Tuesday - February 03, 2009

We Lost By Winning

Another bowling post.

Hey look, I’m still alive. Sorry I haven’t posted over the past couple of days. I even missed out on Groundhog Day, and Rancino sent me a decent recipe for woodchuck stew.

Anyway, we got skunked last week in both leagues.

In the Monday league we were up against our least favorite team, and they beat us like a rented mule. For the first two games at any rate. They have one guy on that team who is just too damned good; he grew up in that alley and works there. So far this season, just past the halfway mark, and he’s up to 9 perfect 300 games. He usually throws about 13-15 per season. Thank goodness he didn’t throw one against us this time, merely tossing in the 270s. (for non-bowlers, a 300 is a perfect game; 12 strikes in a row. A 279 is nearly perfect at 11 strikes and a spare. But that spare takes down 9 pins on the first ball, so a 279 can be thought of as 1 pin shy of perfect). But we managed to eke out a little win in the last game, haha. That took us from our seasonal high of 5th place down to 6th.

In the Saturday league we were up against another hard core team. They won the league last year and the year before, but they’ve been dragging a bit so far this season. Not last week. They trampled us but good in all 3 games. We lost the series by something like 400 pins. Ouch. That brought them up in the standings. Meanwhile the 2nd place team took all 7 in their own match up, so now we’ve lost 1st place by 2 in that league. We aren’t that cohesive a team, and I think that hurts us. One member is always off getting some food, or stewing in his own juices over his failures. Another member sits there and does her puzzle books, or plays her GameBoy. Ok, I accept that people need to relax and unwind, and that this is a fun league. But I think they should be a bit more actively involved in the event. Be part of the team and all that. And actually try. It does irk me a bit when all they do is talk about their physical shortcomings, and it irks me more when they seem to give up after rolling a score equal to their (really low) average and acting like that’s enough. Strive a little folks. It won’t kill you.

This Monday we did the stomping. Mostly. We took the first game by well over 150 pins. Maybe 200. I was rolling really well, 9/ XXXX 9/ for the first 6, but I couldn’t keep that throw going, so I wound up with a 178. The second game we also won, by a large amount, but not quite as much as the first. I didn’t have any hot streak, but kept the little marks coming and managed a 180. Oooh, Mr. Consistent! Game 3 we lost. We were down a lot throughout the whole game, and the other team was really lit up. We closed the gap a bit by the 8th frame, but my scores were in the trash at that point, though I somehow tossed a strike in that frame. My timing was way off, I don’t know why. I was bringing the ball in so late I nearly knocked myself off my feet several times. Grrr. And when my timing is off I have trouble with my release too. Focus focus focus ... and I threw another strike in the 9th. The 10th frame wasn’t good for the rest of my team. Ok, but not “marky” enough to matter, and the other team finished on a high note with at least 6 marks in the 10th. It was over, and we couldn’t win anyhow. I’m the anchor on that team. Don’t ask me why. So after chatting for another couple minutes I just got up and threw my spaz-ball. And made all 3 strikes. So I pulled a 162 out of that game by finishing the last frames off with 5 X in a row. Which shows you just how awful the earlier frames were for me. Yeah we lost that one, but I closed the gap to about 12 pins. We wound up taking 5 points for the match, out of 7. You would think that was a pretty good take for the night, but we actually went down another place in the standings. So now we’re in 7th again, go figure. But we bowl the last place team next week, and if we don’t totally screw the pooch we should beat them handily, even after giving them 108 pins worth of handicap. That probably won’t help out our position either, since 4 out of the top 6 teams above us are playing lesser teams. But you never know.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/03/2009 at 08:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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   Monday - February 02, 2009

Cricket team told it can’t call itself ‘the Crusaders’…in case it offends Muslims and Jews. (WTF?)

I just can not believe this.

When oh when is this kind of shit gonna end.
They can’t do something “just in case.” Using Just In Case as a reason and you can ban anything.

