Monthly Archives: January 2011

Take me back to the '60s

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Last night I sank into a nostalgic haze while listening to some music that appealed to me when I was growing up:  These Were Our Songs: The Early Add an Image60’s.

The lyrics seem preposterously naive by today’s standards, of course. For example:

You come on like a dream, peaches and cream,
lips like strawberry wine:
you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine.

You’re all ribbons and curls, ooh what a girl,
eyes that sparkle and shine:
you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine.

But, as a callow youth, listening to this did manage to sum up what seemed at the time to be the profound attachment I felt towards my fifteen year-old girlfriend. Alas, it turned out not to be true love, so my romantic gushing was soon to be transferred to her replacement.

Unfortunately, for the last 20 years or so, popular music has laboured mightily to dispel the sentimentality of its progenitor: romantic pretension has been expunged by a crass unrelenting assault on the sensibilities:

Your bark was loud, but your bite wasn’t vicious,
And them rhymes you were kickin were quite bootylicious,
You get with Doggy Dogg oh is he crazy?
With ya mama and your daddy hollin’ Bay-Bee,
So won’t they let you know,
That is you fuck with dre nigga you’re fuckin wit Death Row,
And I ain’t even slangin them thangs,
I’m hollin one-eight-seven with my dick in yo mouth, beotch

Which, I have on good authority, could be roughly translated into the slightly less obtuse, but no less revolting:

You talk a lot but you can’t back it up,
You can’t rap well,
You must be crazy to try and mess with me,
I will kill you. Your mum and dad will be crying at your funeral,
If you mess with Dr. Dre you are messing with every rapper on our record label.
I don’t sell drugs, I will yell murder as you perform oral sex on me. Bitch.

If that wasn’t bad enough, here is Me So Horny from 2 Live Crew:

It’s true, you were a virgin until you met me
I was the first to make you hot and wetty­wetty
You tell your parents that we’re goin’ out
Never to the movies, just straight to my house
You said it yourself, you like it like I do
Put your lips on my dick, and suck my asshole too
I’m a freak in heat, a dog without warning
My appetite is sex, ’cause me so horny.

Romantic illusions have been replaced with pornographic illusions.
Take me back to the ’60s.

A nudist tests his constitutional right to public nudity in the courts

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Although some seem to think this is a nudist blog, it isn’t, so I’ve closed the post for further comments.

Brian Coldin is a nudist – a Christian nudist, apparently. I’m not sure what part Christianity plays in his nudist exploits, but I imagine he could easily find an Anglican church willing to offer a generous pastoral response affirming him in his chilly calling.

He is about to assert his constitutional right to public nudity in the courts. This should dispel any lingering illusion that Canadian judges and lawyers engaged on constitutional issues are busy doing much of anything that is other than frivolous; particularly if Coldin makes his court appearance in his preferred state – as he should since he is obviously serious about his vocation.

From here:

Prominent defence lawyer Clayton Ruby was expected to argue current laws in Canada prohibiting nudity in public places, or on private property exposed to public view, are overly broad — thus they should be struck down and the laws under the Criminal Code updated.

According to the Federation of Canadian Nudists, these laws are archaic because they define nudity as generally “indecent” and intended to cause “harm” to those who witness it.

The challenge is being launched on behalf of Ruby’s client, Brian Coldin, a nudist resort operator in Bracebridge, Ont., a small cottage country town about two hours north of Toronto. Coldin, who has been arrested numerous times over the years for public nudity, was charged last year with five counts related to incidents between April 2008 and May 2009 near his resort and at drive-thus at both Tim Horton’s and A&W restaurants.

The criminal trial, which began last fall, heard testimony from one of the workers at the fast-food burger restaurant who cried on the stand when she described how Coldin and two others drove up to the pickup window completely nude. She testified Coldin and the driver of the vehicle both pretended to reach for their imaginary wallets to pay for their orders, causing their genitals to sway back and forth.

