Tuesday - March 15, 2011

That was fast!

Last Saturday night I placed an order. Today I received the order.

I ordered two BMEWS mugs. One for home, one for work.

Sadly, like almost everything else, including my iMac and iPad, the BMEWS mugs are made in China.

UPDATE:

I thought I’d ordered one for home and one for work. My wife appropriated one when she discovered they were 20 oz. size.

Posted by Christopher     on 03/15/2011 at 08:16 PM   
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   Saturday - February 26, 2011

Firefox Tips for avoiding blacklist punishment

Have you ever lost a great comment here because the blacklist filter spit out your post? You can’t post certain links here, but you can avoid the punishment of losing your whole comment if this occurs. This happened to me this morning, so I found out several ways to work around it.

Firefox users can go into about:config and set dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar to TRUE, which will override any Java window.open setting a blog engine might use. That way you ALWAYS get the toolbar in a new popup window, even if the blog is set to not give it to you.

Another way is to learn the Firefox keyboard shortcut, Alt-Left Arrow, which will take you to the previous screen. So it works the same way, but without anything visible. Blacklist message? Alt-Left, then edit your comment and resubmit. You do have to remember the shortcut though.

A third way is for me to change to the parameters of the popup comment window so that it always has the browser toolbar visible. This is easy to do, now that I know how and where to do it. It makes the comment window load a tiny tiny bit slower. I tried it, it works, but I went back to having it set to ‘off’ for the time being. If folks would prefer to have it on, sing out in numbers, and I can do that.

A fourth way is to set your browser to force all popup windows to open as a new tab. That gets you the back button by default because the new tab is still within your original browser window. It should be a tick or two faster to open a new tab instead of a whole new browser window as well. In Firefox this is done in about:config by setting the value for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 1. See http://www.techzilo.com/firefox-power-optimization-tips-shortcuts/

Fifth way: when in doubt, try the obvious. D’OH!!! Using the backspace button will take you from the blacklist message back to the comment editor. It will not take you from a properly submitted comment back to the editor though.

The blacklist filter is usually quite useful, but sometimes it is a real pain. And I hate losing a big essay of a comment because of it. I’m sure you do as well. So know you know. Other browsers ought to have similar kinds of adjustments, so do a bit of research if you have to.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/26/2011 at 01:43 PM   
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   Saturday - February 19, 2011

In which …. the wife and I visit a pub in Crawley, Hampshire, Eng. The Fox and Hounds

The day after Valentine’s day, the wife and I revisited a pub we hadn’t been to in a couple of years. Only approx. five miles away from us, I don’t know why we hadn’t made the effort to go back sooner. Could have been the prices which then were fairly high. It was a last minute thought to go out for lunch HERE.

I know I have too many photos here, and believe it or not, I did a lot of editing and culling before posting these to share with everyone. The village of Crawley is so darn pretty and so peaceful looking, it really was hard to resist not putting in everything. Even the bad pix.

There is more then one Crawley, England. This one is in the county of Hampshire, AND, it is recorded in The Doomsday Book. (The Domesday Book is a great land survey from 1086, commissioned by William the Conqueror to assess the extent of the land and resources being owned in England at the time, and the extent of the taxes he could raise. The information collected was recorded by hand in two huge books, in the space of around a year. William died before it was fully completed.) Crawley has one main street and one other side street. There are no convenience stores and the FOX and HOUNDS Pub is it for lunch and dinners.  There is one ancient church, St. Mary’s Church.

To own a home in Crawley takes some doing. First of all, you won’t see many listings.  There isn’t any new building going on and hopefully there won’t be but with the push for homes in the “affordable range,” who can predict the future?
Crawley is in what is called “The Stockbrokers Belt.” These are VERY costly homes. 

In the spring, many of these houses open their gardens for public viewing with all proceeds going to various charities.  Some of those gardens are nothing short of spectacular. And please note that in this flower and garden mad country, the gardens are NOT designed by professionals.  Folks here take a great deal of pride in their home designed and worked gardens.  A late friend of my wife’s mom with an eye for flowers and all things growing, worked her place even when she was using a walker.  Up the road from us in a small area of a few houses, I once saw an old lady with oxygen working her patch. No kidding. These people are very serious on the subject.

