When shit happens, so the prophet, peace and blessing be upon his name, says, it is the shit of Allah, His will be done.
If that is the case then the old boy must be deeply offended with the House of Saud, for, twice in a month, He has defecated upon the place most revered by His adherent believers; if, in swift sucession, two similar disasters befell St Peter's Square, the faithful would be calling for the excommunication and branding of Pope Nazi Emeritus and probably of Pope Frankie, too; somebody'd have to pay for all this shit raining down from Heaven, cranes and stampedes crushing the faithful to death.
Contrarily though, the CEOs of Islam, the Sauds and the Iranians, are all talking not pious acceptance but Snotty LessonSpeak, just as though they were Christian or Jewish Godlessheathebastards. Gotta learn some lessons, make enquiries, improve our procedures, find sol-you-shuns. Now, either these jokers are fucking muslims or they're not. If bad shit happening is the will of Allah, like they say it is, then surely it is monstrous blasphemy to try to short-circuit His will by improving health and safety regulations around His holy place.
I have always been drawn to the fatalism, the acceptance by muslims of the fact of death, just really an adaptation of how the original Abrahamic Lord giveth and taketh away and of His prophet, Jesus, saying that to believe in Him is to be granted eternal life; the suicide vester, like the Kamikaze pilot, somehow, shaming we who worship our own existence far more devoutly than we worship our own version of God. I am genuinely disappointed, therefore, to hear prominent muslims bewailing this loss when, surely, for the good muslim, death in pilgrimage to Mecca must be a consumnation devoutly to be wished; how better to please God, who knows all and sees all, than to perish in His pursuit.
I mean, is nothing sacred anymore?
66 comments:
Which is precisely what they don't do. Mecca is a cross between Spaghetti Junction and Disneyland. Fly 'em in and scoot 'em through quick. Of course, you may throw your stones at the Devil - but from here on one of these five storey car parks. It is a laughable silliness. Do they sell postcards and T-shirts at the airport? There was a grocer from Brum wailing on the TV earlier. He should be at home flogging veg up Balsall Heath market, I thought.
Ah well. The perils of organised relgion have been rehearsed here enough.
I trust, Mr Ishmael, that your pressure cooker hat trials are not proving too tedious.
No, there is no discomfort, thanks; it is just the hard travelling, up and down, aircraft on Monday morning, thirty five minutes; ferry on Thursday night, seven fucking hours, can't fly, you see, for twenty four hours, after pressurisation and depressurisation, it is all, I am told, a matter of the inner ear.
Always seemed weird to me, the Haj, like Lourdes is for you Micks, only writ large. Sacred sites, my landscape here is littered with them, one way and another; twice, though, in a few weeks, looks like Someone's got it in for old Mohamet.
I get so claustrophobic in crowds that i'd have bailed out before getting on the blinkin' plane let alone wandering round some hole in the ground. Isn't it all to do with lunar timetabling too so you'd be pretty good to go at any any time, unless the devil goes to Cleethorpes for the rest of the year. It almost sounds like it's a tourist blurb - have to do the Haj once in your life - cool beans, but does it matter id you do it at a specific Eid - sounds a bit like cobblers. That El Camino de Santiago thang is all about the doing it rather then when (meant to be shit, too) and everything Bunyen wrote seemed to be more about devotion being the action and the spirit of the action rather than the timing and also making sure you're really nice to people on the way.
The Hindus have a Ganges thing which always appears far too pigging hectic to engender any kind of spirituality. I remember doing the last Glastonbury before they sorted the fences out where there was approx 300,000 people and even with shed loads of Class A's and booze it pissed me right off.
It's a bloody tragedy, to be sure, but it seems like they've almost volunteered for it.
Funny old world. Millions headed this way, millions the other. Expensive, surely, all this travelling?
