Gay Methodist pastor will keep pulpit, church panel rules: The Rev. Mark Edward Williams, who announced his homosexuality at a regional church conference, faced a formal complaint that had the potential to strip him of his ordination. But the United Methodist version of a grand jury, called an investigating committee, yesterday determined there was insufficient evidence to file formal charges and proceed to trial.
Williams declared himself "a practicing gay man" last June at the Methodists' Pacific Northwest Annual Conference, which includes Washington and northern Idaho.
OK, I'm very VERY impressed. The decision to keep him has to be one of the more intriguingly tortured, bizarre and sophistical things I've seen in years. He declares himself a "practicing gay man", refuses to discuss the specifics of his sex life, and the committee thereupon decides that without specific evidence, "practicing gay man" apparently does not mean the same thing as "self-avowed practicing homosexuals".
Understand: I'm certainly not saying he should lose his position. If his congregation wants to keep him and doesn't really care that he's a practicing gay man, if not a self avowed practicing homosexual, that's fine with me. I'm just saying that deciding that his statement doesn't constitute evidence of itself is the most magnificent version of Methodist jury nullification, so to speak, that I've seen in ages.
Interestingly, Findlaw and the Seattle Post Intelligencer seem to reach different conclusions about what happens next. The Post Intelligencer states, "The investigating committee's decision cannot be appealed; yesterday's decision is final." Findlaw, or rather, the AP wire feed, says, "The finding sets up a possible confrontation between local and national church officials over the decision to allow the Rev. Mark Edward Williams to remain at Woodland Park United Methodist Church." That would seem to indicate just a bit of confusion somewhere.
In any event, if this standard is to be upheld, the Methodist church might as well just allow gay clergy to serve. If you're not going to be required to testify about specific acts, and if nobody witnesses those acts, then how can they possibly kick you out?
Posted by iain at 06:18 PM
All continues to be for the worst in this worst of all possible scenarios, as far as the Republicans and Florida are concerned.
Democrats Question Handling of Fla. Voting Probes: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Justice's "failure to pursue any of the allegations of systematic, statewide voting irregularities in Florida . . . raise[s] serious questions about the department's commitment to vigorously enforcing the Voting Rights Act."
Hmm. What is the word I'm looking for ... oh, yes. DUH. Anyone expecting this administration to look deeply and seriously into Florida's voting irregularities would have been fooling themselves. Having decided to do a sham investigation, Our Lord High Minister of Injustice has now set himself and the Republicans up for a summer of political bludgeoning. Mind, they won't be using The Big Clubs. They don't have to. All they need to do is things like this, asking for information as to why Justice declined to investigate other voting rights violations allegations. Shrubya's administration being what it is, no doubt someone is firmly discouraging him from asserting executive privilege. (OK, that's a cheap -- if warranted -- shot, and not related to the issue at hand. I freely admit it.) I do actually expect that Justice will decline to justify itself in this matter. After all, what can they say aside from, "we couldn't find actual evidence." Story after story after story was filed on what happened; finding evidence should have been simplicity itself.
This isn't even touching the redistricting plan review. For once, I actually agree with the Justice department; criticism of that plan is entirely political and has nothing to do with the procedures that were set up.
Basically, the whole Florida mess is being handled in a way to ensure that it bubbles along in low level headlines all summer, continually reminding the pissed-off and disenfranchised in Florida that they were disenfranchised, and they are pissed off.
Florida's Republicans must be ever so pleased.
Posted by iain at 05:16 PM
Legendary Rockers Kiss Get Into Safe Sex Biz (NY Times, registration required.)
OK, the headline alone gets an EWW. And then there's this: Billed as "Rock 'N' Rubbers,'' the first in the series are bright red latex condoms labeled "Tongue Lubricated.'' [...] Despite the racy name, Simmons said he had not personally lubricated the condoms, "however some deserving young ladies will get a personal demonstration, lots of them come to think of it.''
And yet again, EWWW!!
