Never mind my woody

In California they customize cars. In Japan it's vans and dump trucks!



Please don't ask me why they do this. I don't have a clue!!!!!!

Your perplexed scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Take off your clothes and bend over.

As I reported in the article "Bang, bang.......stop or I'll shoot!" cops very quickly go from upholding the law to thinking they "are" the law and can dispense it at their own discretion.
(For example, the Rodney King-thing in L.A. a few years ago!)

Even though this story is 12 years old we are hearing about it here for the first time and it goes to show that some things never change.

On the morning of May 20, 1994, Ms Gray was taken by sheriff officers to Narre Warren Police Station in Victoria, Australia to convert some $400 in unpaid parking fines into community service work.

Shortly after her arrival she was made to stand naked in the corridor of the station as a sheriff's officer, Janet Pike, and Senior Constable Sandra Hatch searched her clothing and person.

In March 2001, a jury awarded her damages totalling $337,000 and represents the highest damages award for police misbehaviour.

Ms Gray said today she was glad the case had been finalised, but an apology "would still be nice".

"All I've asked for for the last nine years is a simple apology and I have never gotten it. Two courts have now found they acted wrongly and all this has just been so unnecessary."

I guess the cops weren't taking any chances with scofflaws in their city, after all, you can never be too careful.
Right boys?

Your ever-vigilant scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Stop with the dogma!

PARIS — For the secular French state, an attack by the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy comes close to a declaration of war.

For two decades, the country’s Muscular Dystrophy Association has run a wildly popular annual telethon to raise money for medical research. (Remember, these are the people who idolize Jerry Lewis!)

This year, the Roman Catholic Church here has sullied the reputation of the telethon, with some church officials calling its financing of research on embryonic stem cells immoral.

“For us, these embryos are not things, but human beings,” Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, told journalists on Tuesday.
“And from the depths of our faith, we cannot accept that they are selected, destroyed and the objects of experiments.”

France, like some other European Union countries, allows limited research using embryonic stem cells. Britain and Belgium are more permissive; Germany and Italy have stricter regulations. But the separation of church and state is an unshakable pillar of the French Republic, and these attacks have been met with sharp resistance.

Government officials and the leaders of the French medical establishment have made clear that the church has no business interfering in matters of state, especially when they involve a practice that is legal.

“It’s not up to the church to put any pressure on families who have recourse to genetic diagnoses, and even less to make the totality of donors feel guilty,” said Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Évry, the suburb of Paris where the Muscular Dystrophy Association is based.

Even President Jacques Chirac entered the fray, staunchly defending the telethon and upholding a 2004 bioethics law that permits stem cell research, with prior parental approval, on embryos that would have been destroyed.

The Catholic Church has consistently opposed research on embryonic stem cells, but the current verbal assault by church leaders is exceptional in republican France.

Speaking from personal experience, I have a wife who is waiting for stem cell research to help with a cure for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

I also have a step-son who is waiting for stem cell research to help with his kidney transplant. This, so that he does not need to be on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life and does not face the possibility of another transplant operation later on.
So don’t tell me this research is immoral.
The church's opposition to it is!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Peace in our time? Don't bet on it!

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh (pictured here - mean looking son-of-a-bitch, ain't he!) told thousands of Iranians on Friday that his Hamas-led government will never recognize Israel and will continue to fight for the "liberation of Jerusalem."

The United States is pressing the Palestinian government to not only recognize Israel, but to renounce violence and form a national unity government with the moderate Fatah party.

Haniveh has his own agenda and said; "I'm insisting from this podium that these issues won't materialize. We will never recognize the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until we achieve the liberation of Jerusalem."

Meanwhile, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah party, said if Hamas wants to be part of a national unity government, it will need to abide by agreements the PLO has signed in the past. This would imply recognition of Israel.

"I can't criticize him (Haniyeh) when he is talking in the name of Hamas. But if he is speaking as prime minister, he should abide by the national agenda," Abdel Rahman said.

After all it said and done, the only thing that really matters in this situation is how badly anyone wants peace in the region. On those grounds, things don’t look too good!

Your frustrated scribe;
Allan W Janssen

God only knows!

Here is the problem I have with mainstream religion in a nutshell.
(It doesn't matter whether it's Christianity, Islam, Judiasm or "The Gospel of Bob!")

You got twenty people in a line and the guy at one end says; "That girl at the other end of the line has a nice smile, pass it on!" The next guys repeats it and so on down the line until the second last person says to the girl; "Your mother wears nice purple pants!

O.K. - So then the girl writes this down and puts the note away!
(With me so far?)

Years later someone finds the note and a great debate erupts about whether "mother's" pants are actually royal blue or some shade of lavender!

This is a good representation of the debate going on now about the role of Judas in the Bible.

The story was handed down in verbal form for a few generations before it was finally written down about 1700 years ago. (300 years AFTER Jesus)

Now scholars are picking apart this bastardized version of what happened and debating whether it means Judas was actually a good guy or the betrayer of Jesus.

If they can't agree on this unchanged, written version of Judas, how in hell can they lend ANY creedance to the original story that was passed on down the line to the girl with the nice smile??

Explain that eh!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

And here I thought I was German!

Modern technology is simply amazing! There is a machine that can automatically translate English into Japanese. I ran into this when I was looking at a copy of my blog and it totaly floored me.

