Hamas really knows how to unload gut-busters, don’t they?

Here’s the latest rib-tickler from their spokesman, seeking to crack up the world press:

Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas government, said that Israel was trying to engineer a whitewash.

“Israel is shying away from its responsibilities over this atrocious crime, without offering the slightest proof,” he said.

“These Israeli allegations are false and lack any credibility. While the resistance wants to ambush the occupation, it does not place bombs on beaches or in the middle of crowds.”

Oh, really?

Al Jazeerah: Fatah blames Hamas for Gaza blast
(September 24, 2005)

The Fatah faction of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas has blamed the resistance group Hamas for the deadly blast at a military parade in Gaza that killed at least 19 people and wounded 80 others.

“The Fatah Central Committee holds the Hamas movement fully responsible for the victims of the military parade (that was held) among civilians,” the committee said in a statement.

Hamas earlier said the explosion at its rally in the northern Gaza refugee camp of Jabaliya was caused by an Israeli airstrike.

Israel denied involvement in the blast, the first deadly incident in the territory since it completed its Gaza pullout.

Fatah’s Central Committee slammed Hamas for holding a rally in the densely populated camp, where thousands watched the parade procession attended by dozens of fighters, armed with rifles and other weapons.

The massive blast on Friday ripped through the Jabaliya refugee camp as throngs of people celebrated Israel’s recent withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, just hours after Israeli troops shot dead three Palestinians in the West Bank.

Medical sources said 19 people were killed with more than 80 wounded. Among the casualties were children and resistance fighters.

What’s the Arab equivalent of tapdancing in a mine field?

This is why teenagers need to be watched all the time:

NEW YORK (AP) - Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class — and many teachers can’t even hear the ring.

Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing.

As people age, many develop what’s known as aging ear — a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds.

The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers — not help them. A Welsh security company developed the tone to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected. The company called their product the “Mosquito.”

Donna Lewis, a teacher in Manhattan, says her colleague played the ring for a classroom of first-graders — and all of them could hear it, while the adults couldn’t hear anything.

Crafty little buggers. Time for teachers to make the kids leave their phones in a basket on the teacher’s desk.

I’m starting to regret again that I wasn’t born a couple of decades later. Oooh, what I could have done with technology added to my other tools of rebellion.

Update: You can hear the sound here. Well, you can if you’re not old. I doubt you’ll be able to hear it; I’ve had extraordinary hearing most of my life, and I can’t hear a damned thing but background noise.

The thieves in charge of the Transcendental Meditation organization have managed to persuade a reputable hospital to put out a less-than-reputable study purporting to show the benefits of TM.

Heart disease patients who practiced meditation for four months showed slight improvements in blood pressure and insulin levels, a small, government-funded study found.

Patients who learned Transcendental Meditation did better on those measures than patients who spent the same amount of time on lectures, discussions and homework assignments about the effects of stress, diet and exercise on the heart.

Adding meditation had “a strong enough effect that we could show a benefit over traditional health care, and traditional health care is pretty good now,” said study co-author Dr. Noel Bairey Merz of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “I think it’s a testimony to this intervention that we could see anything.”

Seems innocent enough, right? But why did they not have some patients, say, practice yoga, some do nothing, and some sit quietly for twenty minutes twice a day?

Well, the easy answer is: This study was paid for and administered by members of the TM organization.

Some of the researchers involved are affiliated with the organization that teaches Transcendental Meditation around the world, raising questions about potential bias, said Jim Lane of Duke University School of Medicine, who had no part in the study.

The research team included doctors from the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. The school was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who started a movement to teach meditation worldwide and was a guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys.

Full disclosure: I learned TM as a teenager, and my then-best friend and her family were heavily involved in the movement. They still practice it today. I attended a few major TM get-togethers, and frankly think my friend was lying when she said her sister can “fly.” Strangely enough, most TM practitioners who can “fly” won’t allow anyone to observe them, because the act of observing will cause them to be unable to do it.

Uh-huh.

Merz said she does not meditate and is not paid by the TM organization, although others on the research team were. She said the potential for bias in her study was no greater than in studies where a researcher gets financial support from a drug company.

Merz doesn’t know the hucksters she is dealing with. Their entire organization counts on people like her getting sucked into recommending TM — which carries quite a heavy price tag to learn — to poor shnooks who would otherwise be able to learn relaxation techniques for far less, if not for free.

The day that the TM organization offers its services free to hospitals and chronically ill patients, I will begin to believe that they are interested in helping people. Until then, I remain convinced that the reason this organization exists is to enrich Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his elites, at the expense of fools.

It’s not on the level as Scientology, but that’s because Maharishi doesn’t want people thinking that he is teaching a religion. He is. It is a sect of Hinduism, and the TM movement lies about that, too. But all cults lie about their true purpose.

Here you have another example of our PR media. This is a non-story, yet it’s going around the world thanks to AP and the wires services.

As for the doctors at Cedars-Sinai: They should be ashamed to put their names on this study. I would be.

The IDF pops an Islamic Jihad crew driving around with Katushyas:

Israel will no longer exhibit restraint toward Palestinian terrorists involved in anti-Israel operations, Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Tuesday following an Israeli air strike in Gaza that targeted a car carrying Islamic Jihad cell members on their way to launch GRAD-model Katyusha rockets at Israel. Eleven people died in the strike and, according to the IDF, at least three of them were Islamic Jihad members.

Islamic Jihad threatens response:

“The Zionist enemy insists on shedding Palestinian blood and we insist on going ahead with our Jihad and resistance. God willing the resistance groups … will have a harsh response. All options are open for us.”

