic injuries in that case. The injuries occurred outside of U.S. territory, which is why the domestic tort exception was held not to apply. Here are the simple facts, as recounted in Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion (joined by Brennan, White, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy):
... the injury to respondents' ship occurred on the high seas some 5,000 miles off the nearest shores of the United States. Despite these telling facts, respondents nonetheless claim that the tortious attack on the Hercules occurred "in the United States." [At p. 440.]
The Amerada Company ship was attacked at sea. Since the tortious act and the damages from it both occurred "5,000 miles off the nearest shores," the Court did not bother to distinguish between the wrongful act and the injuries from it. Kagan uses this to claim that the Court found Amerada's domestic injuries to be unrecoverable, when in fact the Supremes agreed with the district court that there were no domestic injuries (p. 439-441).
Has any solicitor general ever flat lied to the Supreme Court before? Isn't any lawyer who unambiguously lies to the Court about the simple facts of a cited holding subject to disbarment for unethical behavior? And she did it for an unethical purpose: to help the financiers of 9/11 escape justice. Any moral person would either resign in the face of such a job assignment, or would limit himself to making what honest arguments could be mustered. This moral pervert chose to lie and ought to be busted out of the profession for it, not promoted to the highest court in the land.
Obama favors a legal response to terror while working to pull the law's teeth
Obama has long been a proponent of shifting from a military response to Islamic terrorism to a civilian/criminal law response. Putting the terrorists in jail is supposedly more effective shooting them on the battlefield. This is why Attorney General Eric Holder decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in New York City. There is supposedly nothing Mohammad wants less than a public platform for crowing that America must submit or die, while credibly demanding that we must either reveal our intelligence secrets or let him go free.
It is an insane idea, seeking to move the fight against Islamic terror to an arena that disarms us and empowers them, but even that isn't enough for Obama. He has to have his solicitor general lie to the Supreme Court for him in a way that guts what laws Congress has already passed for fighting terror in the courts. First he moves the fight to our relatively toothless courts, then he pulls what teeth the courts have.
If Obama's gutting of the legal fight against terror is intentional it means that he prefers America to have NO effective defense against Islamic terrorists (perhaps because they are his co-religionists). Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court is a clear indication of this intent. Obama is ratifying, in the strongest possible way, her gutting of the law, and like Kagan, he also proves intent by repetition, nominating Kagan's partner in crime, James Cole, to be his Deputy Attorney General.
Oops!... Obama does it again: DAG nominee also favors a legal response to terror while working to pull the law's teeth
Shortly after 9/11, Cole wrote that, since the targets were primarily civilian, the 9/11 attacks should not be viewed as acts of war, but as violations of civilian law, to be combated through our civilian court system. If Cole really wanted to make the civilian courts our main line of defense against Islamic terrorism he would be for aggressive use of the courts in this fight, but in practice, he comes down on the other side, arguing as the lawyer for one of the implicated Saudi princes that the family suit to recover damages from the 9/11 attacks is invalid.
In light of this history, it is impossible to fathom how Mr. Cole can ethically carry out his duties and responsibilities as the de facto head of the Justice Department while U.S. troops are fighting terrorists who receive funding and support from organizations associated with the Saudi government and their proxies. This is a direct conflict of interest. Given Saudi NGOs’ continued involvement in terrorist facilitation world-wide and their connection to the Saudi royal family, this conflict of interest will cripple Mr. Cole’s ability to ethically perform his duties as head of a department charged with investigating and prosecuting terrorist facilitators associated with or working for the Saudi government.
Yes well, to Obama, that's a feature, not a bug. Like Obama, Cole is against a military response to Islamic terror and he is against a civilian court response. In sum, neither of them want the United States to fight on any front, but want us instead to appease and submit to Islamic terror.
Which is nothing new. Obama's entire Department of Justice is of the same stripe:
Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in. [Byron York February 2010.]
Which is worse, the DOJ lawyers who defended terrorists pro bono on the basis of shared contempt for America, or the DAG nominee who defends the financiers of terror for a share of their filthy lucre? "Why decide?" says Obama: "Hire 'em all!" So long as they are defenders of al Qaeda, its all good.
Why isn't Congress fighting back?