What further evidence of causing harm to others could possibly be required: fast food is hard enough to digest without being subjected to the uninvited spectacle of  spontaneously swaying genitals.

Neither Brian Coldin, nor the courts would care, but C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, makes the interesting point that nudity is not the natural state of man:

“Are we not our true selves when naked? In a sense, no. The word naked was originally a past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking, that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts and fruit). Time out of mind the naked man has seemed to our ancestors not the natural but the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from dressing but the man who has been for some reason undressed. And it is a simple fact-anyone can observe it at a men’s bathing place-that nudity emphasises common humanity and soft-pedals what is individual. In that way we are “more ourselves” when clothed. By nudity the lovers cease to be solely John and Mary; the universal He and She are emphasised. You could almost say they put on nakedness as a ceremonial robe-or as the costume for a charade.

Muslim runs over his daughter with a Jeep because she had become Westernised

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From here:

A Muslim father ran over and killed his 20-year-old daughter because he was enraged by her failure to obey him and her increasingly Westernised values, a prosecutor has claimed.

Faleh Almaleki allegedly accelerated his Jeep in a car park in Phoenix, Arizona, hitting Noor as well as her boyfriend’s mother, before fleeing the scene – and the country.

The mother survived but Noor died after two weeks in a coma.

One presumes that the irony of Mr. Almaleki’s use of a Jeep – a staple of Western military and civilian motoring since 1943 – to kill his daughter for being too Westernised  entirely escaped him.

Chinese pianist calls Americans “jackals” in a song performed at a White House dinner

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It’s all part of the new political civility.

From here:

A Chinese pianist struck a sour note at a White House state dinner with a rendition of a well-known anti-American anthem.

With the Chinese and U.S. presidents among the dozens of dignitaries watching, Lang Lang belted out ‘My Motherland’, the theme tune to the Chinese-made Korean War film ‘Battle on Shangangling Mountain’.

The song has been a propaganda tool in China for decades and includes a disparaging reference to Americans as ‘jackals’ who will be shot with hunting rifles.

You can hardly blame the Chinese for treating the American government like half-witted wimps considering the same government gave a benign nod to the building of a victory mosque on the site of a mass murder committed in the name of Islam.

Here it is:

The Pope calls for online civility

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From here:

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI told Catholic bloggers and Facebook and YouTube users Monday to be respectful of others when spreading the Gospel online and not to see their ultimate goal as getting as many online hits as possible.

Echoing concerns in the U.S. about the need to root out online vitriol, Benedict called for the faithful to adopt a “Christian style presence” online that is responsible, honest and discreet

“We must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its ‘popularity’ or from the amount of attention it receives,” Benedict wrote in his annual message for the church’s World Day of Social Communications.

“The proclamation of the Gospel requires a communication which is at once respectful and sensitive.”

I’m all for civility in Christian discourse. This example is one of my favourites – I forget who said it:

People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds.

“You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You build granite tombs for your prophets and marble monuments for your saints.

And you say that if you had lived in the days of your ancestors, no blood would have been on your hands.

You protest too much! You’re cut from the same cloth as those murderers, and daily add to the death count.

“Snakes! Reptilian sneaks! Do you think you can worm your way out of this? Never have to pay the piper?

It’s on account of people like you that I send prophets and wise guides and scholars generation after generation – and generation after generation you treat them like dirt, greeting them with lynch mobs, hounding them with abuse.

“You can’t squirm out of this: Every drop of righteous blood ever spilled on this earth, beginning with the blood of that good man Abel right down to the blood of Zechariah, Barachiah’s son, whom you murdered at his prayers, is on your head.

All this, I’m telling you, is coming down on you, on your generation.

A Toronto artist compares the Pope to Hitler

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Godwin’s law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

This observation, while not infallibly accurate, has its roots in the tendency for discussion group addicts to increasingly invoke ludicrous comparisons as they gradually exhaust their – usually very limited – capacity for rational thought.