So if I understand this idiocy correctly, there were a “couple of complaints.” As in what? Two?  So the management is changing a name after using it with no trouble for 10 fuckin years and suddenly a few crack pot scum bucket sub-human wimpy bastards just discovered a team name, a team I bet they don’t even follow, all of a sudden they find themselves “offended.” After ten years?

I would like to know since when did ANY JEW hear the word Crusader and become offended. When? Who? Where?  BULLSHIT!!!
I doubt many muslims care unless some are instructed to ‘suddenly’ care.

The article claims some Jews complained.  I find that very hard to believe. If it’s true, then fuckem. They’re stupid ppl and deserve no consideration.
What a stupid overdemanding world. Pander to any of these groups and they will make a point of going out of their way to find things that “offend them.”

No country ... no people ... no culture that puts up with and -or- encourages this kind of total crap, deserves to have any kind of future.  You are fuckin DOOMED England!  I hate to say that really I do.  But it’s all over.  You are already dead but nobody has bothered to bury the stinking corpse which is decaying and rotting all around you.  Look at the mess. Can’t you smell the stink of rotting flesh?  That’s your country.  It’s been murdered by the left and there isn’t a soul left able to bring them to book.  RIP ....  unless even that offends your enemies.

Cricket team told it can’t call itself ‘the Crusaders’...in case it offends Muslims and Jews
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 11:00 AM on 02nd February 2009

A cricket team has been forced to change its name after angry complaints from Muslims and Jews.

The Middlesex Crusaders, who have played under the name for almost 10 years, will play next season as The Panthers.

Bosses at the county club acted after protests about the name from Jewish and Muslim communities, who said they felt it was a reference to the religious wars waged by Christians in Europe against other faiths.

But Middlesex members condemned the decision to change the team’s name and described the move as “batty”.

“The world really has gone mad,” one said. “It’s a real kick in the teeth and is bound to upset a lot of fans.”

Middlesex chief executive Vinny Codrington said his club “had one or two complaints from our Muslim community and our Jewish community”.

“The name was nothing whatsoever to do with the Crusades in the 11th and 12th century,” Mr Codrington said.

Middlesex, which plays most of its home games at Lord’s in St John’s Wood, won the 2008 Twenty20 Cup.

THE TEAM PHOTO HERE

Posted by peiper     on 02/02/2009 at 10:36 AM   
Filed Under: • EUro-peons • Nanny State • Stoopid-People • Typical White People: Stupid, Evil, Willfully Blind • UK •  
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British Guantanamo inmate to be returned to UK as hunger strike brings him ‘close to death’.

Good grief Charlie Brown.  This island doesn’t have enough problems.  On the other hand, we won’t have to deal with it in the US.

Oh heaven forbid we let him actually starve.  Which could be a bad idea come to think about it.  He’d then become a martyr. They’d do a play based on his worthless life.  Why not?  I think (?) there was a play based on Bobby Sands. IRA terrorist. 

That headline btw is VERY misleading.  He IS NOT a Brit.  Why does the msm do this kind of thing?  He was a “resident” so he may have been a Brit resident.
But the headline reads otherwise.  I’ve noticed they do that a lot.
Anyway ... Brit liberals wanted us to close Guantanamo and OB is trying to do that.  So now they are about to get one of these guys. 

He’s a “student” at 30?  Night school?  What’s his subject I wonder. Chemistry?  Bombs 101?

I do not like these folks, I do not trust them.  Many Brits don’t either and I have a feeling that it’s being done without any thought given to public safety or even what the public wants.

Is this guy innocent? Guilty?  I really don’t know.  But I am pretty certain that anyone can make a claim of “torture” and the left will pick it up and run with it.
They’ll damn the Americans and assume automatically that Americans are doing something wrong and not being truthful.  They will assume our guilt and tell a world of sheep that the US is in violation of this and that, and our enemies will eat it all up while planning their next attack.

