Where's Sarah?

Normally I don't put unpleasant pictures up on my blog... but sometimes you have to show it, so people know what you're talking about....

If this has been around before and has nauseated everyone already, sorry to subject you to it again, but I hadn't seen it:



On THE SAME PAGE that proudly presented this I found the following crap:

"I just do not understand why the Germans(Nazi's ) are hated so much. Really what did Hitler do that was so wrong, other than being a damn Catlik? So they started a war with half the world. First it was the Pollocks and Checks, well know bastions of retards and gypsies. The French, who cares, same goes for Norwegians, Swedes, Hollanders, and the British, all are strong holds of Joo's. The only bad thing that the Nazi's did was pick the Japs and Dago's to be friends with."

"I'd vote for a make-believe SS officer in a heartbeat over a real Communist Muslim homosexual black militant drug addict."

THESE are the thoughts of people who LIKE and ADMIRE Sarah Palin - and believe it or not are off a "Christian Forum" - and is the cesspool that would be thrilled to see her get somewhere...

Has someone not sat her down and TAUGHT HER SOMETHING already....?

ahem..

Palin: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from a greater problem, when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do. So this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies – we're bound to by treaty....

Interviewer: South Korean.

Palin: Yes, and we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

Even granting it was a slip of the tongue and she meant South Korea all along (questionable at best)... what did she mean by "strong enough policy to sanction"?

Sanction meaning "impose sanctions" or sanction meaning "give approval for"?

What the heck is she on about? Does anyone know? Does SHE know?

As someone commented in The Guardian.... " Yo, my fellow Americans: remember all those Civil War lessons we sat through in history class, learning how the heroic Abraham Lincoln led the Confederate Army in glorious battle against Hitler to free the Jewish slaves in Egypt? Sarah Palin does. "

Lawyer smokes both Bible and Koran

Time for one more post after all.

A university lawyer in Brisbane has decided to contribute to the burn-a-Koran craze sweeping approximately 50 total idiots in all of North America.

...by smoking a marijuana joint rolled from both the Koran AND the Bible.

He posted himself doing this online. I haven't seen the video and - since it can't be much to look at - I'm not putting it here. You can find it if you go looking.

He expects to be fired but the police will not be charging him with anything.
I reckon he actually stands a good chance of keeping his job. I reckon he SHOULD keep his job.

I have a split attitude to religion.... I personally think there is probably no God period, definitely no God as is imagined by any of the Abrahamic faiths. I think religion is enormously destructive in the public domain. I want religion to have nothing whatsoever to do with the law, politics or education, but I'm mindful of the vulnerabilities of people who - against my preference - do believe in it.

Do I think there is absolutely any value on someone getting high on the Koran or the Bible...?
No.
Not in any sense at all, if you get my meaning...

I think religion is a load of shit. But I don't say that to timid grannies coming out of Sunday prayer.

I'll make another observation about this guy, however: He wasn't a Joe Average just doing it as a lark. He is an organisational member for the Brisbane Atheists, meaning... This is HIS religious expression. His way of saying how he wants the world to be.
And that's where I get edgy: I don't want an atheist crusade because nothing good will come of that.
I want an end to religiously motivated political acts of ANY stripe whatsoever.

Just a comment on Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips is the author of 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power', yet another book that seeks to say there is something fundamentally wrong with the world and - you guessed it - it's all the fault of Obama, gay people (about whose rights she has used the word "toxic"), Muslims, the theory of evolution, and people concerned about climate change.

Yawning already?

Oh and all centres around the eternal plot to destroy Israel, naturally...

Political commentator Matthew Norman writes:

" On her Spectator-hosted blog, Melanie Phillips disabuses readers of the suspicion that she can be vulnerable to the lure of hysteria. Responding to Joe Biden’s criticism of Israel for building more homes in east Jerusalem, she disputes his assertion that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own.

“To put it another way,” she writes, nimbly twisting the VP’s point in vintage Mad Mel style, “why does Joe Biden think that Israel “deserves” to surrender? And why, once again, is a final solution being imposed by America on democratic and besieged Israel ? ?” Is it me being fanciful here, or might MM be using that “final solution” subtly to compare Barack Obama with Hitler ? a tactic previously reserved for the more ostentatiously in-bred extremity of the Tea Party spectrum? "

guffaw snort..

Now let's be clear... you cannot reasonably use the phrase "final solution" when talking about Israel and mean anything other than a direct comparison to Nazi evil.

Phillips is deliberately inferring Obama is a Nazi just as she explicitly says he's a revolutionary Marxist and secretly a Muslim.

Phillips... One more bigmouth who has decided HER heritage and HER faith are the gold standard by which everything can be measured for virtue and justice, and anything outside of that experience is to be despised or devalued. All the world must fight HER fight. All the world is topsy turvy and only SHE can explain it.

piss off Melanie

Get a room...

Look... I've got nothing against personal faith, and I do not want to be in the business of telling old women and starry-eyed simpletons that their thing about Jesus is a harmful futile exercise... but enough is enough:

As reported today:

"Children were sobbing in distress at the sight of a man covered in fake blood who appeared to be nailed to a cross in the middle of a Geelong shopping precinct on Saturday afternoon, local police say....A Geelong police spokesman said passersby were concerned about the reenactment in Malop Street, particularly by the man posing as Jesus covered in blood. The reenactment was shut down for breaching the peace, he said."

For my overseas readers, Geelong is a large town just west of Melbourne.

It gets better...

