A Cornucopia of Copenhagen Climate Cons

World leaders are consuming vast amounts of jet fuel to fly to Copenhagen to tell the rest of us that we should make sacrifices and use less energy. How out of touch with normal people is the climate change conference in Copenhagen?

Here is a random selection of climate chicanery:

• Sustainable Fashion with raincoats designed to keep you dry from the crotch up – in a green sort of way:
  
• Worn out clichés: Failure in Copenhagen is not an option.
• Regurgitated IBM slogans: Re-Think
• A ping-pong of Climate Words and Climate Music (I’d like to make fun of this, but it’s beyond me).
• International ecumenical worship with Rowan Williams, who, in spite all evidence to the contrary is known for his championing of hot-air reduction. Bells will be rung 350 times or until the neighbours complain.

After a hard day of trying to explain why eminent scientists expect anyone to believe them when they have been busy falsifying and destroying data they don’t like, delegates can relax with a Danish prostitute whose services will be free during the conference because they feel discriminated against.

It’s all very – cool.

Diocese of New Westminster: Why can’t you all just get along

Canadian Christianity on the court ruling in New Westminster:

The court decision means that the diocese owns the buildings; but they are still being administered by the parish trustees. Kelleher decided to “leave it to the parties to arrive at a workable resolution” to this problem.

Hutchinson suggested that the court was essentially challenging both parties to cooperate and find a mutually acceptable solution. He noted the “clear scriptural injunction about reconciling with your brother,” and said there are Christian mediation resources which could resolve the issues with less expense and less division than the court system.

However, leaders of the Diocese of New Westminster suggested that the issue has already been decided. Ingham contended that “the entire conflict has been unnecessary,” blaming it on a few “extreme conservative leaders.” He has written to the parishes, inviting them to remain in the buildings and work with him to appoint new conservative clergy acceptable to both him and the parishes.

That is not likely to happen, said Chang. The people in the parishes who voted by strong margins to leave the diocese “knew we could lose our property . . . At the end of the day, if forced to choose, we will choose our faith over our buildings.”

Much as it pains me to agree with the Diocese of New Wesmtinster, I think they have it right: whatever the trustees do, the buildings are Ingham’s. Kelleher’s leaving it to the parties to arrive at a workable resolution has simply placed the trustees in a position where they will either have to compromise every principle that they have fought for this far, or resign. Kelleher must have realised this unless he is a complete idiot. The Kelleher leave it to the parties decision – or why can’t you both just get along - smacks of Rowanesque syncretism, frustration, malevolence or stupidity; perhaps a combination of all four.

The Niagara judge, Milanetti, had the same attitude when she ruled – after snorting her disgust at Christians suing each other at Easter – on the sharing arrangements for the three Niagara ANiC parishes: you are all Christians so why can’t you sort this out for yourselves; her error was in viewing both sides as Christian.

Alberta judge rules anti-gay letter not hate speech, overturns ruling

Rev. Stephen Boissoin published a letter that was ruled a “hate crime” by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The ruling has been overturned:

EDMONTON – A Court of Queen’s Bench judge has ruled an anti-gay letter written by a former Alberta pastor in 2002 was not a hate crime and is allowed under freedom of speech.

Justice E.C. Wilson overturned a 2008 ruling by the Alberta Human Rights Commission that the letter by Stephen Boissoin that was published in the Red Deer Advocate broke provincial law.

At the time, the commission said it may even have played a role in the beating of a gay teenager two weeks after it was published.

The commission had ordered Boissoin to refrain from making disparaging remarks about homosexuals and to pay the complainant, former Red Deer high school teacher Darren Lund, $5,000 in damages.

Neither order can now be enforced, as Wilson declared them “unlawful or unconstitutional.”

You can read the entire letter here; it begins:

The following is not intended for those who are suffering from an unwanted sexual identity crisis. For you, I have understanding, care, compassion and tolerance. I sympathize with you and offer you my love and fellowship. I prayerfully beseech you to seek help, and I assure you that your present enslavement to homosexuality can be remedied. Many outspoken, former homosexuals are free today.

Instead, this is aimed precisely at every individual that in any way supports the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage.

Darren Lund was a schoolteacher when he made the initial complaint; he is now  an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary where his speciality is social justice issues in schools and communities.

Lund is a bit of a misery: in the spirit of keeping Christ out of Christmas, he doesn’t like Operation Christmas Child because the help it provides to children is tainted with evangelism; and he believes 9/11 was by caused by a lack of respect for the religion – Islam – of “others”. Lund also appears to be a racist, since he subscribes to the canard that racism is the exclusive failing of white people.

Thus, he is quite at home preaching in the United Church of Canada  where he is wont to intone piously on “diversity” and critical approaches to counter racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination and oppression.

Altogether, Darren Lund is a colossal bore.

Hertz sued over Muslim prayers

The revolt of the dhimmis:

Hertz Global Holdings Inc., the second-largest U.S. rental car company, was sued by former employees who say its policy of allowing Muslims to take daily prayer breaks discriminates against non-Muslim workers.