Below is a copy of it if you are wondering how your humble scribe would look as a Japanese.
My wife says I would look like the guy from
"The Karate Kid."
(I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so!)

"Allan" Morita

"Let's get things back into perpective here" in Japanese.

(One interesting note; some of the words are not translatable so they are left in English)

Now wait a minute!

Things are getting to the point where the whole world is going to slowly grind to a halt. The latest version of "Political Correctness" took an assinine turn over the last few days when a woman who works in one of the offices of British Airways was told to remove a chain with a cross on it because it was offensive to some people!!!!!!

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury had to step in on this one and say it was all nonsense.

It's bad enough that someone complained, but what is even more absurd is that the complaint was taken seriously and the woman told to remove her necklace.

If it had of been me I would have considered ejecting whoever complained about the necklace in the first place!

How's that for poetic justice!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Real life Aliens

NASA researchers at Johnson Space Center, Houston have found organic materials that formed in the most distant reaches of the early Solar System preserved in a unique meteorite.

The study was performed on the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of meteorite that is rich in organic (carbon-bearing) compounds.

Organic matter in meteorites is a subject of intense interest because this material formed at the dawn of the Solar System and may have seeded the early Earth with the building blocks of life.

The Tagish Lake meteorite is especially valuable for this work because much of it was collected immediately after its fall over Canada in 2000 and has been maintained in a frozen state, minimizing terrestrial contamination. The collection and curation of the meteorite samples preserved its pristine state.

In a paper published in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Science, the team, headed by NASA space scientist Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, reports that the Tagish Lake meteorite contains numerous submicrometer hollow organic globules.

The organic globules in the Tagish Lake meteorites were found to have very unusual hydrogen and nitrogen isotopic compositions, proving that the globules did not come from Earth. The isotopic ratios in these globules show that they formed at temperatures of about -260° C, near absolute zero, said Scott Messenger, NASA space scientist and co-author of the paper.

The organic globules most likely originated in the cold molecular cloud that gave birth to our Solar System, or at the outermost reaches of the early Solar System.

The type of meteorite in which the globules were found is also so fragile that it generally breaks up into dust during its entry into Earth's atmosphere, scattering its organic contents across a wide swath.

"If, as we suspect, this type of meteorite has been falling onto Earth throughout its entire history, then the Earth was seeded with these organic globules at the same time life was first forming here." said Mike Zolensky, NASA cosmic mineralogist and co-author of the paper.

The origin of life is one of the fundamental unsolved problems in natural sciences. Some biologists think that making a bubble-shape is the first step on the path to biotic life.

We may be a step closer to knowing where our ancestors came from, Nakamura-Messenger said.
(Mine came from Germany! -ed. ;-)

Alien Attack!

I have said before that we don't have to go to other Planets to find truly alien life forms. Here is a picture of an octopus squeezing itself through a 1" hole to escape from a plexiglass cage.

WARNING - NOT FOR ANYONE WITH A WEAK STOMACH!

Octopus or Alien?

Told ya!

Deal with it!

When I first started this blog and others, as well as comments I made on a few blogs I follow, I put the following quote on the Masthead for a definite reason.

"I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the only warrant and the sanction. Your religion stops where my rights begin. Deal with it!"

Because of my disdain for mainstream religion and how it is all driven by a human agenda mixed with a good dose of avarice, I naturally expected quite a bit of backlash.

What I didn't expect was a lack of outrage from the Muslim community compared to the vile, vindictive, virulent, vixenish vilification and vituperation I have received concerning the denouncements from the "Buddies of Jesus" and all other manner of adherents of the religious far right that exists here in North America.

Even some of the Muslim sites I follow in places like Egypt and Lebanon are more concerned with political matters and oppression than with pulling a "Salmon Rushdie" against people they disagree with.

I know I am in a predominately-Christian neighborhood here in North America as opposed to the reception I might receive if I was in the Middle East. Non-the-less, the mere mention of the fact that the "Christ" of the bible is quite different from the historical "Jesus," as I do in my book "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!) sends a lot of fundamentalist Christians into fits of frenzy that I could write such blasphemous material.

Please, please, stop with the letters designed to help me mend my ways and come around to your way of thinking. Please don't tell me I will rot (or burn) in Hell if I don't repent and accept your version of Christ and especially don't try to argue and debate with me on matters that you have been brainwashed with.

I refuse to participate.

My opinions on matters religious have come to me through many years of hard thought and internal debate and all the evangelizing in the world will not make me "see the light!"

I do not know if there is an actual "Heaven," or if the opposite extreme is true, that after death there is "nothing."

I can tell you for sure that Paradise does not have 72 virgins waiting or that only fellow believers and I will go through the Pearly Gates. (Whether it be 144,000, 39 people taken up in a flying saucer or 900+ drinking cool-aid!

I can also not tell you the nature of God since God, by God's very definition, is quite beyond our understanding. All I know for sure is that these questions are not in the domain of the here and now.

If I am to have any sort of a belief, it is my belief that anyone of a deep religious conviction should put that energy to better use by trying to live an exemplary life before we "shuffle off this mortal coil!".

This would lift humanity to a higher plane of spirituality and make this "vale of tears" a little easier to handle.

We have to stop childish things and rather stand with our heads tall and take responsibilty for ourselves, not just leave it up to some supernatural force. After all, that is our purpose; to get through this life and do the best we can, period!

Your Humble Scribe;
Allan W Janssen

By the way, if you want to see God at work - read the article below!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html