Unfortunatley, some of my pix, in fact most, were not taken in the spring or summer. I took all these photos a few years ago when the wife took us (her mum was still living and able to get out with help, to lunch here.

I took a walk around the place and even went a bit outside the village itself to shoot a house we passed on the way into the village.  It reminded me of a Shakespearian kind of house and frankly it even looked like it could be haunted.  So after the wife found parking, I walked back to the place and up a hill to reach it.  Wasn’t long before I was stopped by someone asking me why I was taking photos here.
I told em because there were no places like this in the California desert. That seemed to allay any fears I was casing the place. Which in any even looked then and still looks today, uninhabited.

Crawley today looks exactly as it did when I first saw the place about 25 years ago.  But the Fox and Hounds has changed hands even since I have been here (2004), and I can’t say it’s as good as it was on the visit when these pix were shot a few years ago.  Only two choices for salad dressing, and no menus in hard copy. Had to order from written posts on blackboard.  You can see it at the link above. The waitress said their new menus were being printed. Used to be the things posted were items that weren’t all on the menu. Still, there is something I’m going back to try. But if disappointed again we won’t return. Frustrating however not to be able to have Blue Cheese Dressing. And their tarter sauce was not at all to our taste.  It tasted like it had too much vinegar, and the wife’s scallops were she says, like something left too long in the freezer.  It’s the second pub outing for us where the tarter was more like, like, ?  I can’t even think of an example.  I’m sure there are folks who like it, we didn’t.  Next time I have a meal out where tarter is needed, instead I’ll ask for a side of Mayo and a Lemon.  That works okay for me.

Having said all of that, I want to go back and try their Mushroom Stroganoff.  But no salad. Even if it comes with it. Which I doubt. They still bring fresh hot bread to the table, with enough (real) butter to cover only half of what they bring to table.  Wife says what with the big brother attitudes here on health, we we lucky to get any butter to begin with. And maybe that’s why there wasn’t any Blue Cheese.

OK, enough of that. Here are my photos and welcome all to Crawley, Hants.  That’s the abbreviation for Hampshire.

It’s named The Pond House.

And for very inexplicable reasons, I don’t think I ever got more then this one shot in the summer. Or maybe one or two.
I hate the spring and summers for photos cos there’s always too damn many ppl around to spoil the scenery.

Here are a few of the homes to be seen in this village.

This ppl is a Victorian water tower.  I guess they thought a water tank was unsightly and so this was their answer.

LINK, INFO ST. MARY’S CHURCH, CRAWLEY

a Shakespearian kind of house and frankly it even looks like it could be haunted. It’s about a quarter mile before coming to the Pond at the village start. I thought a half mile. Wife says quarter mile. Since I had to walk uphill, I originally thought it felt like a mile.

All houses shown here btw ... are on the main street of the village. There are other houses tucked away in places you can not go.  The lady who helps my wife do things in our little patch that wife can’t do anymore, does some work in the summer evenings helping an owner who she says has a huge house here, not seen from any road and behind walls and gate. She describes it as massive.

I call it Crawley’s White House and in the summer, you can’t even see it when everything is in bloom in the front.

Posted by peiper     on 02/19/2011 at 07:11 AM   
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   Monday - February 14, 2011

Gosh, an ad?

I may actually get a paying advertisement for the blog. Negotiations are underway. Not that it’s going to pay any fortune, but it will cover the cost gap if it comes through. And it’s for a reputable, gun friendly online merchant. I’m kind of excited. I’ve never had an ad here that paid more than a nickel. The ones from a few years ago were all based on click-throughs, and nobody clicked, so they paid something like 3¢ per year. Phooey. I’ve never made a cent from the BMEWS coffee mugs either. Probably because only 1 or 2 have actually ever sold.

I was willing to do graphics, but it seems they just want text. Meh, what do I know about advertising? Oh wait, I have an Associates Degree in it. But they never covered stuff like this. That was so long ago PCs didn’t even have Windows yet.

Anyway, if it goes through you’ll see some text and a link over on the sidebar, below the Gallery button.

UPDATE: Please Visit Our Sponsor for great deals on crossbows!

Posted by Drew458     on 02/14/2011 at 10:57 PM   
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   Friday - January 21, 2011

Looks like meat is back on the menu boys!