I should be careful least I give the wrong idea.  I have not done any sort of survey and am not in a position to do that if I could.  I base my opinion on what I hear from ppl and most of what I hear sure does not approve of bringing these folks here. 

British Guantanamo inmate to be returned to UK as hunger strike brings him ‘close to death’

By Richard Shears
Last updated at 6:50 PM on 01st February 2009

UK resident Binyam Mohamed claims he only confessed to being a terrorist under torture.

A British resident said to be just ‘skin and bone’ and close to death in the notorious Guantanamo Bay camp is to be flown back to the UK within days.

West London student Binyam Mohamed, 30, who has been on a hunger strike since January 5 after being held in the prison camp for four years, has collapsed several times in recent days.

His immediate repatriation to Britain is being arranged as US authorities face a political row should a British fatality occur in the prison.

Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer who last week saw Mohamed in his cell - where he has been kept under solitary confinement - described how he was wasting away.

‘The real worry is that he comes out in a coffin,’ she said.

The case of Ethiopian-born Mohamed has been fraught with difficulties for both the British Government and the Americans.

He claims that while he confessed to being an al-Qaeda terrorist, the admission was forced from him under torture.

Among the false admissions extracted by a torture team, he says, was that he had plotted a radioactive bomb attack on the US. And while he had gone to Afghanistan, it was to try to kick his drug habit and find out whether the Taliban had a good Islamic government.

Although President Obama has resolved to close Guantanamo within a year and find countries that will be willing to accept the prisoners, Mohamed decided not to spend another 12 months in the prison and has kept up his hunger strike for more than three weeks.

He became a temporary resident in Britain at the age of 15 in 1994 when he sought political asylum. He was told he could remain in the country until his case was resolved.

But in 2002 he was captured in Pakistan while trying to return to London on a false British passport.

Mohamed has told his lawyers that MI5 were aware of his torture - and along with his imminent release a judicial review in the High Court will determine whether the British Government has an obligation to hand over documents that could support his claims of ill treatment.

His hunger strike and pressure on the government over the torture claims has now led to the decision to fly him back to Britain. His British lawyer, Mr Clive Stafford Smith, says he understands that Mohamed’s release is ‘imminent’.

The decision to return him to the UK flies in the face of Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s insistence last week that Britain would refuse to accept any more terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay.

Britain has taken in 13 former inmates - almost half of the 27 that have been returned to the EU - and Mr Milliband said that the country had ‘done its bit’.

HUNGER STRIKE

Posted by peiper     on 02/02/2009 at 07:46 AM   
Filed Under: • Illegal-Aliens and Immigration • International • Terrorists • UK • War On Terror •  
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Japan’s Mount Asama erupts near Tokyo.  (lets round up amnasty intl.  and drop them in it.)

Japan’s Mount Asama erupts near Tokyo
Japan’s Mount Asama has erupted, throwing hot rocks out of the crater and depositing a fine layer of ash on parts of Tokyo, some 90 miles to the southeast.

By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Last Updated: 8:44AM GMT 02 Feb 2009

Television footage showed white smoke rising from the 2,568-meter peak and experts are warning that a second eruption is possible.

The first explosion occurred at 1.51 am, according to Shomei Shirato, of the Japan Meteorological Agency, and was described as “small.” Rocks were thrown more than 1 km from the crater, although there have been no reports of injuries or serious damage.

The agency raised its alert level for the snow-capped volcano on Sunday after detecting signs of increased activity. Traffic in the area has been restricted and 45,000 local people warned to be ready to leave their homes should the danger intensify.

There were no signs of lava escaping from the crater of the volcano and experts from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology are trying to determine whether the initial eruption has eased the pressure within the volcano or is merely a precursor to a far larger explosion.

“Mount Asama has erupted in the past, but they have been mostly small events,” said Dr. Akira Takada, a volcano expert with the institute. “At the moment, we do not have enough data to predict whether there will be a larger eruption now.

“We are collecting and analysing ash from the volcano to try to determine the condition of the magma, but we do not have the answers right now to the interior system of the mountain,” he said.