There does seem to be some financial imbalance here, mr oldrightie, in the religion of Peace but Holy War, all these beardyboy refugees, their gym fees, back home, and their personal grooming costs and the fives and tens of thousand of dollars which they have paid to Wicked Boatmen, this is surely designer-refugeeism, and so, one assumes, with the Haj, where does the money come from? I daresay some of it will come from the Department of Work, Pensions and Enforced Suicide. I was watching on the parliament channel, a presidential hopeful for the Redneck Party, of Indian extraction, this guy, he made an interesting and valid case against those who wanted to migrate to America yet remain entirely part of another culture. We only want people coming here, he said, who wanna be Mercans, if they don't wanna be Mercans they should stay where they are and be what they wanna be there. We don't need hyphenated Mercans, we want proper Mercans; his was as succint a damning of bogus multi-culturalism as I've heard. Bobby Jindal, his name was, a typical big hair, big teeth, big money US crooked politician ; but what he was saying was just practical, common sense, it wasn't racism, disguised or otherwise, he wasn't deriding race or religion, just sayinmg that people had to get on with each other; we should say something similar, no more hyphenated Brits, thank you. That'd be proper multi-culturalism. Christ, if we all hyphenated ourselves, none of the forms'd be big enough. Just going back a little way, I would be Scandinavian-Norman-Anglo-Celtic-British but, like most people, I am just British, I don't demand to be able to worship Odin in the High Street, and have it all funded and translated and celebrated for it's rich cultural diversity. I don't see why Ahmed and Fatima should be British-Asian, why Delroy and Letitia should be Afro-Caribbean British, all this stuff is just importing subsidised and state-funded Otherness, where none should be.
If these events in Mecca persuade even a few believers to stay in France or Britain or wherever they are and make it their home rather than a place of the Infidel, that will be no bad thing. If only we could persuade the Jews to feel some disinclination about Jerusalem, that wouild be job done, jobs a good'n.
I am sorry that the ferry is so tiresome. Have you thought of livening it up a bit? A pocket full of gravel from the terminal car park and you you could chuck a few bits now and then at the devilish seagulls. A few biblical incantations, some Peter O'Toole desert kit, and the jobs a good 'un. "It's my McHaj, Officer, innit. Now fuck off because I've got me Human Rights lawyer on speed-dial."
The ferry, like many enterprises, is run by and for SERCO and passengers are not the customers but the freight. Before boarding one is confronted by signs saying Our Staff Will Not Tolerate Any Rudeness which translates as Don't Complain Or You Will Be Wrestled To The Floor, Painfully Handcuffed And Sat Upon For The Remainder Of The Voyage. Thank You For Travelling With SERCO And We Wish You A Pleasaant Trip. Vomiting drunkenness - a Shetland Islanders' tradition - is happily tolerated because SERCO sells the beardy darlings the booze but any other eccentric or non-conformist behaviour would see one clapped in irons and thrown in the brig. I always have a cabin, if you can call a sparsely-furnished broom cupboard a cabin, so at least I can avoid the Up HellyA brigade, every other one of whom has a fiddle strapped to his back, ready to play some skriking dirge aboot a big, bonny ship, sailin' awa on a big sea. Fuck me but it is awful, Shetland music. I think it must be the case that North of Inverness everybody is born tone-deaf.
Pilgrimages of any sort are hazardous, mr dick, football matches, Alton Towers, pop festivals. As a kid I went to help Bob Dylan sink the Isle of Wight, the UK's answer to Uncle Sam's fabled Holy Woodstock and I then felt safe among a couple of hundred thousand strangers, most of them stoned out of their minds, the only belligerence I saw the whole time coming from cops and journalists. That, however, was a long time ago and I wouldn't now dream of joining a crowd of any sort, which is maybe why I am here; maybe I go to Symphony Hall or the RHA but they're quite small, really, andI wouldn't dream of going on the Underground, I'd rather walk; I have said previously, I dwell in an infinity of paranoid possibilities, as should everyone.
You shouldn't, I am sure, mention Bunyan, these days, indeed, I have a lovely Victorian poster of him preaching at some market square which I think I should maybe hand-in, next time there is an Amnesty for WASP-religion memorabilia; perhaps buy myself a picture of the Dali Lama, instead, or of Him Imperial Majesty, Haille Selasie-I, Lion of Judah an' King of Kings, mon, 'im true propeht of Jah, I an' I is tellin' ya. I an'I may be a pimp an' a bone-idle dealer in d'sacred 'erb, mon, but I an'I, Mon, is RI-CHUS,, an' livin me life 'cordin' t'Jah's holy law, well, mebbe not de pimpin', but man 'ave to eat, innit, an' otherwise is get 'im some slave job, man, inna Babylon. Can do you really good ten-pound deal, mon, is some good shit, mon, mek ya RI-CHUS, like meself is, mon, no womwan, no cry, innit?
Come to think of it, I actually have both of them, somewhere, Haillie and the the Dalui Lama, but no Swamis or gurus or imams, not unless you count George Dopey, on the cover of Abbey Road, silly daft bastard, his sitar playing wasn't worth a hatful of cold shit, his guitar playing was none too hot, either, no wonder his mrs swapped him and his fucking Hare Krishna nonsense for Eric Clapton.