My fellow Uruk-hai:

I found a very nice letter from a start-up blog in my inbox today, asking if they could perhaps do a guest post on BMEWS. It’s from a group blog, with the cute name of My Dog Ate My Blog.

My Dog Ate My Blog is the creation of editors, writers, and marketers in the education industry looking for an outlet for their general creativity and immaturity.

Our writers and contributors will be focusing on the categories of politics, technology, and pop culture, with an (almost) educational spin. If those topics don’t sound appealing to you, well, we’re at a loss. You are officially on the wrong blog. Fail. If, on the other hand, you’re excited by the prospect of veiled links to the education industry in the form of blog posts, you’re in for a treat (read: entertaining experience).

So I wrote back and asked if they were serious. This blog??? Teachers, fresh out of college, want to write something for this blog? So I invited them in. But instead of just rubbing them with a fresh pork chop and throwing them blindly into the lion’s den, I spent a while checking out their blog. They lean a bit to the left. A bit. That’s not unexpected. But - and it may just be me, deranged Viking that I am - but I found their writing to be rather gentle. Tepid. Not strong or confrontational. Almost as if they were bored students who were writing posts because they had been assigned them for homework. I replied that none of their posts stomped or stamped around; that they write as if they all wear PETA-approved renewable resource artificial chincihlla lined fuzzy bunny slippers. Whereas we write with boots with spikes on. So, since they had asked for writing tips, I gave them some. Be bold, I said. Write about the things that get you fired up. Use your brains. Write with verve and panache. Stand up for what you believe in. And please don’t post any pics with full frontal nudity. That’s Peiper’s job.

I don’t know if they have an essay prepared for submission. I don’t know if they will even respond, or, if they do take up the challenge, how long it will take them to deliver the goods. I suggested that they write about teaching, and come out in support of any of the many aspects about teaching we generally find abhorrent here. Do a great job and you’ll earn our respect I wrote. Do a poor job and my readers will sharpen their knives and bring extra Tabasco sauce to the barbecue. But I wrote that I would go over it first, and reject it if they delivered crap. Come on, who could resist the temptation of grading the teachers?

I don’t even know if they will write in support of any of those academic topics (unions, tenure, Zero Tolerance, diagnosing your child and forcing meds on her, etc). But I would like to to get a good and spirited discussion going in response to their effort if they make one. Hey, go right ahead and visit their place, and read some of their posts to get a feel for things. They don’t like Sarah Palin, they are in slight favor of the Ground Zero mosque, they seem to think that Kelo v. New London was a good decision. But let’s give them a chance.

I also wrote that I would make their author a member here, so that he or she could take part in any discussion that may arise. That’s the fair thing, right?

Notice that I did not write “But instead of rubbing them with a fresh lamb chop”. No. Blood of the lamb would imply a Passover, a free ride. “Hi! My name is Daniel, and I’ll be your server today! Would you like to sit with the lions, or would you like to sit with the lions?” Not that I’m using violent rhetoric to encourage anyone slightly unstable to acts of keyboard violence. I’m just saying that I asked them to be bold and to give it their best shot. So that’s what I’ll be asking of you as well. See? Nothing more than a spirited discussion, using logic and reason to make your points an to win hearts and minds.

You did click on the link at the top of this post, right? [wink wink]

Posted by Drew458     on 01/21/2011 at 08:18 PM   
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   Tuesday - January 11, 2011

More Updates

This is getting tiring.

I downloaded all the flags ... about 50 ... for the countries that didn’t even have internet in 2005. Now they do, and they have a listing in the tables. So I need to rename, resize and reformat a whole bunch of .png files. Joy.

But while I was running through the list, I ran across the nation of Mayotte. Mayotte? Never heard of the place. It’s a couple islands off the coast of Africa, between Madagasgar and Mozambique. Officially it’s called Collectivité départementale de Mayotte, since it’s one of those overseas territories France doesn’t want to let go of. Two islands, size tiny. And nearly 200,000 people live there. Make sure you don’t confuse the place with Comoros, which is the other, far bigger, island nation right next door, comprised of 4 tiny islands instead of just 1 or 2.

