Even when I was in Edinburgh, emergency vehicles dashing down a road one after another was a dramatic sight: it was extra sickening here. This afternoon the 1038 hrs Inverness/Wick train collided with a car at the Bridge Street level-crossing outside Halkirk. Three passengers in the car, reportedly all the occupants, have have been killed. None of the train passengers were injured, but had this been the south-bound train it would have been accelerating at this point.
This is an unmanned crossing and does not have a barrier. Today was sunny, and low-sun has caused problems with dazzle at this site before. In 2002, a pregnant local woman was severely injured in a similar accident (her baby survived), but to my knowledge no plans were instigated to install tighter safety features.
I hope there will be now.
UPDATE – local councillor David Flear describes the scene.
Over at Harry’s Place, a discussion about an American film director being defended by the Eurotrash and faux bellwelters of the litterati Left against extradiction for the drugging and sodomizing of a 13 year old girl has descended into one about Jews and Islam.
This is not the purpose of this missive (because, considering the same once happened in a discussion about Alan Coren, it is not surprising). What caught my eye was the appearance of Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons, JJB Sports), legal eagle for the BNP:
Lee John Barnes
29 September 2009, 12:05 pm
The core meaning of Christianity is contained in the Gnostic gospels, not the Bible – the Bible was not written by Christ and the Churches not set up by Christ, both Bible and Churches were products of Constantine and the church of the Holy Roman Empire he set up.
Those who read and use the Bible actually are Constantinians, not Christians, though much of the Bible does relate to Jesus in order to truly understand Jesus you need to read the Gnostic Gospels as well as the Bible. You will then see that much of what the Christian Churches stand for and have done are the anti-thesis of what Christ taught and stood for.
Lee John Barnes
29 September 2009, 12:13 pm
Christ was not an adherent of Judaism, as the Gnostic Gospels will reveal and the Bible reveal, he came to overthrow Judaism and impose his new teachings.
As John M Allegro then says in the annotations, whatever Jesus was, Barnsey is on the mushrooms.
After putting his foot in it by drawing attention to Nick Griffin’s sad, metrosexual twattery, Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons) may have done it again.
Richard Barnbrook – a Dostoyevskian Shatov for our times, self-confessed admirer of Tilda Swinton as well as Barking councillor and the sole BNP representative on the London Assembly – has been suspended from his borough council for one month following non-truthful claims made on a YouTube upload that three murders had taken place in the borough over a three week period. In addition to attributing this non-truthful claim to misreading due to his dyslexia and the distraction of Southwark Cathedral bells (or a pissed bishop, who knows?), he has insisted that he had previously sought advice from the BNP legal department.
Who heads this shortsighted legal department? Barnsey, of course.
Barnsey can be read at Harry’s Place responding to anything but this. One reader opines that he is a state agent acting to discredit the BNP; another suggests Mossad; Barnsey responds that as long as he is kosher, it will be alright.
If he has yet to receive his bris milah, I can think of a few people who would be willing to oblige. As long as the bigger piece is thrown away.
Despite there being 12 BNP councillors in the Barking and Dagenham group, Barnsey is the one entrusted to speak to the press.
This is Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons), the legal eagle for the BNP. He is 43.
In response to the suggestion that Nick Griffin or Andrew Glans, BNP MEPs, should appear on Question Time, Barnsey said:
Question Time should be a doddle, tearing to shreds the arguments of the Zionist pit bull melanie phillips on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze was – and she is a damn sight more intelligent than the political idiots invited onto Question Time.
Ah, this would be the same Melanie Philips whom Barnsey suggested was disloyal to Britain because of her views on Israel. Just as Barnsey blames the Shoah on “Jewish Bolsheviks”:
The Holocaust was the price ordinary Jews of Europe paid for the actions of the Bolshevik Jews in Russia after the Russian Revolution.
The fear of the Bolshevik threat, and the fact that so many Jews were Bolsheviks, allowed Hitler to link Jews with Bolshevism.
Therefore the Holocaust lays at the feet of those Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany whose actions allowed ordinary people, and ordinary Germans, to link Bolshevism with Jews.
Quite a circuitous route to distance national socialism from any inherent antisemitism. As an Ulrike Meinhof, founder of the gaggle of Strasserite-thugs known as the Red Army Faction, was able to reduce millions of men and women and children to ciphers and not flesh-and-blood humans in similar terms:
Auschwitz,” she said, “means that six million Jews were murdered and carted on to the rubbish dumps of Europe for being that which was maintained of them — Money-Jews.”
But, then again, this is the same Barnsey who believes that as eight members of his family died fighting Axis Powers decades before he was born, he is firewalled from criticism and free to dabble with national socialism and Odinism (hint, Barnsey, Odin is a Norse deity: he ain’t indigenously British).
The thought occurs, if one can find an individual who lost nine members of their family in combat in the Second World War, or even 90% in non-combat situations – old men, women and children included – could they tell Barnsey to put a sock in it?
Not that he would listen, as he also believes that as the BNP never has been in political power – debatable, Barnsey – it cannot be accused of racism.
