Flood-stricken Muslims suffering horrors worse than death.

Pakistan, a nation that blew the budget on making nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbours, a nation that pissed away all its cash and brain power on weapons rather than maintaining its irrigation systems and is now facing mass death from floods causing dysentery and other water-born diseases, is refusing relief money from India. But the story of the day? Some folks in Florida are going to burn Qur'ans. It's the end of the world. Christians! OMG.
[Photo probably of a mob of Floridian Christians burning Qur'ans.]

John Feeny, "World Outreach Center Denied Permit - Will Burn the Quran Anyway." Gather.com. August 19, 2010

The Dove World Outreach Center, a Church in Gainseville, Florida, is planning to burn as many Qurans as they can find on September 11th of this year. The city of Gainseville has denied them a fire permit, but the Dove World Outreach Center will go ahead with their plans anyways.

[Photo probably of the Pope.]

The City of Gainseville says that an open burning of books is not allowed. It does not matter what book is being burned. But that isn't going to stop the Dove World Outreach Center.

The Dove Center released this statement in an email. “City of Gainesville denies burn permit -- BUT WE WILL STILL BURN KORANS.”

Did anyone expect a simple permit violation to stop the Dove World Outreach Center from burning Qurans on September 11th, this year? A group that far on the fringe isn't going to let a little city ordinance stand in the way of the "greater good."

According to the Gainseville Sun, the Dove World Outreach Center will be fined if they go ahead with the burning.

[Photo probably of a board of international capitalist fat cat Christians.]

Mayor Craig Lowe, called the Dove Center a “tiny fringe group and an embarrassment to our community.”

I have a stack of Qur'ans, none of which I'm going to burn. I use them for reference. If I find a copy of a translation I have, then I might well burn it just for fun. Or maybe I'll cash it in for some money to donate to Pakistan flood relief. Who'll start bidding at one dollar?

Addenda, thanks to Blazing Catfur.

Now, the Christians are outrageous in their Qur'an burning, but it doesn't stop there: they also tossed a marijuana-tee-shirt wearing guy from an amusement park in Montreal.

Montreal's La Ronde amusement park is defending a security guard who ordered a man to cover up his T-shirt depicting Bob Marley and marijuana because it violated the facility's family-friendly dress code.

The T-shirt owner, Brunaud Moïse, said he is filing a complaint with Quebec's Human Rights Commission against the amusement park, alleging he was a victim of racial profiling on Aug. 6.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/08/19/la-ronde-t-shirt-incident.html#socialcomments#ixzz0x61BZbry

It doesn't stop there, though. There is some justice:

It's hardly unusual to hear small-business owners gripe about licensing requirements or complain that heavy-handed regulations are driving them into the red.

So when Multnomah County shut down an enterprise last week for operating without a license, you might just sigh and say, there they go again.

Except this entrepreneur was a 7-year-old named Julie Murphy. Her business was a lemonade stand at the Last Thursday monthly art fair in Northeast Portland. The government regulation she violated? Failing to get a $120 temporary restaurant license.

Turns out that kids' lemonade stands -- those constants of summertime -- are supposed to get a permit in Oregon, particularly at big events that happen to be patrolled regularly by county health inspectors.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/08/portland_lemonade_stand_runs_i.html

But then, as soon as we turn our backs and think the world is safe from the terrors of lemonade stands, we find injustice leaping on our backs outrageously again to a point it's unbearable: Polish refugees in Canada are stopped from using "agricultural land" to promote "freedom."

For 10 years, libertarian activist and scholar Peter Jaworski has thrown an annual summer seminar and party on the Clarington, Ontario property owned by his parents, Marta and Lech. The Liberty Summer Seminar typically features speeches from libertarian activists and scholars followed by live music and food. This year Peter's parents, who fled to Canada from communist Poland in the 1980s, face a $50,000 fine for violating local zoning laws.

Peter Jaworski said the local health department called him a few days before the event and he thought he had addressed its concerns over food being served — he decided to cater — and the three portable toilets on site.

But the couple received a summons to provincial court on Sept. 28 on a charge of using land in an agricultural zone “for a commercial conference centre” contrary to a Clarington bylaw.

From the Toronto Star

But the worst is that the government won't arrest people because they're "disabled." Yup, you can't even get arrested. What an outrage.

According to CTV news: 11 people were taken into custody. Two were released shortly afterwards while the remaining activists remained in custody overnight."A small group of OCAP members forced their way into the offices and refused to leave," police said in a news release. Nine people between the ages of 23 and 64 were arrested and charged with mischief interfering with property and forcible entry.

[....]

Now you'd normally think most people would be happy about not having to spend the night in jail. But not Ms. Abbott. Rabble reports the following statement from Anne Abbott:

"They questioned everybody except me, and I felt they thought I was incapable of giving any valid information. With the examples of the abuse on disabled people during the g20 and my recent experience, it's obvious that ableism is running rampant through the Toronto police."