A Toronto artist, Peter Alexander Por, has concocted an artistic expression of Godwin’s law in which he has dispensed with trifling intermediate appeals to rationality and leapt straight to the Hitler comparison – with, of course, the Pope and George Bush. To allay any lingering suspicion that there may, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, be a spark of originality concealed somewhere in his desiccated imagination, Por has thrown in a depiction of a crucified Obama, victim of special and distorted interests.

From here:

TORONTO, Ontario, January 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Toronto art gallery is scheduled to exhibit an array of inflammatory works that include a picture of a seated Pope Benedict XVI riddled with bullet holes, alongside portraits of other “evildoers” such as President George Bush and Hitler.

The exhibit, entitled “Persona Non Grata – The Veil of History,” by Toronto-based artist Peter Alexander Por, is due to open at the Bezpala Brown Gallery on February 5, 2011.

Por’s exhibit, 30 canvases and four sculptures, also includes depictions of Pope Innocent III, Stalin, Mussolini, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and others.

In a press release the gallery said that the “bullet-ridden” depiction of the pope is “a less than subtle expression of the hurt and anger directed at a pontiff and an institution that has abandoned its flock, choosing to focus on dogma while its subjects suffer and, in many instances, die from its archaic policies.”

On the other hand, the exhibition also includes a depiction of the “crucifixion of Obama,” casting the current U.S. president as “a victim, crucified in the wake of special and distorted interests,” according to the gallery.

Obama continues to support murdering the unborn

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From here:

President Obama reaffirmed his support for abortion rights on Saturday, the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a woman’s right to an abortion.

“I am committed to protecting this constitutional right,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption.”

Mr. Obama, the father of two young daughters, called on Americans to “recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill [sic] their dreams.”

Mr. Obama said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling “affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

What a pile of drivel.

Killing an unborn baby has nothing whatsoever to do with a person fulfilling his or her dreams: for sane married couples, having children is their dream and a career is the means of supporting the dream.

If killing an unborn child is a family matter upon which government should not intrude, infanticide would be too. Obviously this is rubbish since the government’s job is to restrain evil, particularly evil inflicted on the innocent and vulnerable. If anyone is thinking of saying that this makes me a socialist, don’t bother.

Children’s Aid Society encourages “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgendered” to foster children

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From here.

But why are they at the end of the of the list: blatant discrimination.

The Christian, common-sense and scientific view that children are better off with with a mother and father rather than two fathers, two mothers or perverse mixtures thereof is obviously of limited interest to CAS, an organisation that appears to be more obsessed with obsequious political correctness than with caring for children.

Windsor police to receive “Report Homophobic Violence” training

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Windsor police will be taking mandatory training on homophobic violence. The training is designed to increase “empathy toward this particular community” – individuals who are, in any combination, one or more of the following: lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans-identified.

Since empathy entails entering into another’s personality, one wonders whether the Windsor Police Service is going to be encouraged to explore its inner gayness.

Read it all here:

The Windsor Police Service is pleased to announce a new training initiative for it’s employees to be undertaken in cooperation with EGALE Canada. EGALE Canada is a national organization committed to advancing equality and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified people and their families across Canada. Members of EGALE Canada have partnered with the Windsor Police Service and will be in Windsor over a five week period commencing on Wednesday January 12, 2011 in order to train all of the Service’s sworn and civilian employees.

The presentation entitled “Report Homophobic Violence Period” will provide further insight into some of the challenges the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified population face within our communities. The training will also assist all members of the Windsor Police Service to more readily distinguish between those crimes considered “Hate Related” or crimes of opportunity during our investigations. Chief Gary Smith explains “As a police service, we want to encourage members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified population to feel more comfortable in coming forward and reporting crimes committed either against them or within the community. This training will reinforce our knowledge of basic human rights and will increase our empathy toward this particular community within our society.” It should be noted that the Windsor Police Service is the first Police Agency in Canada to make this training mandatory for all of the Service’s employees.

There is, of course, nothing new in this: it has been a great success amongst the constabulary of North Wales. The Windsor Police Service could learn a thing or two about empathy from them: