http://maps.google.com.au/maps?oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=&ie=UTF8&ll=-27.479549,153.030281&spn=0.007453,0.014248&t=h&z=17&om=1
The 'Carols in the City' concert is tonight, and this was a thing that I helped to 'bump in' last week.
The 'bump out' is tonight, and I'll be back at 10.30pm to rip it all apart and get it back to the 'Iceworks' workshop. The event used to be called 'The Golden Casket Lord Mayor's Christmas Carols', but because of a price wrangle, the funding was pulled, and now its been 'taken over by the Christians'...I was told. Now it's 'presented by the City Tabernacle Baptist Church proudly [sic] supported by Brisbane City Council and the Queensland Government' (The use of this word 'proudly' is widespread here... as in 'proud to be a Cabbie' as many of the taxi's display).
http://www.carolsinthecity.com.au/
Personally, I'd rather do almost anything [legal] than attend one of these events. I JUST don't get it.
On the way home, I picked up a Saturday paper, and read about Bush's assessment of Tehran's nuclear capability being deemed 'incredible' in the light of the National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran stopped its nuclear program is 2003. Bush's power is concomitantly reduced. Thank GOD for that!
I read about the suicide in Nov 2004 of the effervescent Iris Chang, who had written about the massacre (Holocaust?) in Nanking in early Dec 1937, [70 years ago this December] in which reputedly 200,000 to 300,000 civilians including women and children were brutally beaten/raped/mutilated/slaughtered...
For example, Chang claims that some 50,000 Japanese troops smashed through the walls of Nanking on 13th Dec 37, and proceeded to round up soldiers and civilians. They then slaughtered 2000 of them, by lining them up, cutting off the heads of the first row, and getting the second row to dump them into the river, before they were themselves dispatched in the same way. Some estimates suggest that 80,000 women were raped. Some were gang raped, then mutilated, disemboweled, nailed to trees etc. There's worse! Read the link below if you have a stomach for it.
Chang's book was not an attack on a nation, 'but on a particular militaristic CULTURE'. Her theme was the 'power of cultural forces to [...] strip away the thin veneer of social restraint that makes humans humane, or to reinforce it' Thank GOD for THAT!
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/1197web/nanking.html
Chang didn't want to fill her book with stories of one atrocity after another, but tried to look behind the etiology of the mindset that could spawn such heinous behaviour. She cited the fact that the Japanese thought that they were on a 'holy mission - that it was Japan's destiny to control all of Asia'. Er... does that sound like some other country we know that sees itself as superior to the rest of us? Yeeha... You bet yer sweet cotton pickin ass we are!
Remember Mi Lai?
Did you know that its against the law in Germany NOT to teach about the Holocaust? In Japan Naking is largely overlooked. In the US, Mi Lai is largely overlooked. In Czechoslovakia? And what of our own examples of this sort of mob behaviour? Can you think of any?
Try typing Mi Lai into Microsoft Word. It doesn't recognise it and shows a typing error. Now try typing 'Treblink'. It will try to correct it to Treblinka. Funny that innit?
I found this site called 'Catholic online': http://www.catholic.org/index.php
....which carries the strap line 'fact driven, faith informed'. One of the links in a subset of links under the banner 'Saints fun facts' says;
'Saint Gertrude the Great was told by our Lord that each time the following prayer was said, one thousand souls would be released from purgatory! "Eternal father, i offer you the most precious blood of your divine son, Jesus, in union with the masses said throughout the world today, for all the holy souls in purgatory, for sinners everywhere, of sinners in the universal church, those in my own home and within my family! AMEN!" If you were to say this prayer just 50 times, 50,000 of a FULL BASEBALL STADIUM of souls would be in heaven praying for you NOW and FOREVER MORE!"
This is a FACT apparently! Hard to believe eh? ... go here: (Or its in the links at the side too) http://www.catholic.org/saints/fun_facts_arch.php?image=/saints/ff_images/3.jpg&si=424&s=St.%20Gertrude%20the%20Great
So where were we? Oh yeah. 'Happy Christmas one and all' and I attach a picture of the 3 wise men visiting the baby Jesus in the manger in Jerusalem.... only there's a wall there now! Thank GOD for that?
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