While Obama's terror-defending lawyers are determined to secure rights and civilian court appearances for Islamic terrorists who should be treated as criminal combatants under military justice, they are equally determined to prevent our 9/11 families from getting their day in court, despite the clear intent of Congress that they should. It is time for Congress to start fighting back. The Supreme Court shamefully failed to review a blatant subversion of congressional intent on a crucial front of the war against terror, but Congress doesn't have to take it lying down.
How about passing a clarification to the domestic tort exception that explicitly renounces Kagan's attempt to gut the clear intent of the law? Just use the Senate hearings on Kagan's nomination (commencing this week) to expose her devastating lies to the Supreme Court and to agitate for a clarification of the law that would allow the families' suit to proceed. Kagan would be routed, and the destruction she has wreaked on our terror war efforts would be repaired, killing two dirty birds with one stone.
Most Flight 93 blogburst posts are about our effort to stop the Park Service from planting the world's largest mosque atop the Flight 93 crash site, but sometimes they are on related topics. What is the relation between the crescent mosque and the suit against Saudi funding of al Qaeda? Both are spearheaded by Tom Burnett Senior (father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior), who is lead plaintiff in the families' lawsuit and co-sponsor of our petition to stop the Flight 93 memorial. Please join us:
World leader, known for reminding the Islamic world that his middle name is Hussein, hosts nuclear summit, presided over by large Islamic-shaped crescent:
It is hard to believe that the State Department could do this by accident:
An Islamic crescent is a very distinct and completely unnatural geometric shape, combining a circular outer arc with a non-concentric circular inner arc. The unnaturalness is an Islamic religious requirement. A lunar crescent has an elliptical inner arc. Using such a natural shape as a religious symbol would risk idolatry (the worship of any actual thing besides God). Thus Muslims use as their symbol the explicitly unnatural circle-in-circle crescent shape.
Sometimes the inner circle sits entirely inside the outer circle. This arrangement is typically used to symbolize Islamic world domination, as seen in the MAS logo. More often the inner circle extends beyond the outer circle, as seen on the last last Ottoman flags:
Turkish flag. Crescent covers an unnatural 2/3rds of a circle of arc, give or take (in contrast to a lunar crescent, which always covers a half a circle of arc).
Obama's circle-in-circle NSS logo uses a thin crescent to combine the world encompassing aspect of the MAS logo with the more familiar Ottoman crescent, covering less than a full circle of arc.
Obama has ordered his underlings not to notice Islamic connections
Given that the unnatural circle-in-circle crescent is the only widely recognized graphic symbol of Islam, it must have been recognized as such by at least a significant percentage of the State Department personnel who saw it prior to the summit. Why didn't anyone object, forcefully and publicly if necessary?
It would seem to be the Fort Hood phenomenon, where witnesses to Nidal Hasan's murderous ideology were afraid that making an issue of it would be career suicide, thereby enabling Hasan's mass murder of American soldiers. Obama has now made the career suicide threat official, ordering all members of the executive branch to be as oblivious to Islam as possible. The more disturbing the Islamic connection, the more it is to be avoided, to the point where Muslim terrorists, whose reading of orthodox Islamic interpretation compels them to slaughter infidels, are no longer to be called "Muslim terrorists" or "Islamic extremists." Everyone is just supposed to ignore their Islamic motivation.
Hydrogen atoms and Swastikas
Defenders of Obama's nuclear crescent (trolls in the comments at Gateway) think that so long as the Islamic-shaped crescent can be interpreted in some non-Islamic way, there is nothing wrong with using an Islamic shaped crescent to represent American hospitality:
Oh please, folks, get a grip. It’s modeled after a hydrogen atom, you know, as in hydrogen bombs?
This issue came up when the Missile Defense Agency's crescent shaped website logo became a news story in February.
MDA website logo, uses the world-encompassing symbolism of a full circle-in-circle crescent favored by several Islamic terror groups:
Left: Islamic Palestine Block insignia. Center: Hamas insignia. Right: PLFP insignia (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).
MDA spokesman Rich Lehner insists that the world-encompassing circle-in-circle crescent "symbolizes the worldwide protection of our homeland and deployed forces." But do we get to redefine in this way the only symbol shape that our terror war enemies claim as their own?