Why in heavens name would you want to market condoms as pre-lubricated by someone's tongue? Even meant facetiously, WHY?
(Also, just for completeness, one might note that Gene Simmons has, by all accounts, been involved in a happily monogamous relationship with Shannon Tweed for something like 15 years. I'm thinking that it's not terribly likely that any young women will be getting their condoms personally prelubricated by him. [And once again, EW.] I'm also thinking that there are relatively few young women who would want that from him in particular, but, you know, whatever delusions get you through the day and all that.)
Posted by iain at 04:48 PM
... but I don't HAVE older brothers. Unfortunately, I can't use any of my relatives to judge by; nobody in my mother's generation had more than two boys, and only one actually got up that high.
(And may I just say that I find the concept of half an older brother deeply disturbing? Thank you.)
Besides, isn't it more relevant that birth order makes no difference in 85% of men than that it seems to play a role for 15% of men? I mean, that's the logical conclusion of those findings, isn't it? Or am I missing something?
To be sure, I did actually weigh less than five pounds at birth. (22 inches long. Four pounds, eight ounces. Long and skinny. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have been able to stay on that path...) Maybe the correlation is birth weight and not birth order.
(via smudge)
Posted by iain at 03:38 PM
Recently in Media Relations:
... including her name on my site is going to get me still more interesting search engine referrals, isn't it? Oh, well.
Posted by iain at 01:36 PM
Liberal Reality Check: ... it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others. The bottom line is that Mr. Moussaoui was thrown in jail — thank God — not because there was evidence he had committed a crime but because he was a young Arab man who behaved suspiciously and fit our stereotypes about terrorists. [...] The Moussaoui case neatly exposes intellectual dishonesty on all sides. The Bush administration has engaged in widespread detentions of Muslims, twisting the law to keep them behind bars while denying that civil liberties have been abused. That's nonsense: the administration has wallowed in precisely the kind of hysterical wartime infringement of civil liberties that history always ends up judging harshly. Yet civil libertarians are also dishonest in refusing to acknowledge the trade-off between public security and individual freedom. [...] We must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works. (NY Times, registration required.)
All I can say is, this is a wonderful position to be able to take ... as long as you're in the wonderful position of being able to know that racial profiling has absolutely nothing to do with you. (Go ahead, have a quick look at his columnist biography. See that picture? How often do you think he's going to experience the joys of racial profiling?)
From my point of view, I look at the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List, and I wonder ... how are airport security staff or the police or the FBI or anyone, for that matter, supposed to tell the difference between ethnic Arabs and American blacks and Hispanics? A great many African Americans are members of the Nation of Islam or other domestic Muslim sects, and people in these religions frequently give their adherents Arabic or Africanist names; checking the name on the identification will be no help there. For that matter, Arab Americans -- people born and raised in this country -- will be sure to have a miserable time under this regime, since they will by default be assumed to be terrorists. Comparing the US to Israel in this matter is not useful; we are not them. Arabs in the US are not a statistical majority, and our history is markedly different than Israel's in racial matters.
To be sure, Mr Kristoff's wife is Asian. He may have seen or experienced some aspects of racial profiling up close and personal. But Chinese Americans are not suspected of participating in recent terrorist activity here, are they? She would not be directly affected by the regime he appears to be encouraging.
Mr Kristoff may decry liberal hypocrisy all he wants -- I do not necessarily even disagree with him on that point. However, he should acknowledge the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty in his own view; it's easy to advocate something when you can be serenely confident that you'll never have to experience it in your own country.
Posted by iain at 01:28 PM
Isotopes! Isotopes! Rah rah rah!
I wonder if this means that they might use Homer as the team mascot .....
Posted by iain at 03:36 PM
Va. License Plate Remembers Sept. 11: Virginians who want to honor the victims and heroes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks can now choose a state-sponsored license plate that calls on Americans to fight terrorism and reminds motorists that people gave their lives in three states that day.