And I found one unique flag. In all the world. Seriously, it’s like there must be a book on “how to do your flag”, and every nation on earth read it except these guys. So here is the only unique flag on earth. Guess which country it belongs to? And should they ever get online, register at BMEWS and then leave a comment, then I’ll have a flag ready for them.  Um, I’m not really sure if they have internet there. They have an IP address, but that doesn’t mean anything. That could just be forward thinking on somebody’s part. OTOH, it looks like this country has a decent per capita income, so maybe they do.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/11/2011 at 01:06 PM   
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updated?

I think I may have finally got the flag thing fixed on the comments. Too many people have written in, saying “Why does it show me in country ______ when I’m in country ____?”

That’s because the internet has grown by leaps and bounds since this version of the blog software was installed. IP addresses once associated with some country have been assigned to other countries. Thousands of new IP addresses have been created, and none of them were in the database tables for this blog.

It would cost me quite a bit of money, lots of time, and several ulcers to update the Expression Engine (EE) software to the current version. So I’m not going to do that. Too bad, as the latest version has the ability to just click a button and you can update all that IP and country information.

No, Drew had to do it the hard way. First I had to figure out what was wrong, then I had to find where everything was located - and the structure of this blog has dozens and dozens of folders on the server side, with thousands of files in them ... and that’s just the stuff that makes the blog run, not the posts, comments, and images. Then I had to get the update scripts and translate the current version of the database tables back into the early version that this blog software uses, then I had to modify all that data into flat SQL commands. This is an impressive amount of data, about 1500 pages worth in MS Word; around 50,000 records. Even editing the data caused Word to roll over and die several times, but I got it done.

Next I had to find the tables in the database out on the server. Um, this is getting scary. I haven’t messed about with databases in more than a decade. Truncating all the existing records while the tables were active? Crivens! But that’s what you have to do. And there is no such thing as an “un-truncate” function: once you dump the existing data it is gone. Forever. Then I had to paste in the new commands to enter each individual record. Hell, it took 3 minutes just for the paste command to go through. That’s a LOT of data. Then run it. And cross my fingers that the blog software is robust enough so that any “not found” returns from any database table queries that came back while the data updates were running didn’t cause the whole damn blog to crash. Yikes!

And it worked. WOO HOO!!!!

So now the “flags of the world” folder is updated with the latest images of all the world’s flags, the country code table has been brought up to speed, and the IP to Country table has 45,000 new entries, 790 pages worth of commands that look like

INSERT INTO exp_ip2nation (ip, country) VALUES(692551680, ‘ng’); (this just happens to be Nigeria, which now has listings for over 20 IPs. But no flag in the EE World_flags file! Niger neither.)

And that means the flag thing is just about fully modernized. “Just about” because the new table layout has more fields, which allows certain oddball parts of the world to come back with a proper hit on the tables. Places like “Palestine” which the raw data wanted to list as “occupied territory”. Oh the hell you say! I spent a gleeful 2 minutes changing “occupied territory” to “terrorists”, then realized that changing this aspect of the new format to work with the old format was too much of a pain. So I dumped that chunk of data. Which means that any comments or posts from these places may come back with an “unknown”, although my reading of the actual computer code ... which is not the best ... implies that the USA will be the default value. Not that we have any Paleoswinian members. I checked. Nipping off that part of the data cut 300 pages off the document and shortened things up by about 5000 records. So if you’re sending in a comment from the remote island of UngaBunga, gee, too bad, you may not get the proper flag displayed.

So lets see what happens. If it still is messed up, well, maybe I’ll fix it and maybe I won’t. This was a fair amount of work, and a bit of a scary thrill, but it’s not something I want to mess with more than once a year or so.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/11/2011 at 10:50 AM   
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   Wednesday - January 05, 2011

Thank You Thank You

Not Blegging, But

I got a check in the mail yesterday, a small donation to help keep BMEWS running. Thank you thank you! This blog costs about 75 cents a day to run, what with the hosting fees, the domain registrations (we are also barkingmoonbat.com, for those folks who forget the dash), widget subscription, etc. Yes, I know that our server company, Hosting Matters, is not the cheapest kid on the block, but they have the best support and the least amount of downtime. This blog runs on an old version of Expression Engine; updating it would cost me something. It’s all pretty much as Allan left it, and that’s pretty good.

