From here:
A 54-year-old carpenter in Wantage, England, accidentally cut off his own penis while working with a saw, his mother says.
“This was an unfortunate accident but these things happen all the time to people in his profession.”
“I have spoken to him and he is quite embarrassed about the whole incident”
And to think I get upset when I accidentally delete a computer file.
It would be more accurate to say I hate team sports; this is probably because, in modern vernacular, I am not a team player. I don’t want to be a team player – I even dislike the term. Of course, to get on in modern business, you have to at least give the appearance of being a team player. However, although still employed by a large company, I am too old, tired and crotchety to maintain any illusions of being one, having long given up any pretensions of getting on.
But I do like tennis. It is the antithesis of a team sport: individuals battle physically and mentally – alone. When I was younger, fitter, thinner and taller I used to play tennis; I stopped when my son started beating me. But I still watch and enjoy Wimbledon; of course, the men’s finals is always on Sunday, so I always miss it.
I suspected Roger Federer would win and beat Pete Sampras’s Grand Slam record; watching Federer ply his trade is like watching grace in motion. He deserved to win and is probably the greatest tennis player ever – until the next one.
As part of the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) – the bastion of Anglican Marxist chic – Fred Hiltz is peddling Primate’s Blend Fair Trade Coffee. On first blush one might be tempted to rejoice that Hiltz has given up on theology – as it has given up on him – and gone into the more honest occupation of coffee planting, preferably near some remote and humid Colombian rain forest where he would be free to meditate on his minuscule carbon footprint. No such luck; this is more about Fair Trade than coffee.
Introducing The Primate’s Blend – a uniquely blended, shade-grown, organic, Fair Trade coffee. Shade-grown coffees trees are grown under a shade canopy that is made up of a variety of trees; there are often companion plantings of tropical fruit trees. This means the plantations use a minimum of water and support local and migrating bird populations. These coffees are certified organic.
Is Hiltz striking a blow for justice as I am sure he would like us to think, or is this an elitist liberal decoy, requiring no effort, and having little effect other than soothing the delicate consciences of effete coffee swilling bishops?
Some claim it’s worse: Fair Trade is damaging to those it claims to help:
A number of interventionist initiatives have been launched or proposed in response to the coffee
market’s perceived breakdown. The best known is the “fair trade” coffee campaign, in which roasters and retailers are pressured by activist groups to sell coffee grown under specified conditions and purchased at above-market prices.
However well-intentioned, interventionist schemes to lift prices above market levels ignore those market realities. Accordingly, they are doomed to end in failure—or to offer cures that are worse than the disease. There are constructive measures that can help to ease the plight of struggling coffee farmers, but they consist of efforts to improve the market’s performance— not block it or demonize it.
And:
Unfair Trade argues that for all its good intentions, Fairtrade is not fair. Firstly, by guaranteeing certified farmers a minimum price for their goods, it can distort local markets leaving other farmers even worse off. Secondly, only about 10 percent of the premium paid by consumers actually makes it to the producer, which makes it an inefficient way of helping the poor. Most importantly, Fairtrade does little to aid economic development, focusing instead on sustaining farmers in their current state.
Poor Hiltz, he can’t even get his coffee right.
Gay Pride Parades are a celebration of grotesqueries. One would think that the ostensible desire for homosexuality to be absorbed into the zeitgeist of humdrum social acceptability would be antipathetic to publicly displaying the oddities that inhabit the fringes of the gender demolishment movement. But no, every year, in every country that will allow it, there is the hideous cavorting of those intent on impressing the rest of us with their normality.
What is even stranger, is the attendance of politicians who obviously view the whole exercise as a means of attracting votes. In the UK, political parties are vying with each other to exhibit their gayness by abandoning themselves to the revelry.
Gordon Brown even tries to smile, which is a dreadful mistake.
We are having two bathrooms renovated on the top floor of our house. This means that in the early hours of the morning, the cost of the evening’s fluid intake is either abdominal agony or a trek through an obstacle course of sleeping dogs, cats, vacuum cleaner hoses – which become oddly animated at night – and furniture which has shifted position so that you stub your toe as you pass it.
