A poisonous Pentecost for the Pope – The Globe and Mail

The Vatican faces a widening scandal that in one short week has seen the butler of Pope Benedict XVI arrested, the president of its bank unceremoniously dismissed and the publication of a new book alleging conspiracies among cardinals.

It was a poisonous Pentecost Sunday for the Pope, who likely had the tumultuous events of the past week on his mind as he celebrated a mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on the day regarded as the birthday of the church.

Pope’s butler arrested in Vatican leaked documents scandal

On Saturday his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, 46, was formally charged with stealing confidential papal documents in the scandal that has come to be known as “Vatileaks.” Some of the documents allege cronyism and corruption in contracts with Italian companies.

One prominent cardinal, illustrating the growing emotion of the debate in Vatican circles, wrote in an Italian newspaper that the Pope had been betrayed just as Jesus was 2,000 years ago.

The scandal, which has been brewing for months, has hit the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Gabriele – now known in Vatican statements as “the defendant” – was until Wednesday night the quiet man who served the Pope’s meals, helped him dress and held his umbrella on rainy days.

The Pope made no reference during his two public appearances on Sunday to the scandal or the arrest, which aides said had “saddened and pained” him.

via A poisonous Pentecost for the Pope – The Globe and Mail.

Interesting side-note: St. Malachy predicted the last 112 popes in his Prophecy of the Popes. Here is World Net Daily’s take on these prophecies (my favorite lunatic’s rag; they take it somewhat seriously, as you might imagine).

What’s really interesting, however, is the article was written before the election of the current pope, Benedict XVI; look for the reference to the Benedictine Order in the article.

The Internet Defense League – Protecting the Free Internet since 2012.

The Internet Defense League – Protecting the Free Internet since 2012..

Hey there,
I just joined something called the Internet Defense League – and I’m hoping you will, too. I joined because it’s important to stand up against the powerful industries that are tyring hard to lock down the net. Remember SOPA and PIPA? The people who wrote them are working on more bills to censor the internet, spy on users, chill innovation and generally wreak havoc with the web.
The Internet Blackout helped kill SOPA/PIPA with nothing more than websites and individuals working together to broadcast messages and actions. The Internet Defense League uses the tactics of the Blackout, but supercharged and ready to take on anything that corrupt congresspeople and big business can throw at us.
The Internet Defense League works like this: organizers and members monitor Congress and industry for threats to internet freedom. When there’s a grave threat or unmissable opportunity, people use their websites, Twitter, Facebook or other social network accounts to display action messages about the threat and tools for taking action. When we rise up together, we’ll be impossible to ignore.
With SOPA and PIPA, internet users found a new ability to take a stand together when our rights are at stake. Our powerful protest surprised everyone, especially the congresspeople and lobbyists who wrote the bills. We made them see the internet in a new light, but they still don’t know what we’re really capable of. The next time internet freedom is threatened, we will be able to use the League to come out even stronger than we did last fall.
The Internet Defense League can be the strongest network in the fight for internet freedom – but it will only work if large numbers of people get on board. It would be great to have you standing with us.
There’s more about future threats, targets, and The League on the site. I hope you’ll join me.

WordPress, Reddit, Others Join New “Internet Defense League” – Liz Gannes – Social – AllThingsD

In the hope that the online enthusiasm and organizing that helped fend off anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA in the U.S. Congress this year can be captured and redeployed, online activists are now founding an “Internet Defense League.”

Members sign up to receive code they can choose to include on their sites to alert visitors about a perceived threat to Internet freedom from legislation or elsewhere.

The Internet Defense League already has onboard sites that can motivate the online masses: WordPress, Imgur, Reddit, Cheezburger Network, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark have signed up.

A more formal launch is planned in two weeks when Congress returns to session, according to Tiffiniy Cheng of Fight for the Future, which put the League together along with Reddit co-founder and de facto spokesperson for the Internet Alexis Ohanian.

The League alerts are meant to be like an emergency broadcast system — or a “bat signal” for the Internet — cuing activist sites to swoop in and save someone in distress like Batman would.

Cheng and Ohanian joked that their version could be called a “cat signal,” referencing Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism,” which posits that user-generated content platforms excel at getting activist messages out to larger audiences who are there to share pictures and videos and stories about cats. That’s in part because when governments shut down these sites to block activist activity, the cute-cat-sharing masses get pissed.

via WordPress, Reddit, Others Join New "Internet Defense League" – Liz Gannes – Social – AllThingsD.

A Teacher on Teaching: What’s Mitt Romney’s Stand on Witchcraft?

With gay marriage back in the mix as a political issue for 2012, I’ve been thinking a lot about religion, morality and human rights. I’ve been thinking a lot about Mitt Romney.

I’m a liberal and I support gay marriage.