Katie Barkley and Shirley Harris, who worked as part-time drivers moving Hertz cars from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to other locations, claim Muslim employees were given as many as three paid, 15-minute prayer breaks each shift while non-Muslim employees were denied equal time off, according to the suit filed Nov. 30 in federal court in Atlanta.

This could all be cleared up quite simply: Muslims get their 15 minutes every day, Christians get Sundays off, Jews Saturdays, agnostics split their time equally between Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and atheist readings of The God Delusion – which take place on Mondays. Alternatively, Hertz could stop giving Muslims time off to pray or stop hiring Muslims. Whatever they do, either Hertz will have a skeleton workforce most of the time or someone will be suing them; time to buy shares in Avis.

Putting Fowler Back in Fowler’s

Oh happy day, there is a new edition of Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage coming out:

H.W. Fowler and David Crystal, ed. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press. 832 Pages. $29.95

Henry Watson Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage is an unabashedly prescriptivist tome, which is to say that it doesn’t waffle in describing the right way, and the wrong way, to use English words. The archetypal usage manual, commonly called just “Fowler’s,” was initially published in 1926. It has undergone two revisions since, the product of the first of which, a book judiciously and lightly edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, was released in 1965. F.W. Bateson, the English literary scholar, reflected the general feeling when he wrote that Gowers was “remarkably successful . . . in retaining Fowler’s ipsissima verba while making the minor corrections and qualifications that time has made necessary.”

Similar approbation did not greet the second revision of Fowler’s, published in 1996 and helmed by the late lexicographer and linguist Robert W. Burchfield. John Simon, reviewing that book for the New Criterion, wrote that Burchfield — who before editing Fowler’s had edited both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge History of the English Language — had “made himself a true citizen of Oxbridge.” “But an ox bridge,” Simon quipped, “can be no better that a pons asinorum.”

The trouble, simply put, was that Burchfield had expunged Fowler from Fowler’s. Gone were some of the original author’s beloved subheadings (“Pairs and Snares” was pared, “Unequal Yokefellows” unyoked) and gone, too, was his jaunty, slightly mischievous, scything-while-grinning tone. Most objectionable was that Burchfield had changed Fowler’s from a prescriptive book to a descriptive one. Usage was no longer to be judged but understood. Entries that had earlier attacked ambiguity, castigated the careless, and lowered the boom on barbarism were suddenly more interested in explaining the origins and development of the English language’s scofflaws than in pointing them out and locking up. The warden had become the prison psychologist.

David Crystal, editor of the rereleased first edition, writes that Fowler “turns out to be far more sophisticated in his analysis of language than most people realize.” What’s more, “Several of his entries display a concern for descriptive accuracy which would do any modern linguist proud.”

Study in B minor by Fernando Sor

A haunting and serene (well, it is when Julian Bream plays it) study in B minor by Fernando Sor

Technical details:

Guitar: Martin OM21 Special

Digital Recorder: Edirol R-09HR

Format: 24bit WAV 88.2 Khz, converted to 44.1Khz, 192kbps mp3 for Internet

Sound Editor: GoldWave

Fingers: Antique, but still more or less working

Abortion is a “God given right” according to one Baptist Minister

For the mother, of course; Carlton Veazey, a Baptist minister, doesn’t seem to think unborn babies have a God-given right not to be aborted:

Rev. Carlton Veazy, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told a small crowd of pro-abortion protesters that women have a “God-given right” to abortion and that opposition from pro-life congressmen and religious leaders would never take it away.

Veazy, closing speaker at a “Stop Stupak” rally on Capitol Hill staged by major pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL-Pro Choice, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) told the crowd that not only did they have a constitutional right to abortion, but that they had a God-given one as well.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that religious people don’t support choice,” Veazy said at the gathering in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right.”

There is a disconnection between Veazey’s pro-abortion view and the love he has for his children and grandchildren that borders on mental derangement:

As for me, this work is an extension of the constantly maturing love I have for my children, and now my grandchildren and the children of the village. Every day I feel blessed that I am a father to all my children, that I’m still on this journey, and that I am faithfully, prayerfully, pro-choice.

I am pro-choice too: I’m pro giving the unborn the chance to choose life without the threat of being dismembered or burned to death in utero.

A Ramadan grope

Life gets frustrating for Muslim men during Ramadan since there is no conjugal boinky-boinky:

A DISGRACED Muslim taxi driver tried to use the holy time of Ramadan as his defence against allegations he repeatedly grabbed the breast of a disabled female passenger.

Abdul Majid Qazizada, 51, had argued that Ramadan was a time when Muslim men “don’t even touch their wives”.

He was yesterday found guilty of the aggravated indecent assault of a 23-year-old woman who suffers cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

Magistrate Jennifer Betts said Qazizada claimed he was a devout Muslim who was fasting when the attack occurred in September last year.

” ‘Men don’t even touch their wives (during Ramadan)’, were his words,” Ms Betts said in Ryde Local Court.

An interesting if ineffective defence: a variation on “the devil made me do it”. “Your honour, Ramadan made me do it”.