" "Kids were particularly upset and crying," the spokesman told AAP. "It was causing a bit of a ruckus ... the parents of these kids who had a six-year-old child that's screaming at someone who is covered in blood and bawling and is crying out loud, they (the police) decided that they would ask them to stop it and move them on." "

And PLEASE... this is not suppression of religious expression:

" "If they want to do that sort of thing they are quite welcome to do it in a place where it's not going to disturb anyone and where people are going there for that specific reason and know what they are getting themselves into." said the police."

Fair? I think so. Oh but... Heaven on Earth pastor Sarah Kenneally defended the whole exercise... i.e. live torture porn in a public place where no-one knows what they're about to walk into.

She said "it was a silent display".

Well how "silent" is a man covered in blood and apparently nailed to a cross in the middle of a shopping precinct???

ENOUGH! Just dig how cool the Easter Bunny is and get a life!

Religious idiot of the week

The inaugural award goes to Tony Abbott, recently elected by a margin of one party vote to the leadership of the federal opposition.
The next prime minister should the people of Australia collectively lose their mind (stranger things have happened...)

To quote Michael Peruso, chief executive of Sacred Heart Mission:

" I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government's goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no. In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ''The poor will always be with us,'' he said..."

Tony...have been asleep all your life?
Spouting quotes from the Bible as social policy is, REALLY, the wrong thing to do here.

Blogger-nut sighted

In the US, a female teacher, Amy Bishop, shot three people dead Friday, and wounded three others, after learning she had been denied tenure at an Alabama university. Tragic incident. She can't have been okay in the head.

Implications for gun control? Well... none it seems.

Now... some people who fly in the same blog stream as magpie will know of a certain neocon loon. I was willing to bet HE had it all worked out, and I was not disappointed:

"Amy Bishop, Detained in Huntsville University Faculty Murders, is Harvard-Trained Left-Wing Professor." says he.

Right. She was Left-wing and went to Harvard. Ergo it was obvious she was going to kill someone. Genius. Perhaps everyone who ever went to Harvard and doesn't believe in American hegemony through force of arms should be pre-emptively jailed. Dunno.

Perhaps someone should take HIM away in a straitjacket before he goes on a rampage after hearing an academic sneer at Sarah Palin (He's real tough though...shows pictures of male models to a blogger he doesn't like and swears he had abs like that 20 years ago).

Appropriating a tragic and violent crime to serve one's personal political paranoia is loathsome and without merit. It's not the first time this blogger has done this. And if she was a life-long Republican and an avowed neoconservative, it still wouldn't mean jack shit as far as the case goes.

No coverage I have seen indicates her political leaning - whatever it actually is - had anything to do with the crime. Unless Bishop was a member of a radical organisation the remainder of which is an immediate threat to public safety, there is absolutely no reason to even hypothesize what her political leanings are.

Blair unrepentant

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he had no regrets over the invasion of Iraq...

No matter the lack of WMDs, the intense public disquiet, the massive number of casualties and the subsequent debacle of a failing occupation... he thinks it was worth it. More troubling, he says Iran presents the same opportunity to mount pre-emptive slaughter.

As you will have worked out by now, I am of the opinion that the war was a catastrophe for the rule of law and the struggle against terrorism. For what little it counts, I was of this opinion before the coalition of the willingly fooled even went into Iraq.

"So you'd prefer Saddam Hussein was still in power?" is the inevitable cheap retort (and strawman argument).
The answer is "no, I would prefer he'd have been removed by means other than full scale invasion".
Tracking this hypothetical exchange to its next evolution, I would then come under attack for hypocrisy and "moral confusion"...

As if moral clarity automatically means "...invade". It does not.
There is nothing clouded about my morality: I think massive unnecessary death is a very bad thing. I think creating a beacon for terrorism in the Middle East was a very bad thing. And I think deception of the public about how, why and when the decision was arrived at... was a very bad thing.

Much has been made of Blair's religious bent in how he arrived at his decisions.

Matthew Parris, formerly a conservative MP, writes:

"Tony Blair is a Manichean, or dualist. He believes that the Universe is best understood as an eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, in contention for dominance. Christians are supposed to believe that the battle is already won, and Mr Blair’s dualism is (paradoxically) closer to Islamic fundamentalism than to the Gospels. For Mr Blair at least “Axis of Evil” was not just a Bushite soundbite: it was a profound philosophical insight into the meaning of world history."

I'm personally not convinced that Christians are in fact supposed to believe the battle is already won, but whatever... rigid dualism in politics is dangerous, is the point.
All 'our' enemies are not, in fact, friends of one another. Acting is if they are, or as if the fact doesn't matter... is stupidly dangerous. It DOES matter. How destroying Al-Qaeda transformed into taking down a regime who were hated by Al-Qaeda and who had nothing to do with 9/11 will become a paradox of policy that will darkly entertain students, teachers and observers of political theory for centuries to come, should civilisation live so long (I like to think it will).

Parris categorises the different types of people who are bitter about Blair's lack of repentance into original opposers of the war (like me), hindsight critics, and another group: "most ominously of all, a number who have not really repented of their doctrine of muscular interventionism, are now eyeing up Iran, and badly need to distinguish between what happened last time and what might happen if we try it again."

Comments by Parris in The Times Online, sourced here.

"M" is for moron

Republican Party in the US misspelling the word "conference" ON THEIR BANNER as they set about trying to attract "working class white Democrats" by insisting on English language-only initiatives. Oh the irony...

"Isn't this Right wing in this country in a nutshell?" asks Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks. More of Uyger's pointed and funny presentation of this latest act of small-minded conservative idiocy is here on Youtube.

Related coverage and comments here.

(quietmagpie uses spelling that is standard in Australia, and speaks two languages).