Well ... on the one hand, I suppose it's no worse than the flags that have been everywhere since the attack, the various articles of clothing, the commemorative medals made out of WTC metal itself (which always did strike me as utterly revolting) or any of the other things that have appeared since then. I understand people wanting to display their patriotism, wanting some sort of symbol that seems to pull people together after something like that.
But still ... why does it seem like this is yet another trivialization of everything that happened? And a state sponsored one, at that.
And I'm not at all sure about this: Noting that it will be "forever linked" with the World Trade Center attack that resulted in the loss of 658 of its employees, bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald has chosen to focus its new ad campaign on that very fact. The eight television spots show employees in documentary-style testimonials talking about co-workers and friends they lost, what it took for the company to get running again and how it has rebuilt. You know ... I suspect they'll only be "forever linked" if they choose to be so, although I can understand why they would actually make that choice. Most people really don't know the details of what happened to whom, and in general, don't want to. The commercials are very simple, and I suppose as tasteful as they can be, given the subject (although if you didn't know about the firm, and didn't know what they did, the three commercials I've seen leave you sitting there thinking, "Well... yes, but what do you do? A horrible thing happened to you, yes, and you've displayed all sorts of drive and determination in getting up and running again ... but what exactly does that have to do with what you do? What on earth are you selling?"). That said ... they still make me want to change the channel.
Posted by iain at 10:19 AM
"A slight schism, just a slight schism..."
(Fats Waller, appropriate unto every occasion, one way or another.)
Posted by iain at 12:19 PM
It will be interesting to see if the various machinations of the several dioceses actually work. In general, courts take an extremely dim view of restructuring to protect yourself from legal judgements, and given the timing of all this unseemly financial scrambling, it's hard to think that it can be anything else. That said, I would be surprised if a smaller diocese wasn't ultimately pushed into bankruptcy by this mess. The Joliet diocese, for example, doesn't seem to own that much property (phrased most carefully, that), and property in Joliet isn't the highest valued in the state. Several cases of abuse have come to light in Joliet recently -- more than can reasonably be explained, given the small size of the diocese and the strikingly smaller number of complaints coming out of Chicago -- and given that they seem to be related to a small number of priests, it may be that there were serial abusers and that more cases will emerge. Especially given the current grim mood of the country regarding these cases, it wouldn't be surprising for the diocese to be forced into bankruptcy.
Purely a side note: in a recent Journal Sentinel article, one of the writers covering the Milwaukee situation wondered why the archbishop had handled it so very badly: "I was amazed at the public relations stance that he and his people took," says ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross. "There would have been 100 different ways to handle this better."
I dare say this might have something to do with it: Federal authorities to review archdiocese's $450,000 payoff: The entry of federal authorities into any investigation could raise the stakes for the Milwaukee Archdiocese, given the broader authority of federal statutes. The decision on whether to begin a criminal investigation will hinge on whether the hush money paid to Marcoux was donated for a specific program and then diverted to pay for the settlement, said Pam Pepper, a former assistant U.S. attorney now in private practice. [...] Anyone who knowingly diverts targeted money from a specific program for another use could be criminally culpable, she said. Penalties upon conviction can range from zero to 10 years in prison, she said.
Weakland's issue wasn't simply the humiliating public revelations, or even the public relations aspect. Commenting at all would have provided evidence that could be used against him. After all, one of the first questions asked would be, "Where does a man sworn to poverty, obedience and chastity -- and paid the notoriously low salaries of the priesthood -- manage to find $450,000?" He could have declined to answer the question, of course, but that would have simply thrown the issue into sharp relief. Really, if he hopes to avoid jail, his only choice was to say nothing until forced.
Posted by iain at 12:05 PM
You know, the existence of Fig Newtons explains so much of the world's evil, doesn't it?
Posted by iain at 11:44 AM
Well ... that would certainly be an interesting reason for the loathing, I suppose.
One can only imagine the transcendant fury in certain places if they every read this ....
Posted by iain at 10:43 PM
No, really.
No. REALLY.
(Make sure to read "next date", too!)