Right. The evil Toronto police are practicing discriminatory "ableism" by not throwing her in jail.

http://eyecrazy.blogspot.com/2010/08/heres-one-you-dont-see-every-day.htm

Oh, those Christians. I'm scared. Someone should call the government and have them stopped.

The rain of pain falls mostly on the plain Muslims of Pakistan

Pakistan is flooded, and folks are dying. Is it "global warming" or is it stupid irrigation techniques in Pakistan? Unlike most people, I don't have a clue what makes the weather do what it does. Or, I don't have an opinion. I do have an opinion about Muslims in Pakistan facing serious flooding, regardless of why it's raining.
It looks to me that the rain falls mainly in Pakistan and India as well. Why aren't the Indians dying from flooding? Same place, different political boundaries.

Maybe if the Pakistanis would spend less time, money, and brain-power on maintaining their jihad against India and the world generally they wouldn't have to go begging for money from-- not Saudi Arabia-- the West to help them save those at the mercy of nature. Well, we can forget that. Pakistanis have their priorities: jihad, war with India, sponging money from the West for military adventures against India and the West, and money for disaster relief. Now there is rain. Who'd have thought?

If Pakistanis irrigate and don't dredge the canals, then when the rains come down the river, they hit the sludge, the water finds a way around the stopper, and it goes on its merry way, killing those on previously dry ground. It ain't rocket science. But what do I know? Let's ask a real weather guy.

Jim Andrews

The International weather blog from AccuWeather.com is written by Jim Andrews who has more than 10 years experience forecasting outside the United States.

Pakistan Flood in More Detail

Aug 5, 2010; 10:22 AM ET

FLOOD CREST POURING DOWN INDUS, CHENAB RIVERS

[....]

MAJOR RIVERS SWELLED INTO FLOOD

Runoff from most of the far north and northwest of Pakistan is directly to the upper Indus River, which quickly began to burst its banks at the end of July.

[....]

INDUS IS MUCH LIKE THE NILE

The Indus, like the longer and better known Nile, rises in highlands watered by seasonal, or monsoon, rains.

For much of its length, there is minimal inflow to the Indus, as it crosses what is essentially a desert. Or at least it would be were it not watered by the river's water through the industry of the people.

A good true-color satellite image would show clearly the green of lush croplands grounded in fertile alluvial soil. All this rich earth needs is dependable water and the farmer's care, and it can burst forth with green growth.

GEOGRAPHY SHAPES FLOOD THREAT

Fast-rising (in the geological sense of meaning) mountains, like those rimming the Indus Valley to the north and west, shed vast loads of sediment, which find their way downhill to streams and rivers on the way to the sea (in most instances).

When the main stream or tributaries reach flatlands, as does the Indus, the load of sediment can be too high for the streams to carry. When this happens, it chokes the stream beds and, over time, they tend "wander," thereby distributing the sand, silt and mud in a broad sheet. Much of Pakistan, as well as northern India, has such a landscape.

Satellite images of the Indus show a wide, meandering bed riven into untold channels, sandbars and islands. No doubt, any of these can shift markedly, and appear or disappear during a single flood.

Sometimes, the lowest spots along the river's flood plain are not those followed by the river bed. This happenstance renders such spots exceptionally prone to inundation when such a river "reclaims" its rightful place on the flood plain during high water.

Crops and human habitation along rivers, and foremost desert rivers, are inevitably in harm's way during times of exceptional flow.

In the present instance, this accounts for the stated tragic loss of life (well above 1,000), number of displaced/affected people (3,000,000 or more), and land inundated (in the 100,000s of hectares) along the Indus River basin.

As I understand it, the top flow on the Indus (1,000,000 cusecs) is about 10 times the mean yearly flow of the river.

Unlike the Nile, the Indus does not have one great dam and flood control reservoir (as in the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser upstream of Egypt) to moderate flow in its lower reaches. The huge Tarbela Dam, north of Islamabad, is on the upper Indus, upstream of much of the runoff from this July's exceptional rainfall, and thus not a factor in controlling it.

LOW DAMS, FLOOD CONTROL AND IRRIGATION

Instead of major flood control dams, the mid- and lower reaches of the Indus are fitted with low dams, or "barrages." These work rather more to shunt water into supply canals than to have any direct moderating effect upon the flood crest.

At least in theory, the water supply canals can act to sluice away some of the flood flow, and this may be having a significant effect upon flow dynamics on the lndus at this time.

"Barrages" are, north to south, at Jinnah, Taunsa, Guddu, Sukkur and Kotri/Hyderabad. Having never been here myself, I must rely on other means to grasp this setting.

Satellite imagery shows that each of these structures has canals that split away right upstream. These canals then flow parallel to the river itself, their water being distributed to the croplands, towns and cities along the way.

While I have no actual statistics one way or another, it is my understanding that Karachi gets most of its water in this way.

http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/andrews/story/35027/pakistan-flood-in-more-detail-1.asp