By that logic, one could say that the swastika represents a helicopter rotor in motion, making a great logo for our Apache squadrons, but no such interpretation can obviate the established meaning of the symbol shape, and like the swastika, the full circle-in-circle crescent has its own established meaning (a meaning not so different from the swastika). It represents Islamic domination of the planet. For Lehner to protest that this isn't what the full circle-in-circle crescent means to him is as ludicrous and irrelevant as saying that he sees the swastika as a spinning propeller.
Not that it matters, but the NSS logo fails as hydrogen atom
Most obviously, why the gap in the electron's orbit? The only purpose of this gap would seem to be to turn the crescent into the familiar Islamic-shaped crescent.
Less obviously, notice that the fattening of the crescent at the lower left indicates visually that the electron is coming closer at that point. That would only be the case if the orbit were being observed somewhat edge-on, but that would make the orbit appear to the observer as an ellipse, not the circle seen in the NSS logo.
By the same token, since the orbit is seen as circular rather than elliptical, that means it is being observed from above (from one of the poles of the axis of rotation), which means the electron is not moving closer to and further from the observer, hence no crescent-like fattening of the arc would be observed.
The only purpose for the unnatural fattening of the circle on one side representation would again seem to be to create the familiar Islamic shaped crescent.
Frank Gaffney was pre-mature in walking back his concerns about the MDA crescent
Kudo's to Frank Gaffney for forcing our Democrat dominated media to address the crescent shaped MDA logo two months ago. In addition to noting the Islamic shape, Gaffney also noted the likeness to Obama's permanent campaign logo:
When he discovered that the MDA logo predated the Obama administration, Frank began a walk-back, which he extended to the crescent shape:
It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.
No, the crescent cannot be interpreted as the target of the intercepting missile, because the target of the intercepting missile is explicit. It is shooting down another missile. The missile shot in the logo can be interpreted as defending the crescent, but it cannot be interpreted as attacking the crescent because the crescent is not a missile.
Ignorant coincidence, or stealth jihad?
The unanswered question is whether the Islamic-looking logos are the product of ignorant coincidence or Islamic supremacism. There are stealth jihadists who work in the field of Islamic symbolism, like the Los Angeles architect who designed the giant Mecca-oriented crescent that is now being built atop the Flight 93 crash site. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque.
Like Gaffney (sorry Frank, but you really wimped out on this one), the defenders of the crescent mosque are willing to embrace untenable excuses for their Islamic symbol shape. Asked how he could abide the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, argued that the almost-exact Mecca-orientation cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it (within 2° of Mecca) would be "disrespectful" to Islam.
After the cartoon jihad, Gaffney and White might be excused for thinking that Muslims will take offense at just about anything, but the fact is, orthodox Islam cares very little about how exactly anyone faces Mecca for prayer. For most of Islam's 1400 year history, far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca (and God).
So where did Patrick White get the idea that orientation on Mecca must be exact? From a Muslim scholar commissioned by the Park Service to answer just this question. His name is Nasser Rabbat, and he told the Park Service a flat out lie. Why? Rabbat is presumably a stealth jihadist, though he could have also been doing a personal favor for ex-classmate Paul Murdoch, the Los Angeles architect who designed the Crescent of Embrace.
This is why these possibly coincidental Islamic symbol shapes need to be properly investigated: because where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire.
Gaffney was also premature in dismissing the Obama-like character of the MDA logo
Just because the Obama-like logo was not a product of the Obama administration does not mean it was not the work of a freelance Obamaton, or even an Obama-connected logo designer.
Obama started using his logo in early 2007, when it made a huge splash in the logo-design community. The contract for the MDA logo was not let until September 2007 and the logo itself did not appear until October 2008. Thus the MDA logo was designed while Obama's logo was all the rage, and given Obama's connections in the advertising industry, his people could even have exercised some direct influence over the MDA logo.
The strong Obama likeness makes it almost certain that the MDA logo was created by an Obama partisan as a tribute to Obama. From that strong prior, the likelihood that the Islamic-shaped crescent was also intentional goes up dramatically. Our president does not emphasize the "Hussein" in "Barack Hussein Obama" for nothing.
