9-9-9

It was reported tonight that Herman Cain devised his famous tax plan after his romantic advances were rejected by three consecutive German women.

Don't blame me. Blame Doug.

I'm rolling on the floor with this one.

UPDATE: I just watched the Rachel Maddow segment on Herman Cain. Unbelievable!

Cain: "I'm proud to know the Koch brothers.... I am the Koch brothers' brother from another mother."

Rachel is right. Cain's campaign is all theater. He's putting his followers on, and they don't seem to know, or, if they know, they don't care.

ABOUT THAT ANGLICAN COVENANT...

...the Tikanga Maori says:

The Anglican Covenant is all but dead in the water as far as this church is concerned. This follows a crucial vote by Tikanga Maori at its biennial runanganui in Ohinemutu today.

The Covenant will still come before General Synod in July, but a decision to accept it requires a majority vote in all three houses – lay, clergy and bishops – and by all three tikanga.

Today's runanganui decision effectively binds all Maori representatives on General Synod to say no.

Two of the five hui amorangi – Te Manawa o Te Wheke and Te Tairawhiti – have already rejected the Covenant, largely on the grounds that it could compromise Maori rangatiratanga (sovereignty).

Moving today's resolution, Archdeacon Turi Hollis noted that the Covenant applied at provincial level. "If one diocese makes a decision that another objects to – then the whole province will be held accountable," he said.

“We are being asked to conform to the standards of the rest of the world. Yet we have a constitution that the rest of the world does not understand.

“Would that have been agreed to had the Covenant been in force?

“The proposed Covenant is trying to impose on us something that should be based on relationship – on whanaungatanga or manaakitanga.”

Seconding the motion, the Rev Don Tamihere said the Covenant was not about homosexuality.

“It is about compliance and control.

“We are being asked to sign over our sovereignty, our rangatiratanga to an overseas group… To a standing committee over whom we have no choice or control. And they have the power to recommend punishment.

“The proposed Covenant offers us nothing new – or nothing we need as Anglicans, as Hahi Mihinare, or as disciples of Jesus Christ.

“We don’t need it to have faith in Jesus Christ: We already have a covenant that binds us to our saviour, Jesus Christ. And that is the only covenant we need.”

Philip Charles (Te Waipounamu) said: “Over the years, the practice has been: If you disagree with the church, you leave.

“And those groups who have left have often withered and died.

“The Covenant changes that. If you disagree with a group – you kick them out.

“I give it two thumbs down.”

The Rev Ngira Simmonds (Manawa o te Wheke) pointed out that to be Anglican means to be in relationship with people – even if you don’t like them.

“We want this church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia to focus, instead, on acting for the restoration of justice.”

No mincing of words there. I intended to emphasize my favorite words in the quote but then decided to put the entire quote in bold.

I'm not sure that the rest of the world understands the constitutions and canons of the Episcopal Church, either, and I expect that the constitutions of a good many of the churches in the Anglican Communion could be compromised by adopting the covenant.

EFFICIENCY EXPERT

An efficiency expert concluded his lecture with a note of caution: "You don't want to try these techniques at home."

"Why not?" asked somebody from the audience.

"I watched my wife's routine at breakfast for years," the expert explained. "She made lots of trips between the refrigerator, stove, table, and cabinets, often carrying a single item at a time. One day I told her, 'Hon, why don't you try carrying several things at once instead of just one thing?'"

"Did it save time?" the person in the audience asked.

"Actually, yes," replied the expert. "It used to take her twenty minutes to make breakfast. Now I do it in seven."


Cheers,

Paul (A.)

I'm considering turning my blog over to Paul (A.)

HAPPY 121st BIRTHDAY TO THE LONDON UNDERGROUND!

 

Click on the map for the larger view.

I'm proud to report that during my time in London this past July, I never once took the wrong train or got off at the wrong station.

H/T to The Writer's Almanac.

'THE KINGS ENGLISH - 100 PHRASES IN 3 MINUTES'

I'd give credit if I remembered how I found the video, but...alas....