Mount Asama has had frequent bouts of activity in recent years, with the last major eruption in September 2004.

Most worrying for the experts would be a repeat of the 1783 eruption, which caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people and widespread damage.

The 1783 eruption began with small scale activity in May, building up in intensity and scale before the main detonation in early August.

Japan - part of the Pacific “rim of fire” - has more than 100 active volcanoes and is regularly subject to seismic activity.

volcano

Posted by peiper     on 02/02/2009 at 07:32 AM   
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   Sunday - February 01, 2009

Japan defies the critics to hang four killers.  (Bravo Japan but it took too damn long)

HERE’S THREE CHEERS AND THREE CHEERS MORE ..........

I guess Japan flipped the bird to their critics.  Well good for them.
The gene pool has been improved.  Now they need to hang the rest and the sooner the better.
Then go after those idiot human rights critics who seem to think that this is their business.  Hang those A-holes too.
The world won’t notice and nothing would be lost. In fact, it might be a major gain.

Japan defies the critics to hang four killers

By Mail Foreign Service

Four convicted killers were hanged in Japan yesterday amid criticism of its secretive and slow justice system.

Japan and the U.S. are the only industrialised countries to enforce capital punishment . 

The policy has broad support in the country, which has one of the world’s lowest rates of violent crime, but critics say the system is too slow-moving.

There are currently around 100 convicts on death row. Many have been there for years and some for decades.

But the pace of hangings has picked up recently.

Last year saw 15 convicts executed – the most since 1975 when 17 were hanged.

Human rights groups including Amnesty International have protested against the rise.

Those executed yesterday included Tadashi Makino, 58, who stabbed someone to death and assaulted two others as long ago as 1990.

Yukinari Kawamura, 44, and Tetsuya Sato, 39, were hanged for kidnapping a cafe owner and his wife, driving them into the forest and burning them to death in April 2000.

Also hanged was Shojiro Nishimoto, 32, a robber convicted for murdering a 59-year-old taxi driver in 2003 and three old people in separate attacks in 2004.

Critics also say Japan’s system is too secretive. Inmates do not know when they will be executed until the morning it happens.

Executions take place in secret, and lawyers and family are only notified after the fact.

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2009 at 10:37 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • International •  
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There’s an old expression that says “It never rains but it pours.”

As regulars here know, my wife’s mother passed away recently, and so there’s much to do and probate of course but you won’t be interested in all that.

Well, now a new bombshell has been dropped in our lap. Actually mine for the moment.

I have to break the news to the wife that her brother has undergone surgery (in Australia) for a “high-grade tumor meaning that it is very aggressive and will keep coming back.” You couldn’t make this up.

“He has totally lost his left field of vision – which no surgery can repair. The tumor has grown to such a size that the brain has shifted in his skull causing pressure and swelling, they have been giving him steroids to reduce the swelling.”

He has always been one of these hang gliding walk 20 miles just because could and loved ripping through the countryside on motorcycles and camping etc.  Not a health nut but always had a healthy lifestyle.

He woke up one morning on the floor beside the bed, had no memory of falling, and found his limbs unresponsive. and no vision on the left side.  He hadn’t been ill or had any sick days outside of the routine common cold. And I don’t know what year that was.

My little personal problems have become so much smaller.

Except how to gently break this news to the wife who is just getting over a nasty cold. 

stay tuned

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2009 at 09:32 AM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life • Health-Medicine •  
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Bush was a reckless near-dictator; his successor is returning power to the people.

Right ... he was also Hitler and Stalin and Mao.  Anything else?

Never ends does it?

I thought you should see the left leaning Times of London and their take.  Clearly they’re in love.  What gets me though is why they think it’s any of their business to begin with. Or maybe it is.  ??

Now you wanna talk about restrictions and democracy etc. mr editor, you need to look closer to home.  You might wanna start with your own back yard.

Even conservatives (USA) have lots of serious issues with Bush. 

