Saudi Arabia v.s. Ethical Oil

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The Saudi government has hired a law firm to prevent the airing of an advertisement by ethicaloil.org. The advertisement makes the redundantly obvious point that it is better to buy oil from Alberta than an Islamist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic tyranny that would have remained a sand-ridden wasteland populated by antediluvian barbarians had it not been for a Paleozoic accident.

From here:

OTTAWA – Efforts to silence an advertising campaign about Saudi Arabian oil before it re-airs in Canada have succeeded in keeping the ads off of CTV News Channel.

QMI Agency has acquired an e-mail that indicates the broadcaster cancelled a booking for an Ethicaloil.org ad campaign that presents Saudi Arabian oil as an ‘unethical’ energy choice.

“Our position should be that we are in receipt of notice of a legal dispute with respect to this spot and that, accordingly, we will not broadcast the spot until the legal dispute is resolved,” reads the e-mail quoting CTV’s legal department.

The ads have raised the ire of the Saudi government because they equate buying Saudi oil with helping fund a kingdom that oppresses women while presenting Alberta’s oilsands as a more humane alternative.

Sun News Network is still running the ads.

Saudi Arabia’s government has hired a high-powered law firm to get the ads banned. Individual broadcasters have also received warnings not to run the ads.

The Saudis clearly find the advertisement convincing or they would not be exerting themselves to suppress it.

First Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco

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Now he’s mislaid his brain in Timbuctoo.

From here:

Legendary singer Tony Bennett has waded into a new controversy by saying America “caused” the attacks on the Twin Towers.

[….]

“But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett said talking about the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

[….]

“They flew the plane in, but we caused it,” Bennett said. “Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”

Fresh Expressions in the Anglican Church of Canada

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From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has expressed hope that the Fresh Expressions initiative will flourish in the Anglican Church of Canada as it has in the Church of England.

[….]

Fresh Expressions “encourages new forms of church for a fast changing world, working with Christians from a variety of denominations and traditions,” according to the Fresh Expressions U.K. website.

The question is, fresh expressions of what? The fact that heretical dioceses like Niagara and New Westminster have launched into Fresh Expressions is hardly reassuring.  Both dioceses are willing to try anything to boost their flagging numbers but a fresh expression of diocesan baloney isn’t likely to help.

While on the subject of baloney, here is Rowan Williams explaining what Fresh Expressions is all about. Among other things it invites us “to explore one another” – anything to get people in the door.

Pornographic vegetarianism

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PETA, in a flash of marketing insight, has decided that treating women as pieces of meat will prevent cows suffering a similar fate.

From here:

An animal rights group, which is no stranger to attention-grabbing campaigns featuring nude women, plans to launch a pornography website to raise awareness about veganism.

[….]

Visitors to the X-rated site will initially be presented with pornographic content as well as images from PETA’s salacious ads and campaigns, Rajt said. Those images will be followed by pictures and video shot undercover of the mistreatment of animals. The site will also include links to vegetarian and vegan — using no animal products — starter kits as well as recipes.

No doubt pornography addicts will be lining up in droves for their vegetarian starter kits.

N. T. Wright on abortion, the death penalty, Iraq and 9/11

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From here:

You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world. As far as they were concerned, their stance went along with the traditional ancient Jewish and Christian belief in life as a gift from God, which is why (for instance) they refused to follow the ubiquitous pagan practice of ‘exposing’ baby girls (i.e. leaving them out for the wolves or for slave-traders to pick up).

Mind you, there is in my view just as illogical a position on the part of those who solidly oppose the death penalty but are very keen on the ‘right’ of a woman (or couple) to kill their conceived but not yet born child…

From where many of us in the UK sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn’t see things in this horribly oversimplified way…

While we’re about it, how many folk out there were deeply moved both by the reading of the 9/11 victim names and by the thought that if they’d read the names of Iraqi civilians killed by your country and mine over the last ten years we’d have been there for several days?

