Things I Throw Up

Monday Night 10pm

I was feeling the late eve hunger. So after standing in the kitchen for 15 minutes thinking of what I want to eat, I decided on bowl of cheerios.

10:45pm

Sitting on the bathroom floor. It feels so nice and cool in here. The tiles and I are friends. Here comes the cheerios.

is



PREGNANT

Dead Armadillo

So as I was driving across the great state of Oklahoma yesterday (Wednesday ) night. What was I doing? OH YEAH, drinking coffee in Stillwater. Their coffee is so good I sometimes drive there with my friend Kamlah to drink it. Then we decided to give a friend a ride. Dropped her off nearby in EDMOND. En route home this gross little brown thing ran out in front of my car. I gave a little scream and HIT IT straight on. I think i smacked it in the head. BIG THUD. Sooooooooooo gross! I felt sick. I've never hit an animal before. Also I've always hated Armadillos. One less now. My poor car. gross gross gross. I have to get off this highway. An hour later I pulled home into Jenks.

Fun night!

Interesting Article-Must Read!

When AIPAC said 'no' to Israel

Posted By Sasha Polakow-Suransky Monday, March 29, 2010 - 11:52 AM

The U.S.-Israel relationship has entered into a tailspin for the first time since 1991, when Secretary of State James Baker refused loan guarantees to Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government. Now, like then, the issue is Jewish settlements in areas Israel conquered in 1967. When Israel embarrassed Vice President Joe Biden on March 9 by announcing the expansion of an existing East Jerusalem settlement, the reaction from Israel's friends in the press and in Washington was swift. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likened Benjamin Netanyahu's settler-coddling government to a drunken driver, Hillary Clinton scolded Bibi for 45 minutes over the phone, and pundits across the political spectrum spent an entire week debating just how grave the current "crisis" is.

More interesting, however, is how Israel's self-proclaimed defenders in Washington have reacted to it. Rather than maintaining a neutral stance or endorsing the pro-Israel, anti-settler line espoused by Thomas Friedman and Hillary Clinton, among others, AIPAC chose to denounce the Obama administration in a press release on the eve of its annual conference, urging Obama "to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State" and "make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel." There was no mention of Netanyahu's politically inflammatory expansion of settlements surrounding Jerusalem, his lack of control over the junior cabinet officials who announced the construction of 1,600 new housing units while Biden was visiting, or steps Israel could take to defuse the crisis.

AIPAC was not always like this.

In the late 1980s, the pro-Israel lobby faced a similar dilemma that jeopardized U.S. military aid to the Jewish state: Israel's refusal to stop selling arms to South Africa's racist apartheid regime. Then, unlike now, AIPAC did not blindly defend the government in Jerusalem and attack the U.S. administration. Rather, it pressured the Israeli government to back down from a myopic and destructive policy that damaged Israel's image and threatened its warm ties with Washington.

In August 1986, as popular anti-apartheid legislation was making the rounds in the U.S. Senate, a paragraph with far-reaching consequences for Israel crept into the bill. It called for the president to document any arms sales to South Africa and "add the option of terminating U.S. military assistance to countries violating the embargo." In Israel, the national-unity government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir disregarded the bill, convinced that it would never pass.

In Washington, though, leading AIPAC officials believed that Israel's ties with Pretoria were tarnishing the country's image in Congress just as the push for anti-South African sanctions was gaining momentum on the Hill. And they began pressuring the Israeli government to act.

Some of AIPAC's biggest donors were outraged, given that arms sales to South Africa were a major economic windfall for Israel. But unlike the donors, AIPAC's Beltway insiders saw the bigger strategic picture. In their eyes, the ongoing and increasingly publicized military relationship with South Africa was alienating some of the Jewish state's staunchest supporters in Congress, who were also committed to the anti-apartheid cause. Pro-Israel lobbyists believed that attempts by anti-Israel groups to paint the Jewish state as an ally of the racist South African regime would eventually sway the American public unless Israel ceased selling arms to South Africa.

