Whatever you do, don’t mention the war

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There is almost no-one left that it is permissible to stereotype; now Germans are out, apparently.

A radio advertisement has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for implying Germans are tyrants.

Complaints were upheld about a Reed recruitment website commercial, which had an angry boss speaking in German.

The ASA said it could cause serious offence to some listeners and was found to be offensive because it used a negative stereotype.

The advert had sparked 13 complaints from the public, but Reed did not comment on them.

The ASA also said that while the use of stereotypes was “inevitable” to establish a character in a short radio advert, this should not “perpetuate damaging misconceptions”.

The watchdog said: “We noted the ad used a German speaker, rather than someone speaking English, to portray the boss as ‘a bit of a tyrant’ and the humour derived from a stereotype at the expense of German people.

This is a shame really, since up until now I have been killing Nazis in Wolfenstein 2 with a completely clear conscience – I’d hate to “perpetuate damaging misconceptions”, though. Really.

Classical music used to punish school children

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Detentions are not what they used to be:

Detentions where pupils are forced to listen to classical music are an effective deterrent against unruly behaviour, a head teacher has found.

Brian Walker, head at West Park School in Derby, runs the two-hour detentions, featuring Elgar, Mozart, Verdi and Bach, on a Friday after school.

Pupils on their third official warning that week can expect to attend.

When I was in school things were much tougher: we were forced to listen to John Cage. It was so agonising, some of my friends cut off their own ears.

Another unrealistic proposal from Ephraim Radner

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It’s a specialty of his:

An Unrealistic Proposal for the Sake of the Gospel.

In the face of the tragedy in Haiti, I want to make a proposal. It’s not a realistic proposal, I grant; but it is a serious one. My proposal is this: that all those Anglicans involved in litigation amongst one another in North America – both in the Episcopal Church and those outside of TEC; in the Anglican Church of Canada, and those outside – herewith cease all court battles over property. And, having done this, they do two further things:

a. devote the forecast amount they were planning to spend on such litigation to the rebuilding of the Episcopal Church and its people in Haiti; and

b. sit down with one another, prayerfully and for however long it takes, and with whatever mediating and facilitating presence they accept, and agree to a mutually agreed process for dealing with contested property.

Before addressing the “unrealistic” character of this proposal, let’s be clear about the money that may be involved. As I read TEC’s national budget, for instance, over $4 million has been spent already on “Title IV” and litigation matters in the dioceses, and over $4 million more is budgeted for the next triennium. Let’s assume that some comparable amount is being spent by the opposing parties – maybe not as much, but still a lot. I don’t know … $3 million over the past three years and $3 million more over the next? Maybe less. Then there are the dioceses alone that are spending their own money. I know that Colorado has spent upwards of $3 million in these matters, and its opponents again, perhaps less again but certainly a sizable amount. I really don’t know what we’re talking about here – maybe $20 million already spent, maybe more? And certainly another $10 million in the pipeline.

Isn’t this rather crazy? Isn’t this in fact unfaithful? Isn’t this, indeed, perverse and even blasphemous?

And it is certainly so in the face of the needs we have just been witnessing in Port-au-Prince, needs which, it must be said, have been around us all the time these past years, but here have come into a blinding and heart-rending focus.

Rev. Radner has a point; giving large sums of money to lawyers to squabble over who owns a building does seem criminal in the face of what the church in Haiti has suffered.

Of course, it is so much easier to offer advice on how others should donate to good causes than it is to receive similar advice oneself. Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. I can’t help noticing that Wycliffe College occupies some large buildings in an expensive part of Toronto; they would probably fetch at least $10M if sold to a condo developer – the probable fate of most of the buildings that are now in property disputes. So, Rev. Radner, take your own advice, sell the buildings and, along with Messrs. Bowen, Hayes, Seitz and the rest, find somewhere cheaper – a tent, say – and give the money to Haiti.

Church fetes ‘radicalising Anglicans’ claim

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Anglican extremism in action:

An extremist Anglican group is infiltrating church fetes and vicarage tea parties in a plot to radicalise churchgoers, according to the anti-terrorist squad.

The group, MoreT4Uvicar, is believed to have close links with Al-cester, with some members allegedly attending training camps in the town.

But the group says that the training camps only provide religious instruction, choir practice and bell-ringing classes.

It’s alleged that the money raised at the events is laundered and used to build and maintain strategically placed fortified stone towers throughout the country.

‘We’re concerned about MoreT4Uvicar and the paramilitary infrastructure being built right under our noses,’ said the head of the anti-terrorist squad. ‘We want to ensure that innocent church-going folk understand the dangers of paying 20p for a slice of Victoria Sponge to these people.’

Warming and Rumours of Warming

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The fudging of climate science is much broader and deeper than the Climategate email embarrassment would lead one to believe. Guesswork is rife:

Claims by the world’s leading climate scientists that most of the Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 25 years were last night exposed as nonsense.

The alarmist warning appeared two years ago in a highly influential report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At the time the IPCC insisted that its report contained the latest and most detailed evidence yet of the risks of man-made climate change to the planet.

But the experts behind the warning have now admitted their claim was not based on hard science – but a news story that appeared in the magazine New Scientist in the late 1990s.

That story was itself based on a telephone conversation with an Indian scientist who has since admitted it was little more than speculation.

