America vs. Obama

I enjoyed the Iowa Caucus, and even the results, because I wasn't looking at it as "I really want this guy to win" or "I really want this guy eliminated," as much as I felt like any of them would be an infinitely better leader that the pathetic excuse currently occupying the White House.

Would that that headline were so, it'd be a relatively easy fight.  And make no mistake, that's exactly the nuts and bolts of this coming election: Obama wins and America dies.  End of story.

But the headline isn't true, or at least it isn't complete.  More accurately, it should read: America vs. Obama and His Fawning Media.  Because with only a modicum of objectivity, Big Media would be all over the combined malfeasance and ineptitude of this administration.

Fred Barnes, in The Weekly Standard, says there will be six more televised debates by the end of January.  Add four more by the end of March, already scheduled.  In order, those debates come courtesy of ABC, NBC, FOX, CNN, NBC, CNN, CNN, CNN, NBC, and PBS.

Yikes.

With the obvious possible exception of Fox News, don't you honestly expect the moderators' questions to be geared toward emphasizing the individual faults of the candidates, and stirring the slightest antipathy between them, rather than any of their comparitive strengths vs Obama?  The only way their candidate (The One) stands a chance is if they continue promoting his narrative.  That is, they'll ask questions that paint the candidates (and GOP) in the worst possible light in order to avoid any light at all hitting their guy.

Here's a list of ten questions I wish they'd ask (or I would ask, given the opportunity):

Let's go straight down the line with 10 seconds for each candidate.  Off the top of your head, if you count being Senator of Illinois as one, and President as the other, how many MORE jobs have you actually had in your lifetime than Obama's two?

Which do you think is a more egregious offense, experimentally implementing Romneycare as a trial balloon solution in a very liberal state or forcing Obabamamacare down the throats of the entire nation, in spite of its heated opposition?

Follow-up question, show of hands...Which of you would, immediately upon being sworn in, grant waivers regarding Obamacare to all 50 states and begin working toward repealing it completely?

How many rounds of golf did you play last year, while you should/could have been working?  Alternative question, how much vacation travel did you and your family enjoy last year at the expense of the American people?

If you and a Marine and Nancy Pelosi were all getting on an elevator, how many of you would still be standing when the elevator doors opened?

Could you envision your home congregation inviting the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright to deliver a guest sermon?

If Bill Ayers, George Soros, Cass Sundstein and Michelle Obama were all swept away in a flood, but you could save only one of them, would you A) order a pizza, or B) go to a movie?

Obama once said he'd convened a panel of experts to determine "whose ass to kick."  What odds would you give each of your fellow candidates in a bare-knuckle match versus Obama?  What odds would you give yourself?

Would you be in favor of waterboarding Eric Holder?

Pick any of the following and tell whether they would endorse you or Obama:
     *Bin Laden
     *George Washington
     *Martin Luther King, Jr.
     *Josef Stalin
     *Adolph Hitler
     *John Wayne
     *Kim Jong Il
     *Flight 93 passenger Tom Burnett, Jr
     *Milton Friedman
     *King Solomon
     *King Leonidas
    
If asked to moderate any of those planned debates, I'll gladly see about moving some things around to make it happen.  It'd be the best debate evah!

What question would you ask?

Flight 93 Blogburst-9/23/2011

Flt 93 mother on Crescent jury: "I don't want to reach out to those people! THEY MURDERED MY DAUGHTER!"



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."

Still A Slap in the Face

It's not a memorial to the passengers who overtook the hijackers of Flight 93...It's a giant Mihrab (or Mosque) on the 2200 acres of ground in Shanksville, PA.

It is a California architect's attempt to redeem the four hijackers, and symbolically complete their mission.  It is oriented to face vistors towards "Mecca".  It mockingly suspends the "souls" of the forty passengers and crew between heaven and earth, and glorifies the acts of the terrorists.

Any pretense to the contrary is a lie.

I refused to help build this thing, because I recognized the design for what it was, and knew enough of the story behind it.  I hoped that my stance would empower others to shun this as a disgrace, but it hasn't worked out that way.

But I still hold out hope that opposition to this farce can gain some traction, reverse course, and abort the project.

In the meantime, there's no reason to celebrate any kind of anniversary this week.  It was all bad ten years ago, and nothing good has come from it.  The best thing that happened that day was the handful of guys who did what I'd have done: storm the cockpit and kill the bad guys.  And their memory is being perverted for the benefit of the despicable.

