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FrodosPet

FrodosPet's Journal
FrodosPet's Journal
September 26, 2014

Terrorists would never attack subways or trains. Who ever heard of such a thing?

August 4, 1974

San Benedetto Val di Sambro, Italy



A bomb explodes on the Italicus Express train. Responsibility was claimed by the neo-fascist terrorist organization Ordine Nero.



March 20, 1995

Tokyo, Japan



The Tokyo subway sarin attack, usually referred to in the Japanese media as the Subway Sarin Incident (地下鉄サリン事件 Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken?), was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated on March 20, 1995 in Tokyo, Japan by members of the religious movement Aum Shinrikyo.

In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on several lines of the Tokyo subway, killing 13 people, severely injuring 50 and causing temporary vision problems for nearly 1,000 others. The attack was directed against trains passing through Kasumigaseki and Nagatachō, home to the Japanese government. It is the most serious attack to occur in Japan since the end of World War II.


March 11, 2004

Madrid, Spain



The 2004 Madrid train bombings (also known in Spain as 11-M) were nearly simultaneous, coordinated bombings against the Cercanías commuter train system of Madrid, Spain, on the morning of 11 March 2004 – three days before Spain's general elections and two and a half years after the September 11 attacks in the United States. The explosions killed 191 people and wounded 1,800. The official investigation by the Spanish judiciary found that the attacks were directed by an al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist cell, although no direct al-Qaeda participation has been established. Though they had no role in the planning or implementation, the Spanish miners who sold the explosives to the terrorists were also arrested.


July 7, 2005

London, England



The 7 July 2005 London bombings (often referred to as 7/7) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks in central London, which targeted civilians using the public transport system during the morning rush hour.

On the morning of Thursday, 7 July 2005, four British Islamist men detonated four bombs—three in quick succession aboard London Underground trains across the city and, later, a fourth on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. As well as the four bombers, 52 civilians were killed and over 700 more were injured in the attacks, the United Kingdom's worst terrorist incident since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing as well as the country's first ever suicide attack.


11 July 2006

Mumbai, India



The 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings were a series of seven bomb blasts that took place over a period of 11 minutes on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai, the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the nation's financial capital. The bombs were set off in pressure cookers on trains plying the Western line of the Suburban Railway network. 209 people were killed and over 700 were injured.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_involving_railway_systems

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We cannot go back in time. We cannot undrop the bombs. We cannot unfire the missiles. We cannot uninvade Iraq, we cannot unvote for the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

I hope the Iraqi PM is a lying sack of shite. I hope that everyone who is essentially saying, "No problem. No one is going to attack trains or subways. They don't have the capability or desire" is right. I absolutely hope I am merely some blowhard paranoid asshole worried about imaginary boogeymen.

But bombing, and even gassing, trains and subways is not that far fetched. It has been done by terrorists of various ideologies several times in the past.

We have to deal with people who would deliberately harm the innocent, be they Islamic terrorists, right wing or left wing American terrorists, whoever they are and whatever they believe, in an effective manner.
September 25, 2014

Orwell wrote more than '1984' and 'Animal Farm'

Many opponents of the current campaign against the Daesh invoke Orwell's 1984 concept of perpetual warfare as a source of their opposition.

But he wrote more than that. The following essay is the one which seems to be the inspiration of his "rough men" misquote

-----------------------------------------

George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism

http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

~ snip ~

(v) Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

~ snip ~

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

- BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.

- COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

- IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.

- TROTSKYIST: The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.

- PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued ‘as background’ a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

~ snip ~

September 24, 2014

26 Facts That Prove Mick Foley Is The World’s Coolest Person

If he's not the coolest, he is in the running.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewziegler/facts-that-prove-mick-foley-is-the-worlds-coolest-person

Mick Foley AKA Mankind AKA Cactus Jack AKA Dude Love is commonly known for being one of the most famous and respected professional wrestlers of all time. But there’s more to this hulking man than his wrestling career could sum up.

~ snip ~

When he finally got the opportunity to meet Amos in 2008, she turned him onto an organization with which he would become very involved: RAINN.

Foley is a member of the National Leadership Council for the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), an organization for which Amos was the original spokesperson.

He is constantly raising funds for and making large donations to RAINN. He auctioned off his priceless wrestling memorabilia (including Mr. Socko) and donated half of his advance from his memoir, Countdown to Lockdown.

~ snip ~

He sponsors children for ChildFund International as well. The other half of the advance from his memoir went to them.

~ snip ~
July 13, 2012

Metro Detroiters - PLEASE help save the Detroit Institute of Arts on August 7th

http://www.artisforeveryone.org/

The Detroit Institute of Arts has been a vital part of our community for 127 years. With more than 400,000 annual visitors, the DIA has been called America’s most visitor-friendly museum. But the DIA is at risk of closing its doors.

Voting YES on this low cost millage will keep the museum open, and allow for free, unlimited admission and free school field trips. A required annual audit and report to each county will insure your investment is used wisely.

~ snip ~

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PLEASE help save this treasured place. Detroit has suffered so much for so long, we CANNOT afford to lose this vital connection to history and culture.

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