Joy to the World at Clapham Junction
1
The Anglican Church of Canada and its $600 million
From here:
State Street has been appointed by the General Synod Pension Plan of the Anglican Church of Canada to provide custody, securities lending and other services for CAD $600 million in assets.
- Services include custody, fund accounting, securities lending, foreign exchange
- CAD $600 million in assets to be serviced
State Street has been chosen by the General Synod Pension Plan of the Anglican Church of Canada to provide custody, fund accounting, securities lending and foreign exchange services for CAD $600 million in assets.
The Plan, registered with the province of Ontario and was started in 1946, provides benefits to clergy and lay employees of the Church and related organisations.
A match not made in heaven, perhaps, since State Street has had legal action taken against it for, among other things, misleading investors over sub-prime investments, highly risky illiquid investments, failures to disclose risks to investors and “unconscionable fraud”.
As this article notes,
Over the past two years the US custodian has lost money and reputation. The search is on for new fee revenue to support the industry colossus that the bank has become.
I expect State Street is gratified to have found a church to bolster its fee revenue – if not its reputation.
Yodeller fined for offending Muslims
From here:
An Austrian has been fined for yodelling while mowing his lawn because it offended his Muslim neighbours next door.
A judge decided Helmut Griese, 63, was ‘ridiculing’ their beliefs and fined him nearly £700.
Rather than face a protracted court case with all its attendant legal costs, Griese agreed to pay.
This is obviously a miscarriage of justice: Griese should have been fined for yodelling regardless of the opinion of his Muslim neighbours, although the fact that they were offended by it would be a good reason to reduce the amount of the fine.
The meaning of free will: one of the oldest problems in philosophy
Roger Penrose in his book, “The Emperor’s New Mind” effectively demolished the idea that thinking is algorithmic; the belief that artificial intelligence is possible using current computational mechanisms, is also a casualty of Penrose’s reasoning.
Penrose, not being a theist, places more faith in the role of quantum mechanics in the operation of an apparent Cartesian version of free will than, say, a Christian, who might be more inclined to view free will as the result of being made in God’s image.
Some interesting new research on animals shows that, whether his quantum explanation is correct or not, Penrose’s notion that the operation of the brain is not merely algorithmic is confirmed.
From the BBC:
The free will that humans enjoy is similar to that exercised by animals as simple as flies, a scientist has said.
The idea may simply require “free will” to be redefined, but tests show that animal behaviour is neither completely constrained nor completely free.
The paper, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests animals always have a range of options available to them.
“Choices” actually fit a complex probability but, at least in humans, are perceived as conscious decisions.
The idea tackles one of history’s great philosophical debates, and Bjoern Brembs of the Berlin Free University brings the latest thinking from neurobiology to bear on the question.
What has been long established is that “deterministic behaviour” – the idea that an animal poked in just such a way will react with the same response every time – is not a complete description of behaviour.
“Even the simple animals are not the predictable automatons that they are often portrayed to be,” Dr Brembs told BBC News…..
Christof Koch, a biologist from the California Institute of Technology and frequent author on topics of free will and biology, said that the work hits at the heart of “one of the oldest problems in philosophy”.
In writing about Dr Brembs’ research, he suggested that “the strong, Cartesian version of free will—the belief that if you were placed in exactly the same circumstances again, you could have acted otherwise—is difficult to reconcile with natural laws”.
“There is no way the conscious mind, the refuge of the soul, could influence the brain without leaving tell-tale signs. Physics does not permit such ghostly interactions.”
That last sentence betrays a thoroughly unscientific preconception: that the numinous doesn’t exist. If it does exist, there isn’t any scientific reason for supposing that it could not interact with nature – physics – or, rather physicists – no matter how they exercised their free will, would have little choice but to admit it.
Jihad plots in a Stockholm Mosque
I spent a few days in Stockholm last summer. The security everywhere appeared to be relaxed; here it is around the royal palaces where the crown jewels are kept. I don’t think the cannons work.:
People seemed amiable and trusting. Too trusting, perhaps.
Julian Assange wants his bail address kept private
From here:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tried to hide his bail address from the public in an astonishing move for the man responsible for leaking thousands of diplomatic secrets.