“Bush the dauphin lived and breathed a monarchical sense of the office” The what?  Dauphin?
Hmmm.  Clever use of words but come on.  I really doubt Bush thought in those terms whatever else he may have been guilty of.

I sure didn’t feel any less a free citizen when I left the USA (which I miss more then you folks can ever imagine)!
So then, President Bush must have become a dictator AFTER I left the country.  Is that correct? 

Please comment and tell me about the oppression I luckily escaped from.

COMMENTS

Ah, you can’t be more wrong if you tried. The real BO is the tyrant. Watch, and be very very afraid.
BO wants what he wants. Wait until he is denied. Then it will get interesting.
PS-why don’t you guys clean your own stall and we will do the same?

Richard, Carlsbad, USA

you make Bush out as an oppresser of constitutional rights. Three of what are considered our best or better presidents were far worse, Lincoln suspended the rights of habeus corpus, W. Wilson suspended free speach, FDR placed US citizens of Japanese, and some German, heritage in internment camps

thomas peters, danbury, usa

(Brits did the same re. Italians and mostly Germans. Even those who were not Nazis)

THE FOLLOWING MAY BE THE LONGEST LOVE LETTER EVER WRITTEN.

From The Sunday Times
February 1, 2009
Obama calmly buries the legacy of Mr Toad
Bush was a reckless near-dictator; his successor is returning power to the people
Andrew Sullivan

Because we live in a practical world where nothing is ever totally new, it is possible to see there is as much continuity between the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama as discontinuity. The massive stimulus package being prepped for presidential signature follows a similar, if more modest, effort by Bush. More than 140,000 troops are still in Iraq and it will not be easy to withdraw them. The war in Afghanistan grinds on. The fantastic debt of the past eight years will soon increase by an even more fantastic amount. The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay cannot simply be let go, however haphazard and clumsy their detention.

And yet there is something unmistakably different about Washington. Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution from his immediate predecessor. The constitution itself has been quietly but swiftly rebalanced by the manner and tone and executive orders of Obama.

This is a good thing. Bush the dauphin lived and breathed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his political godfather (Dick Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky you’d get an explanation later, usually dolled up in abstract pronouncements about freedom advancing or work being hard. The president, in his own mind, had only one “accountability moment”: the election of 2004. The rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power to be used with total boldness and declarative clarity. It didn’t matter that in 2000 he won fewer votes than his opponent. He acted as if he had won a landslide. As Garrett Epps recently put it, Bush “treated the White House much as Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad treated a new automobile - a shiny toy to be wrecked by racing the motor, spinning smoke from the tyres, and smashing through farmyards until the wheels come off”.

At times, Bush’s indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. One of the oddest aspects of his presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. This was dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anaemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush’s authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong.

The Decider, we eventually discovered, had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, Americans had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Buried within this was something more sinister. The events of 9/11 undoubtedly required energetic executive action, as the founding father Alexander Hamilton once described the virtue of the president. In an emergency, the genius of the American executive is its ability to act more swiftly than a parliament or Congress. But over time, we realised the following. Bush did not see his immense war powers as temporary. Because the war had no end, his extra-constitutional war powers also were now permanent. The war, moreover, was not just abroad. It also included the homeland and anyone in it. So an American citizen, Jose Padilla, was picked up at O’Hare airport, locked in a cell, tortured until he was a mental case and finally charged with much lesser offences than the government had first warned of, and he is still languishing in jail.

President Bush declared that he was the sole arbiter of the law, broke it repeatedly in wire-tapping, torturing, extraordinary rendition and detention, and dared Congress and the Supreme Court to stop him. In the end, the court did begin to hedge him back in. Congress? Not so much.

The executive claim, however, was larger than ever previously made. The battleground was potentially anywhere: your bedroom, your telephone, the security queue at the airport. The Decider was answerable only - and only retroactively - to the people, whose will legitimised him.