And figures have been fiddled:

Certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo of Icecap.us and a computer programmer from San Jose, Michael Smith, have written an expose of extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the federal government’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. D’Aleo says in the report, “NOAA is seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud.

four key revelations:

1. NCDC is no longer monitoring many actual temperature stations. Coleman explains, “In the transition to a computer averaging system, the National Data Climate Center deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it evolved to a system of global grid boxes. The number that goes into each grid box is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more weather observation stations nearest that grid box.” This method is inaccurate according to D’Aleo because “temperatures are not linear over space, but instead vary enormously because of differences in terrain, elevation, vegetation, water versus land and urbanization.” It also makes an apples and oranges situation, comparing today’s averaged grid boxes to past actual station temperatures.

2. The number of weather stations NCDC uses was reduced 75%, from approximately 6,000 to 1,000 stations.

3.  The vast majority of the stations cut from the record were from the cooler higher latitudes and altitudes. Smith says, “The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called ‘The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat.”

4.  Temperatures then were altered by “homogenization,” a process which always seemed to result in higher readings. According to the report,”the data centers then performed some final adjustments to the gathered data before final analysis. These adjustments are in some cases frequent and undocumented. Examining raw data versus processed final data shows numerous examples where the adjusted data shows a warming trend where the raw data had little change.”

In fact, it’s getting to the point where the only people who still believe in global warming are the non compos mentis inhabitants of the dusty corners of derelict liberal churches represented by dotty United Church Moderators and batty Anglican bishops.

A Post Copenhagen Jeremiad

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The Moderator of the United Church of Canada has written this lament on the dismal failure of the climate conference. It cheered me up immensely:

An open letter to all Canadians from the Moderator of The United Church of Canada.

This letter was born in Copenhagen where, heartbroken, I watched the international climate talks fall apart.

Heartbroken because it was clear to me, as it was to many of you, that the talks in Copenhagen needed to succeed, that it is no longer safe for us to go on as we have before.

I believe this is a unique time in humanity’s fretful reign on Earth, a rare moment that will have historic significance.

And yet the Copenhagen talks failed. We have no plan to reduce deadly emissions of carbon dioxide. Emissions that are a symptom of our broken relationship with the web of life.

I don’t remember ever having a relationship with the web of life let alone breaking it; still, if I do discover it, I’ll be sure to emit copiously all over it to ensure that we become disentangled at its earliest convenience.

Pious Atheism

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An organisation associated with Richard Dawkins called Non-Believers Giving Aid is collecting donations for Haiti. This is a good thing, of course, since Haiti needs all the help it can get. A side benefit for atheists, apparently,  is that not only will their donations be god-free, but also they will help to dispel the vicious rumour that atheists are a heartless bunch who care only for themselves:

2. When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.

It goes without saying that your donations will only be passed on to aid organizations that do not have religious affiliations. In the case of Haiti, the two organizations we have chosen are:  Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières),  International Red Cross.

This goes to show that these ‘non-believers’ do actually believe in something: that the suffering of their fellow-man should be alleviated. Since atheists are convinced that the universe is one with at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference, I can’t help wondering why they have at least this one not particularly rational belief. And why does an atheist wish to present an appearance of being less callous than the universe that he claims begot him?

It’s just not like that in England

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Maybe it’s got something to do with the weather in the UK: it’s usually grey. In keeping with avoiding black and white, in July 2008, Tom Wright criticised GAFCON in this way:

It is to say, rather, that the GAFCON proposals are not only not needed in England but are positively harmful and indeed offensive. This was more or less what I said on the radio last Thursday, where I distinguished carefully between the American and English situations. AS FAR AS ENGLAND IS CONCERNED, it is damaging, arrogant and irrelevant for GAFCON leaders to say, as they are now doing, ‘choose you this day whom you will serve’, with the implication that there are now only two parties in the church, the orthodox and the liberals, and that to refuse to sign up to GAFCON is to decide for the liberals. Things are just not like that. Certainly not here in England.

The Church of England does seem to be moving full steam ahead in that direction, though:

A proposal to give the partners of gay priests some of the same rights that are awarded to priests’ spouses is likely to spark a new row over homosexuality.

Bishops and senior clergy will debate at next month’s General Synod whether the Church should provide same-sex couples with the same financial benefits as are awarded to married couples.

Traditionalists have expressed strong opposition to the move, which they claim would give official recognition to homosexual relationships.

They warn that affording equal treatment to heterosexual and homosexual couples would undermine the Church’s teaching on marriage.

At present, the Church bars clergy from being in active gay relationships, although it bowed to pressure to allow them to enter civil partnerships on the condition that they are celibate.

If this is sufficiently important to risk the stability – what’s left of it – of the Church of England by bringing a motion to General Synod, there must surely be a significant number of homosexual clergy in “celibate” – nudge, wink – relationships. If this motion is brought to GS, let alone if it passes, it will make a mockery of the CoE’s teaching on marriage.

So, Tom, is it time for  ‘choose you this day whom you will serve’, yet?

Just when it seemed that Cindy Sheehan had decided to lead a quiet life

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She turned up again protesting outside Dick Cheney’s house of all places.

LANGLEY, Virginia  —  A group led by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has protested near the CIA’s headquarters and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s home in northern Virginia.

They were protesting the use of unmanned drone aircraft to attack al-Qaida and Taliban targets.

The group of about 70 people rallied alongside a highway near the CIA compound Saturday. About half then marched to Cheney’s nearby street and stayed for 20 minutes. Police kept them from going down his street.

Hasn’t anyone told her that Obama and Biden won the election in 2008?