This is where 'eat me last' gets you.

The remarkably socialist, one might even say pinko-led Church of England has received an extraordinary rebuke. From the Left!

They can't run a PAID advertisement featuring the Lord's Prayer in English movie theaters the week before Christmas. No, really.

The advert, produced by JustPray.uk, shows the Lord's Prayer being recited by a members of the public ranging from bodybuilders to children, and also features the Most Rev Justin Welby.
A CoE spokesman said it was initially believed that their minute-long advert had been approved and would be played before showings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from December 18.
They were later informed that, due to a DCM policy not to run adverts which could potentially cause offence, the video would not be shown.
When asked for a copy of that policy, CoE was told there is no formal policy document but that it had been agreed with the DCM's members.
There is now a formal policy on the DCM's website, which states: "To be approved, an advertisement must ... not in the reasonable opinion of DCM constitute political or religious advertising."

Please note this is not a PSA or some other free donated-time thing. This is a bought-and-paid-for advertisement. A one minute spot of people reciting the Lord's Prayer. Can't show it. Too offensive. Running with scissors.

The delicious irony for me is that this kind of thing is exactly what the Lefty minions of the Church of England have been working toward since World War Two ended. The notion that secular theaters SHOULD NOT feature religion in any way, shape or form is one that CoE upper management embraces wholeheartedly.

We have a similar situation in Canada with the United Church of Canada. If you go to certain UCC churches in Toronto, you may be able to go through an entire service and not hear anything overtly Christian the whole time. The gay minister may not even mention Jesus. Because it wouldn't do to OFFEND anyone, y'know. It's all about Social Justice and doing Good Works and all that great lefty stuff.

All of which boils down to a corporation that defines itself as a church but acts like a retail store, changing it's wares to appeal to new customers and begging the ever-more-rapaciaous taxman regulators to eat them last.

The trouble with eat-me-last as a strategy is that eventually, if you wait long enough, you get eaten.

The other thing is that the movie chains are not banning the ad out of some SJW yearning to make everything fair for everyone and Kumbaya. Nuh uh. They're banning it because they are terrified of having their theaters burnt down by hordes of militant Mooselimbs being offended at the very existence of the Church of England in... England.

The movie chain guys are not wrong of course. Their know their audience. If that ad gets shown, theaters in some parts of England will probably get burnt down. At the very least there will be "unrest", as Monty Python says.

More delicious irony, which denomination is number one for "outreach" these days? Church of England! They just love that multi-cultural exchange stuff, makes 'em feel all warm and fuzzy, and keeps the government grants flowing through their coffers. Gotta keep the roofs patched on all those ancient church buildings y'know.

This is why I don't like churches as a general thing. They behave a lot more like a retail real estate investment trust (REIT) than a religious organization that believes in stuff. If I want to see wishy-washy salesmanship I'll go to the mall, thanks.

The Retail Religion Phantom.

Instant update! Superblogger and fabulous short person Kathy Shaidle sent this in a minute ago: Famous Atheist (and all-round dick, IMHO) Richard Dawkins comes out in support of the Church of England.

“My immediate response was to tweet that it was a violation of freedom of speech,” Dawkins told the Guardian. “But I deleted it when respondents convinced me that it was a matter of commercial judgment on the part of the cinemas, not so much a free speech issue.”

“I still strongly object to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people,” he said. “If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”

Yeah, the "commercial judgement" was that they didn't want their theaters burnt down, and between the lines Dawkins knows it.

Mr. Dawkins, dick though he may be, realizes that an Islamic England is going to be one where he gets hanged, or possibly stoned to death, drawn, quartered, burnt at the stake or suffers some other medieval atrocity simply for being an atheist. He, unlike the CoE, realizes eat-me-last is not a winning strategy. 

Even a blind pig finds the odd acorn.

Paris

I suppose I have to comment on this, it isn't like if we all ignore it it'll go away.

First, my condolences to everybody who lost someone on Friday night, or who got wounded.

Second, this is all down to policy decisions made back in the 1950s or even earlier. Disarm the average citizen, propagandize them to be passive in the face of violence, make them believe that only police have the moral right to use force.

That mindset is what got us where we are today. The official policy of Western governments is that citizens shall wait for the police, and the police will do the shooting. Any citizen who does not wait for the police will be subjected to The Process, which will be long, arduous and ultimately pointless.

It's credentialism, basically. The idea that if you want the best job, you get the experts who have been trained and tested. Like a doctor or a plumber. The industrial model of social justice.

Now, this model has it's advantages. It makes everything very convenient for police forces and governments, it creates very large budgets for police forces and justice bureaucracies, and it gives politicians something to campaign on. Lefties run on Compassion, righties run on Law and Order. Two sides of the same coin, credentialism. No one questions the model, because the model is their iron rice bowl.