I don’t run ads here. I don’t have anything against them, but they don’t seem to pay much of anything ever. Not on a blog of this size (1K-2K hits per day). So I don’t really bother. I’ve never made a cent from any of the BMEWS gear for sale on the right sidebar. Actually, I think I own the only coffee mug they ever made. I think Mr. Christian set that up, but he’s long gone now. Oh well.

Anyway, any little clink in the PayPal cup is greatly appreciated. Or a check in the mail. Or a free pony delivered by FedEx!! No, just kidding. We can’t have ponies at this condo park. Besides, we live upstairs. So please, no ponies. 

Posted by Drew458     on 01/05/2011 at 01:00 PM   
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   Friday - December 31, 2010

to all our friends and bmews surfers, good wishes for a happy new year ..

Well, we made it through another year.  Drew introduced me to what he referred to as the workings under the hood of bmews. I wasn’t looking forward to that but he assured me that nothing would go wrong. Just keep in mind he said, that you’re entering a dark cave full of gun powder with only a match for illumination.
That’s Drew’s idea of reassurance and putting one at ease.  Scared the hell outta me but I couldn’t chicken out and so entered the cave once. And hey ...
I came out without taking down the blog site.  Will wonders never .... How ‘bout that? Can’t imagine what the next test will be like but I’m looking for a blog union.

This year has been rewarding in many ways but most especially I think, cos we’re all still here. Still fussing and bitching and often angry at the turn of political events, but we’re communicating.  And thanks to a number of bmews regulars, managing to get quite a few laughs in spite of the things that cause us to see red.
I’m still convinced that a few of you actually do write TV scripts. And if ya don’t you damn well should.

So then ... there isn’t anything else to say except to thank again all of you who have taken the time to make comments and have been regulars for so long.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU IN THE USA, AND AROUND THE WORLD.

Posted by peiper     on 12/31/2010 at 04:34 PM   
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   Saturday - December 25, 2010

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR REGULARS AND ALL WHO SURF THROUGH OUR DOMAIN

MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL ...

However, a very special and large THANK YOU to our regulars because without you loyal folks, we might not exist at all. 

Today is a day I thought I would take off and take a rest from the year’s madness. The stories that disturb and anger, the politics etc. Soon enough we’ll get back to that.  BUT .... something current came up this morning and don’t you know ... I feel compelled to share it. NOT because it’ll stir up any angst, but rather it might make you laugh out loud.  It had that effect on me. I think you will smile as well.  Not even an entire article. Just a brief line.  Here’s the headline.

GLOBAL WARMING WILL MAKE BRITAIN FREEZE

Scientists now say that Melting sea ice is to blame for freezing conditions.

They don’t say exactly who the “scientists” are, but I just got a big chuckle out of that. And speaking of winter freeze and England .... here are some shots by some people.

SNOW OR BEACH?  hmmmmm.  CHOICES,CHOICES

Posted by peiper     on 12/25/2010 at 05:38 AM   
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   Tuesday - December 21, 2010

Conservative Link Clearing House

A bit like Insty, only without the blended puppies.

Liberty Junkie is doing the job BlogRolling no longer does; they have a list of your favorite two or three hundred Conservative blogs. They also have links to the latest post from those blogs sorted out into 16 categories of what’s current. It’s useful, especially if you don’t want to make a huge RSS subscriber list, or plod through dozens and dozens of blogs to see what’s going on.

Vilmar’s, Theo’s, Stoaty’s, Ace’s, Steamboat’s, Cbullit’s and Lemur King’s are not on the list.  Nor are any of the other Moronosphere blogs. Nope, not Rott. No Right, Wing-Nut either. But both versions of Liberty Pundits (.com, .net) are. So it isn’t a complete list of the places I visit, but it might be useful to some of you.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/21/2010 at 09:30 AM   
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   Friday - November 26, 2010

leave the united nations?  oh if only

H/T SULTAN KNISH Blog site

As usual there’s more at the link.  I’ve gone to the Sultan before. He can be funny at times even when being serious.
You may find this an interesting read.