Despite AIPAC's pleas, the Israelis still refused to take the threat seriously. In the upper echelons of the Israeli government, there was a widely held belief that AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, as well as friendly members of Congress, would protect Israel. They were convinced that this threat, like other bumps in the road, would soon pass. AIPAC's lobbyists saw plainly that Israel was shooting itself in the foot, but it would take a few months before this dawned on leaders in Jerusalem.

When President Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act on September 26, 1986, the Israelis felt vindicated. But Congress immediately overrode Reagan's veto with overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act became law a week later--including the amendment threatening to cut off military aid to Israel. It was a rude awakening for Shamir, who left the foreign ministry to take over as Prime Minister on October 20. He was forced to apologize to the AIPAC lobbyists, telling them "Your president told me I didn't have to listen to you." But now, with the anti-apartheid law on the books, he did.

Embarrassed by his miscalculation, Prime Minister Shamir had no choice but to impose sanctions of his own. As two leading Israeli journalists argued in the Washington Post, "Without U.S. military aid, valued at $1.3 billion this year, Israel could soon be defenseless, destitute or both." Shamir's government now saw the threat clearly and passed a sanctions resolution on March 18, 1987, vowing to sign no new defense contracts with South Africa. Two weeks later came the dreaded U.S. report on South Africa's arms suppliers. It named several European countries as occasional violators of the arms embargo, but the focus was on Israel's arms sales. Damningly, the report's authors concluded, "We believe that the Israeli government was fully aware of most or all of the trade."

Suddenly, American Jewish organizations were forced to acknowledge an unsavory relationship they had downplayed and denied for years and defend Israel's more pressing interest: ongoing military aid from Washington. Pro-Israel organizations such as AIPAC saw the prospect of losing U.S. aid as a much greater threat to the Jewish state than cutting ties with South Africa. As the self-appointed guardians of Israel's interests in Washington, they told Shamir to make sure Israel's measures against South Africa were just as strong as those taken in the United States and Western Europe--export revenues be damned.

Such resolve and foresight is sorely absent today, when AIPAC's reflex is to denounce the White House rather than quietly pressuring the Israeli government to abandon policies that damage its image in Washington and the rest of America. The pro-Israel lobby is not stupid; it has correctly judged that ongoing settlements in greater Jerusalem and the West Bank are not as politically toxic in today's Washington as arms sales to a white supremacist government were in the 1980s. But its ostensibly pro-Israel line is startlingly shortsighted. It allows Israel's government to get away with further settlement expansion that will eventually do grave harm to Israel's long-term survival by undermining the two-state solution.

As with arms sales to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, most clear-eyed observers of the Middle East regard the settlement enterprise as a public diplomacy disaster for Israel--not to mention a long-term strategic liability.

If AIPAC is truly concerned about Israel's long-term security, it should be denouncing new settlements and demanding the dismantlement of existing ones with even greater fervor than the Obama administration. If it does not, AIPAC lobbyists may soon find themselves defending something far more distasteful than 1600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo. As Bibi's own defense minister Ehud Barak acknowledged last month, "as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic...If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a bi-national state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state."

And when that day comes, AIPAC will have to confront a South African problem far bigger than the one it faced in 1987.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs and the author of the forthcoming book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.

Pouring out myself

Mirror images of me, courtesy of iphone.

ClothesBlog

Today I wore a polka dot shirt with zebra striped shoes and black and white striped sunglasses. This would have been better with a picture.

I shop way too much. So yesterday I took a gigantic look at my entire closet and decided I am not going to buy anything untill I put together 10 new things and wear them. That is my goal for the next two weeks. Then I will reward my self by buying a new dress. Yes!

This are my new favs: Stands out and gets lots of compliments.

La Musica

Maybe you can figure out what's going on in my life by what I have been listening to:

Lady GaGa

JJ

Joanna Newsom

Beach House

Sleigh Bells

YACHT

Last Night at the Marriage Forum

If the U.S government grants divorces to anyone, Why don't they give marriage licenses to everyone?
-Rev Dr C. Welton Gaddy

This is what CAIR does

Lawsuit: Muslim Scarf Not Part of Abercrombie & Fitch 'Look'

EEOC Charges Abercrombie Denied Teen a Job Because of Her Hijab

By SARAH NETTER and LINDSAY GOLDWERT
Sept. 18, 2009

Clothing giant Abercrombie & Fitch is not exactly known for its modesty, as evidenced by sexy catalogs featuring models in barely-there clothing. Now the company is being sued for allegedly denying a teenager the right to wear a religious headcovering.

