From here:
DELANO, California — A teacher is charged with urinating in front of a classroom full of students.
Substitute teacher Matthew Steven Davis is charged with urinating into a cup in front of students at a high school in Delano.
Davis had been an Anglican priest and may have mental issues because of a severe car crash several years ago that killed his wife. His bail is set at $650,000.
Davis is not yet in line to become the next Episcopal Bishop of California.
But those who don’t will be disciplined by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff: they will be forced to read one of his books.
The Liberal plan to include abortion in the Conservative government’s G8 maternal health initiative failed by 144-138; surprisingly, some Liberals still have a conscience and either voted against the bill or stayed away.
From the National Post:
And so the Liberals ended up with some tremendous egg on their face. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff seemed to concede as much after emerging from the weekly closed-door meeting with his caucus. ““I would have preferred a different result,” he wryly observed.
Privately, Liberal MPs said that the 90-minute caucus meeting was not a happy place with MPs directing their frustration at Ignatieff, his staff, and party whip Rodger Cuzner. It would have been Cuzner’s job to make sure all of his MPs knew it was a whipped vote and to make sure they were all in their seats and ready to vote “Aye”. Ignatieff would not say what punishment would be in store for the Liberal MPs who did not vote the way they were supposed to, saying only that Cuzner would decide on that.
“We look like fools,” one Liberal MP said privately.
Liberal MPs don’t mind looking like baby killers, but they hate looking like fools.
The Diocese of Niagara may not have a mission, but it does have a Mission Strategy Committee. According to one of its members, (page 1 here) bold steps are needed to pull the Niagara diocese out of what even the most optimistic are seeing as a slump.
In case anyone is labouring under the misapprehension that Niagara’s malaise is rooted in a liberal drift away from Christianity towards an amalgam of neo-paganism, Gaia worship and Unitarianism and that to speak to a non-believer about this is simply too embarrassing, Andy Kalbfleisch sets us straight. The people of Diocese of Niagara keep quiet about their beliefs because to do otherwise might expose them as aggressive right-wingers – this ever present danger is a constant worry for the diocese:
The growth of, dare I say, aggressive right wing evangelical denominations, have made us fearful of being coloured with the same brush when we speak about mission and discipleship. We want to be seen and heard as promoting a God of love instead of a God of fear. So it’s much easier to forget or push to the margins of our church experience, actions and strategies about mission and discipleship. Instead we may engage aggressively in important, but peripheral activities that serve God but that may not spread His word in the manner of first century Christians.
As Malcolm Muggeridge noted:
So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he heeled over – a weary, battered old brontosaurus – and became extinct.
Canada is busy breeding a league of barbarians in the University of Ottawa under the tutelage of Provost, Francois Houle. When Ann Coulter tried to speak at the University of Ottawa, she was greeted by the Nazi tactics of intimidation and mindless chanting – the book burning will begin soon. Imagine what would have happened if something really controversial had taken place – oh, right, nothing.
From the National Post:
“Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council, so welcome to Canada!”
The “accusation” of which Ms. Coulter speaks is a reference to an email she received from University of Ottawa vice-president and provost Francois Houle on Friday, warning her that freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada than in the U.S. and that she should take care not to step over the line.
Ms. Coulter said that letter set the tone for and encouraged the protesters. She said it’s well known on the campus speaking circuit that conservatives need to travel with security staff, as she did.
“I’m pretty sure little Francois A-Houle does not need to travel with a bodyguard,” she said. “I would like to know when this sort of violence, this sort of protest, has been inflicted upon a Muslim — who appear to be, from what I’ve read of the human rights complaints, the only protected group in Canada. I think I’ll give my speech tomorrow night in a burka. That will protect me.”
After I have celebrated Earth Hour by turning all my lights on, I am going to flush all the toilets in the house in orgiastic abandon. While doing so, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that crackpots in churches in 50 countries will be queuing in front of pretend toilets in order to bring clean water to those in need. I can already feel the water beginning to flow.
“The water crisis is a symptom of our ‘unjust’, our ‘polluted’ relations with one another and with the rest of creation,” she added. “The two are interconnected. And water, the bloodstream of the earth, is one of the elements that makes this connection visible and felt.”
In a act of solidarity with the 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to safe, private and hygienic lavatories, staff members of the various church-related organizations based at the Ecumenical Centre queued in front of a symbolic “toilet door” for ten minutes. By doing so, they became part of the World’s Longest Toilet Queue. This campaign, taking place in more than 50 countries on all continents, is urging governments to tackle the global sanitation crisis.
