Wednesday - August 13, 2014

Lauren Bacall, 89

Sultry screen siren Lauren Bacall, who rose to fame in the 1940s opposite her husband Humphrey Bogart in films such as “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep,” died Tuesday, The Bogart Estate said. She was 89.

Variety reported Bacall suffered a suspected stroke.

“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall,” the Humphrey Bogart Estate tweeted.

The managing partner of the Humphrey Bogart Estate, Robbert J.F. de Klerk, said that Bacall died at home, but declined to give further details.

The actress, known for her throaty voice and seductive stare, made her screen debut opposite Bogart at age 19 in “To Have and Have Not"-- a film in which she also memorably said, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.”

After seeing her in that film, director Billy Wilder referred to Bacall as “the girl with ‘the look,’” and the phrase stuck.

Bogart was married at the time he met Bacall, and, within months, divorced his wife. The couple married in 1945 and co-starred in three more films, “The Big Sleep,” “Dark Passage”, and “Key Largo.”

Bogart died of lung cancer in 1957 and in 1961 Bacall married actor Jason Robards, Jr. They divorced in 1969.

She also appeared such films as “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Designing Woman” and “Murder on the Orient Express.”

Posted by Drew458     on 08/13/2014 at 12:01 AM   
Filed Under: • Hollywood •  
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   Tuesday - August 12, 2014

What A Lying Sack

The president who spent years touting the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq suddenly has had to distance himself from that action.

At the White House on Saturday morning — less than 48 hours after authorizing airstrikes against Islamist militants and humanitarian air drops to save the lives of trapped Iraqi civilians — President Obama blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the absence of American troops in Iraq and rejected the assertion that he could have left a small peacekeeping force in the war-torn nation.

He uttered those after three years, and a successful re-election campaign, in which the full removal of U.S. forces from Iraq was cast as this White House’s most significant foreign policy achievement and one Mr. Obama had promised all the way back to the earliest days of his first presidential campaign in 2008.

Now, however, with the terrorist force the Islamic State running roughshod through Iraq, capturing key territory, slaughtering Christians and promising to “raise the flag of Allah at the White House,” Mr. Obama has begun to adjust the narrative.

“What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision. Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government,” Mr. Obama told reporters just before leaving for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “So let’s just be clear: The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because the Iraqis — a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq. So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made.”

Mr. Obama’s new take on the 2011 troop withdrawal quickly came under fire from a number of political pundits who pointed out the irony of a president moving away, at least in part, from his signature foreign policy achievement.

Everything is his idea. And when it seems to go right he gloms all the credit. And when it then turns out to be wrong, and falls to pieces, it’s somebody else’s fault. Always.

“I brought all the troops home from Iraq. That’s a promise I made and I kept it.”
“Oh, we should’ve left troops in Iraq? That’s Bush’s fault.”
“And by pointing out ahead of time that removing all the troops would be a disaster, Mr. Romney is not just a laughable idiot, but positively un-American.”

Unreal.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/12/2014 at 04:00 PM   
Filed Under: • Obama, The One •  
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Oh, You Beautiful Doll …. sing along

A few years ago I posted a similar story about this Japanese industry and interest in this kind of thing.

One enterprising fellow was even working on one with movement and speech of some kind, but I never saw a follow up on the story.
It was then forgotten as other stories took interest away, and today this popped up in the Daily Mail online. 

There’s a load of photos and a video at the link.

It seems a mite on the creepy side I have to say.  On the other hand, I think this sort of technology, and it surely has to be seen as such, will in time go further as it already has from it’s very crude beginnings.  Keeping in mind that were there no need out there, this would not be possible. So there must be a demand of some kind.  And Japanese science and technology as well as being entrepreneurial, are leaders in this field, I have been led to believe. 

All else aside .... it is weirdly interesting. 

Prediction.

At some point in the future, someone will finally produce the perfect clone and the old Twilight Zone story about a humanoid or robot or whatever she was, will come to be.  That might be scary cos if any of you recall that episode with James Whitmore as the unsuspecting husband/lover,
The story was titled ....  “On Thursday We Leave For Home.”

Yesterday’s Si-Fi is today’s reality.  Don’t discount this.

Sold under the name ‘Dutch Wives’ and cost just over £1,000 each

Company say early sales indicate the dolls are a big success

A Japanese company claims to have reached the next level in developing the most genuine looking sex doll which comes complete with realistic feeling skin and authentic looking eyes.

Orient Industry say their new range of dolls, made from high quality silicon, are so realistic there is very little to distinguish them from a real girlfriend at first glance.

The dolls, which are non inflatable, are sold under the name ‘Dutch Wives’, a Japanese term for a sex doll, and adverts in the media boast that anyone who buys one will never want a real girlfriend again.

Photos and Video

Posted by peiper     on 08/12/2014 at 01:23 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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this way back … follow me. the muslim idea of the future

I think this says everything on the subject of ...... Them.

Posted by peiper     on 08/12/2014 at 12:35 PM   
Filed Under: • muslims • Terrorists •  
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Robin Williams Tribute

George Takei shared this on my Facebook page.