(/ABC News)

A Muslim teenager hoping to work at one of the company's childrens clothing stores says she was told during an interview that her head scarf, known as a hijab, would violate Abercrombie & Fitch's strict but secretive "Look Policy," which governs everything from dress to the length of one's fingernails.

This week the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit in Oklahoma federal court on behalf of Samantha Elauf, 17, whose hijab became an issue during a June 2008 interview for a position at Abercrombie Kids at the Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Okla.

Funny Chat #2

Via Facebook chat:

Ryan is online.

10:51pmYasmeen

you joined my group!!

10:54pmRyan

MLIA

10:54pmYasmeen

lol

This is why we can't leave.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on opening schools for Afgani children.

Funny Convo #1

Dad: What did she say?
Me: Who? Birdbrain?
Dad: yeah
Me:She is getting her hair cut on friday
Dad: oh, not too short


2 reasons why i love this convo: 1. My dad acknowledged me calling my sister birdbrain. 2. my dad has an opinion about my sisters hair.

Paternals

My dad has five brothers and four sisters. 10 kids in all. The eldest brother left India and eventually settled in Wichita, KS. He called up the rest of the fam to come live with him. This is why my family lives in the midwest.

AltBros from India...

Sunset Sighting #2

This sunset was seen from the Drillers Stadium in Tulsa. After the baseball game was rained out. Ah wells. The attendees were Gavin and I. Not a bad way to leave a postponed game.

Celebrations!

My cousin Samir married my new cousin-in-law Sara! The lucky couple will reside in Lawrence, Kansas and will soon be moving into their own home. Oh, and they have a new doggy. Congrats! Mubarak! Felicidades!

Sunset Sighting #1

My friend Dave Hanon watches sunsets/sunrises like all the time. Some time ago he invited me to the top of a parking garage to watch the evening sunset on a saturday night. It was quiet, pretty, and simple. Sometimes when my life gets bogged down with music, news, internet, and parties, its nice to find an activity that has nothing of that in it. So, I've been inspired, by this Dave Hanon. I'm gonna try to watch sunsets from all over tulsa and maybe even other places.

The End.

Iran is Cool

Here is a summary of the Iran election sitch from a Hipster point of view. I love hipster culture.

[Taken from http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/]

Every now and then, I am in a campus computer lab, and I check the popular blog CNN.com so that people behind me think that I ‘care about the world’ + ‘miscellaneous global issues.’ I happened to see that there was some sort of election in Iran.

There was apparently some President bro who wore Palestinian scarves. He h8s America, apparently, and used to ‘take shits on pix of George W. Bush.’

Then there was some sort of Barry Obama-like candidate in Iran. He used twitter and facebook to ‘get mad hits’ from ‘young ppl. Then the election happened, and it was ‘bullshit’ because it was ‘rigged’ to get the ‘i h8 America bro’ 2 win. There is some religious bro named The Ayatollah who also h8s America, and loves his version of Gawd.

So n e ways, the Iranian Govt shut down facebook+twitter or something, and then the young people had nothing 2 do, so they ‘took to the streets’ to march + riot. Seems like what I would do if I didn’t have sweet ass social networks to chill on.

Think this might be some sort of ‘altbro rebellion’. Wonder if ‘riot pix’ are the same as ‘party pix’ in Iran.

This guy goes on and on. Check out his blog to see the post in its entirety with pictures. Beware this website is HILAR and you might love it and be obsessed with it. If you are like me.

5 Albums I am Spinning in my Car around Tulsa

1. Passion Pit -Manners

2. Titus Andronicus-The Airing of Grievances

3. Vivian Girls-Vivian Girls

4. Lady Gaga

5. Phoenix-Wolfgang Amadeus

What a Cool Car!

Obams

Today, June 3rd 2009, our president, Barack Obama, gave a very impressive speech to the muslim world from Cairo, Egypt. Just when I think I cannot have any more admiration for him, he goes and delivers this speech.