Islamic Jihad responds:

18:49 Car explodes in work accident that kills 2 Islamic Jihad men in Beit Lahia

Trying to put Jews out of work by cutting out the middle-man and blowing yourselves up?

How tacky.

The thing that defines Gracie is routine. She is absolutely devoted to things being the way they’re supposed to be, and the way they are supposed to be is the way she says they are.

For the first few years of her life, I lived in an apartment in Bloomfield, NJ. The nighttable was on the left-hand side of the bed, and I sleep on the nighttable side of the bed. Tig slept to my right, and Gracie would leap into bed for her bellyrub from the left. When I moved to Montclair, the nighttable wound up on the right-hand side of the bed. Tig quickly adapted and began sleeping to my left. Gracie never came into bed on the wrong side for the entire time I lived in Montclair. When I moved to Richmond, the nighttable migrated back to the left-hand side of the bed, and soon, Gracie was coming into bed every morning for her bellyrub. For the two years I lived in Montclair, she did not do this.

It’s not just routine. It is THE routine. It must be her way, or no way.

It has taken me nearly two years to break her of the habit of being petted on the bathroom sink. This is because during a visit, my mother catered to Gracie’s every whim, and that included petting her while she was on the bathroom sink. After Mom went home, Gracie would leap onto the sink and yowl for me to attend her. Her place used to be on the shelf between the living room and kitchen. I have finally succeeded in getting her back there. She won’t simply leap to the shelf, even if there’s plenty of space. She has to go around me, jump on the leather chair, leap to the top of it, and then jump onto the shelf to be petted. Every. Single. Time.

The biggest problem with Gracie’s habit of developing routines is that she is the smartest cat I have ever had. She remembers what you do. If you do something once to trick her into taking medication, or getting into her carrier for a trip to the vet, she will remember it and run like hell the second she sees you doing it again. The same goes for routines. She picks them up in a heartbeat, so you have to be careful, unless, of course, you want to spend your life enslaved to Gracie’s whims and desires.

She is currently more than a bit miffed that Tig has been sleeping on her side of the bed in the mornings, mostly because he’s been waking up around six and yowling at me for attention, and I’ve been ignoring him. So he curls up and goes to sleep next to my head (where he was formerly yowling in my ear). To my left. Which is Gracie’s side of the bed.

This morning, she came up the bed in obvious anxiety and sniffed at him. Finally, she leaped over him and onto my pillow, but her annoyance was evident. Tig, oblivious, slept on.

Cats. They are far more complex than they appear, curled up and sleeping in the sun. Gracie? Now she could use a good shrink. But she’s going to have to pay for it herself.

Reuters leads the packs with most reprehensible headline:

Israel set to deny role in Gaza beach killings

They could get more accusatoy. Wait, no, they can’t. The thing is, the story is actually not too badly biased. But that headline is straight out of Reuters, and it will go around the world on top of these words:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An investigation by the Israeli army indicates it was not responsible for a blast on a Gaza beach last week that killed seven Palestinian civilians and set off a storm of protest, a senior military official said.

The Palestinians, mostly members of the same family, were killed on Friday in the northern Gaza Strip. Palestinian witnesses said an Israeli artillery shell had killed them.

A senior Israeli military official told Reuters the explosion was likely caused by a land mine planted by a Palestinian militant group and not the result of Israeli fire.

He said the findings, based on evidence from radar tracking, videos and fragments taken from the bodies of victims, would be in a report due for release at midnight on Tuesday.

“On Friday night, I had the feeling it was Israeli activity. On Saturday, I thought it was 50:50, now I am convinced it was not,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because the investigation has still not concluded.

The AP story spins it negatively as well. But at least not in the headline. Notice, however, that my prediction came true: palestinian spokesliars are right there in the lead, lying their heads off by saying that their boys don’t put bombs in civilian areas.

Israel Says It Didn’t Cause Blast
JERUSALEM Jun 13, 2006 (AP)— An Israeli investigation into what caused an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed eight Palestinians will conclude that the blast was most likely caused by a mine planted by Hamas militants against Israeli naval commandos and not an Israeli shell, military officials said Tuesday.

The Palestinians had blamed an Israeli shell for the killing of the civilians in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, and had recognized as a hero a Palestinian girl whose image was broadcast around the world crying over her father’s lifeless body at the scene with injured relatives all around her.

Palestinian officials said it was highly unlikely that Hamas militants would plant bombs at that beach because it is frequented by hundreds of people every weekend.

In an initial response to the Israeli findings, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights disputed the Israeli claims, saying the blast occurred at about 4:40 p.m., when the army said it was firing in the area.

Buried in the middle of the story are these facts:

Colin King, an explosives expert with Jane’s Defense Weekly, said that, even without access to the beach, Israel could probably tell what caused the blast if it had some photographs of the area and pieces of shrapnel.

The blast occurred on the outskirts of the town of Beit Lahiya, not far from where Palestinian militants frequently fire rockets toward Israel. The shore is frequented by hundreds of Palestinian beach-goers on Fridays, a rest day in Gaza. Israel often shoots artillery in the area to prevent rocket launchings.

Ohmigod! The Israelis might be telling the truth. And the AP prints it!

Of course, you have to go to the Israeli press to find the least biased headline.

Probe: Hamas bomb, not IDF shell, caused Gaza deaths

There’s even a mea culpa on the rush to judgment from Ha’aretz in that one.

But here’s the thing: When the Gaza incident hit, within a very short time, there were thousands of news items on the incident all around the world. There are currently 114 news items about the IDF report denying responsibility.

As I said last night:

The world has spoken: Blame the Jews.