Thursday, July 06, 2006

Brits Piss on Themselves. A Plague on Them.


The English are allowing a Muslim hate-fest to take place in London on 7/7. They are also starting to ban the St.George flag.

Oh no! I am in for trouble next time I go to Britain. I have pasted on my roost, my motorcycle body armour, the very flag the British are banning. Oh horrors. I have another of St. George slaying the dragon pasted on my shoulder protector. Maybe I should cover them over with suastikas so I can get in without any problem.

The Land of Sickness. I ride there.
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Muslim event 'to build bridges'

Former Iraq hostage Norman Kember will speak at IslamExpo Building bridges between Muslims and the wider community is one of the aims of a four-day event in London about the faith, organisers say.

The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) said it wanted to attract a wide range of visitors to IslamExpo.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, Lord Coe and Yusuf Islam - formerly Cat Stevens - will open the event in London, which is expected to attract 40,000 people.

[....]

'Islam no threat'

A two-minute silence at midday on Friday, in memory of the victims of the 7 July bomb attacks, will be observed at the event in Alexandra Palace.

[....]

"The hope is that all kinds of people will visit and go away thinking about things, and not that Islam is a danger or a threat," he said.

Ihtisham Hibatullah of MAB said the event would see mainstream Muslims "condemning terrorist atrocities taking place in London and elsewhere against innocents".

"The focus on Friday will be to share in the sorrow of the families of the victims and the survivors. There will be a strong message from the mainstream Muslim community against all violence by extremists."

[....]

This week Prime Minister Tony Blair called on moderate Muslim leaders to speak out more against extremists within their communities.

But Muslim Council of Britain secretary general Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari accused Mr Blair of playing an "unhelpful blame game" by suggesting moderate Muslims were doing too little to challenge extreme views.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5150126.stm
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Will George be slayed as England's patron saint?

By STEVE DOUGHTY, Daily Mail 19:23pm 2nd July 2006

Could the flag of St George be replaced by Alban's symbol, a diagonal yellow cross on a blue background that bears a strong similarity to St Andrew's cross?

His dragon-slaying heroics have kept his legend alive through the centuries.

But the Church of England is considering rejecting England's patron saint St George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.

Clergy have started a campaign to replace George with St Alban, a Christian martyr in Roman Britain.

The scheme, to be considered by the Church's parliament, the General Synod, has met a cautious but sympathetic response from senior bishops.

But it clashes with the increasing popularity of the saint and his flag in England. The World Cup brought out millions of St George crosses as the symbol became increasingly mainstream and less frequently dismissed as a badge favoured only by far-Right political activists.

If St Alban replaced St George, the red cross on a white background would have to be replaced as England's flag by Alban's symbol, a diagonal yellow cross on a blue background that bears a strong similarity to St Andrew's cross, the flag of Scotland.

The proposal has been put forward by the Rev Philip Chester, vicar of St Matthew's, Westminster, who has called the use of St George as patron saint 'dotty'.

His call for a change is based on the lack of firm historical evidence that George - said to be a Roman general from the 4th century AD who was put to death by Emperor Diocletian for professing Christianity - ever existed.

He said: 'We are sure St Alban is a real figure. What's more, he lived in this country.'

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams indicated support for an upgrade for Alban, although he is said to be cautious about relegation for George.

He told the Sunday Times: 'I think St Alban is irreplaceable in the history of English Christianity. Perhaps we ought to raise his profile because it's the beginning of the church in this country with martyrdom, wisdom and courage.'

The image of St George was used to foster patriotism in 1940, when King George VI inaugurated the George Cross for civilian acts of the greatest bravery. The medal bears a depiction of the saint slaying the dragon.

However, George has become unfashionable among politicians and bureaucrats. His saint's day, April 23, has no official celebration in England, and councils have banned the St George flag from their buildings and vehicles during the World Cup.

The saint became an English hero during the crusades against the Muslim armies that captured Jerusalem in the 11th century.

An apparition of George is said to have appeared to the crusader army at the Battle of Antioch in 1098.