Assange’s lawyers argued that the location – a 10-bedroom stately home – should not be disclosed on grounds of privacy during yesterday’s hearing at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
And who can blame him? After all, it’s so inconvenient to have one’s private life plastered on the Internet for everyone to see.
Poor Julian; now everyone knows he is languishing in a 10 bedroom mansion. We can only hope his telephone is bugged.
Anglican vicar fights to keep strip clubs and sex shops open
Rev. Paul Turp is vicar of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, a church which was immortalised in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons: “When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch”.
It now has another claim to fame since Rev. Turp is supporting something that will undoubtedly start a trend in the Anglican Church: he wants to keep the local strip clubs and sex shops open – not for his own personal use, of course.
His argument is that closing them would drive the businesses underground where they would be controlled by criminals. By that standard, the borough might as well install some opium dens and brothels, too. Rev. Paul Turp could rent them space in his church making it rich – as the bells would say.
[flv:https://anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/Strip_club.flv 740 450]
The Diocese of New Westminster: still distorting the facts
Trustees of four Vancouver-area churches will be filing an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, appealing an earlier court decision which prevents them using their church buildings.
In spite of the fact that the parishes have made generous offers to settle the dispute, the Diocese of New Westminster seems determined to portray the Vancouver parishes as litigation villains who are unwilling to negotiate with the diocese outside of the courts.
The diocese declares:
ANiC Trustees Initiate Further Legal Action
Bishop Ingham has offered to meet with the leaders of the four congregations to discuss how everyone can move forward in keeping with the decisions of the courts and appoint new clergy for these parishes. To date, there has been no response.
Bishop Ingham and Diocesan leadership do not believe that there is any need to take any further court challenges, which will incur more expense and anxiety. However they respect the Plaintiffs’ right to request the Supreme Court to hear their case as the final legal option available to them.
Ingham has left the parishes the option of submitting to his leadership, leaving their buildings or continuing the appeal. His belief that there isn’t any need for an appeal is hardly surprising since things have gone his way so far: the fox has a chicken in its mouth and doesn’t see any need for the chicken to continue struggling.
A diocesan document that was filed with the courts to obtain costs from the parishes goes further:
ANiC is obviously pursuing systematic, widespread litigation across the country aimed at securing church properties for its use, in the same manner as this litigation. As ANiC has stated in its newsletter, the case at bar is just the “first significant ANiC parish trial”. If ANiC were to be insulated from adverse cost awards (and a fortiori. To be indemnified for its own legal costs from parish funds), the natural result will be simply that ANiC will pursue litigation more readily and ACC will be left to defend itself against a zealous litigant with nothing to lose.
All of which is arrant nonsense, since in the vast majority of court cases, it is the ACoC diocese that has been the zealous litigant. Even the Vancouver parishes only used the courts as a last resort: it was the only alternative to being thrown out of their buildings.
The same twaddle is being peddled from the pulpit in the Diocese of Niagara: the diocese is claiming to be the defendant in the Niagara court cases, even though it initiated the litigation.
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Abortion
Planned Parenthood is selling abortion promoting Christmas cards. No doubt they would have advised aborting the baby Jesus: after all, his mother was obviously 
mentally unstable – she thought she was a Virgin.
From here:
Quick quiz. Tell us what comes to mind when someone says Christmas: The Christ child and the Virgin Mary maybe? Santa and his reindeer? Abortion? If you nodded at all three, you must be one of the whacked out Americans who will be buying their holiday cards from Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania this year, the one place you can find “Choice on Earth” cards for sale for the holiday season.
Switzerland to vote on incest legality
From here:
Switzerland is considering a repeal its incest laws to make sexual relations between family members legal.
It claims the law is ‘obsolete’ and that the courts have dealt with just three cases since 1984.
The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law de-criminalising sex between adult consenting family members which must now be considered by the government….
Politicians of both the left and right are outraged at the suggested change. But Green party MP and lawyer Daniel Vischer said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.
The Green MP’s seeing nothing wrong with incest is an apt illustration of what happens when you toss out the foundation upon which right and wrong are based: in this case, Judeo-Christian ethics.
When that is gone, subjectivity replaces it and all it takes to turn a wrong into a right is for someone to see it that way. One wonders what churches will do with this if it passes; will they bless same-sex partnerships between siblings?