A slap in the face.

For more, read Alec Rawls' recent blog.  Then, find a way to help fight it.

Keef Undermann Comments!

Or perhaps this is from Chris "You've lost that tingly feeling" Matthews, or Allahpunted, or the O!Bummer himself.  They are all lurkers here at the House of Livermush, and are the suspected authors of frequent anonymous comments to older posts.  This one was received this most-recent Friday but in response to the BLOGBURST of Oct. 23rd.  As if they can vandal-tag my posts when my back is turned and I wouldn't notice.  Don't think I don't recognize the poor command of spelling and syntax you learned from the Cornell Tractor College, Keith.

Nice research but please let me asure you that its not what you think. The Arc is so big that a person would struggle to find the exact centre that they would have to face for prayers. Also you are right that most older Mihrabs are not exactly correct and the intension is what counts, but as a land surveyor myself Obviosuly in this day and age with acurate survey & GPS the norm there is no excuss for new constructions having the direction wrong, the intention would then be false and it would not be a mehrab for prayer to mecca. Either way, you dont have a mehrab without a mosque and its not Islamic custom to make a house of worship to God out of trees.

I say this as a Muslim who strongly opposis any act of terrorism and belives in the True teachings of Islam, not the misinterprated and twisted to suit their objectives religion of terrorists.

Let me just say I ain't buying your "I say this as a Muslim" bit, any more than your half-hearted claim to be a surveyor. If you were a surveyor on the ground there in Shanksville, you'd point your wing-stretched fingertips at the ends of the crescent and slap a 90 (real surveyor's field technique for establishing a surprisingly accurate perpendicular bisector). The architect could have been trying to incorporate an adjustment for magnetic declination, but I don't think so, and I bet you know better, too. His intention is called "plausible deniability." He needs to be able to tell one story ( I didn't design any real Islamic symbolism into it, because if I had, I'd have made it more precise) to the National Parks Service, and the opposite story (This is a Mosque, wherein the greater orientation is slightly off, but with enough interior elements to help you fine tune your direction) to those Muslims he wishes to appeal.

For anyone to suggest that this architect has benign intentions (don't forget that the focus of his grad school thesis was Middle Eastern influence in architecture), is an insult to anyone paying attention.

Also don't discount the presumed "value" for the architect later claiming that the "3-degree error" is reflective of his presumed American inferiority. His intent is to memorialize the terrorists, to symbolically complete their mission by martyring them on the ground in Shanksville. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool. Anyone who vandalizes my blog posts with anonymous comments on old posts is a coward.

And if you really think you've "asured" me: Uh, no. Dipshit.

My assurance will come with the widespread exposure of this dispicable design and the project's cancellation.

Tom Burnett, Sr regarding civilian trial for KSM

Flight 93 father denounces civilian trial for 9/11 terrorists



Tom Burnett Sr:

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:


Update, note from the Livermush Command Center: if the video doesn't open as it should, follow this link.

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:


Again, if the video malfunctions, follow to the source...

After the jump, you can see the list of those in the Blogburst.  There are about a dozen of my fellow bloggers from whom I've directly requested their support/allegiance in opposition of the project, but are mysteriously (still) absent from this list.  As before, I want to hear of any rationale for your tolerance of this "memorial" as it is designed, if you have knowledge that I've not heard.


Or tell me you think I'm wrong.  I can take it.- Jeff

"...was in danger of being trampled by a dwarf"- Nigel Tufnel

I usually just let my voice in this forum substitute for any "petition" that I'd consider signing, and have seldom included my name on such. The following represents a rare exception. In fact, since I am pretty sure my name and the product of this blog are already on the snitch-list in the White House, signing a petition is certainly redundant. I done it anyhow.

The Coward-In-Chief has seen fit to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted architect of the 9/11 attacks, to New York...to be tried in Federal Court. There is absolutely zero logical justification for this. No legal justification, either. The bad outweighs the good in this decision so disproportionately, it's insulting.

Tim Sumner and Debra Burlingame (siblings of two 9/11 victims) wrote this petition, and I encourage you to add your name. It's a relatively long letter, so you'll have to read the rest after the jump. But consider the fact that it isn't nearly as long as that 1900 page "healthcare" nonsense that your representatives won't read. I read it and signed it (the petition, dummy, not the socialized medicine moonbattery). You should do so as well.