To summarise:

  1. The execution by the state of a person guilty of the crime of murder is equivalent to the killing of an innocent baby for the sake of convenience. Therefore, the only consistent position is a polarized one where either abortion and capital punishment are both permitted or neither are permitted.
  2. The polarization of American politics is all wrong – except for point 1 above where it is obligatory because it is the Wright kind of polarization.
  3. If you are moved by remembering the deliberate murder of 3000 of your own countrymen, you must be equally moved by the wartime deaths of enemy civilians, even though you tried your best to minimise such casualties. This may appear to be a yet another polarized viewpoint, but it’s fine since it is an example of a number of issues piled into one great Wright-approved heap, not two.
  4. The rest of the world isn’t deceived by American Horrible Simplifications. That’s why, for example, UK sophisticates riot at the slightest pretext, routinely indulge in binge drinking and erect sharia controlled zones  –  all horrible, but at lease not horrible simplifications.

I get the impression that N. T. Wright doesn’t much like America; oops – that’s another hopelessly polarized opinion.

 

Taking pride in the Anglican processes

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While I worked for IBM I was an avid follower of Dilbert, the cartoon character who seemed to understand how IBM works better than the executives who pretend to run it. One of my favourites was pinned to my office wall. In it, Dilbert spent his entire week accomplishing nothing other than fulfilling the demands of the institutional processes surrounding the task – the actual task was never completed. At the end of the week, he concluded that, if he was to take pride in anything, he had to take pride in the processes. The strip was entitled, “We take pride in our processes.”

Such is life at IBM: few executives care what gets done as long as the attempt adheres to the process. To accomplish anything worthwhile demands an intricate knowledge of an underground network of people willing to conspire together to circumvent the elaborate obstacles erected by entire divisions of bureaucrats, the object of which is to prevent anything happening any faster than the pace of continental drift.

I sometimes think that Rowan Williams, with his indabas and listening process, should work at IBM after he retires: he would fit right in.

Here is an article by the ever perceptive Charles Raven:

The strategy behind Williams’ address was not to promote his views on homosexuality directly, but to reflect on the process by which moral decisions in general should be made – not so much to play the game, so to speak, as the more ambitious task of actually trying to define what the playing field should look like. And this is the enduring significance of his address thirteen years later as he continues to promote ‘indaba’ and ‘listening process’ strategies which focus on the process of decision making, while all the time kicking the can down the road in the hope that the institutionally messy consequences of closure can be avoided.

Reminders being sent for abortion appointments because the prospective mothers are forgetting to show up

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From here:

Britain’s largest abortion provider said it is introducing reminders because some girls and women had forgotten about their procedures.

Critics said the move, by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), gave a disturbing insight into casual attitudes to abortion.

BPAS, which carries out almost one third of NHS-funded terminations, likened the service, which begins in November, to reminders sent out by dentists before check-ups.

[….]

Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP for Northampton, who supported an amendment earlier this month by Nadine Dorries to introduce independent counselling for abortion, described the initiative from BPAS as “morally squalid”.

If an unborn baby is a non-human with no soul, not bearing the image of her Creator, then dismembering her in the womb and scraping out the broken parts is of no more significance than a tooth extraction, so sending a reminder is simply – practical.

If an unborn baby is a human, then a reminder to keep an appointment to murder could hardly be more morally squalid than the decision to murder or the act of murder.

The pro-abortion contingent can’t have it both ways.

How to make yourself even more unelectable than you already are

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It isn’t an easy job to further reduce the election chances of the Halton Family Coalition candidate but, with a few well-chose words, Tony Rodrigues proved himself up to the daunting task. There are many reasons for suspecting that the received dogma on global warming is incorrect, so why did Rodrigues have to support an even less plausible theory?

From here:

Family Coalition candidate Tony Rodrigues got the panel off to a unique start stating he does not believe in climate change, but feels the severe weather irregularities around the globe are due to a large dam in China is [sic] tilting the earth off its axis.

The dam does have the potential for increasing the length of day by 0.06 microseconds – around the same length of time Rodrigues spent pondering his environmental platform – but earthquakes have a far greater effect on the earth’s rotational speed.