To join our blogburst-effort to stop the crescent mosque, just send your blog's url.
Alec Rawls noticed something not quite right about Jihad Jamie's mother and father. Compare these two snippets from their Wall Street Journalinterview:
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez's interest in Islam "came out of left field," said her mother, Christine Holcomb-Mott, in an interview at her home Friday, wearing a blue sweatsuit with a silver cross around her neck.
How out of left field?
Mr. Mott, a convert to Islam himself, says he went to Denver to find his stepdaughter but couldn't track her down.
This woman is married to a Muslim, but neither she nor her husband can grok where in the world their murder-plotting daughter/step-daughter ever got exposed to this worrisome religion that subducts so many of its followers into terrorism.
Their disgust at daughter Jamie sounds sincere, but their blatant dishonesty about how she could have gotten interested in Islam suggests otherwise. It is possible, however, that the Journal's paraphrase is not precise. If put on the spot, Holcomb-Mott would likely clarify that she has no idea how her daughter ever got interested in murder-cult Islam.
There is a way that this could actually happen: if Mr. Mott is some kind of multiculturalist do-gooder who converted to Islam in sympathy with the idea that "Islam was hijacked too" on 9/11. Such a person could have converted without comprehending the well established Islamic pedigree of violent aggressive jihad.
Don't scoff. This same "Islam is a victim too" sentiment is right now allowing a giant Mecca oriented crescent to be built on the Flight 93 crash site. After all, it would just be too horrible to reject the Crescent of Embrace memorial simply because it is in the shape of a giant Islamic crescent, not when Islam itself was amongst the victims on that terrible day. No, we must do the opposite and embrace Islam.
If Mott is thinking the same way, he has hardly gone any further than the Memorial Project. But then it seems that his step daughter took one step further still and actually read the Koran, with its endless commands to slaughter the unbelievers. Thus did an unhappy misfit finally find a home for the vicious vindictiveness that the religion of her birth had kept in check.
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A military trial will do the same thing--give them justice, give them a chance to talk--but not out, you know, in the public.
Nicely framed and edited by KSTP Minneapolis:
Second Burnett interview here. If only our government, with all its resources, could make 1/100th the sense of this honest patriot, but honesty and patriotism seem to be completely absent from the Obama/Holder makeup. Mr. Burnett says he will fight.
Mr. Burnett is also trying to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son's grave
Video expose of what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace design, contains footage of Mr. Burnett and Alec Rawls (author of this blogburst post) at last year's Memorial Project meeting:
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It is just too bad it is outside of Jerusalem and not southwestern Pennsylvania.
A bright blue sky could not hide the gray shadows of pain that marked the eyes of the families of the victims of the "9/11" terrorist attack that found themselves in Arazim Park in Jerusalem on Thursday. They had gathered together with international dignitaries and Israeli leaders to dedicate a new monument to the their loved ones, who lost their lives in the senseless 2001 attack on America by the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
Designed by award-winning Israeli artist Eliezer Weishoff and commissioned by the Jewish National Fund-USA/Keren Kayemet L'Israel (JNF-USA/KKL), the memorial depicts the World Trade Center and Pentagon through sculpture and landscape architecture.
People from nations around the world lost their lives that morning, among them a number of Jews, including Israelis. Fewer Jewish New Yorkers than usual were present in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, however, because many had stopped on their way to work to vote in fiercely-contested local primary elections.
The 30-foot high bronze sculpture commemorating the event and honoring the memories of the victims is composed of a waving American flag transformed into a memorial flame. The monument rests on a base of gray granite, part of which comes from the original Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, destroyed in the mammoth airliner attack eight years ago. The sculpture, which was funded by the Bronka Stavsky Rabin Weintraub Trust, is surrounded by a circular, crater-like plaza and reflection area tiled in stone.
The Jerusalem monument is one of the first major international memorials to mark the terrible event and honor the memory of its victims -- and the only site outside of New York to recognize the names of every victim of the attack.
Memorial donor and native New Yorker Edward Blank explained that he funded the project as a means of expressing the myriad conflicting feelings he struggled with after the tragedy. "My wife died just a few days before 9/11," he said, "and then the whole world was sent reeling by the events of that day. I was looking for a meritorious way to recognize the many feelings I was having, and this memorial was the perfect fit."