Posted by Christopher     on 08/12/2014 at 12:34 PM   
Filed Under: • Celebrities • OBITITUARIES •  
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   Monday - August 11, 2014

horry clap

Robin Williams is dead.

By asphyxiation.

Horry clap.

Academy Award-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams died Monday in a suspected suicide, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office said. He was 63.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2014 at 06:11 PM   
Filed Under: • Hollywood •  
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a room with a view ….. of the far left

I think the main thing I hate about this article, aside from the fact that Fisk hates America, is the ever constant use of the word Islamo in place of Islamic.
Make that lower case. islamo for islamic. 
I see it everywhere these days. islamo this and islamo that. Someone writing in a conservative paper even described it as islamo-fascist, instead of islamic fanatic.
But to Fisk here.

I am not about to defend O. on anything, but no matter who is head of state in the USA, that person for bad or not has to deal with the here and now and how to respond to the threat as he (or she?) sees it. So damning O. in this case with regard to his not fighting the genocide of Christians in 1915, seems like just another reason for Fisk to be critical of something, anything, American.

I’m not a fan of this guy, but every now and then I do read him.  He gets my dander up so usually I avoid the aggro by avoiding his column. 

Along with others of the bedwetting left, it’s all about the pals and their misfortune at the hand of those bloodthirsty Israelis.
I think the problem those critics have and it’s a serious one to them, is that the numbers aren’t right.  Now if it was 1500 or more Israelis killed in Hamas rocket attacks, and only 64 Hamas dead as a result, you wouldn’t be seeing those fat tears from ppl like Fisk and his ilk.

Then he (Fisk) brings up civilian deaths by American drone attacks in Afghanistan, like the USA plans it that way with the intention of killing innocents.

Speaking of bedwetters and falsely bleeding hearts, there were thousands of (for once peaceful) protesters in London last week, people with time cos they aren’t gainfully employed, out on the streets protesting against Israel and demanding that the UK stop shipping arms to them and calling for an end to the Israeli bombing of kiddies and old ladies and old men.  Like their protests are gonna solve anything.  Schmucks.

I didn’t write the following but I believe it is true.

If Hamas didn’t fire rockets at Israel, there would be no war.

If Israel didn’t defend itself, there would be no Israel.

Bombs away! US to the rescue – but only of certain minorities, not Muslims

Obama’s air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of déjà vu is understandable

Robert Fisk

He wouldn’t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees – and the Yazidis – because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.
This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened – in case he upsets the Turks – to use the “G” word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr’s thugs have not yet attempted. We’ll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.

But for now, “America is coming to help” in Iraq with air strikes on “convoys” of Isis fighters. But isn’t that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist “convoys”? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq – also under way – is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds.

Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create – and which America now bombs – must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies – and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way – but won’t say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad.

That’s the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon’s pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a “mandate” to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love “mandates”, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our “mandates” – the very frontiers which Abu Bakr’s caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating.

His threat to the Christians of Iraq – convert, pay tax or die – has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees – at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar – tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr’s men. Alas, they may all be true.

The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali – whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East – might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr’s Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which – like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban – believes in “the suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue”. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand.

But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war. The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama’s latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?

source for view from the far left

Posted by peiper     on 08/11/2014 at 01:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Israel •  
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How Bad Are They?

They’re so bad that ...

Wow, that’s bad!

ISIS was too brutal for Osama bin Laden, letter reveals

‘Daily Mail’ reports that letter discovered in bin Laden’s Pakistan compound said associating with extremely brutal ISIS could harm al-Qaida’s reputation.

The extremist Islamist group currently wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria, which has prompted US airstrikes to prevent a potential genocide, was even too brutal for the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, among the items found in the Pakistan compound where the former al-Qaida leader was killed by US special forces in 2011, was a 21-page letter warning of the dangers of the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS.

In the letter, Bin Laden reportedly called for al-Qaida to sever all ties with the group due to its extreme brutality.

He added that ISIS’s blatant disregard for civilian life was likely to damage the reputation of al-Qaida should the groups remain associated.

This really makes me stop and wonder ...
If OBL, the most fearsome and wanted terrorist in the world, thought that ISIS was a bunch of savage barbarian killers, and Obama thinks they’re merely the Junior Varsity, just who is it that Obama thinks are the real bad guys out there?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Israel, Republicans, the NRA, and the Tea Party.



The world is upside down.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2014 at 01:09 PM   
Filed Under: • Terrorists •  
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yeah … a lot of us miss president reagan … there isn’t anyone waiting in the wings either

I’m not sure who this fellow is. I mean beyond US editor.
I think I’ve read him somewhere before this.
Anyway ... I was much surprised (at first) to find this in a lefty paper Drew once described, as a paper that should be printed in pink, it was so left.
But they have had a few voices on the right over time.  Must toss the old dog a bone now and again ya know.

Actually, this paper is somewhat disillusioned with Obama. So maybe that’s why they allowed this. 

Letter from the US Editor: No Drama Obama could use some theatrics

David Usborne

What was it about winning the Nobel Peace Prize within minutes of taking office that made President Barack Obama go so tepid on foreign policy?
The question became urgent when he backed away from striking the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons. Then when Isis stormed through northern Iraq, the White House responded by sending advisers to Baghdad. Even relations with allies have been neglected.

