Mid-Week Post

For the chewy centre of the week.

Un-freaking-believable:

On Monday, Heritage Minister James Moore responded to an order paper submitted in November by fellow Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber.

Rathgeber  had asked the public broadcaster to disclose how much it spends on everything from alcohol and hospitality to the salaries and expenses of its top personalities.

According to a story at iPolitics, Moore and the CBC were short on details.

While the CBC did disclose that approximately 730 employees are paid more than $100,000 a year, the taxpayer funded corporation won't tell Parliament who they are and exactly how much they earn.

Their names and precise salaries, according to the documents tabled in Parliament, are protected under Federal Privacy Act.

The only employee whose salary range and expenses the broadcaster was willing to divulge was CBC/Radio-Canada President Hubert Lacroix. The CBC said Lacroix's salary, set by the Governor in Council, was between $358,400 and $421,600 in 2011.

De-fund this.  Now.

This wouldn’t be a problem in North Korea but it is in Canada:

The students’ union of University College London has passed a motion this week officially making the campus “pro-choice.” The motion also dictates that campus groups, including the chaplaincies, must invite pro-abortion speakers to their events in equal numbers to pro-life speakers when addressing “terminations.”

The problem could be solved if student unions are abolished and the money that students could use is not given to greedy little censorious fascists.

Another problem could be solved if schools are strictly for academic achievements, not playgrounds for special-interest groups populated with freaky little kids:

After Ontario’s Catholic trustees took a strong stand against homosexual activism in a new anti-bullying plan last week, Ontario’s government has slammed the plan for failing to allow for single-issue clubs for homosexual students.

“We’ve been absolutely crystal clear that we expect students to participate in groups and have the issues important to them talked about,” Education Minister Laurel Broten told the Catholic Register’s Deborah Gyapong on Monday.

In a Jan. 25th document titled Respecting Differences, the Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association (OCSTA) established a framework for student-led clubs to combat bullying related to racism, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.

The document insists the clubs remain faithful to Catholic teaching, be overseen by a staff advisor who knows and believes the Church’s teaching, and cannot engage in activism against Catholic teaching.

It comes in response to Broten’s Bill 13 (the Accepting Schools Act), which would require schools to allow students to “establish and lead … organizations with the name gay-straight alliance or another name.”

Broten and Premier Dalton McGuinty have both insisted the bill would require schools to establish GSAs, and Broten has labeled opponents of the bill as “homophobic.”

OCSTA’s document states, however, that GSAs are “not acceptable in Catholic schools.”

From the hostess with the mostest:

A HOMILY delivered at Knock shrine by the Bishop of Raphoe, Philip Boyce, is being investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions following a formal complaint by a leading humanist who claims the sermon was an incitement to hatred.

The gardai have confirmed to former Fine Gael election candidate John Colgan that they have prepared and forwarded a file to the DPP after he made allegations that the address by Dr Boyce was in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989.

The homily, entitled: "To Trust in God" was delivered to worshippers during a novena at the Marian shrine in Co Mayo last August and subsequently reported in the media, including The Irish Times, under the headline: "'Godless culture' attacking church, says bishop."

Mr Colgan, a retired chartered engineer and economist from Leixlip, Co Kildare, referred in his formal complaint to two key passages in Dr Boyce's homily which he believes broke the law.

One of the passages referred to the Catholic Church in Ireland being "attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture".

A second passage, which was included in the complaint, stated: "For the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is the fact they have a future; it is not that they know all the details that await them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness."

Mr Colgan, who was a leader in the 'Campaign to Separate Church and State' in the late 1990s, said in his complaint: "I believe statements of this kind are an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the [Incitement to Hatred] Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican's Irish Mission Church."

To back up his complaint, Mr Colgan referred to two statistical surveys carried out two decades apart by the Jesuit sociologist and academic Fr Michael MacGreil, entitled: 'Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland' and 'Prejudice in Ireland Revisited' which Mr Colgan claims showed "marked prejudice by Roman Catholics and other Christian denominations against agnostics and atheists" (humanist was not an option offered to respondents in either survey).

In his complaint, Mr Colgan said he attributed this prejudice to "hostile propaganda disseminated in school and chapel in the main by or for the institutional churches, for there is no rational or temporal reason". 

This is proof that militant atheists are the new fundamentalists.

