The Bigsibling Blog

It’s coming, at least that’s the way it looks. I’ve always been an opponent to so-called "network neutrality." The concept sounds good on paper – but then again, so does Communism. The basic premise is this: All internet traffic is delivered at the same speed, with the same priority as all other traffic. Internet providers are not allowed to filter content, nor alter in anyway the speed in which it is delivered. Like I said, it sounds good on paper. The whole reason this net neutrality came about is people feared that ISPs would begin charging not only the end user (you and me, folks) but also the content originator (folks like google.com, foxnews.com, abc.com, etc.) – and we just can’t have that, I mean, the gall of some people, trying to maximize profits like some greedy capitalist!

Actually, they are afraid that the bigger content providers will pay the likes of Comcast, Time-Warner and AT&T to have their content delivered faster than their competitors content. They purport that this will stifle free speech. Free speech will be stifled, because the YouTube delivers a video 15 or 30 seconds faster than, say, moveon.org can deliver a video. Mind you, they are not afraid that a provider will filter content, that a provider will bar you from seeing certain things, make them totally undeliverable…no, that isn’t it. What they are afraid of is that the super-evil providers will allow content creators with deep pockets to get to you faster.

Now, my position is this; I pay my provider for, say 3Mbps access. That is, I can download content at roughly 3Mbps, give or take, as conditions allow. Now, if my provider wants to deliver search results from bing.com to my computer at 6Mbps, and google.com at only 3Mbps (the agreed upon speed that I pay for) because bing.com pays the provider a premium delivery fee, why should I care? Why should you care? Why should any end user give a hoot? Why should I be against the provider making a few extra bucks off content providers that can afford to pay for express delivery? Is the post office wrong for charging a premium fee for delivering a package overnight, I don’t think so. Now, if the provider began to charge EVERY provider for delivery, regardless, then I’d have a problem with it, and would promptly switch providers.

See, this is what some proponents of Net Neutrality don’t understand. They think that without it, AT&T and Cox and Comcast et al will begin to filter the internet based on who pays for delivery. I would present this as a poor business model, and nothing a sane business that wants to earn a profit would engage in. If content is filtered in such a way by the current crop of providers, we’ll see new providers rise up – ones that will not filter the data stream – to take their places. It’s called ‘free market’. Broadband internet is largely unregulated, and largely available to vast majority of Americans in one form or another. Remember the days before the small, 1 meter satellite dishes? Back when you had two options for TV? Over the air, or one cable company serving an entire city? No choices, you paid what the cable company wanted you to pay, and you got what they gave you. Period. No exceptions.

Obama has mentioned before that he sees broadband as a utility, much like power, and gas and water. Do you really want the government to regulate your internet? Do you want the folks who arbitrarily decide what news organization is actually a ‘news organization’ to decide what size of pipe you get, and how much you pay for it? Do you want to go back to the closed, government sanctioned monopolies of cable TV? How about electricity, water and gas? How much competition is there for those utilities? Think of there were two gas companies you could buy your gas from, that maybe you’d have a lower gas bill? I’ll bet you would, not to mention better customer service.

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This, I don’t understand. Looking at the FoxNews website this morning, I get this:

Now, ok, I get it, if Fox doesn’t want people to really watch live feed from the ‘net. Otherwise, how many people do you REALLY think will click through the link, to watch as NASA doesn’t fire an experimental rocket?

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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. 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. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

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With the massive $700 BILLION dollar bailout of the biggest, and wealthiest financial institutions over the last year (this isn’t all Obama’s doing – the bailout began under Bush – BTW), a new report reveals the program has created “anger, cynicism and distrust” in American taxpayers, of both the program AND the government.

The huge problem most taxpayers have is lack of oversight, and lack of knowing what happened to the money. We hear the stories, how Bank of America paid millions and millions of dollars to executives as bonuses who put the company in such financial distress that it required the American taxpayer to bail them out. And that’s the real story here. The federal government didn’t bail these Wall Street tycoons and robber barons out, the American taxpayer did – you and me and our neighbors and “Joe Sixpack”.

If one were to ask the Treasury, who distributed the funds, what did theses banks do with them – they’d get a dumbfounded blank stare as a response. Why? Cause the T doesn’t know WHAT the banks did with the money. Well, we know SOME of what they did. We’ve all heard the stories of lavish parties for corporate officers. Lavish bonuses. Heck, BofA even has a policy that ENCOURAGES their folks to travel on private jets…PRIVATE JETS!!! ON OUR FRAKKING MONEY!!!!

It’s all crap. We, the taxpayer, paid these robber barons for a job poorly done. Do you think they learned their lesson? Heck no, but then, all this plays into the “we need more regulations” ploy, and paves the way for government takeover of the largest banks – just like they took over General Motors – and yes, they did take it over, the US Government now owns 61% of GM – that’s called a majority shareholder folks.

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