I am sure it is all just showbusiness, the sacred, holy place thing, no more or less meaningful than Kissing the Blarney Stone. I blame that Nonce Protector General bastard, John Paul, was it, the onm who slobbered all over the tarmac of every country he landed in, him, that one, the head of the Church of Jesus Christ, Child Molester.
And as for jumping about in the Great Mother Tolilet Ganges, well, they must, with all due respect (ie none) to C4 News's Krishnan Guru Murthy, need their fucking heads looking at.
Is it not strange we mock all fear except (plausible) fear of death? It is the one courage we insist on being conditional, permitted only when another's death is at stake or ours is inevitable. No moral argument satisfactorily explains that, and neither does biology (conventionally conceived).
I think it is on the retreat, that mockery, mr tag, as more people see machismo as just another word for stupidity.
The pro-Death movement, people such as Falconer and Pratchett, have also, in some minds, moved Death's goalposts a bit, demanding For me, though, Death is as frightening as it ever was; how could it be other?
G
:...demanding a home-grown Digitals.
Poor form on my part I'm sure but I always laugh when some gentle soul of the Meccan persuasion assures his audience that Islam respects Jesus as a prophet. Prophet of what, effendi? Some terrible error must have occurred in the Greek-or-Aramaic-to-Latin-to-English translations. Not so much of your blessed are the meek, perhaps, as the bearded misogynist cunts? I'm no linguist so I don't know.
Meanwhile, if DC did facefuck that pig, is he thereby haram, or just his cock?
"Digitals" - Dignitas? Digitalis? Fucking predictive text, eh? (Jesus-prophet-of-Allah passim.)
verge.//
I doubt if King Salman Ibn Cunt al Saud and his fellow headchopping parasites will see it as a judgement on them to stop supporting terrorist shit, stop waging proxy war against their Iranian brothers in Syria and take in a few million of their displaced brethren from Syria. Terrified of their own nutterbastard clergy they might see it as Allah giving them a kick up the arse to do that terrorist shit a bit harder.
Not that Britain will tell the medieval bastards otherwise. Remember earlier this year when the previous king snuffed it, Ham Face and Cock and Charles flew over there and flags were lowered to half mast in Whitehall. Bunch of fucking Quislings.
This is a new device, mr verge and I cannot yet turn the PT off. There is no doubt about HamFace's undergrad deviance, end, as they say, of story. I expect, although you are more expert in these things than I, that at bedtimes poor Mrs Cameron is compelled to dress herself from head to foot in suede and utter ecstatic oinks, the whole grisly charade applauded by a quartet of masturbating Old Etonians standing in the Number Ten bedroom.
I am never sure about Abrahamism, certainly its clergy, monarchs and politicians have proven rank, scabrous and corrupt; its builders and artists, though, have made our world, but does Bach's St Matthew's Passion expiate centuries of child abuse?
Speaking of beastliness, this was new to me the other day: the American term "stump-broke", referring to a trained cow or donkey or horse, was used by pioneers to describe an animal that would obediently back up to its rapist, who'd be standing on a tree-stump of appropriate height, ready to go. (I say rapist because I don't see how someone who fucks a dumb animal can ever prove consent.)
(How the Chinese must laugh at talk of "Number Ten", by the way. Shorthand for a pile of shit, isn't it?)
v.//
Stump-broke. Took me a minute. An animal trained to accept being assaulted by a human standing on a platform behind it. Jesus fucking wept.
There does seem to be a groundswell of revulsion at the BukkakeBoy's groveling to the Chink, may be time for a spell in rehab.
I wonder, mr yardarm, if the pro-monarchy majority figures are just pulled out of thin air, by MediaMinster and I will be bitterly disappointed if our Savior, Jeremy, does more than shake Brenda's greedy hand, his bowing the knee will be as bad as Cameron porking the pork, worse.
I sometimes wonder if their is a Reconditioning Dept. "up there" whose sole purpose is to recondition, to virgin status, those women who have been stoned to death.
Didn't they say that if we'd put some Bach music in that space capsule thing that's hoping to bump into aliens and show them about humanity, they'd just think we were showing off? And so they would.
A powerful question, that, m. alphonse, about the nature of Salvation but also an irredeemable damnation, I feel, of complicit Islam.