U.S. Ambassador to Israel James Cunningham attended the ceremony dedicating the monument, as did U.S. Congressman Erik Paulsen, who led a delegation from the United States. They were joined by Israeli Cabinet ministers, Knesset members and many families of the victims of 9/11, as well as other distinguished guests.
Strange how the people of Israel can design and implement a memorial to the victims of terror that will grow and bloom as time goes by. How strange that the designers never considered facing it towards Jerusalem, just on the road to the city. Nor does it face Mecca as the Flight 93 Memorial does.
When you visit Israel, take a moment outside of Jerusalem and visit this memorial. It is well worth your time and trouble to do so.
The desecration has begun. A ground-breaking ceremony was held at the Shanksville crash site on Saturday. Bulldozers will start reshaping the land this week. Never mind that the only rule for the Flight 93 memorial's design competition was that the landscape had to be left as it was. In order to complete the full arc of the Crescent of Embrace (now called a broken circle, but still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent), an earthen causeway will have to be built across the wetlands that lie about 50 vertical feet below the crash site.
A contractor posted recently about his decision to turn down work on the memorial, despite economic hard times. Our friend Jeff just could not stomach the idea of helping to build a tribute to the enemy, a sentiment that is easy to understand and much appreciated. To anyone else who might find themselves in this situation, just be aware that there are other options. Someone is going to do the work, and if the pay is lucrative, it could be better for our cause to have that money go to someone who is on our side.
Blogburst author Alec Rawls has succeeded in driving driving quite a bit of Western Pennsylvania news coverage through the purchase of a half-dozen half-page full-color ads in the local Somerset paper. If anybody wants to fund another, Alec will gladly put the ad together. Call it anti-dhimmi jiu-jitsu. We can use the Park Service's own money against them.
If we don't succeed, then you have to live with knowing that you helped to build an abomination. There is no simple answer.
On the subject of worthy causes, long-time blogburst participant Curt at the excellent Flopping Aces blog is helping to orchestrate fundraising for Project Valour-IT, which helps provide voice-controlled computers and other technology to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand wounds and other severe injuries.
Soldiers Angels, which hosts Valour-IT, is also fundraising for the victims of the jihad attack on Fort Hood.
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The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.)
The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of "tweaking" would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6).
The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca.
Here is the original Crescent of Embrace:
"Qibla" is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°.
Here is one of the new construction drawings:
Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°).
As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.)
The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes
When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site:
Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent.
This is explained on the Park Service's own website. The extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:
In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.
Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees:
The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center).
What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this:
Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design.
The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane.
They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven't. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.
The giant crescent is actually a mihrab
Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93:
Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world's largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:
...most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.
Right. That's why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can't figure it out.
To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:
Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.
In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry.
Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11?
The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don't care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.
Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey
So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed?
Ed Morrissey urged his readers "to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans," promising for his own part that "as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial." Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight.
The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque.
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Tom Burnett Sr. and his wife Beverly did some 9/11 interviews the last couple of days, remembering their son Tom Jr., who was murdered by Islamic terrorists aboard Flight 93. Mr. Burnett has been trying for several years to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. In their interview with WSAU radio in Wisconsin, the Burnetts were joined half-way through the hour by Alec Rawls (the author of this blogburst post), who has written a book about the terrorist memorializing Crescent of Embrace design.
Mr. Burnett's words are always heartfelt, yet marked by a constant scrupulousness. Emotion never carries him to utter a word beyond what he actually has grounds to assert. Highly recommended listening, perhaps especially for those who are better at judging people than facts. Let's face it, show some people the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, and they just aren't sure what they are looking at. Point out that the central feature of every mosque is a Mecca-direction indicator, and somehow the pieces don't fall together in their brains:
What is that? Just a mysterious diagram to some.
Yet these folks can still be good judges of character. So judge the Burnetts. The WSAU interview begins with host Pat Snyder asking Mr. Burnett if America is doing enough as a nation to remember 9/11. Most of us, on being asked any question, will try to answer it, but Mr. Burnett immediately defers, and in the most polite way:
Well, I'm not a very good judge of that. We are tucked away here in the southeast corner of Minnesota...