That anyone has to apologise for his views should be personally tiring enough, especially to the perpetually thin-skinned, but that a man of the cloth cannot deliver from the pulpit or epistle- his purview, I might stress- what is plainly godless, ergo, atheist, just shows how far some will go not to hear what they don’t want to hear.

Men and women died for this:

There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department.

This reflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime.

In the intervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan's new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country.

The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the State Department's latest International Religious Freedom Report. The report, which was released last month and covers the period of July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010, also states that “there were no Christian schools in the country.”

“There is no longer a public Christian church; the courts have not upheld the church's claim to its 99-year lease, and the landowner destroyed the building in March [2010],” reads the State Department report on religious freedom. “[Private] chapels and churches for the international community of various faiths are located on several military bases, PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams], and at the Italian embassy. Some citizens who converted to Christianity as refugees have returned.”

Even the Americans see where the Shafias could lead us:

Shafia's victims were tragic figures who deserved much better. There will be more like them in Canada if Islam becomes more and more established, if Canadians continue to turn a blind eye to what it really is, not to what its apologists and adherents would have them believe it is. Perhaps the Shafia case will serve to wake Canadians up to Islam's true nature and essence and to the threat it poses to them and to take meaningful steps to overcome it.

Thank you:

Exactly so. The default position of pro-choicers, whether or not they frame it this way themselves, amounts to a belief that abortion is always the right choice for women who have given it even a moment’s consideration. Once a woman has so much as considered the possibility of abortion, any effort to change her mind – or even just to give her more information to consider – is an attempt to limit her freedom of choice. A woman who doesn’t go through with her impulse to abort is a woman who has fallen victim to some sort of pro-life plot against her rights.

Who will make Godzilla movies if there are no Japanese left?

Japan's population is expected to shrink to a third of its current size over the next century, with the average woman living to over 90 within 50 years, a government report said Monday.

The population is forecast to decline from the current 127.7 million to 86.7 million by 2060 and to tumble again to 42.9 million by 2110 "if conditions remain unchanged", the health and welfare ministry said in the report.

The projections by the ministry's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that Japanese women would on average have just 1.35 babies, well below the replacement rate, within 50 years.

The report said that last year's earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, which left more than 19,000 people dead or missing, hit average life expectancy but that the figure was expected to continue its upward trend.

Japan's life expectancy -- one of the highest in the world -- is expected to rise from 86.39 years in 2010 to 90.93 years in 2060 for women and from 79.64 years to 84.19 years for men.

In September the government announced that the number of people aged 100 or older hit a record high for the 41st consecutive year.

The health ministry said 37 out of every 100,000 people in the country are now centenarians -- a total of more than 47,700, with 87 percent of them women. The figure was more than 3,300 higher than in 2010.

More than 20 percent of Japan's population are aged 65 or over, one of the highest proportions in the world.

UGG boots along with the sloppy pony tail/head-band, puffy winter jacket and pajama/sweat pants looks should be banned for the sake of humanity:

Say what you will about UGG Boots (warm, fuzzy, cruel, unflattering, so 2003, etc.), they're not the biggest problem in education today.

But a Pennsylvania middle school wants them off students' feet and out of the classroom for good.

As of Monday, students of Pottstown Middle School will be barred from wearing the fur-lined boots in classes, reports the Delaware County Daily Times.

 

This past Wednesday, Pottstown Middle School principal Gail Cooper sent a note home to parents stating "following several problems with these items, I have banned the outdoor, open top boots from our classrooms."

Those "problems"? Cell phone contraband, hidden in the cozy space between the ankle and boot. 

School policy states students are allowed to bring their phones to school but they have to be turned off and kept in their lockers during classroom time. All that roomy fur has become the perfect place to smuggle handheld technology into the classroom.

Did someone say love?

Nothing says love like a heart-themed postmark.

Canada Post says cards sent via the Love, Sask., and St-Valentin, Que., post offices will get special postmarks.

Canada Post says the Love and St-Valentin post offices will postmark twice as much mail as usual over the coming weeks.

Already, mail is coming in from across Canada and from countries such as China, Japan, Hungary, United States, Switzerland and France.

Those wanting the special postmark in time for Valentine's Day can find out how to send their card to the postmasters at the Love and St-Valentin post offices from Canada Post's website.