Good-Bye Grace Bryant Scott

This past week has been a sad one for me. My grandmother Grace died Monday in her sleep after a long illness. She was born 92 years ago during a far differant time than now and she always remained a grand ladyof the Old South but not the one that resisted integration.
She was born into a differant class in Farrington, NC just outside of Durham NC and she never ever lost her sense of class and manners, trying like hell to keep her only grandson from losing the manners that his French mother and grandparents had put so much effort teaching this old alley cat, who can act perfectly well-mannered when I want. (My mother is reading this and going "All too true!")
This makes the end of a grand generation of grandparents for me. My beloved grandfather Leon Chopinet died 7 years ago, followed quickly by my grandmother Julia Louise. They also were fine people of quality, although not exactly born to the same class Grace was I firmly believe that had they met they would have become friends and even allies in the raising of a difficult child. (my mother would insert "Stubborn as a mule" with that)
I have yet to mourn at all for the three grandparents that loved me and tried as hard as they could to impart to this wayward alley cat some breeding, manners, and self-respect. The damnable restraint hammered into me by years of martial arts and emotional control that drives those around me who love me crazy (Mom, go ahead and say "Will you go on and cry already?") prevents me from doing so but that discpline and restraint are now so much a part of me that some of my friends literally grab me and shake me.
Those of you who have lost such wonderful grandparents, those stand-in parents who do so much to help their own children be good parents, can understand my feelings and how damned hard it is for me to express them. I miss Grace already and still miss Leon and Julia. But I draw immense relief imaging them in the afterlife, if there is such a thing, sipping on their favourite drinks, chatting and still keeping an eye on their wayward cubs, one especially.

Damn, how I miss them!

Enough Already

Hello all. It has become apparent to me that the press has lost any and all serious objectivity about the President and his staff. I mean, they have spent what, a whole week on the accidental shooting of a lawyer, something that in and of itself would not even merit a notation on the back of the obituaries. My reaction?



I mean who cares other than a media system obscessed with getting President Bush anyway they can. Goign so far as to hound the poor fellow doing the daily Whitehouse briefing like this was a major crime instead of the ridiculous accident that sometimes happen when you mix firearms and people. Get off it already, sheesh!

And the ongoing "outrage" over the cartoons that were published months ago in an Egyptian paper is nothing more than a bunch of religious shysters getting together to bully a West that they know will kowtow in the name of "tolerance" and give up our cherished rights to freedom of speech and freedom to laugh at whatever we want. I personally have not found the cartoons offensive in anyway because they do depict the sad truth of what Islam has become and it is not the fault of the West but their own. Islam is at it's roots fundamentally anti-democratic. Wikipedia recently published the cartoons and as you can see for yourself below there is nothing offensive to me anyway.

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_drawings.jpg

Not to be outdone, a group of Jewish graphic designers have decided to hold their own Holaucaust cartoon competition because, to quote them, "we cannot have the Muslims making better cartoons mocking us on our own soil" and I must agree with their dark humour. They are rightly participating instead of running around burning and killing.

See this site for more: http://www.boomka.org/

But we must remember that these loonies masquerading as holy men are after something far more precious than our rights, they are after a global Islamic Sharia'a empire where no thought is safe, no impulse allowed, and no person allowed their own right of choice. The forces in our country who are coddling these people had better come to their senses because they may wake up one day to an Islamic republic. We have watched Christianity reform itself because by it's very nature it is a religion that manages, with a few execptions, to live in relative peace with a secular government amd at it's heart desires peace. But Christianity nows that peace without the strength to protect it is worthless hence it's understandable reluctance to take up arms.

We must not lose the lessons of the battles of Poitiers and the Reconquista, where Christiandom had to defend itself from the mullahs and ultimately keep Europe free from Islam's creativity stifling grip. We must rise up, both seculars and believers, to defend that which has taken us so damned long to achieve and what the mullahs on one hand and the Christian fundamentalists want to destroy, that is the idea of a secular republic where even the very groups that want to destroy our way of life are free enough to say what they want and be held accountable to secular authority when their words cause lifes or property or both to be lost. Because in the final analysis there has to be a time where secular and religious alike must learn to live with one another.

As far as I am concerned, these cartoons are protected by freedom of expression. If you want to argue about it in a civilised way then let's sit down and do so...But if you want to attack schools, embassies, government building, commit all manner of violence against the very secular state that gives you those rights and it's citizens, then donot be at all surprised when we finally lose patience and give you the spanking that you should have gotten a long time ago. As much as you have the right to express yourselves, we have a right to kick your sorry butts out and send you to the grey bar hotel for the rest of your sorry life or even go ahead and send you to your anticipated after life, courtesy of a fair trial of course. The fringe elements of the Christians have learned this and so have many other fringe religious groups.

We Americans insist that EVERYBODY behaves and respects their neighbours and that is why we are doing what we are doign around the world to make it a safer place where kids in Afghanistan and Iraq can walk around playing without worrying that some dumbass with a gun or an IED blows them to hell because his version of whatever flavour of the month tell him to do it. Enough already.

Learn the lesson or get ready for the butt kicking that you deserve for being a bully in the first place. The Danes are not as tolerant as they appear.