But if he isn't interested in passing judgment on how much America should do to remember 9/11, he is very concerned that we don't honor the wrong people, and starts right in on the Flight 93 memorial (which Mr. Snyder puts off to later).
Both the Burnetts have a sophisticated understanding of American liberty. Talking about the generosity of Americans towards each other and the world, Beverly notes the change that has taken place in her lifetime, where assistance used to be all private, but now the government has gotten involved. She passes no explicit judgment on this development, but just notes what should remain constant (at 17:22):
I think about all the programs we have in the government. I come from a different generation, and my mother and father, and Tom's, that we never really looked to the government all the time. We looked to our neighbors and churches and friends for things. But our government should be there to make sure we're SAFE.
Instead, as Tom and Bev both note, our elites don't even want to acknowledge that it was Muslim terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.
It is these same elites who don't want to acknowledge the Islamic symbol-shapes in the Flight 93 memorial. To witness this symbolism would be to tie Islam to 9/11, which to these people is some unconscionable bigotry, regardless of the truth. There is the rub. As Mr. Burnett put it (at 25:16):
All we want--Alec, and the thousands of Americans who back us--we want the truth. What happened? [How did we end up with an Islamist design?] And we want to honor the 40 people. I don't want anything to do with the Islamic fanatics, anything at all.
Mr. and Mrs. Burnett are very thoughtful, careful, rational people. So who is it who is "too far out"? People like the Burnetts, who are skeptical that the architect of a memorial to Flight 93 could plant a giant crescent and star flag on the crash site by mistake? Or is it the people who somehow convince themselves that a crescent and star flag is just fine, so long as we can't prove that it is intentional?
Actually, we CAN prove that the Islamic symbolism is intentional. Architect Paul Murdoch does not want history to be able to deny his achievement, so he included extensive redundant proofs of intent, such as the following. Murdoch says the crescent comes from the terror attacks breaking the circle (leaving only the giant Islamic-shaped crescent still standing, hmmm). Remove the parts of the crescent that stick out past the point where the flight path (coming down from the upper left) symbolically breaks the circle, and what symbolically remains standing is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.
The full Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca ± 0.1°. Remove the parts of the Entry Portal walls that extend past the flight path at the upper crescent tip and the remaining “true” or thematic crescent points exactly at Mecca, ± 0.1°.
All the supposed redesign did was add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle, leaving Murdoch’s circle-breaking crescent-creating theme completely intact. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a precisely Mecca-oriented crescent, the centerpiece for the world’s largest mosque.
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Crime 1: Another multi-billion dollar subsidy for Government Motors.
When Obama stole Chrysler from its stockholders and gave it to his union cronies, we knew he would take every opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars trying to keep this lead balloon afloat. The Cash for Clunkers subsidy is just particularly egregious, since it works by subsidizing the last people in the world who need a subsidy: those who are well off enough to be buying new cars in the midst of a deep recession. Talk about a middle class welfare program!
Crime 2: Eliminating Government Motors’ competition by gratuitously slagging an expected 750,000 perfectly good used cars in the sub-$4500 price range.
The Obamacrats aren’t just subsidizing cars for the well-to-do. They are destroying the cars that the less well-off are in the market for, driving up used car prices as part of their effort to make new cars more attractive:
Some parts may be kept but the engine and drive-train must be destroyed. Specifically the engine will be injected with a liquid glass solution to permanently disable the engine and it will be the responsibility of the dealer to make sure this is done to the engine.
Injected with liquid glass? Sounds like a Quentin Tarentino murder fantasy, and the reality isn't any prettier. Witness Obama's procedure for destroying the would-be cars of the non-wealthy:
Here is another one, a spiffy-looking Volvo that holds out for 4-plus minutes. Some clunker, and check out the row of semi-new cars lined up to go next:
Take THAT all you graduate students, newlyweds, store clerks, aspiring actors, single moms, non-deadbeat dads, warehouse workers, journalists, hippies, and other assorted poor relations. You want a car, you can scrape together your savings for a down payment on the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars a month to Government Motors for FIVE YEARS, just like everybody else.
How big is this crime?