... well, that's revolting.
Not the product itself, mind -- or not quite the product, anyway -- but the need for the product.
To be honest, I do wonder how many women will be willing to use this. I mean, how do you unobtrusively manage to say, "Sorry, but I don't trust you or anyone else in this bar, so I need to test my drink?" I just wonder if a lot of people will be too self conscious to even try.
Then again, if enough people decide to just use the things and propriety be damned, maybe it would reduce the actual need for the product.
Posted by iain at 04:46 PM
Warning: Bras can seriously damage your (man's) health
... all I can say is, I'm so glad I don't have to worry about that.
... 20 minutes? I'm thinking this would not be a problem replicated in real life. After a few seconds of annoyance, how many women are there who wouldn't say, "Oh, just let me handle it."
Posted by iain at 03:02 PM
Court Unbending on Death Row Appeals: The Supreme Court drew a hard line on death row appeals Tuesday, upholding a sentence for a convicted double murderer who claimed his mentally ill lawyer did next to nothing to save him from a death sentence. [...] The Supreme Court chose Cone's case over several others that make a similar claim, including the much better-known case of a Texas inmate whose lawyer allegedly slept through much of his trial. The court is hanging onto the Texas case, and is expected to rule based on its answer in Cone. (NY Times, registration required.)
I'm guessing this probably means that Calvin Burdine is just S.O.L., and the Court will feel that having a lawyer sleep through significant parts of your trial is just peachy-keen fine. To state that having a mentally ill lawyer is fine, but having one that sleeps is not, which the Court would be required to do if Burdine is to win, would be logically inconsistent. Apparently, it may be sufficient unto the Court that your lawyer be physically present and make some sort of case, however good or bad. (That said, as I understand the details of Burdine's case, his lawyer sleeping and his effectiveness really are the only issue; waivers of the rules regarding timely appeals are not, I believe, being requested. A simpler case may produce a different result ... although I can't see how.)
Posted by iain at 02:55 PM
Supreme Court to Consider Free Speech Challenge to Laws Banning Cross Burning
Well, well, well. Isn't this going to be fun?
I do wonder why the Court picked up this case. It would initially seem that they probably want to find some way to reverse the Virginia Supreme Court and set a policy of sorts. After all, decisions that conflict in state courts are not usually sufficient reason to pick up an issue. In general, the Court needn't care if California and Virginia decide an issue in different ways (which they frequently do) as long as neither path offends the Constitution. That said ... the original RAV v City of St. Paul, 505 US 377 (1992) was a straight 9-0 decision invalidating a cross-burning prohibition ordinance. Granted, the court's makeup has changed somewhat since then ... but only by one judge (Ginzburg for Blackmun). Given that, why on earth wouldn't they simply refuse the case, or, if slightly more detail was needed, issue a per curiam decision, referring to RAV v St Paul and affirming the Virginia Supreme Court's decision?
Virginia's core argument is that since their statute does not speak to motive, only intent, then it should be allowed. It's rather difficult to deal with intent without speaking to motive, although I suppose it can be done. Virginia's position is essentially "If you burn a cross as a direct threat or a way of intimidating someone, we will arrest you. We don't care why you want to threaten or intimidate them; the threat alone is sufficient for our cause." I think this may be a valid distinction ... I'm just not sure the Court will buy it.
I suspect that cross-burning is the sort of thing that can be regulated ... but not banned. The trick is the type of regulation. You can certainly handle it, in part, as a simple matter of zoning. That is, if you want to burn a cross in a place where you're legally allowed to burn things anyway -- trash or leaves, or whatever -- as a mark of political speech, go right ahead. (And if you don't mind getting arrested for burning things in a place where you're not supposed to, you can do that, too.) You're going to offend people that you would normally not seek to offend, but so be it; that's the nature of crossburning. However ... when you want to burn a cross on someone's lawn or doorstep, as a direct threat, Virginia says that the state has an interest in arresting you when you do so. (Note: they are not preventing you from doing it in the first place -- it isn't prior restraint, although I'm not sure that's a necessary argument -- they're arresting you for having done so. Depending on location, the state may also have an interest in preventing you from doing so if it's meant purely as an incitement to violence.