Getting late, hafta go.  More puter problems.  I think my sound system is failing.  Vol. isn’t very high. ??? Gonna see if I can find the problem.
Cheers All

Want Human Rights? Leave the United Nations
By Daniel Greenfield

Good news everybody. Saudi Arabia now has a seat on the women’s board at the United Nations. That’s right, a regime where it’s illegal for women to drive or leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian, where girls were pushed into a burning building because they were trying to flee without covering their ‘obscene’ female faces… will be a key player in the international effort to empower women.

I don’t know what contribution the Saudis can make to the project, since in Ridyah, empowering women usually means strapping them into an electric chair. But in the Muslim world, human rights is usually read to mean banning criticism of Islam under the guise of Islamophobia. In Europe, Islamists are calling the Burqa a human right. That’s probably what the Saudis will bring to the table, along with the condemnations of Israel that are De rigueur in every UN group and body.

Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called the Saudi win, “a very good outcome”. I’m not sure what she would consider a bad outcome. Given her role in kneecapping Canada for the Security Council seat, Rice would probably have considered a victory by a country that actually gives women full equal rights to be a defeat. When your only goal is to pander to the Third World, particularly the Muslim parts of it, in order to defy the colonialist and phallocratic Western patriarchy, handing over power to a phallocratic Eastern patriarchy is just a means to an end. At least until it actually becomes the end. The end of everything.

The fallacy of the United Nations is its assumption that every member of the UN is morally equal. The truth is that the majority of the world’s nations are dictatorships with limited human rights. The UN is nothing more than the representatives of dictatorships trying to talk about human rights without breaking up into gales of laughter. If you replaced 75 percent of the UN’s representatives with members of American street gangs, you would still end up with a more civilized body.

But we look the other way. And now Saudi Arabia, along with the likes of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Libya are on the board. Their mission will be to promote global standards for gender equality. Which should in theory disqualify countries who don’t believe in gender equality from membership. Of course since this is the UN, UN Women will have little to do with its stated mission.

Chilean leftist Michelle Bachelet, who heads up UN Women, praised Sudan for its commitment to gender equality in her opening statement. Yes, Sudan, a genocidal state which uses mass rapes as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign. And it’s already clear that the focus of UN Women isn’t to promote gender equality, but to intervene in conflict areas. Which means the odds are excellent that UN Woman will be used to crank out an endless stream of condemnations of countries that fight Muslim terrorists, while cloaking those condemnations in the name of the rights of women in the affected areas. And the Saudis are perfectly positioned to guide UN Women down that road.

MORE FROM SULTAN GREENFIELD

Posted by peiper     on 11/26/2010 at 03:25 PM   
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   Thursday - November 25, 2010

thanksgiving … for lots of reasons

Not much to say at the moment ... except to wish BMEWS readers a most satisfying day wherever you are.
Might be light on posts today depending on how soon we get back.

Seems like bad news and bad happenings every day. You might not always think there are things to be thankful for. But there really are. And you don’t have to go too far back in history to catch examples of our good fortune. Not being Pollyanna on the subject, it’s just that as awful as I sometimes think things are, I see evidence of my own good luck. We live in an old house that is below modern standards but ... the roof keeps the rain out and there isn’t any mortgage.  Some folks this Thanksgiving day have no home at all.  Some are hungry while many of us don’t worry about the next meal cos it’s always there.
Many are just plain lucky to have been born in the West, and have yet to appreciate their good luck . Most of all on this day, I’m thankful for the many troops of whatever nation and especially my people and the folks I call Battling Brits, who aren’t so lucky in their present situation but who are keeping as best they can, a West free of islamic domination.  For now at least. 

So ,,, Cheers all.
Later

Posted by peiper     on 11/25/2010 at 02:22 AM   
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   Wednesday - November 24, 2010

another critic of the rop on trial in austria for hate speech ….

This is one of the seriously most interesting articles I have run across lately.  I’m feeling a bit guilty on my timing as it should have been posted much earlier. I won’t go into silly details as to why it wasn’t.  Reason being, I dropped the ball on this one and can’t find a good excuse to palm off. So better to just say, read as much as you’ve patience for.

A word about one of the links I have here. English save free speech .org.  I have had no problems with it personally. I believe it to be a safe site.  However, for some reason the Zone alarm site check I have installed on my tool bar, which came with the recent ZA update, flashes a yellow ribbon at the top of the screen saying it’s a questionable site.  It isn’t to my knowledge. And only ZA is giving that warning. I feel I have to state that in case some may prefer not to visit the site. I have, and experienced no ill affects.