Here are some remarks from the adorable Reza Aslan:

President Obama came to Cairo to forge what he called "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect." He had his work cut out for him.

While Egyptians have far more confidence in President Obama than in President Bush (38% versus 8%), that is obviously not saying much. In fact, according to polling done by worldpublicopinion.org, there has been little change in Egyptians' views of American foreign policy. Some 76% still believe that the United States seeks to "weaken and divide" the Muslim world and 80% continue to argue that the US wants to impose "American culture" on Muslims. These numbers are essentially unchanged since the Bush Administration. Still, overall views of the US have improved dramatically, with 46% now holding a favorable opinion of America. Indeed, many Muslims admit to being cautiously optimistic that, at the very least, there can be a new tenor in relations between the US and the Muslim world, meaning that expectations for Obama's speech were extraordinarily high.

In some ways, Obama did not disappoint. Citing the Qur'anic verseIslam, and that the United States has not always lived up to its ideals. These may be historical facts that most university students are taught in their first year of studies, but they are rarely spoken of with such candour by an American president. "Be conscious of God and always speak the truth", Obama did something practically unheard of for an American president: he told the truth, and frankly. Obama acknowledged that colonialism had denied "rights and opportunities to many Muslims", that Muslim countries have often been treated as little more than proxies of the west, that Muslims sometimes have cause to view the US and the larger western world as hostile to Islam, and that the United States has not always lived up to its ideals. These may be historical facts that most university students are taught in their first year of studies, but they are rarely spoken of with such candour by an American president.

Yet as Obama himself acknowledged, it will take more than words to reframe the perception of America among Muslims. And so he spent a good deal of the speech focusing on some concrete issues that animate much of the Muslim world, most significantly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here, too, little new was said. But once again it was the frankness with which Obama spoke of the situation, using terms that no American president would dream of using, that caught one's attention. Speaking movingly of the daily humiliations of the Palestinians, Obama referred to the situation in the Palestinian territories as "occupation", a word sure to ripple through both the Muslim world and the United States, and urged both sides in the conflict to live up to their obligations under the so-called road map to peace. "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements", he said. "This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

Of course, every president since Jimmy Carter has called for an end to Israel's settlement activity and every corresponding Israeli government has ignored that call. Indeed, the current Likud government has blatantly rebuffed Obama's demand. Yisrael Katz, Israel's transport minister has flatly declared that the Israeli government "will not accept in any fashion that legal settlement activity be frozen." Never mind that, according to international law, UN Resolution 242, the Oslo Accords, and the road map to peace, which Israel itself has signed up to, there is no such thing as legal settlement activity in the occupied territories.

Unfortunately, Obama made no mention of the consequences for Israel's continued defiance of international law. Nor did he have much to offer the barest of platitudes for the one issue that poll after poll in the Muslim world indicates is the biggest concern of Muslims: the lack of political rights. Obama may have felt hamstrung by the presence of his host, Hosni Mubarak, one of the worst despots in the region, a man who runs a police state in which bloggers, journalists, and democracy activists, not to mention freely elected members of parliament, are routinely rounded up and jailed on trumped up charges. Nevertheless, the few words he did have on the topic of democracy received the loudest and most sustained applause, an indication that this is a topic that Obama cannot afford to ignore.

It remains to be seen whether this speech will launch the "new beginning" that Obama, and so many Muslims around the world, so desperately seek. But, at the very least, it has gotten the conversation started. And that may be all we could have hoped for.

After the speech, Obams visited the pyramids with his senior aides. I love that he is able to laugh at himself. Read some silly Obams humor here: (reports from Mark Knoller)

Serving as Mr. Obama’s guide in Giza was Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. He led the way in and around the pyramids and the Sphinx, including a visit to the Tomb of Qar, who Hawass described as a well-known priest, scholar and judge in ancient Egypt. On the wall were hieroglyphs of Qar, primitive images engraved in the stone. He was a thin man man with big ears.

“That looks like me!” exclaimed President Obama. “Look at those ears.”

An image of the hieroglyph:

The president summoned to his top aides to take a look, and repeated his observation about the Qar hieroglyph.

“Look, that’s me,” he told them. None of his senior staff was willing to disagree with the boss. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel smiled politely, if not knowingly.