Given the results of the original St Paul decision mentioned in the Post article, I would expect at least an 8-1 break upholding the Virginia Supreme Court decision, if not yet another 9-0. They could surprise, of course; the Court may say that this is a legitimate regulation. One can but hope, anyway.
Posted by iain at 01:06 PM
Good land, it's a meme! Workshops for ballparks, national associations with conventions in Vegas, terror in Scotland. Who knew it was a problem on this scale? I mean, really, Who Knew? (and when did they know it? sorry, couldn't resist.)
I do love this one part, though: [Glasgow-based psychologist Alex Gardner] added: "I’m working on the slogan ‘Encourage providers to install dividers’, and I would like to see everyone installing partitions in their toilets. There should be ceiling to floor dividers in the women’s toilets and partitions that go from head height to below knee level for the men’s urinals." But Gardner’s demands have been met with criticism from local authorities, who claim there is a safety risk. Raymond Reid of Aberdeenshire Council said: "If someone took ill in a fully closed cubicle, no one would be able to access them." He added: "One of the biggest problems with carrying out alterations is that you don’t want to encourage undesirable group activities, particularly in gents toilets, which would become more difficult to supervise."
So ... basically, they don't want to put head-to-knee-length dividers between urinals because it would encourage "undesirable group activities" in the gents.
Yeah. Right. "Undesirable group activities." Is that what they're calling it these days?
I'm just trying to imagine what, precisely, one could do through a divider at a urinal, especially given that most such dividers are made of metal these days. What sort of activities (aside from the actually desired one) could such a divider promote?
... Nope. Can't come up with anything.
Posted by iain at 08:53 PM
Taliban rule as darkness descends: THE villagers of Darwazagi are used to unexpected visitors. American, Australian and Canadian troops have all passed through and they are greeted with polite smiles and offers of hospitality.
"Have you seen any al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters," they ask. The Pathan tribesmen shake their heads and watch as the Allied troops leave.
After dark, a motorbike with its headlight extinguished roars into the village as a Taliban official arrives for an evening of meetings and instruction of the faithful.
If a patrol arrived, the mullah would melt into the hills before returning to sanctuary in Pakistan. The villagers would say nothing. The soldiers might ask the villagers if they had received any visits. They would almost certainly say no.
Wonderful. Just wonderful. I can understand that the administration doesn't want to be in Afghanistan forever, but their decided reluctance to do what they need to do is going to produce results like this.
I have a horrible feeling that, if they want the Taliban to go away and stay away, the administration needs to make a concerted military effort -- involving several times the number of troops currently present -- as well as a concerted and immediate major effort to rebuild the country and provide humanitarian aid. Visibility, you see, is the issue
Military aside, most of the Taliban were Afghan. They wouldn't have risen in the first place if there weren't something in that reactionary doctrine that appealed to the people.
"They [the Taliban and al-Qaeda] are like cockroaches," complained US Major Brian Hilferty. "They won’t operate in the open where we can catch them, but only come out at night."
You know ... I understand the whole military wanting enemies in plain view thing, but this complaint makes the military look stupid. I mean, seriously, being out in the open served the Taliban and al-Qaeda so well in the past; why on earth wouldn't they want to do it again?
Posted by iain at 08:36 PM
Evolution, Males, and Violence: Imagine that you were interviewing an intelligent fish, and you asked it to describe its environment. One thing it probably would not volunteer is that things are awfully wet down here. Like our hypothetical interlocutor, people are generally insensitive to whatever permeates their lives. So, if you were to ask someone to describe human violence, only rarely would you hear that it is overwhelmingly perpetrated by males. And yet, the truth is that if we could eliminate or even significantly reduce male violence, we would pretty much get rid of violence altogether. The maleness of violence is so overwhelming that it is rarely even noticed; it is the ocean in which we swim.