There’ll a bit of reading involved but I think it will hook ya. Have a drink and a snack handy. That’s just for ppl like me who are not very fast readers.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff Versus the State of Denial

Dianawest.net

By Diana West

This week’s syndicated column is about Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff , who goes to trial for “hate speech”—i.e., speaking out against Islamization—on November 23 in Vienna. Her website, including defense fund information, is HERE.

When Barack Obama spoke in Mumbai about “the different meanings” of jihad, he set up us up again for the Big Lie: “I think,” the 44th president said, sounding much like the 43rd president, “all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence toward innocent people that is never justified.”

All—all—of the sacred books and schools of Islam say differently. Every, single one. The fact is—not the fantasy—there is no distortion of Islamic texts required to justify the violence of jihad from Mumbai to Tel Aviv to New York City to Bali to Madrid and beyond.

But we, dhimmi-citizens of an Islamizing world, are not supposed to notice the links between the violence and the faith, the faith and the law, the law and the violence—and certainly not say so out loud. Most people don’t. Increasingly, this state of denial is enforced by actual states of denial - the most recent example being Austria, which, in a trial on Nov. 23, will attempt to use “hate speech” laws to send Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff to prison for as long as three years for statements about Islam very similar to those I’ve just written.

The Viennese mother and housewife originally approached the subject of Islam from her unique background that includes a childhood stint in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 when her diplomat-father was stationed there; and her own work experience with Austrian embassies in both Kuwait at the time of the Iraqi invasion in 1990, and Libya, on 9/11 ("The Jews did it!” Elisabeth’s Libyan landlord shouted at her that same day).

She studied the Islamic texts and commentaries, the apologetics and the critiques. Empowered by her natural right to free speech, she decided to educate others in her native Austria about the Koran, about Islamic law (Shariah), in seminars she offered under the auspices of the pro-Western-civilization think tank Wiener Akademikerbund (Association of Vienna Academics). Contracted by the anti-Islamization Freedom Party (FPO) in 2008, Sabaditsch-Wolff has been educating Austrians about Islam ever since.

“The groups were very small at first, sometimes as few as five or six people” she recently told me. “Later on, the numbers rose to 35.” Last fall, one attendee in particular seemed “overly enthusiastic about the topic,” Elisabeth recalls. She turned out to be a journalist who would brand the seminar a “hate school” in a sensational story for NEWS, a left-wing publication.
“It caused a huge uproar among the establishment,” Elisabeth says, although now that her trial approaches Austrian media are silent.

“Bishops, rabbis, politicians, all of whom had never attended any of my seminars and knew nothing of the content, were asked to weigh in and condemn me. The bishop said, `One must never speak about any religion the way Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff did about Islam.’ This was especially painful for me.”

Elisabeth’s husband, a military surgeon, is very supportive of her. “My mother had to come to terms with her daughter being maligned in the media,” she says.

“My sister has cocooned herself and believes the NEWS story rather than confronting reality. My father, who has attended all of my seminars, knows the truth and supports me 100 percent.”

Of course, when she enters that Vienna courtroom, she will face the state alone. “The thought that the state—a state that I love very much and that I represented proudly all my life—is prosecuting me for thoughts is a painful one. It is hard to understand that I should have to stand trial for thoughts that are not only based on experience but are the product of careful study of the texts that make up Islam.”
But Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is also standing trial for her courage ...............

DIANA WEST SOURCE

H/T credit also to Europe News

THE TUNDRA TABLOIDS LIVE BLOGS ELISABETH SABADITSCH-WOLFF’S TRIAL IN VIENNA……

Posted on 11/23/2010 by KGS

This is coming straight from the courtroom in Vienna, Austria, where the Tundra Tabloids is being handed a live feed from Henrik Raeder Clausen of EuropeNews. You’ll be the first to know about the events taking place inside the Austrian courtroom, where the first hearing of the case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who’s accused of violating Europe’s onerous hate speech statutes, will be heard.

Posted by peiper     on 11/24/2010 at 08:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • FREEDOM • Jack Booted Thugs • Judges-Courts-Lawyers • RoPMA •  
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