That doesn’t mean I’m some “godless” communist, as the crazies on the far-right like to put it any time they encounter someone with whom they happen to disagree. I’m just some ordinary guy, doing the best I can to understand the world around me.

So it sparked my interest when the New York Times ran a story about rhesus monkeys and how they’re overrunning New Delhi in India, biting pedestrians and stealing groceries out of bags as people stroll along the streets. Monkeys, it turns out, are believed to be the living representatives of the Hindu god Hanuman and tradition holds that Hindus should feed them accordingly, Tuesdays and Saturdays, every week.

There was a similar story about Mr. Romney in the Times not long ago. Not about monkeys. No. Romney is a good Mormon. His church teachings hold that ancient Israelites fled to America many centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived. These ancient Israelistes developed their own civilization, which later fractured in a bloody civil war, involving two groups, the Nephites and Lamanites, the latter triumphing in the end and going on to become the people we call today the “Native Americans.”

Conservatives tend to be sure they’re right because they have (or think they have) religious truth and the U. S. Constitution on their side. Liberals, of course, tend to skeptical. So I might not buy the Hindu take on monkeys. I might not buy Mormon teachings about Nephites and Lamanites, either. Yet, as a good liberal, I understand that what Mr. Romney chooses to believe in no way harms or influences me.

via A Teacher on Teaching: What's Mitt Romney's Stand on Witchcraft?.

How Bad Is It? – The New Inquiry

Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

Intellectual distinction isn’t everything, it’s true. But things are amiss in other areas as well: sociability and trust, for example. “During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, “all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues — disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent; card parties declined 50 percent; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent — admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital.

Still, even if American education is spotty and the social fabric is fraying, the fact that the U.S. is the world’s richest nation must surely make a great difference to our quality of life? Alas, no. As every literate person knows, economic inequality in the United States is off the charts – at third-world levels. The results were recently summarized by James Speth in Orion magazine. Of the 20 advanced democracies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. has the highest poverty rate, for both adults and children; the lowest rate of social mobility; the lowest score on UN indexes of child welfare and gender inequality; the highest ratio of health care expenditure to GDP, combined with the lowest life expectancy and the highest rates of infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, inability to afford health care, and personal bankruptcy resulting from medical expenses; the highest homicide rate; and the highest incarceration rate. Nor are the baneful effects of America’s social and economic order confined within our borders; among OECD nations the U.S. also has the highest carbon dioxide emissions, the highest per capita water consumption, the next-to-largest ecological footprint, the next-to-lowest score on the Yale Environmental Performance Index, the highest (by a colossal margin) per capita rate of military spending and arms sales, and the next-to-lowest rate of per capita spending on international development and humanitarian assistance.

Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a distressing extent — a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, passive, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies and cultures, unwilling or unable to assert or even comprehend their nominal political sovereignty. Or, more simply, that America is a failure.

via How Bad Is It? – The New Inquiry.

Blood for Sale? Ronald Reagan’s Pagan Cult – The Daily Beast

It’s official. With the online bidding for a vial of Ronald Reagan’s dried blood reaching $30,000 before the auction was called off, the Republican Party is now the party of paganism.

The blood, reportedly taken from Reagan at the hospital he was rushed to after the attempt to assassinate him in 1981, was instead donated to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in California after it and the Reagan family threatened to sue the auction house. It’s hardly surprising that the macabre item will now be on public display. Reagan is the right’s Christ, and his sacralization speaks volumes about the character of today’s right-wing insurgents.

Like Christ throwing the moneylenders out of the temple, Reagan signed into law a tax cut that forever changed American life. It created a stratum of moneyed elite that, finally, in relieved conservative eyes, could compete with the liberal cultural elite that had always oppressed conservative hearts. For conservatives, Reagan replaced the liberal Christ, John F. Kennedy, whose own historic tax cut they thought favored Kennedy’s culturally glamorous crowd. And where Kennedy had ended as an American martyr, in true, Christological fashion, Reagan finished his life—so it seemed—with a cheerful smile. He was a nontragic, happy-ending, American Christ: half-messiah, half Santa Claus. In the contemporary mind, he is all resurrection, and no crucifixion.

Can anyone doubt that today’s swing voters, either former Reagan Democrats or their descendants, look right past Mitt Romney’s spineless fluidity and economic heartlessness and see, on his handsome, shiny, happy face, the Gipper himself? How else to explain the astounding fact that this cynical cipher is now more or less neck and neck with Obama in the polls? A true Christian, alienated by the status quo, will search for Christ in every face he or she meets. So do many of today’s voters search for Reagan’s comforting aura in every politician they encounter. It’s no coincidence that in the very early days of Obama’s presidency, the one figure he was compared to more than any other was Reagan. Now he is the meek, soclialist Christian; the anti-Reagan.

via Blood for Sale? Ronald Reagan’s Pagan Cult – The Daily Beast.