... well, that's depressing. So ubiquitous across cultures that nobody thinks about it. It just is. And yet ...
What I want to know is, if violence is so overwhelmingly male, how on earth does this happen?
New research from institutions and publications as varied as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Mental Health, the University of California and the Annals of Emergency Medicine indicate that men are victims of domestic violence as often as women. What's more, hundreds of peer-reviewed studies show that most domestic violence is mutual, with women the first to hit as often as men, and nearly as likely to kill. The biggest difference: Men don't tell anyone what's happening to them.
Wouldn't that seem to say that we're just an overall violent species? Male and female, we just want to hurt or kill something ....
Posted by iain at 06:58 PM
To help stem rising popularity, 'club drugs,' terror are linked
Are we really THAT paranoid about drugs?
... Apparently we are.
Of course, the problem with this approach is that it assumes that drug users know ... well, nothing, really. The simple fact is, most "club" drugs -- ecstasy, ketamine, etc., -- are actually produced in these United States, by our own citizens, using chemicals that aren't too hard to obtain. The DEA certainly knows this; it's only undermining what little credibility it has by saying things like this.
Nonetheless, I fully expect this campaign to be every bit as effective as every other antidrug campaign launched by the government in the past few years.
Posted by iain at 06:05 PM
Inmate May Not Ship Wife Semen: Courts: Sharply divided federal appeals panel overturns ruling that right to procreate even from prison is protected by the Constitution.
Okey-doke.
Somehow, I don't believe that the Supremes are going to field this one, if it gets appealed up that far. Frankly, I'm surprised it made it this far.
Rampaging liberal though I may be, I honestly don't think that people in prison have a constitutional right to procreate. It's a perfectly silly assertion on its face; nobody really has a constitutional right to procreation.
Can you just imagine how many times during deliberations one judge or another said or thought, "I do not believe that we're talking about semen shipments."
Posted by iain at 04:30 PM
Justice Dept. Urged To Widen Fla. Probe
Yep. This looks to be the worst of all possible worlds for the Republicans. Not only is the administration going to open an investigation of Florida's voting irregularities in the last election, they'll also be investigating the least important and notable of the violations. Not only do they thereby remind voters what happened, they manage to cheese off said voters by looking at something of comparatively little consequence. (And they're not doing much better in either Missouri or Tennessee, either.)
I honestly don't understand this. The Justice Department showed no signs of wanting to investigate before now; why not continue to ignore the complaints? And if you're going to investigate, why not investigate all of the complaints? Why do things in a half-hearted way sure to upset both partisans and detractors?
Seriously, this is just bizarre.
Posted by iain at 04:23 PM
Skill level of new air marshals in doubt: The government has cut training for federal air marshal applicants and put new hires on flights without requiring the advanced marksmanship skills the program used to demand, USA TODAY has learned. [...] TSA officials acknowledged Thursday that they no longer require applicants to pass the more difficult shooting test that some argue was the program's critical requirement. The government considers the marshals, who fly incognito, a critical deterrent to hijackings. Current and former marshals say the advanced training helped prepare them to fire accurately in the close confines of passenger jets. They and others within the TSA say agency officials, under pressure to meet congressional deadlines for hiring, are lowering standards to get marshals aboard more flights quickly.
Oh, good. I feel ever so much more secure now, don't you? No fear at all that incompletely trained people might, oh, say, puncture an airline wall because they hadn't been trained to fire accurately enough. (Or, more worryingly, might accidentally puncture me.)
The TSA says that it's not true. The current and former air marshalls say that it is. I think, somehow, that I believe the people who are, shall we say, testifying against their own interests. After all, it may not be terribly difficult for people in the TSA to figure out who some of these current and former air marshalls are, especially if they've been vocal about this problem within the agency itself.