THE DANGEROUS 'MISSISSIPPI INITIATIVE 26'

Abortion is a difficult subject for me. I expect that a good many of my friends might disagree with my views, which I won't go into here and which I have no desire to impose on the entire world. What I will say is that all of the statements in the image above are true. A fertilized egg is not a 'person' from the moment of conception.

Elizabeth Kaeton says at Telling Secrets:

The "Mississippi Initiative 26" - the “personhood” amendment on the November 8th ballot - aims to sidestep existing legal battles, simply stating that “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

It would effectively end access to reproductive health care in Mississippi — including banning all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest or the life of the woman; some forms of contraception; and in vitro fertilization.

It also offers the frightening possibility that doctors would not be able to provide life-saving medical treatment to a pregnant woman, for example, in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.

Even Roman Catholic bishops are against the amendment. The dangerous 'personhood' initiative is spreading to other states and needs to be stopped. Please read all of Elizabeth's excellent post.

PRAIRIE

From xkcd:

(some physics background necessary)

Cheers,

Paul (A.)

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO US!

Statue of Richard Hooker in front of Exeter Cathedral.

O God of truth and peace, who raised up your servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

From Lionel Deimel at Comprehensive Unity, The No Anglican Covenant Blog:

A year ago today, the No Anglican Covenant Coalition announced that it had come on the scene to defeat adoption of the Anglican Covenant. The date of November 3 was chosen because it is the day that Anglicans remember Richard Hooker, that quintessential Anglican theologian who, we believed, would be appalled at the direction the Anglican Communion seemed to be headed.

As the Coalition celebrates its first birthday, there is cause for both optimism and concern. The program to impose a repressive covenant on worldwide Anglicanism has lost momentum. Few churches have adopted it, and some of those that have have framed their actions in ways that undermine the intent of the proposed agreement. The GAFCON churches have largely rejected the Covenant as inadequate, and many Western churches are expected to reject it as too intrusive. The Covenant is not dead, but it is severely wounded.
....

Much has been accomplished in the past year, and there is reason to believe that the Anglican Covenant will never become the Anglican straightjacket that threatened to constrain Anglican thought and action. Defeating the Covenant is, nonetheless, an ongoing task. Re-imagining the Anglican Communion to allow it to move forward as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy in the twenty-first century will be an even more daunting enterprise. It is a task about which Anglicans everywhere should be thinking and praying.

Read the post in its entirety at the link above.

Photo of the Richard Hooker statue from Wikipedia.

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT!

Exposed! Over 40% of the United States Congress are members of the richest 1%!

Click on the image for the larger view.

Thanks to my friend Paul on Facebook.

A VISION OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION?

James Ussher, Irish primate and Archbishop of Armagh by Sir Peter Lely - National Portrait Gallery, London

[Archbishop of Canterbury William] Laud's interference in the affairs of the Church of Ireland, aided by [King]Charles [I]'s high-handed Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, likewise angered the Irish primate, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Ussher was a rare figure as a member of an old Irish family which had become firmly Protestant, for the established Church had failed to carry more than a minority of the people of Ireland with it away from Catholicism. He is now unfairly remembered only for the misguided humanist historical precision of his calculation that God created the world on the night preceding 23 October 4004 BCE, but he was a formidable scholar who wanted to defend the independence of his Protestant Church. Ussher knew the Irish Church's weakness was the result of a badly funded and badly administered Reformation, in a country in which English colonial interference produced a state of permanent crisis, but nevertheless he saw it as a potential vehicle of proper Reformation in Ireland. He was very consciously part of an international Reformed Protestant world, but in his discreet efforts to maintain his position against Archbishop Laud, Ussher might also be seen as the first senior churchman to have a vision of episcopally governed sister Churches which might cooperate in a common identity across national boundaries, without any single leader to tell them what to do. Without knowing the later phrase, he was envisioning the worldwide Anglican Communion. (My emphasis)

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch, p. 651.

I must say that I was pretty excited when I read the paragraph above. Archbishop Ussher was a true visionary way back in the 18th century. At present, we're still fighting the battle to resist the Archbishop of Canterbury's attempt to force the centralization of power on the churches in the communion with the Anglican Covenant.

Image from Wikipedia Commons.