A very substantial portion of the population NEVER buys a new car. I, for instance, have never bought a new car, and I never expect to. Why would I, when California has the best used car market in the world? In the last 10 years I have bought two 1984 Toyota Vans, one with 45,000 miles, one with 115,000 miles, each for $1500. Both still run great. One is set up as a work vehicle. One converts from passenger van to camper. No new vehicles would serve as well, or look as sharp.
My two uber-vans, one extra-dirty from its recent 2000 mile trek to Seattle and back. (Shasta, Crater Lake, Boeing Museum of Flight, Blue Angels, Olympic Peninsula, Fort Stevens, Oregon Dunes, North Coast, and back across the Golden Gate. Ain’t that America?)
The vehicles that are being gratuitously destroyed are newer than my two vans (which are just outside the 25 year age limit) and they are up to three times the price. For instance, the immensely popular Toyota Previa vans (1990-96) all qualify.
A good California Previa with a hundred thousand miles left on it sells for two to three thousand dollars. The government's offer of 35-45 hundred is outbidding the market even on these top quality used vehicles. Cash for Clunkers is a misnomer. Some bottom-of-the-barrel cars will be turned in, but the rules insure that most will not be these “clunkers.”
To qualify, a car must have been registered the name of the new car buyer for the last 12 months and it must have been insured for the last 12 months. These actively-used cars of people who buy new cars are the quality core of the used car market. Most “clunkers” will be perfectly good cars that would be prize possessions for a half million less well-off Americans, wantonly destroyed only because the Obamacrats prefer that they be destroyed. Dollar for dollar, this is the equivalent of trying to solve the glut of housing foreclosures by purchasing the houses with taxpayer money then burning them down.
Any Obama supporter who claims to be motivated by distributional justice, go soak your head. You want to subsidize the better off? Be as stupid as you want. But don’t go destroying en masse what the less well-off need to survive.
All justified by a lie
Obama’s excuse for decimating the last two generations of used vans, SUV’s, pick-up trucks and full size cars is the global warming hoax. The ascendancy of Obama is, in his own narcissistic vision:
...the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
Energy consumption must be curtailed in the extreme:
…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
It is all about CO2 and the phony global warming industry that Vice President Al Gore created with $10b of seed money when he pioneered and administered the executive branch’s global warming portfolio (now called “climate change,” since the earth stopped warming 10 years ago). Gore’s appointees have directed almost all of the full $79b that the U.S. has spent on climate science since 1989, and they don't care at all whether CO2 is actually warming the planet. Their real motivation is an eco-religious belief that economic activity is gobbling up the natural world, so that for the natural world to survive, economic activity must contract.
To these high priests of green religion, CO2 is the perfect fall guy, no matter how insignificant its actual impact on climate. If the CO2 released by fossil fuel burning can be framed as a threat to the planet, that provides a rationale for drastically curtailing human economic activity, thereby stopping economic activity from gobbling up the natural world, whether or not CO2 itself actually has any harmful effects.
CO2 alarmists reject the scientific method
We can say with nearly complete certainty that the bulk of 20th century warming was NOT caused by CO2. This is because we know what DID cause the warming: the “grand maximum” levels of solar-magnetic activity that obtained for most solar cycles between 1930 and 2003.
Numerousstudies have found a high degree of correlation (.6 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature. That is, solar-magnetic activity "explains" statistically 60-80% of global temperature change on all time scales. That degree of correlation, observed over thousands and millions of years, HAS to be causal, and the causation can only go one way. It is not the temperature of the earth that is causing sunspots.
What is not well understood is HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature. We just know that it does, just as before Einstein we did not know what mechanism causes massive objects to fall towards each other, we just knew that they do.
We actually have some pretty good theories of how solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature but set that aside. The eco-religionists, who thanks to Al Gore control ALL of the research funds for the “climate change” industry, use uncertainty about HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature as an excuse for completely omitting the solar-magnetic variable from their models. They explicitly put theory over data, exactly the opposite of the scientific method, which says that data is always supposed to trump theory.
This anti-scientific method misattributes to CO2 the warming caused by high 20th century levels of solar-magnetic activity. Put solar-magnetic activity back into the equation, attributing to it what warming has historically been correlated with high levels of solar-magnetic activity, and the levels of warming that could possibly be attributable to CO2 become small. In particular, they become benign.