Posted by iain at 10:05 AM
JS Online: Weakland paid $450,000 to silence man's claim of sexual abuse, documents show: Archbishop Rembert Weakland asked the Vatican to speed up his retirement Thursday after a former Marquette University theology student revealed that he was paid $450,000 in hush money to silence his allegations that Weakland sexually assaulted him.
Oh, my.
That can't be a good thing.
And, of course, he and the Milwaukee priests have been conducting meetings all over the city, asking how Catholics feel about the abuse mess, and what they think should be done. With this coming out, surely the people who attended meetings guided by him will feel even more betrayed and lied to.
In any event, he's probably just the first archbishop to fall. To be sure, the others will be forced to resign or retire for the more mundane felony of concealment of crimes, rather than direct commission of crimes. And it's quite likely never to be called that. After all, were they any other sort of person, a normal citizen, who had hidden case after case after case of sexual assault, they would have been arrested and charged with conspiracy and concealment, both felonies major in their own right.
That said ... Marcoux' story is being described in interestingly different ways. In the Journal Sentinel, which has apparently interviewed him repeatedly according to the above-linked article: Marcoux said the two men shared two bottles of wine and several aperitifs during dinner. Then Marcoux drove Weakland home and Weakland asked him in for a nightcap. Inside the rectory, Weakland made advances, Marcoux said, adding that the combination of the alcohol and awe for priests that had been a part of his traditionally Catholic culture caused him to freeze. He said he rebuffed Weakland when the archbishop attempted intercourse.
How is this sexual assault or abuse? Marcoux was an actual adult at the time; he was 30 when they met. From the description given by Marcoux himself, it sounds like they had too much to drink, Weakland started something that Marcoux didn't want but couldn't figure out how to refuse at first ... but when he did refuse, Weakland seems to have accepted it and stopped. Where's the sexual assault? Apparently there were several "sexualized encounters" after that; how in hell does that work? If you feel that someone has assaulted you, why would you go back and let them do it again? If you're a child or an adolescent or an abused spouse, you may wind up with no choice, but he was a 30 year old adult who had his own place to live. He gives the reason that he was considering becoming a priest, and the friendship of the prelate of Milwaukee could only be a help in that goal. True enough. How is this worth staying around someone who not only assaults you, but apparently keeps trying to do so? Frankly, given the correspondence that's included, it sounds quite firmly as if Marcoux was blackmailing him, knowing that if any hint of attempted sexual encounters had gotten out, it would have derailed Weakland's career. To be sure, the threat of a lawsuit is not legally extortion in any way, shape or form, as the Milwaukee County DA states; however, anyone with half a brain would understand how it would be perceived.
In the ABCNews article: Marcoux says he met Weakland in 1979 while attending Marquette University. He says the incident occurred in the archbishop's apartment, after a dinner, when he asked Weakland for advice about entering the priesthood.
"A short time later he was sitting next to me and then started to try to kiss me," Marcoux said. "And I would say, well, think of it in terms of date rape."
Weakland forced himself on him, pulling down his trousers, and trying to fondle him, Marcoux said.
Over the next year, Marcoux says he only wanted a friendship, but the archbishop wanted more. He says the relationship essentially ended soon after Weakland wrote an 11-page letter to Marcoux, dated Aug. 25, 1980.
That is certainly what one could reasonably think of as sexual assault (although, again, there seems to be no suggestion that Weakland didn't stop when finally asked to -- and since when is a kiss "date rape"? Someone tries to kiss you, you don't want it, you say no and leave, or tell them to) ... but why in the name of heaven would you want a friendship afterward with someone who had done that to you?
At this point, I can't help but have a studied lack of sympathy for Marcoux.
Interesting: in all the articles on this, there's a striking lack of analysis of Marcoux' actions or versions of his story. I suppose nobody wants to question abuse victims' stories, especially during the ongoing self-immolation of the Church.
Side note: It's actually possible for an archbishop to make more than $450,000 in honoraria? And keep it? It seems rather unlikely. And even if it were possible, according to Weakland, he'd originally handed the money over to the Church ... which will now cause him untold grief. As it stands, the Milwaukee County DA may investigate Weakland for what he is very carefully not calling embezzlement or misappropriation of funds, trying to determine the actual source of that money.