In Western societies where there basically is no crime to speak of, it works well enough to get by. Meaning it doesn't work at all for the victims of crime, but they are few and don't have a platform to make a fuss. The wealthy and powerful get a special deal from police forces, and the rest of us get by ok. Mostly.

Places where crime is high of course it doesn't work at all, but again nobody cares about non-white ghettos or the poor. Those People don't matter, what can you expect from them anyway. Liberals like to -say- they care, but when you turn the sound off, they act like they don't care.

Now we add one more variable, the politically motivated Mass Migration.

In America back when cotton was king, they imported slaves. In their hundreds of thousands, Africans were purchased from Arab slavers and brought to North America. The one reason this was done, they wanted Cheap Labor.

Fast forward to 2015, South Americans and Mooselimbs from the Middle East are being imported in their millions. Same reason, Cheap Labor. And gee whiz, it's working about the same as slavery did. As in, not well.

Suddenly, the credentialist model isn't working and it can't be swept under the carpet anymore. Cops aren't there when the trouble happens, nobody can do anything about it except run away. People die.

This Paris attack was inevitable. The French imported people from a region where they are having a religious war. Surprise, they continued the war, except now it's in France. Inevitably terrorists are going to attack anyplace where more than three people are gathered and unarmed. It's like magnetism, they'll always go there. In a disarmed population, five shooters can kill a lot of people.

In an armed population, they may not manage to kill anyone. That's why the Palestinians switched to suicide bombs in Israel, their rifle squads were getting eliminated by the intended victims before they could get a round off. Mohamed pulls out an AK-47 at the grocery store, and before he's finished yelling Allah Akbar some old lady shoots him in the  head. That's how it goes in an armed population.

Of two things we can be certain, therefore. There will be terror attacks. They will grow in number and intensity, because it's like a popular movement. All the cool kids are doing it. The official response will be to rearrange the deck chairs on their ship of fools. More cops,bigger guns, security checks, the whole Police State trip. That's what they're going to do. For sure. And more gun control, because police states like gun control, it makes everything more neat and tidy for the police.

The other thing is, people will ignore the police state and arm themselves when it starts to get bad. Already there are no guns available in European stores and ammo is on back order because it has all been bought up. Europeans are arming themselves, the same Europeans that vote for more-bigger-better gun control every year. Right now they are buying shotguns and keeping them in the closet. After a few more Paris attacks they will be carrying shotguns, and the cops will be looking the other way.

If the Liberal Party of Canada does what they're saying they will right now, that's what our future in Canada will be as well. I'm not looking forward to it.

Those two things are 100% lead-pipe certain. Likely but not guaranteed, a civil war and ethnic cleansing of Europe. Every two or three generations Europe has one of these events throughout history. They're about due. Maybe they'll manage to skip it this time, so far it's not looking good.

The Phantom

November 11th, 2015.

We do not forget.

Wait, I thought casting didn't matter!

This is confusing.

The casting of a white actor as Martin Luther King in an Ohio university production of Katori Hall's acclaimed play The Mountaintop was "a disservice to not just Dr King but an entire community", the playwright has said.

Hall wrote an essay for the African American cultural website the Root on Monday about Kent State University's production of her play, which dramatizes the night before King was assassinated in 1968.

Hall told the Guardian that director Michael Oatman's decision to double-cast the six-show production with a black actor and a white actor as King went "deeper than just casting a white man in the role of MLK".

"I just really feel as though it echoes this pervasive erasure of the black body and the silencing of a black community – theatrically and also, literally, in the world," she said.

Oatman, who like Hall is black, said in a statement in August promoting the play that he chose a white actor for the production "to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity".

So casting a historical character who is black with a white actor is racism? But wait! Don't I recall that merely objecting to the casting of a white character with a black actor was racism?

Yes I do recall that. That post is one of the most-read things I've ever written. Every week it gets hits. Objecting that they cast Johnny Storm with a black actor is nerd racism my friends. Lots of people say so.

And you know, they cast a black guy in the movie to play the white character, then amazingly enough, Stan Lee did NOT write an essay for some white culture website complaining that the switch was "a disservice to not just the Fantastic Four but an entire community!"

You know what happened instead? All us comic fans got told to shut up.

I decided shutting up would be boring, so I went out on a limb and said any movie that casts a white character with a black actor to get PC points is going to suck. Behold, it did suck. The FF movie came out and dropped off the face of the Earth two weeks later. Because, of course, it sucked hard.

Casting does matter. Duh. Casting Martin Luther King with a white actor is stupid. The play will suck. It will suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

I'm waiting for J.F. Sargent to call Katori Hall a racist, in keeping with his thesis that objections to race switching in movies is racism. Got my popcorn right here.

The Phantom.