Now look at Obama. He has just won an election victory more profound than any Bush did, and by a much larger margin. And yet what one senses is restraint. This president, one recalls, is a constitutional lawyer and a deliberative fellow. He began life as a community organiser, a role that seeks to facilitate rather than to dictate, to provoke others to take responsibility rather than seizing it always oneself.

And what the critics misread in his sober inaugural speech was its classical structure and its awareness of what the oath of office had just done to him. He was not running any more. He was presiding.

His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Yes, Obama set some clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window not for presidential action but for constitutional invitation. The invitation is to the other coequal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order.

You saw this in the flurry of modest but piercing executive orders quietly gutting the near-dictatorial powers seized by Cheney on behalf of the dauphin. You see it in the patient understanding that Guantanamo cannot be closed overnight, although the world-view that gave us Guantanamo has already been abolished. You saw it also last week as the Democratic president spent two long hours with House Republicans seeking consensus - which he did not require to pass the law - on the stimulus package. The Republicans never had that kind of respect from Bush. And they rewarded Obama with unanimous opposition in the vote on the package. But the symbolism was telling.

From the Decider we now have the Presider. If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. And this is not a Democratic or Republican issue, or even a liberal or conservative issue. It is one form of conservatism – authoritarian, bellicose and protective - being replaced by another: consensual, traditional, cautious. It is the conservatism of law replacing the conservatism of action.

It’s fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realise itself in public actions. The system - as the founders once hoped - is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. It took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

SOURCE, THE LEFT WING TIMES

* Have your say

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2009 at 04:55 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Media-Bias • Obama, The One • UK •  
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Nurse suspended for offering to pray for elderly patient’s recovery .

I’m left wondering if there’s any more to this story then the headline.

If she took it upon herself to say a prayer without asking the patient, then I’d say she might have been out of line.

Many years ago when I was still a smoker and was recovering in a Nashville hospital from bladder surgery (removal of a tumor), I filled out a hospital card that had been passed around asking folks who wanted to stop smoking if they would like help in doing so. Well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get some help if it were offered and especially as it was the hosp. I was thinking in terms of some kind of treatment or maybe a pill that might put an end to a habit of some 36 years.
It wasn’t really that I wanted to quit as much as I thought I should, and so I filled out the card saying yes, I would like to quit smoking and yes I would appreciate help. Thinking it would be medical.

The very next day this polite and well dressed fellow showed up.  We exchanged a few pleasantries and had a very brief conversation with no religion being mentioned beforehand.  Next thing I know he has his eye shut tight and he’s talking to Jesus asking for his help in getting me to stop smoking.

Now people ... that really was unexpected, unwanted and unappreciated.  That isn’t exactly the help I had in mind.

PICTURE THIS:
There I am with a catheter and a tube and a bag attached to one personal part of me, one hand with a couple of drip whatever going in me, I am feeling anything but perky and this guy is on another side of me loudly praying.

I threw him out of my room.  Verbally of course.

I have nothing personal against prayer, but where my personal choice or space or whatever term you want to apply is hijacked, it stops being prayer and becomes an intrusion.  And it would have been polite to at least ask me if I wanted that rather then simply take it for granted.

A nurse has been suspended from her job for offering to pray for an elderly patient’s recovery from illness.

By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
Last Updated: 10:04PM GMT 31 Jan 2009

Caroline Petrie, a committed Christian, has been accused by her employers of failing to demonstrate a “personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity”.

She faces disciplinary action and could lose her job over the incident.

Mrs Petrie, a married mother of two, says she has been left shocked and upset by the action taken against her.

She insists she has never forced her own religious beliefs on anyone but politely inquired if the elderly patient wanted her to pray for her – either in the woman’s presence or after the nurse had left the patient’s home.

“I simply couldn’t believe that I have been suspended over this. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I am trying to do is help my patients, many of whom want me to pray for them,” she said.

Mrs Petrie, 45, is a community nurse employed by North Somerset Primary Care Trust to carry out home visits to sick and elderly patients.