His dragon-slaying legend is thought to have begun as an allegory of Diocletian's persecution of Christians.

Alban was martyred in 304 AD on the site of St Albans abbey in the Hertfordshire city that now bears his name.

A Roman army officer, he was said to have converted after sheltering a Christian.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=393651&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true
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England afraid to fly its own flag

Following threats by extremist Islamic group, several corporations, chain of pubs ban England flag

Modi Kreitman

Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the 'blood thirsty crusaders' and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags. The flag has recently appeared in England on everything from bikinis to cars, and sold in endless versions in stores.

But the Islamic protest forced some corporations, such as cable companies NTL, and even the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency to ban the flag in every form due to fears from reactions of Muslims.

The Sun tabloid newspaper has in recent days launched a campaign to bring back the flag, and has published a blacklist of companies preventing their workers from expressing their patriotism at work.

The Sun said that a large pub network has banned drinkers from entering with symbols of the national team.

The hero of the day is a two year-old toddler, who was thrown out with his parents from Leicester, because he wore the England team's uniform.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3258613,00.html
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Thanks to Grant Jones at:
http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2006/07/church-of-england-to-ban-st-george.html
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Well, why go all the way to Britain when I can go instead to Ottawa, Canada to watch people cheer and laugh as louts piss on the Veterans' Memorial on Canada Day at Parliament Hill? I do travel.

I witness in my own lifetime the Black Death sweeping across the land. It's terrible to see the devastation and the flagellants and the fear of the spirits unknown. As the Plague sweeps over our lands and claims the people in their millions I will watch and perhaps go with them to the dusty grave, but I'll go in the knowledge that from this devastation we will rise as we did in our past to achieve even greater glories. It's a sweeping time, and the life of Man will recover from it and stride along afterward in beauty and strength unknowable to us.


Wave to me. I ride a pale bike.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Seven Against Dhimmitude


"The words of truth are naturally simple, and justice needs no subtle interpretations, for it has a fitness in itself; but the words of injustice, being sick in themselves, require clever treatment."

Polynices.

Euripides, Phoenician Women.
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Recently, on the national day of Canada, three young men pissed on the Veteran's Memorial in the capital city. Seemingly, many people cheered. Others quitely complained. I have no words to describe my disgust. I have to go back a number of years ot find a way to sort out the nature of this event so I can put it in a context that makes some sense to me, and I go back to Oedipus who, disgraced, exiled, and blind, is abandoned by his sons. In a rage, Oedipus curses his sons, cursing them with mutual antagonism.

The sons decide to rule their kingdom alternately by the year, till the first year is over and the first son refuses to relinquish his reign. In the ensuing war, seven armies wage war, and both brothers are killed. One lays unburied till his sister Antigone comes to steal him and bury his body. For that she is killed as well. Such are the stories that make our tragedies beautiful in spite of the harm and the suffering.

The stories of our time are not tragic, they are stories to be pissed on. I am ashamed to have been witness to this theatrical event, even from afar. And it is the tale of our time.

Why do we live like this? Why do we stand in the filth listening to lies? The truth is simple. It was a dirty thing to do, and people cheered it on.

A family torn and killed, and there is tragedy aforethought.

I will not leave my own unburied.

Antigone sacrificed her own life to bury her dead brother even though he was wrong to have acted as he did. Antigone buried her own. We piss on them.

But not "we."

We meet in Vancouver, Canada each Thursday evening from 7-9:00 pm at the atrium in the public library down town. We are not the majority of Canadians yet. I ask you to join us, even if we are outcasts and unliked for what we say and do. Justice needs no subtle interpretations. Just come as you are. It's simple. We'll see you there.