Disgusting Anti-Semitism in the UK – from self-styled Christians

From Ruth Gledhill:

Barmy Baptists in Britain demonstrate their tolerance:

Another reason I’m glad I moved to Canada.

Canadian Anglican clergy screwed in their dotage

The Anglican Church of Canada has social justice, eco-justice, climate justice, poverty justice – but no geriatric-justice:

General Synod pension plan changes will cost more, pay less.

The pension fund for staff of the Anglican Church of Canada, including clergy across the country, is going to cost more and return less in the coming year.

Some thanks after a lifetime of combating global warming.

Devilish deception

As Baudelaire observed, the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist. Anglican clergyman, George Pitcher is persuaded:

English satanic practices always make me smile. They conjure up images of very white, fat people dancing around clumsily in a wood. So when I read our story today that a vicar in the Forest of Dean is seeing signs of “dark forces”, I’m afraid I was reminded more of Ghostbusters than of The Omen.

But the Rev Nick Bromfield, rector of Drybrook, Lydbrook and Ruardean, is taking it all very seriously: “It might sound medieval to talk about the relationship between good and evil, but there is no middle ground on this. People need to leave well alone.”

Oh, c’mon, Rev Nick. We’re not talking about Old Nick here, are we? All that classical theistic Greek dualism, which gave us the battle between God and the Devil, with the great eschatological battle fought out at the Cross of Calvary? Are you mates with Mel Gibson?  Or perhaps you just didn’t like finding a sheep’s head impaled on a stake outside one of your churches?

I agree that’s not very nice, least of all for the sheep, but are we still really talking about a Miltonesque battle for dominion between the powers of darkness and light? I don’t think so. Evil is the absence of the divine in humanity, made potent by the power of human imagination gone wrong. So I agree that humans obviously have a capacity for great evil. But because they are possessed by the Prince of Darkness? No. There’s only room for one deity here.

Let’s see, if there is no devil there was no Fall, no rebellion against God, no sin, no need for a Saviour, no Incarnation, no atonement on the cross, no salvation, no heaven, no hell, no hope.

What does that leave us with? The Church of England.

The Gay Anglican Church of Canada has arrived

It has its own Wiki: Homosexuality and the Anglican Church of Canada.

In 2006, same-sex couples represented 0.6% of all couples in Canada. This is comparable to data from New Zealand (0.7%) and Australia (0.6%). Over half (53.7%) of same-sex married spouses were men in 2006, compared with 46.3% who were women. About 9.0% of persons in same-sex couples had children aged 24 years and under living in the home in 2006. This was more common for females (16.3%) than for males (2.9%) in same-sex couples.

So, just in case no-one has noticed, the Anglican Church of Canada has ripped the Anglican Communion to shreds, promoted heresy and become the laughing-stock of rational Christians throughout the world for the sake of pandering to 0.6% of Canadian couples. Most of them must be Anglican priests.

Diocese of Niagara: homosexuality is evident in animals, so it must be OK for humans

Here is the argument for blessing same-sex unions as stated by Charles Stirling in the Niagara Anglican; it is fairly representative of the view espoused by the DoN:

Gay and lesbian people are not mistakes of God, to be loved and honoured by congregations who deny them of the sexual gifts and rights of their creation. Make no mistake, it is a matter of natural desire and not an acquired taste or habit. Sex is the natural expectation of all creatures, who come to develop and find a need for each other. Homosexuality is evident in animals, although it may usually miss our observation, and fortunately we don’t have folk chasing them down to prevent it. Fundamentally it is a matter of human rights, as we seek to improve these rights for all people, as they come to us in faith, as whole people of God.

Unstated in Stirling’s reasoning is the assumption that God’s creation has not been corrupted by Satan and mankind’s fall; thus we find, “Gay and lesbian people are not mistakes of God, to be loved and honoured by congregations who deny them of the sexual gifts and rights of their creation.” By liberal lights, if a human trait exists, God must have made it and all who are endowed with it can indulge the appetites it engenders while the church celebrates and blesses them. Animals do it, it must be natural, God must have made nature that way. It doesn’t seem to phase Stirling that the same argument could be applied to pederasty to equal effect.

Alternatively, if, as the bible tells us, the Fall has infected every aspect of creation so that it is no longer entirely in line with God’s intentions, it should come as no surprise that our sexuality has also become corrupted. Homosexual activity is explicitly forbidden in the bible and the desire to indulge homosexual inclinations is a result of the Fall, not of God’s planning.

To sum up the Stirling point of view: if you feel like doing something strongly enough you must have been made that way by God, so you should be allowed to do it; if animals do it too, that clinches the matter.

In the quest for enlightenment on guiding their flock along the path of moral purity, I suggest the bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada take a trip to the zoo. The last time I was there, I noticed some people admiring a gorilla; the gorilla reciprocated by attempting to urinate on them. As Charles Stirling would note, since this type of behaviour is evident in animals, it must be a fundamental human right.

Canada’s image lies in tatters

According to the Guardian

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

Makes me feel proud to be Canadian.

Fear of flying