I don’t know why no-one has thought of this before: people who don’t need to use a toilet lining up in front of a mock loo is the obvious way to tackle a global sanitation crisis.
Perhaps it would shut him up. From the Montreal Gazette:
Yolande James, Quebec’s immigration minister and the Liberal MNA for the West Island’s Nelligan riding, got a rude awakening yesterday.
Rev. Alan T. Perry, the Anglican pastor of St. Barnabas Church in Pierrefonds, took James to task for her decision last week to bar a woman wearing a niqab from French classes for immigrants.
In a letter to The Gazette, Perry chastised James for reneging on her baptismal and confirmation obligations as an Anglican “to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect for the dignity of every human being.”
“I was surprised to see that,” James told The Gazette. “Notably because, first of all, I’m Catholic.
Perry later apologised to James for misidentifying – stigmatising – her as Anglican. Nevertheless, his insistence on striving for peace and justice is only in evidence when convenient. Here, for example, Perry is determined to illegitimately strip the clerical title from Anglican clergy because they refused to acquiesce to the heretical drift of the church that employs him.
So says Mark Steyn.
Houle was stupid enough to send Ann Coulter an email warning her not to spend her time in Canada promoting hatred against any identifiable group [which] would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges, a missive which has earned him ridicule from all over the place.
Houle is employed by the Ottawa School of Political Studies; unsurprisingly he appears to be a callow leftist – a condition of employment in Political Studies departments – who enjoys waving red flags in front of bulls in his spare time.
Equality hell in action:
A Christian bed-and-breakfast owner is facing legal action for breaching discrimination laws after turning away a gay couple.
Susanne Wilkinson said it was ‘against her convictions’ to let the couple share a double bed in the home where she lives with her husband and children.
But she was reported to police after refusing a room to Michael Black, 62, and John Morgan, 56.
Mr Morgan said he and Mr Black, who live together in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, were considering suing not for money but ‘for a principle’.
The principle in question appears to be the grinding into oblivion anyone who is not prepared to accept homosexual activity as other than aberrant – and Christians are in the direct line of fire. This isn’t the first instance.
In December 2009, the Anglican Church of Canada implored its membership – whose size is diminishing far more rapidly than Arctic ice – to petition parliament to combat melting sea ice in the Arctic:
What was, only a few years ago, seen as one possibility among several has now become an undisputed fact: Climate change is real and is having increasingly serious impacts on the environment and people. More worrisome, its impact is stronger and faster than was predicted even a short time ago. Artic [sic] ice is melting much faster than expected, so are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In Canada, we see impacts of changing climate in the melting of permafrost in the North and weather- related events such as floods and droughts in the South. The changes are taking place at an increasing speed and the predictions are repeatedly turning out too optimistic.
Oops. It appears that strong winds are causing much of the loss of Arctic sea-ice:
Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years, new research reveals.
Ice blown out of the Arctic area by winds can explain the one-third drop of sea ice since 1979, scientists believe.
The study helps to explain the huge loss of ice in the region during the summers of 2007 and 2008, after which some commentators suggested the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free during the summertime within a decade.
Still, there is probably enough wind generated by the ACoC to blow all the ice back again.
As Einstein observed, pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. To find a concise elegant solution to a mathematical problem is satisfying, exciting and intrinsically worthwhile; I’m sure God likes pure mathematics.
The Poincaré Conjecture has bothered mathematicians for almost 100 years; it has been solved by a somewhat eccentric Russian mathematician:
The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announces today that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, is the recipient of the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. The citation for the award reads:
The Clay Mathematics Institute hereby awards the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture to Grigoriy Perelman.
The Poincaré conjecture is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems established by CMI in 2000. The Prizes were conceived to record some of the most difficult problems with which mathematicians were grappling at the turn of the second millennium; to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics, the frontier is still open and abounds in important unsolved problems; to emphasize the importance of working towards a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems; and to recognize achievement in mathematics of historical magnitude.
Formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, the conjecture is fundamental to achieving an understanding of three-dimensional shapes (compact manifolds). The simplest of these shapes is the three-dimensional sphere. It is contained in four-dimensional space, and is defined as the set of points at a fixed distance from a given point, just as the two-dimensional sphere (skin of an orange or surface of the earth) is defined as the set of points in three-dimensional space at a fixed distance from a given point (the center).
Since we cannot directly visualize objects in n-dimensional space, Poincaré asked whether there is a test for recognizing when a shape is the three-sphere by performing measurements and other operations inside the shape. The goal was to recognize all three-spheres even though they may be highly distorted. Poincaré found the right test (simple connectivity). However, no one before Perelman was able to show that the test guaranteed that the given shape was in fact a three-sphere.
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