November 9, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear
President Obama:

On September 11, 2001, the entire world watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then turned the fully-fueled planes into missiles, flying them into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 3,000 of our fellow human beings died in two hours. The nation’s commercial aviation system ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan was turned into a war zone, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for days and causing tens of thousands of residents and workers to be displaced. In nine months, an estimated 50,000 rescue and recovery workers willingly exposed themselves to toxic conditions to dig out the ravaged remains of their fellow citizens buried in 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and concrete.

The American people were rightly outraged by this act of war. Whether the cause was retribution or simple recognition of our common humanity, the words “Never Forget” were invoked in tearful or angry rectitude, defiantly written in the dust of Ground Zero or humbly penned on makeshift memorials erected all across the land. The country was united in its determination that these acts should not go unmarked and unpunished.

BLOGBURST: Regarding the official construction documents

Construction drawings released: Flight 93 crescent now points less than 3° from Mecca



From Error Theory:

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, where 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.

Proud infidel refuses to submit to allah

The Crescent of Insult Project Marches On

Can you imagine the justifiable horror if 19 Baptists plotted against and killed 2996 citizens of, say, Yemen?

And, how much worse would it be if somehow some radical Baptist-sympathying element in Yemen then also tried to commission a structure to memorialize the victims and the killers, and submitted a design resembling a giant baptismal font? Yemeni-friendly folks the world over (not to mention more than a few non-Baptists) would have a colossal bug up their collective butt. And every (ahem!) journalist from Taterhill to Timbuktu would be climbing over each other for their own version of the "local angle."

Paul Murdoch, architect from Beverly Hills, CA was responsible for the design of the Flight 93 Memorial project, originally named "The Crescent of Embrace." His unadmitted goal is to complete the mission of those four terrorists, which would have been otherwise thwarted by the efforts by the passengers aboard Flight 93: a victory for islamic terrorism.

On September 11, 2001, United Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, after some of its passengers, who had been in cell-phone communication with loved ones on the ground and being informed of the recently attacked World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, decided to die fighting, if necessary, trying to divert this plane from the fourth target.

Paul Murdoch received his Master's Degree in Architecture from UCLA specializing in Middle Eastern subjects. His website has this to say regarding their philosophy:

As architects, we are uniquely qualified to help formulate and translate policy into tangible form; mitigating pressures of urbanity with the need to heal the natural environment. Each design solution is seen as a contribution to the human condition; as it exists today and evolves into future generations.

What a steaming pile of runny post-TexMex! "Uniquely qualified to formulate and translate policy"? "Heal the natural environment"? As if the natural environment is flawed, or sick? You're a doctor for the blighted land, or maybe a faith healer? This all sounds way too self-important to me. They're also self-affirmed LEED professionals, which stands for "forced subjugation to climate-warming-hoax mania as a method to justify our inflated fees under the guise of a perceived 'greater collective good'" Murdoch and his gang are a bunch or modern-day Ellsworth Tooheys.

If the memorial gets built as it is currently designed, and you go visit there someday to pay your respects to those 40 heroes, you will be standing in a Mosque. Your intention may be to honor the Americans who died in the first battle against islamic terrorism, but you would be unwittingly paying homage to the murderers.



At right, you'll see a picture of the Tower Of Voices, which is also in the shape of a crescent, and which is also a sundial that accurately marks the time for a muslim's afternoon prayers.

The forty chimes in the tower are representative of 40 damned souls suspended in mockery from Heaven. After all, those 40 passengers kept the terrorists from becoming martyrs and are infidels to Murdoch and other muslim sympathizers.


The best way to make sure that the worst that can happen does happen, is to sit there and do nothing to stop it. For my part, I will speak out in opposition, and encourage others to do likewise.

You can't eat your principles

I declined the biggest project I've ever been offered.

Tuesday, October 6

I suspect that this post may evolve into a small series of essays, as it takes shape...so here would be the first installment...

Today, I sent an email to a potential client, declining work whereupon he'd asked me to quote my services. I've never turned down work, so this was a first.