Warming in general is good. When Greenland was green, civilization prospered, as did plants and other living things. Nothing gobbles up the natural world like ice. It is only by claiming that CO2 could cause some unprecedented “runaway warming” that the alarmists have been able to present CO2 as dangerous. Stop misattributing solar-magnetic warming to CO2 and that possibility is off the table.
The dominant driver of global climate is solar-magnetic activity and any modicum of warming we can get out CO2 is all to the good. If our fossil fuel burning has the side effect of making our warm times a little warmer and our cold times a little less cold, that is a happy bit of luck for a world that ALWAYS seems to be colder than the optimum, with the next glacial period due any Millennia.
Proof that the IPCC completely omits the solar-magnetic variable
Just look at any of the IPCC assessment reports. They all include the following graphic (slightly updated over the years):
From the 4th Assessment Report (figure 2.4 on page 39 of the Synthesis Report).
The only "natural" climate influence accounted by the IPCC is "solar irradiance," which means visible light and other electro-magnetic radiation. It does in any way include the solar-magnetic flux, which is completely omitted from all IPCC models, even though every climate scientists knows full well that, according to the raw data, magnetic effects are the primary driver of global temperature.
EVERY educated person who accepts CO2 alarmism on the authority of the global warming anti-scientists is failing the most basic due diligence.
Technically, the alarmists’ anti-scientific inversion of theory and evidence takes the form of what is called “omitted variable fraud,” where the omission of any important explanatory variable causes its explanatory effect to be misattributed to whatever correlated variables are included (in this case CO2 which, like solar activity, also went up in the 20th century). This is the most basic, the most common, the most familiar form of statistical fraud. Everyone who has ever studied not just any physical science but any social science at any moderately high level is fully competent recognize for themselves the statistical fraud that is being committed by the CO2 alarmists.
The educated Democrat-voting elites who are pushing to unplug industrial capitalism on the authority of alarmist anti-scientists have an obligation of due diligence to check for themselves whether the facts of the matter are beyond their own competence, and they are ALL failing this basic obligation. They are just assuming that they have to accept on authority that the survival of the planet requires the radical curtailment of CO2, when even a quick look at the facts reveals that the statistically most important variable is omitted from the alarmist models.
Why this willingness uncritically enlist as foot-soldiers for the destruction of modernity? Because like the CO2 anti-scientists themselves, these Democrat elites also don’t care whether CO2 is actually a threat. They too are eco-religionists who are glad for any excuse to curtail the economic growth that according to their presumptions is gobbling up the natural world.
Wrong about economics too
Of course the eco-religionists are also wrong about economic growth being bad for the environment. Economic growth creates and is created by technological advance, and it is technological advance that is allowing mankind and the natural world to both thrive at once. Economic activity is not the enemy of the natural world. It is the salvation of the natural world.
Having dedicated their intellectual resources to maintaining their religious presumptions instead of following reason and evidence, our Democrat elites have become pure political animals in the lowest sense, driven entirely by their lust for power. Every excuse, be it phony concern for distributive justice or phony concern for the environment, is wielded with complete dishonesty, utterly heedless of how distributive justice or the environment are actually affected, until all that is left is their ultimate presumption: that the one thing most necessary is that THEY have power.
This pathology finds its epitome in President Obama. Cash for Clunkers is just one paltry multi-billion dollar program, but the same coming-and-going perversity is manifest in Obama’s larger jihad against CO2—his push for cap and trade legislation. If we would uncork energy, the economy would rebound tomorrow, but Obama is determined to close the energy spigot down, not open it up.
Anybody who thinks this recession is ending is out of their minds. Obama is draining the oil and pouring in the silica slurry. If you want to hear where the economy is headed, listen to the “squirk” from the end of the Obama-car-death video, when the engine jerks at the end of the hangman’s rope.
This is the sound of a valuable helper being sacrificed by government to the false idols of green religion. It isn’t just barbarous. It is a clear violation of the establishment clause. Execute the worst human criminals, yes, but Mission Solano has it right: “No Death Penalty for Cars!”