As in the case of all renovations, everything is behind, things are forgotten, the workers are pulled off your job to pacify other agitated customers and everyone is frustrated. The person in charge is a Muslim; he is a decent fellow and is doing his best to get things done. This afternoon he was supposed to bring over some of that sticky stuff that Canadians use to fill holes in walls, so that the person doing the work could complete at least one of the bathrooms.
The person doing the work told me in hushed tones that the “mud” – I was tempted to say wattle and daub – would not be coming because the person in charge had gone to the Mosque to pray, even though this was a repeat performance that was bound to make me less than happy. So we have another delay and no bathrooms for the weekend; I am about to search ebay for chamber pots.
Now to the point: how many Christians are willing to inconvenience themselves, annoy people who might want them to do something else and jeopardise their livelihood because, on Sunday, nothing is more important than the public worship of God?
Instead, we are constantly looking for ways to make our services more appealing – not just to the unchurched, but to Christians so we can get them to show up. Shorter services, shorter sermons, more modern music, less modern music, services later in the day, Fresh Expressions, softer pews, coffee before and after: you name it, we’re willing to try it.
The truth is, Christians don’t take their faith seriously; I suspect it’s because they don’t really believe it’s true. Muslims do take their faith seriously; I suspect it’s because they really believe it’s true.
That’s why Christendom is doomed.
While many of us are too nervous to talk to our neighbours about Christ, for Acts 17 Apologetics Ministries that’s too easy: they like to evangelise Muslims.
This extraordinary video shows what happens when they went to the Dearborn Arab Festival to ask some questions; imagine what might have happened if they were actually evangelising:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEPod-hxD7g]
The Association of Chief Police Officers in the UK has written a report containing a 102 word sentence that defies all efforts to pry meaning from it:
‘The promise of reform which the Green Paper heralds holds much for the public and Service alike; local policing, customised to local need with authentic answerability, strengthened accountabilities at force level through reforms to police authorities and HMIC, performance management at the service of localities with targets and plans tailored to local needs, the end of centrally-engineered one size fits all initiatives, an intelligent approach to cutting red tape through redesign of processes and cultures, a renewed emphasis on strategic development so as to better equip our service to meet the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.’
My favourite part is: “a renewed emphasis on strategic development so as to better equip our service to meet the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.” A phrase of concentrated impenetrability, garnished with the inevitable split infinitive.
[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_viL4HY3ttw]
The Anglican Church of Canada has a site where you can leave comments on what you think the ACoC should look like in 2019. I have left comments but they languished for a while in comment moderation purgatory until they the time came for their final casting into outer darkness, never to be seen again. I put this down to my unpopularity with the apparatchiks responsible for experientially discerning the prophetic utterances worthy to find a place on the forum.
What does surprise me is that there are unannounced modifications and deletions being made to the “stories” that do appear.
This is a particularly devious and underhanded way of dealing with unwanted criticism: it is censorship of the worst kind, borne of the kind of desperation prevalent amongst leaders of decaying regimes.
How to make everyone’s life miserable: Equality Camp:
The Government’s ‘equality’ watchdog is recruiting 14 and 15-year-olds for its second annual summer camp.
The camp, called Our Space, will consist of a few days in the Lake District with outdoor activities and “modules to discuss diversity, equality and rights”.
The camp is being organised by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the body which recently funded a leading homosexual lobby group to write a guide for employers on how to deal with religious workers.
In practice, equality means the reduction of everything and everyone to the same squalid level of grey mediocrity; the fortunate few who escape the malevolent levelling are the government officials employed to inflict the misery on everyone else.
As Theodore Dalrymple observes:
Equality of opportunity is a thoroughly nasty and totalitarian concept. It is the demand that no one should start (or continue) life with any advantages relative to another. But how could such a condition actually be achieved? Leaving aside genetic differences, which must persist until all hereditary endowments can be made precisely the same, and which for the time being must be accepted even though they are unfair (not unjust, although most people nowadays seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the two), the only way environmental factors affecting opportunities can be made equal is by social engineering on a scale that would make North Korea look like a paradise of laissez-faire..