I often wonder if there is a Music of the Spheres, it's scales, intervals and tempi uniform throughout Creation, yet although European, Middle Eastern, African, South Asian and South American musics all, so to speak, work on me, I will be buggered before I will listen to Oriental music, it is simply unpardonably disagreeable to my ear; I would rather listen to whale or birdsong, as would, I guess, any number of Oriental artists anxious to perform Mozart or Shakespeare.
Universal or not, mr bungalow bill, the idea that music can transform an unflinchingly hostile cosmos, seems to me - like the insistence upon the existence of comprehensible alien life forms - an absurdly infantile presumption on the part of people who really ought to know better.
Having said that, JS Bach's chilly mathematical precision often strikes me as having originated Somewhere more Else, Somewhere more Over the Cosmic Rainbow.
Art transforms fuck all, Mr I. Only some of us from time to time, when we least expect it, and even then it doesn't last. Just the way I like it.
This offers a new slant on the situation regarding the "reconditioning" of women!!!
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/isis-islamic-state-fighter-beheads-104558925.html#VSUK0E1
"Having said that, JS Bach's chilly mathematical precision often strikes me as having originated Somewhere more Else, Somewhere more Over the Cosmic Rainbow."
I think that you might like this: an arrangement of "Somewhere over the rainbow" combined with "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" for the left hand alone, played by Frederic Meinders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQAKCkXyPoM
Johnny.
"If bad shit happening is the will of Allah, like they say it is, then surely it is monstrous blasphemy to try to short-circuit His will by improving health and safety regulations around His holy place". You have it exactly fucking right Mr I. The trouble is that the laws of physics seem to have been transcended, or maybe only suspended, by lifestyle 'choices'. Sexuality, religion - to chop heads or not - simply consumer decisions...
By the by, this one is a good read about an SNP member, Michelle Thomson, and mortgage fraud. The blogger explains how it works. Her solicitor has been struck off, but solicitors work at the behest of clients.
http://ianssmart.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/mortgage-fraud.html
In one of the deals, a pensioner with cancer who was desperate to return to England to be with her family sold her home in Stirling to former journalist and business partner of Ms Thomson, Frank Gilbride, for £64,000 in 2010. Source: Herald Scotland 28 September 2015
Ms Thomson bought the property for £95,000 the same day, and received a "cashback" of £28,181.80 from Mr Gilbride.
Apparently she was also hacked on the Ashley Maddison data release. She says it was a defunct email address, harvested and added maliciously to the list.
Mrs Raft has beat me to it I see...
That's one of the bastards headed to jail at least. Although we must prepare ourselves for "didn't understand" and "just took advice" and "am only a wee thing" defences. We may even get a sight of "am just trying to make low-cost housing available to poor people" - that's if she thinks she'll get away with it all.
'ello, 'ello...she has resigned the party whip.
Stand by for a Margaret Moran defence:
A jury concluded unanimously last month that Moran, 57, the former MP for Luton South, was culpable for more than 20 instances of fraud totalling £53,000.
However, she escaped a criminal record and will not be jailed after a judge ruled she was "not fit mentally to defend herself", having heard that she was suffering from severe depression.
20 instances of fraud and only £53k to show for it. Pah. English Amateur.
£53000 is measly. A real pro would have screwed a lot more ‘n that. Probably just as useless as a party whip too. No wonder she’s depressed.
Couldn’t she just sign on to a few boards as director…some shitty consultancy company advising on carbon footprints or some such shit coulda bin earning that for 20 days works a year.
57 years old…probably 37 years in the bizness and this to show for it…makes me smile.
Whalesong? Repetitive and powerful and no-one knows what it means.
https://youtu.be/NyXt5dPEfeQ
-richard
You've been off air for a good while Mr I. I trust all is well?
Same here, Mr Ishmael, I hope you're well, either still deep diving or recovering from said adventures.
Hope all well like them two said
-richard
Ditto. Is Mrs I able to rest our nerves?
Been wondering whether tentatively to ask ... but now others have ... I trust all is well, mon Capitan.
Yup, you're allowed to be silent but don't go worrying us now. Whenever you're ready, as I am sure you will be.
There's a lot of good will coming your way Mr Ishmael, please reach out and use it.
Thinking of you.
So am I. And my dear mr narcolept waves an encouraging spanner in your and mrs ishmael's general direction.
Likewise - here's hoping it's cyberennui or a technical snafu.
Don't dust your broom just yet...
cheers
verge.//
Moi aussi. Ditto all of the above.
Hope all is well...
There's more bastards out there in need of a good nailing than ever Mr Ishmael; and I can't think of a better man to do it. Greetings and best wishes from Brixton.
Hope all's well dude.