Contrast Mr Obama’s clunky statements on the loss of MH17 to Ronald Reagan’s address to the nation after the downing of Korean Airlines 007 by the Soviets in 1988. “And it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy,” Mr Obama said last Thursday. Looks like it may?

Mr Reagan didn’t do clunky. “Make no mistake about it, this attack was not just against ourselves or the Republic of Korea,” he said, staring at the camera in the Oval Office. “This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life.”

What we see now as limpness in the Oval Office may be judged by history as wise restraint. Mr Obama cares only about the right end results. No Drama Obama. And he has a deep sense of history. He hasn’t forgotten the USS Vincennes, when a US surface-to-air missile struck the Iran Air airbus, killing all 290 passengers.
All that said, in the past days Mr Obama has flunked the presidential “optics” test. The day the plane went down, he carried on with his schedule, delivering a speech about repairing roads then attending two fundraising events. On Tuesday he left Washington for three days of fundraising.

In these tricky days, he needs to drop the cool act and give us some presidential theatrics – even if it goes against his better nature.

source

Posted by peiper     on 08/11/2014 at 12:32 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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happy garden

I think my Canna plants are finally going to bloom. They got in a bit late, and the plant is a bit too tropical to do well in my area, which is barely Zone 6 for you gardener types. I think I put in the “dwarf” variety, although what came up has grown to nearly 3 feet tall at this point and dominates the rest of the garden. Great big leaves, although not really sturdy ones. For a Canna, 3 feet tall is a dwarf; in the deep South, these things grow 6 feet tall. And right now I see they have exactly ... one bud. Got my fingers crossed.

Oh, I wish these were mine!

Said to be a cousin of the banana, the canna is not too far removed from the useful tubers Taro and Cassava (latter being the source of tapioca). But the main interest in the plant today is not in its potential nutritional or pharmaceutical uses. It is widely regarded as an ornamental. Please notice we did not say it was prized as an ornamental. The canna, you see, is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Southern garden.

Cannas, along with prickly pear cactus, are frequently the only flowering plants found in ghost towns and they sometimes rival irises as rooted cemetery flowers. However, their perceived association with poverty and their habit of spreading themselves thick makes them flora non grata at many graveyards - especially those of the ‘scraped earth’ variety.

Ridiculously easy to grow, cannas will take root if dropped on sand, soil, asphalt, cement or slag heaps of radioactive waste. Before the arrival of the dumpster, towns had back alleys where garbage was hidden from view. Cannas grew so thick that people assumed the flowers appearance was a government beautification project. What convinced them otherwise was that the cannas throve - which they would not have had it been a government project. The truth is that these back alley orphans grew from roots discarded by gardeners who had exhausted other disposal methods like napalm, burial at sea and encasement in cement.

Sounds about right for my skill level of sticking plants in dirt. As in, ZERO. Sadly, this kind of bulletproof hardiness doesn’t apply up here in YankeeLand, where I was absolutely amazed to see a hummingbird the other day. Like I said, we’re just barely Zone 6 here, and these are Zone 8 plants.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2014 at 10:15 AM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life •  
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GW100N revisited again

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2014 at 09:43 AM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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A Bit Of Privacy?

If you are concerned about being internet privacy, here’s a search engine that you might like. Duckduckgo.com has a simple interface up front, and search algorithms as good as the other guys in the back. It appears to be pretty capable ...

The overhauled engine can now return videos, images, definitions, local places, and Knowledge Graph-like bursts of basic biographical information—dubbed “instant answers"—when you search for topics, all via an attractive image-driven carousel at the top of the results.
...

Plus, the icon is cute. So add this one to your list perhaps; there are more ways to hunt things up online than just Google, Bing, and DogPile. DogPile, however, was the only one that could find the real name of my favorite model The Girl With 100 Names (GW100N), who is now doing fashion work under three new aliases.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/11/2014 at 08:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Computers and Cyberspace •  
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Islam

How did I miss this?

Posted by Christopher     on 08/11/2014 at 01:06 AM   
Filed Under: • PAT CONDELL •  
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   Sunday - August 10, 2014

School lunches

Did you ever suspect that school lunches would be anything more than what am I packing for tomorrow?

Lunch at Fort Thomas Independent Schools may include more French fries, fewer vegetables and larger portions this year. One thing that won’t be on the menu: federal dollars.

The Campbell County district is opting out of the federal school lunch program, forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding.

The reason: Kids didn’t like their healthful lunches.

“The calorie limitations and types of foods that have to be provided ... have resulted in the kids just saying ‘I’m not going to eat that,’” Fort Thomas Superintendent Gene Kirchner said.

I’d say just pack lunch, but I’ve read some stories, mostly in Virginia, where teachers have confiscated students’ lunches for not following Federal guidelines!

Makes me want to be a kid again. Just to pack my lunch and have some old bag of a teacher try to take it away!

Read more here

Posted by Christopher     on 08/10/2014 at 11:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Education •  
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