Since shortly before the 2008 election, the trickle of work to my business had dried up. I had a little ray of sunshine in March, which I'd hoped was a trend of better days to come, but proved to be only a blip on the radar screen. In about a three-week span this March, I got 5 projects to work on. I performed the work on all of them, and all but one of those clients paid me. Since that time, however, and until the last week of August, there was nothing.

Then, some of my tireless marketing efforts began to bear fruit. I got a project in NH (which I'm still fighting to get paid for), then two more in PA, then two in TX, and two more in Texas...and then I got a reply from another company in PA, to which I had sent a request that they consider my company to fill a void in their estimating workforce. They'd like me to look at a job called "The Flight 93 Memorial."

On my blogger profile, I say that my profession is "Dirt Counter", but more specifically, I perform quantities analysis on construction projects, some of them very large. A client sends me the paper plans and/or an AutoCAD file, and I analyze the proposed finished product versus the existing "lay-of-the-land" and calculate the amount of earthwork involved. Those people I work for, then apply their own costs and profit margins to the amount of work required, and bid (or negotiate) the construction contract. I invested thousands of dollars on the software to process these calculations, and thousands of hours making individual contact with potential clients. I've helped my clients win projects in New York, Delaware, Florida, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and New Hampshire. I've introduced over 4000 different companies (one at a time) to my services and abilities.

This year, I've barely fended off the collections and foreclosures, and lived mostly on favors from family. So, it is particularly hard to reject work, any work, for any reason. For most of my projects, the invoices range from $450 -$1,000, but for this one, as I looked it over (238 plans sheets) my proposal would have been $5800. But this morning, I sent the following note to my would-be client declining to perform the work. Names changed for the purpose of guarding their anonymity...

["Steve"],

I truly wanted to win your company's takeoff business, but I think I should politely decline this project. Based on what I had read before Mr. ["Smith"] asked me to consider doing this work, and the research I've done in the brief time since, the nature of the memorial's design is a personal affront to me as a patriotic American.

I view those people who died trying to retake control of Flight 93 as heroes for having diverted the plane from a fourth symbolic target. And I suspect that the symbolic weight of the memorial's resemblance to an islamic mosque is the architect's complicity in finishing that mission.

It is fair to say that, "if I do not do this work, someone else will..." But, I do not accept that as validation for contributing to what I feel is a heinous perversion. Perhaps that is your company's rationale for bidding the work. Or perhaps, without the architect's proven or confessed intent, someone involved in the execution of the work (like you or me) can always claim ignorance regarding the design's symbolism. Apparently you and your company have found some justification for proceeding, but I can't square it in my own heart. If the symbolism were reflective of the Jewish Star of David or even the Dallas Cowboys' star, I'd have no reservations at all. I've read that unprompted muslims viewing the artistic rendering immediately identify the drawing as a mosque. That's enough for me.

And for me, it is no less sinister than the notion of chiseling out Teddy Roosevelt's face on Mt. Rushmore to be replaced by Bin Laden's, in an effort to appease the terrorists and those who would do harm to me and my countrymen.

Please, if you have better information than I do, I urge you to share it. The project is more grand in scope than any on which I've worked before, and I'd cherish the opportunity to contribute to something worthy of the victims' sacrifice.

Lastly, I apologize for dragging my feet on this response. I wrestled with my conscience over the decision, and finally came to the conclusion that I'd rather go hungry than abandon my principles. I would say good luck on the job, but if I'm right, I hope your company similarly walks away from it, and it doesn't get built according to it's current design. Personally, if it only takes one person saying "No!" to keep it from happening, then I'll be proud to make that financial sacrifice.

Witness photos of the plans on my digitizing table...

There were a number of articles I had read before being asked to help with the project, but I hadn't exactly bookmarked any of them, and had to try and retrace my steps from memory. Like so many things we read, my initial reaction on reading them was that there was no way such a design would pass scrutiny through to the implementation stage. But it looks like I was as naive as everyone else on this point.

My research on this included the National Parks website, CNN's reportage (sorely uncritical, as you might imagine), and fellow bloggers:

• Flopping Aces
• Michelle Malkin
• Error Theory

The offensively named "Crescent" has been re-labeled "Allee" and the original design, reported to have included 44 glass blocks (40 of them for the passengers plus four for the terrorists!) has evolved into forty "STONE SLABS WITH NAME INSCRIPTIONS" instead.

More on this soon. Construction is slated to begin within one month...