Canada Attacked by Skate Boarders

People have to learn that it's OK to piss on the Veterans' War Memorial in Ottawa, Canada. They have to learn it. It doesn't come naturally. A monument, just because it is one, makes strangers stand back in some kind of respectful silence. I've seen countless monuments to any number of things I know nothing about, and because they are monumental, regardless of what they represent, I know they mean something to people. If I were to piss on one I'd have to know that I hate the thing it represents. It's not a passive activity. Some young men in Canada pissed on the War Veterans' Memorial in Ottawa. Somehow they came to learn that it's OK to do so. Someone taught them.

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Three young men were photographed urinating on the memorial on Canada Day. Police were looking for the three on Tuesday and asked them to come forward.

The ensuing outcry has spurred public officials to consider new security measures for the site even though police say similar incidents around the capital are virtually unheard of.

[....]

"When they brought him — the unknown soldier — back from France in 2000, this site changed from a war memorial to a grave site, so there should always be an attendant, at least during the day," Mr. Dawson said.

RCMP spokesperson Martin Blais said the force keeps no statistics on vandalism and desecration of memorial statues, but as far as he could tell, the incident was an isolated one.

Ms. Price said a few years ago, a plaque was erected to keep skateboarders off the site.

But Cliff Chadderton, chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations, says that although he can't recall other acts of desecration at this or other memorials in Canada, skateboarders continue to be a problem at the national monument. Mr. Chadderton also believes Governor General's Foot Guards are needed.

"Members of our organization patrolled the site five years ago for about six weeks to keep skateboarders away, but we received too much ridicule and abuse," Mr. Chadderton said.

"We thought it wasn't a safe thing to do and that instead it was a task for the government. We are just asking for something simple, done nicely with few people and a small budget. We aren't asking for a whole regiment to be assigned."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060704.wurinators0704/BNStory/National/home
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People died for this? I shake my head.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Independence

Some people are upset with the following post. It seems ot be negative and pointless on a day we all need to look up to the greatness of America, to celebrate our nation while most of the world's people condemn us.

I'd hoped that in the post below I would show that we are greater than all other nations because we are free to be people as individuals, independent of all but our own choices to be as we will. I consider that to be the greatest freedom of all, the freedom of will to be, whether for good or ill. Below I try to celebrate our freedom in the harsh light of our lives as they are. I do not try to paint our lives as pretty if they aren't. I show the negative side of one small town and hope that in doing so one will see the greatness of it in its struggle to rise above and keep on to find the better. We can try, whereas almost no one else on Earth can, and in that choice we are blessed.

My little town, populated by the dead and the dying, is a town of men and women who live lives of their own making, and in that they are blessed with a freedom to choose what few others can. That, friend, is our greatness. America is not perfect. America is what we make of it in a harsh world, and we are free to live as we will. When we live rightly we are supreme. And when we fail we do so by our own free choice. Below, in spite of the harshness, I celebrate our independence. Without the right to do evil we are nothing. And we are independent.

Friend, do you know how blessed you are?
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I stopped in my home town a few years ago, stayed a few days with a girl I picked up on the road, and while we were there I showed her around the town.

This is my friend ....'s old home. He was a goofy kid, got hooked on heroin, robbed a gas station, went to prison for two years, got out and died the next night at our friend's house. Larry'd been off the heroin so long he wasn't ready for it, and he over-dosed the first time he shot up.

Over here at the lake I lost four buddies on highschool graduation night, four losers who didn't graduate. They were drunk for about the first times in their lives, they being drug users not used to drinking. They got drunk and went into the lake and drowned. One, sitting trapped in the back seat, drowning, gripped a beer can so tightly the top broke off.

Over here at the motel one of our friends was trying to shoot up methadrine using a turkey baster with a tire pump needle, filling it from a soup ladle. He was one of the idiots who'd been in the truck on the hill with the cross street running running through the middle. The lot of them had stopped and I got in the back while they idled at the hilltop, shot up, and let out the clutch, hoping to level off half way and then descend again for a second rush. They all passed out and the truck hit a tree. At the motel they were all doping like fiends, not even noticing that a girl had died on the floor. That's our cabin there, next door.

And on the road right about here my pal passed out after getting drunk and he killed a woman and her kids as they were walking down the road. The police woke him up and gave him the bad news.