The incident which led to her suspension took place at the home of a woman patient in Winscombe, North Somerset.

“It was around lunchtime and I had spent about 20 to 25 minutes with her. I had applied dressings to her legs and shortly before I left I said to her: ‘Would you like me to pray for you?’.

“She said ‘No, thank you.’ And I said: ‘OK.’ I only offered to pray for her because I was concerned about her welfare and wanted her to get better.”

However, after the incident on December 15, she was contacted by the trust and asked to explain her actions.

The woman patient, who is believed to be in her late 70s, is understood to have complained to the trust.

Mrs Petrie will not disclose the woman’s name or reveal the precise nature of her ailment because it would breach patient confidentiality.

Mrs Petrie, who lives in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, said she was initially confronted the next day by a nursing sister who said the patient had been taken aback by her question about prayer.

“I said: ‘I am sorry. Did I offend or upset her?’ The sister said: ‘No, no. She was just a bit taken back. You must be aware of your professional code of conduct. I would be careful.’

“But the next day my coordinator left a message on my home phone and I realised this had been taken further.”

Mrs Petrie said that she often offers to pray for her patients and that many take her up on it.

She either prays with them or after she has left their home. The nurse has been a committed Christian since she was ten – after her mother died of breast cancer.

Initially, she was Church of England but she switched to the Baptist faith nine years ago. “My faith is very important to me,” she said.

Mrs Petrie had previously been reprimanded for an incident in Clevedon last October when she offered to give a small, home-made prayer card to an elderly, male patient, who had happily accepted it.

On this occasion, the patient’s carer, who was with him, raised concerns over the incident.

Alison Withers, Mrs Petrie’s boss at the time, wrote to her at the end of November saying: “As a nurse you are required to uphold the reputation of your profession.

“Your NMC [Nursing Midwifery Council] code states that ‘you must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’ and ‘you must not use your professional status to promote causes that are not related to health’.”

In the letter, Mrs Petrie, who qualified as a nurse in 1985, was asked to attend an equality and diversity course and warned: “If there is any further similar incident it may be treated as potential misconduct and the formal disciplinary procedure could be instigated.”

Mrs Petrie said: “I stopped handing out prayer cards after that but I found it more and more difficult [not to offer them]. My concern is for the person as a whole, not just their health.

“I was told not to force my faith on anyone but I could respond if patients themselves brought up the subject [of religion].”

It is the second incident – the offer to pray for a patient – that led to the disciplinary action. She was suspended from her part-time job, without pay, on December 17.

She faced an internal disciplinary meeting last Wednesday and expects to learn the outcome this week.

At last week’s hour-long meeting, Mrs Petrie says she was told the patient had said she was not offended by the prayer offer but the woman argued that someone else might have been.

The nurse had her representative from the Royal College of Nursing present Mrs Petrie’s husband, Stewart, 48, works as a BT engineer and they have two sons, aged 14 and ten.

The couple attend Milton Baptist Church every Sunday and Mrs Petrie said: “Stuart and I have decided to put God first in our lives.”

Mrs Petrie, who has worked for the trust since February last year, has already taken legal advice from the Christian Legal Centre, which seeks to promote religious freedom and, particularly, to protect Christians and Christianity.

The centre, in turn, has instructed Paul Diamond, the leading religious rights barrister. Andrea Williams, the founder and director of the centre, said: “We are backing this case all the way.”

A spokesman for North Somerset Primary Care Trust said: “Caroline Petrie has been suspended pending an investigation into the matter.

“She is a bank nurse and she has been told we will not be using her in this capacity until the outcome of our investigation is known.

“We always take any concerns raised by our patients most seriously and conscientiously investigate any matter of this nature brought to our attention.

“We are always keen to be respectful of our patients’ views and sensitivity as well as those of our staff.”

ARTICLE SOURCE- THE TELEGRAPH

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2009 at 04:06 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous • Religion •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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