The Radio4 broadcast, in all its barking mad lunacy, is here:
Y-Net reports on a promising Halakial interpretation by Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, of the Petah Tikva Hesder Yeshiva:
Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, head of the Petah Tikva Hesder Yeshiva, has declared it permissible for a blind man to “feel” his date if he intends to marry her.
“This is the way a blind man gets to know his partner,” the rabbi said in response to a halachic question he was asked. “It may even be correct to say that he is required to touch her.”
[…]
Sherlo also explains that despite their disability, the blind still desire to know what their wives look like. “A blind man cares about many things, even if he cannot see them,” he explains.
This indeed is good news for randy Orthodox Jews wishing to remain shomer negiah. Wear blindfolds.
David Starkey, the thinking-man’s crumpet, has risked enraging the revolting Scots yet again by calling their country a in-growing toe-nail of a nation. Following the release of Abdul Basset Baby, he said:
He said: “I would say that Scotland’s decisions with the Libyan bomber confirms everything I said about them.
“If you want to see what happens when a country becomes ‘little’, when you have a government that wouldn’t make county councillors in England and a minister of justice that is an underemployed solicitor – that’s what you get.
“Scotland’s greatness took place not in medieval history, when it was a catastrophe of a place, but in its long, long association with England and Britain.
“It has become exactly like medieval Scotland – the clannishness, the introversion.”
He is correct, is he not?
Culture minister Mike Russell described Starkey’s comments as “unfortunate and silly”.
This coming from a man who would fight for the haggis on the beaches. What does he know, anyway? He was not even born here.
He added: “We would be delighted to welcome Dr Starkey to Scotland, so that he can discover the truth about our country”.
What, after the Great Fish-heid has wiped the floor with Jim Murphy?
Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, is to be fined £5,000 for irresponsibly employing illegal immigrant, Loloahi Tapui as a housekeeper; and not filing adequate documentation. In 2008, she had been instrumental in pushing through Parliament the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act which legislated for this.
Rules apply only to the little people, eh?
Any political party led by characters such as these does not deserve to govern. Nor do the British people deserve to be governed by the Tories.
I must say I like the way this scene from an Egyptian beach combines Islamic sexual morality which a complete and utter lack of modesty. A psychologist would have a field day, especially if the be-niqab’d woman’s husband was accompanying her in shorts and a tight-fitting t-shirt: no doubt gazing longingly at her coquettishly revealed wrists.
A recent article in the Global Post states some 90% of Egyptian women wear some form of headcovering. I find this incredible to believe, as this represents the Muslim proportion. If I were shown convincing data, detailing precisely which pieces of apparel are worn and in what settings and for what periods, I would happily stand corrected.
The article focuses on Sarah el-Sirgany (shown left), from an affluent family and graduating from the American University of Cairo, who was refused entry to a Cairo restaurant as she was wearing a headscarf:
She walked the gangplank of one of the Nile’s posh boats and asked the manager of the restaurant inside to lead her to her friends’ table.
“The bouncer at the door told me I can’t get in,” she said. “Honestly, it was too late into the night to get into an argument. But it was infuriating. I just told my friends to come out to meet me.”
In all honesty, I have as much sympathy for el-Sirgany as I did for two female Police sergeants and one Police Community Support Officer from Sheffield who donned Islamic dress to “understand how Muslim feel”; that is, not much.
She patently was not refused entry due to an integral quality, such as her gender or ethnicity. She was not even refused entry due to her being a Muslim. She was refused entry due to her choice of apparel. And it is for the proprietors of private establishments to deem which dress-code is adhered to.
As far as I can tell, el-Sirgany is, like the Police sergeants and PSCO mentioned above, already enjoys a position of authority and relative wealth. Conscious choices to don such apparel, and remove it when they please (as implicitly suggested of el-Sirgany in the article) are freely open to them; not necessarily to the women at the lower-rungs of society, which they apparently empathize with.
This would definitely include voiceless Egyptian women in the densely packed inner-cities or rural hinterland, who cannot flit between what appeals to them about different social settings, as well as Muslim and Coptic or non-Muslim Egyptian women who do not wish to be pressured by a growing socially conservative majority.
If you suspect that even with a three-tier referendum potentially allowing your preferred result through without a plurality on the first choice still would not return this result, what to do?
Suggest lowering the minimum age so that you get an additional cohort of 125,000 voters who may not have even been born when a certain xenophobic film was released, but are statistically-inclined to your preferred view.
You can also title your press release to suggest the die has been cast, without the tricky bit about state-approval. And if anyone objects, you could then turn on the passive aggression by claiming they are refusing to allow the little cherubs a say in the most significant political event in Scotland when a poncey, flatulent Italian landed with his eye on the British crown.
BBC News is reporting that the same Scottish Executive which Diageo called “financially illiterate” is offering to reimbursed failed tender bids for the new Forth Road Bridge by up to £5 millions, and £10 millions for successful bidders if the scheme were to be cancelled.
The sound we have just heard is of Adam Smith turning in his grace.
Next time, I will explain to readers how one can receive change of a shilling from a sixpence.
A Rabbit's Eye View of the Hyperborean North 