X was taking dope and it pissed off his mother that he kept stealing her stuff, so she got in her car and tried to run him over on the front lawn, and he got pissed off and shot her in the head with a shot gun.

And over here this kid was roller skating and another kid grabbed his arm and spun him, not really meaning to send him through a glass door. The kid who died had already been kicked in the balls so hard he'd had to be castrated.

That girl got pregnant when she was eleven, grade six.

My mom died there, all bones and colostomy bags filling up with dripping stuff.
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I don't go home very often.

I don't go home, not because I cry in front of a girl I met on the road as I give her the tour of the town: I don't go home because I'm still curious about the whole world, and I can't be at home and elsewhere too. For all the bad things I recall there are more that were wonderful, things that make me happy to be alive. Yeah. I wonder; therefore I wander. Often I'm gone from my home town for a decade or more. I'll probably die some place far away. That'll be the end of that.

I don't get home very often, but America never leaves me. I remember nearly every day of my life as if I were watching a movie. When I die America will carry on just fine without me. Yeah, the bad stuff, the good stuff, what do you do?

It's the Fourth of July, and today I have to work on something I'd avoid forever if I could. Such is life. I'll cope. America will do what it does, and America will cope. I put on some music and I sing along with some fine gusto to an upbeat-tempoed tune, jazzy and swingin'.

In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall my little town
Coming home after school
Riding my bike past the gates of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze
And after it rains there's a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagination they lack
Everything's the same back in my little town

In my little town I never meant nothing
I was just my father's son
Saving my money
Dreamin of glory
Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun

Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
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Down there at the bottom of the lake in the toolies, that's where my dad caught a bass so big that I chained it through the gills and hiked up the cliff to the road where I hung the fish on a post and pointed at it every time a car drove past till eventually the fish stank so bad I had to bury it.

I remember.

I remember the Fourth of July when the fireworks on the lake were so incredible that there has never again been anything like it, and the guys on the barge who blew up with it, they were shot through with sand from the lake bottom.

And the girl who was beaten to death while we stood looking from behind a rock on the shore, not even caring any longer at all about the crawdads getting away. And the horror, and the horror, and the horror? No, that's not it. That's life. It's hard and it ends.

I remember America. I don't remember being happy at all. Life was often very hard. Many, many people were murdered, more died young by violence, and more still were destroyed by life itself.

The horror? Yes, there was lots of it. I remember it. None of that makes any difference, really. It's not my life that determines the good of my nation. I remember my flag and my country, and regardless of my personal life I remember my nation as it is in itself. My town was good in spite of the personal things bad. My home was a good home in spite of the life I lived in it. It's nothing to do with me, not to do with my personal experiences. America? It's the Fourth of July, and nothing for good or for bad can change it. My life is not that important to anything, and not to America at all. I live the life of a man independent. I grew up, I went, I live.

I don't know if I've been clear here. I don't have anything to add. If it's muddled you'll have to make of it what you will, if anything. It's very late, and I'm going home to lay in bed where I'll close my eyes in the darkness, and there I will remember again, not my life but the life of my nation.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Stupid-Muslim-of-the-Day Story

MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus.

Wednesday night, doctors brought Mohammad's misery to an end after a one-and-a-half hour operation to remove the object.

"Thanks Allah, now I feel comfort. Today, I had my breakfast. I was just drinking water, nothing else," Mohammad, a grey-beared man in his mid-40s, told Reuters from a hospital bed in the southern central city of Multan.

"We had to take it out intact," said Dr. Farrukh Aftab at Nishtar Hospital. "Had it been broken inside, it would be a very very complicated situation."

Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn't know the bulb was there.

"When I woke up I felt a pain in my lower abdomen, but later in hospital, they told me this," Mohammad said.

"I don't know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners."

The doctor treating Mohammad said he'd never encountered anything like it before, and doubted the felon's story that someone had drugged him and inserted the bulb while he was comatose.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060629/od_nm/pakistan_bulb_dc_1
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