Mucho, mucho,...whatever,... good wishes from Belgium. Do please wave in a time-tested non-affectionate manner.... just so we know everything and nothing is all right.
Sorry, comrades, rude of me; this tanking life, there's no discomfort or anxiety involved, just a weight of bone - weary fatigue, and with the endless travel, always being someone's citizen-suspect, passenger, patient or guest I have just felt a bit of a refugee of late, bouncing from one official to another, my past life a used-to-be. I shall try to steal away to it.
The tank is steam punk medicine, in an industrial facility, all scaffolding, girders, valves and dials, boffin-nurses in mufti, doctors pulling levers and barking naval orders, me helmeted at sixty feet pressure, breathing one hundred per cent oxygen, or O2 as we divers call it, for two and a half hours. The process has started to work, almost like magic, really, and I will try to surface and walk my quarter- deck in a day or two.
Thanks for the good wishes.
Welcome Back, kind sir, to your rightful place in the grand scheme of things.
May you soon be back to your abnormal self.
Glad you`re getting better, Mr Ishmael.
Hm...if you ever need it again, perhaps find someone who can offer local rather than systemic oxygen therapy. Probably works just as well, and I would imagine you could have it at home.
Great to see you surfacing.
Bon jour, Mr I. Good to hear your sweet tones again.
Good to know you are on the mend Mr Ishmael. Thanks for the news
Sounds positively macabre, Mr. I. Glad that you are battling through ... I've got a couple of full cylinders of Medical O2 in the yard, I'll have to give it a go :-)
HOORAY!, sorry for the caps but, HOORAY! It's definately worth shouting about.
Welcome back.
I'm glad you've surfaced Mr I - your observations have been missed...
BTW, Mr I, and in case you are in need of refreshment, a little lateral reading (I'm not up to the 'thinking' thing...) led me to the Cynic's Wordbook, aka 'The Devil's Dictionary', by Ambrose Pierce (published in 1906). You may have imbibed there already but if not I offer a few vignettes:
Conservative
(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.[1]
Cynic
(n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.[2]
Faith
(n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Lawyer
(n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.[3]
Marriage
(n.) A household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
I especially like the definition of a cynic, it reminded me of you - though I hope there are no Scythians nearby as I feel that you see well enough with your eyes left intact...
For Pierce read Bierce.
A man with almost the same outlook as Mr Ishmael.
Thanks for the correction Mr Alph - I had just noticed, with some irritation, the error myself! Grrrr...
Pleased that you're not dead, which is an understatement. Happy Halloween.
One of Ambrose Bierce's definition of FRIENDLESS, "Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense."
Which is strange, because that's one reason why you have plenty of friends.
Cheers,
-richard
You're looking like a saint, Mr I.
I was always amused by Bierce's notion of noisey silence.
I think we have had that here for a week or two.
On the matter of Mr. Bierce, recent personal experience compels me to relate his accuracy viz. dentists: "Dentist: A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coin out of your pocket". Saucy bastards.
Thank fuck.
That's all I can say. I was fearing a captain ranty moment.
Phew...
I did read Bierce when I was younger; now, like so many, from Kahlil Gilbran to Robert Persig, he seems to have disappeared in the welter of scripted smartass nonentity, people like Steven Fry, waving their cocks at us, talking smut and enchanting the feeble-minded. I may even have the Bierce dictionary, somewhere. Lewis Lapham, however, lives, writes and edits still, is a bigger effort but a much bigger reward, essays, his own and others', sparkle with wit, erudition and remorseless coruscation of the ungodly, Then and Now. If you have fifty quid to spend on yourself for Christmas subscribe to Lapham's Quarterly. A one-year subscription will see one through a lifetime's nodding in agreement with Eternity's scepticism.
How did someone figure out that chucking someone in a pressurized chamber could ameliorate certain conditions - loads of able bodied submariners or something? To Google to figure out this randomness! I bet the 1st patient they suggested it to replied 'oh do fuck off Doc, you know it hurts to laugh!'
Dunno, mr dick, it's all very steam punk, industrial medicine, girders and platforms and tubes, expect to see Fred Dibnah working on the lifting gear. If medicine had gone in a different direction maybe there'd hav been one of these opn every village green, sites filled with them in the towns, it is, aside from the pressure and the pure oxygen, an entirely non-invasive, non-traumatic and non-chemical procedure which does work in most cases. It may yet develop further. There is not a lot on Google, by the way, about hyperbaruic medicine. I have one more week to go and I will be glad to setttle down at home again.
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