UPDATED: Something Stinks

I googled the names of the members of Stephen Harper's secret advisory committee, the one intended to make recommendations regarding potential candidates for Canada's next Governor-General.

To my admittedly sensitive nose, something stinks.

• Sheila-Marie Cook, Chair of the committee, was appointed by Stephen Harper in September 2006 to secretary and deputy to the Governor-General.
• Rainer Knopff is a University of Calgary political-science professor and member of the Calgary School.
• Kevin MacLeod was appointed by Stephen Harper in 2008 to the Senate Usher of the Black Rod.
• Christopher Manfredi, McGill University political-science professor, has written about the 'dangers' of 'feminist activism', referencing the Supreme Court and the work of LEAF.
• Christopher McCreery is Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia.
• Jacques Monet is director of the Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies and the Archives of the Jesuits of Upper Canada.

By their Harper appointments, Cook and MacLeod would appear to have passed Harper's liberal whiff test.

In his note to journalists this morning, Dimitri Soudas, Harper's director of communications, didn't just name names; he also outlined the committee's primary activities and mission.

"The advisory committee engaged in extensive consultations across the country, meeting with leading constitutional experts, past and current political leaders, and other distinguished Canadians before providing the Prime Minister with its confidential recommendations...

The members were guided "by one key question in assessing their recommendations to the Prime Minister: 'Will the next Governor General be able to serve without partisanship and according to the Constitutional role he/she will be given?'" [my emphasis]

Given the makeup of the committee, can you imagine Soudas writing that with a straight face? This is the best evidence yet that the man's got a sense of humour.

UPDATE: Well, lookie here! It appears that Paul Wells agrees: "Three minutes’ googling would tell you Chris Manfredi and Rainer Knopff have built long and fruitful careers drinking each other’s intellectual bathwater."

Recommend this post

If you heighten 'security', deny citizens their rights

... the citizens will gather and they will challenge you.

Stephen Harper, you got things backwards; just like your buddies, who hold aggression to be the only road to peace.

You build bombs and bombs will fall. You build walls and people will tear them down. You turn Toronto into an armed camp and people will become fearful.

The mere presence of 20,000 armed personnel was the primary act of intimidation. YOUR decision, Harper, to have such a huge security presence, is the chief cause of the violence that was Toronto this weekend. YOU were the primary agent provacateur.

Recommend this post

His Popishness Has a Problem

If His Popishness canna forgive paedophile priests and hence keep them in the church, then how can he ensure there'll be enough priests to herd the world's unruly flocks?

Proposed solution: 1. Let women become priests. 2. Let clergy marry - each other. (Hetero marriages, natch.)

In that event, your popishness, sir, will be all set to grow your own suitably indoctrinated band of insufferably moralizing doom-sayers.

Problem: If you allow women to become priests, won't they be priestesses? In which case, there'd be the hint of paganism - da devil! - having entered the church.

If you allow priests to marry priestesses, might not all that frolicking and child-rearing divert attention from your church's cause of world domination?

Recommend this post

OMG! Not Again!

Not again! Children are being punished for the 'sins' of their parents. Lesbian parents, that is.

In Denver, Colorado, at the Sacred Heart of Jesus School, two children have been barred from attending school by the Catholic Archdiocese.

"Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment," the Archdiocese of Denver said in a statement.

However, the laity are speaking up against such discrimination to challenge the archaic teaching from their higher ups.

Aicila Lewis, executive director of Boulder Pride, a group that advocates for the gay community, said her organization has been hearing from Catholics.

"They want us to be aware that not everyone in the Catholic Church agrees with this decision. It's a wake-up call that this will cause a public outcry and not go unchallenged," Ms. Lewis said.

In my non-believing mind, I see any organized religion as causing more harm than good. Why would anyone subject themselves and their children to such vile behavior in the name of GOD?

Recommend this post

OMG! There's More!

Rob Johnstone has been moved to file a complaint with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission over his inability to find a non-religious support group to help him fight his addiction to alcohol.

"I should not be forced to participate in someone else's religious beliefs. I shouldn't have to add to mine," said Johnstone, who added he has been an alcoholic for 40 years.

"I have my own beliefs and I'm happy with them."

Johnstone said his faith-neutral stance to his own treatment prompted him to be dismissed from an intense residential 12-step program at the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM), a provincially-run rehabilitation initiative.

What unbridled POWER is given over to Religion that is to be believed by FAITH alone.

Recommend this post

OMG! Da Devil Made Me Do It!

When will homo sapiens sapiens earn its sapiens moniker? When will we be rid of religion once and for all? Until it happens, we'll continue to get bilge like this. Yet again, those who dictate to others what they should and should not believe or do absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions and the abuses they do unto others.

Recommend this post

Oh, the Rapture!

No doubt said with serious and earnest face: "Lets [sic] face it Atheism is bankrupt so they have to indoctrinate young children."

That comment came in a discussion over at Rapture Ready, about Camp Quest, a new secular summer camp for youth in the US.

Out of their own mouths, people of certain rigid faith testify to their failure to exercise their 'God-given' reasoning faculties and the natural curiosity they were born with as children. I mean, how 'bout checking out the FACTS first?!

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, expands on the wacky discussion.

Recommend this post

Arizona Senator: Earth 6,000 years old

For real. On tape:

Recommend this post

Parliamentary Games

James Travers lists ten reasons why Parliament no longer serves the people. Among them:

Happiness here is reducing complex problems to a bumper sticker. "Do the Crime, Do the Time" resonates, but it doesn't make Canadians safer any more than cutting the GST made us noticeably richer. Keep it simple, stupid, is the rule, not the exception. So stick this on your subsidized Suburban: "Don't just vote, think."

I've a better suggestion for that bumper sticker: "Think, don't vote."

Only THEN, provided enough of us choose NOT to vote, will politicos start to worry about their legitimacy to govern. Only THEN will politicos get serious about accountable and representative government.

We need to turn our backs on the whole lot of them and the system they've managed to despoil.

Recommend this post

Vatican to Probe US Nunneries

Over the past three decades, the number of nuns in the US has dropped from 180,000 to 60,000. So what does the Vatican decide to do about this? Investigate orders that have adopted a modern lifestyle, including allowing nuns to wear regular garb and engage in professions previously taboo.

The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition....

The more extensive of the two investigations is called an Apostolic Visitation, and the Vatican has provided only a vague rationale for it: to “look into the quality of the life” of women’s religious institutes....

The visitation focuses only on nuns actively engaged in working in society and the church, not cloistered, contemplative nuns....

The investigation was ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican office that deals with religious orders. In a speech in Massachusetts last year, Cardinal Rodé offered barbed criticism of some American nuns “who have opted for ways that take them outside” the church.

Given this backdrop, Sister Schneiders, [a] professor in Berkeley, urged her fellow sisters not to cooperate with the visitation, saying the investigators should be treated as “uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house.” She wrote this in a private e-mail message to a few friends, but it became public and was widely circulated.

I hope the Cardinal's ambitions succeed. That would only hasten more women turning their backs on Catholicism and the Vatican.

Recommend this post

Sad Story

Picked up on Twitter: Jesus leads authorities on three-hour car chase, shoots self.

Recommend this post