Side note 2: Why is it that bishops are required to retire at age 75, but the pope isn't?
Posted by iain at 12:04 AM
USATODAY.com - Military leaders question Iraq plan
You know, I'd wondered why the administration was suddenly so ambiguous about its Iraq plans. Not that there have ever been lots of details out there, but they'd been beating the drums for an invasion and then suddenly ... weren't.
Bush: 'I have no war plans on my desk': President Bush assured German leaders today that he does not seek war with Iraq but wants prevent President Saddam Hussein from forging alliances with al-Qaeda and other terror groups.
Germany was not amused. Their defence minister made the point that, regardless of the merits of the plan that doesn't exist, Germany simply can't afford to make that sort of commitment to support the war on terrorism. (Or, to quote him: "We have no room for a new engagement." Whatever that means.)
Aside from the specific issue of Iraq, Defense seems to have a massive administration problem. I don't know what he did -- if anything -- but the military side seems to utterly loathe Rumsfeld. They don't like his plans -- the spectacular saga of the Crusader gun a particular case in point. (Although Rumsfeld may be winning that one, or so it seems at the moment.) Except for the whole "gays in the military" mess, they weren't nearly this publicly obstreporous under Clinton -- whom they also clearly disliked. Certainly not so early, anyway. (That said, even if Saddam could be toppled easily, I'd think that the military military would be slightly better judges of their readiness than the civilian leaders. THAT said ... it does nobody any good for the military side to fight with the civilian side.)
Purely as a side note: Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon: Microsoft Lobbies Hard Against Free Software. Not surprising. What is surprising is that it seems to have backfired rather badly: But the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded. "Banning open source would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DOD groups to protect themselves against cyberattacks," said the report, by Mitre Corp.
I wonder if this may mean that the Pentagon will take a position against the Senator from Disney's ... er, that is, Senator Hollings' intellectual property bill. After all, given military uses, they can't be happy at having their computers restricted that way. (In fact, I would think that, given even a second's thought, no govermnent office at any level would want a computer that hamstrung.)
Posted by iain at 09:29 AM
Ryan: No reason to think he is indictment's mystery official
This whole thing is just getting hysterically funny. Or it would be, if the consequences for so many hadn't been so bad. The governor's people keep getting nibbled away from him by indictments from various fits of corruption. The most egregious was the license for bribes scandal, where significant portions of the bribes allegedly went into his campaign fund. People actually died from that one, because truckers who shouldn't have gotten licenses were out driving and killed a few people in accidents in Illinois, Wisconsin and (I believe) Kentucky.
They've obstructed investigations in other cases, and gotten caught.
And now it seems that they were selling contracts.
The question is, how can the people around this man have been so comprehensively corrupt ... and he didn't know about it? Over and over, both he and they have said that he didn't know. There's no reason not to believe them all. And yet ... you wonder how it's possible that all this was going on and he knew nothing? The sad thing, from a purely personal perspective, is that George Ryan has not been a bad governor. If nothing else, he suspended the death penalty when it was shown not to work in this state.
The problem for the Republicans is that this scandal is damaging their hopes possibly beyond repair. The Republican Jim Ryan (no relation) was already trailing former Congressman Rod Blagojevich in the polls. The additional problem for Jim Ryan is that as former attorney general of the state, he should have been investigating most of this. They generally all started out as state investigations, and got bounced up to federal for some reason. But from now through November, Blagojevich can flog Jim Ryan with the question "Why didn't you know? Why weren't you investigating all this?" And he doesn't really have any answers so far.
Posted by iain at 12:19 AM
Failures in cargo security reported Jet freight isn't checked, officials told in October: A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, a government report warned federal officials that terrorists easily could plant bombs on passenger jets by shipping them as cargo. But the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has failed to remedy flaws that the report warns could prove ''catastrophic,'' government sources familiar with cargo security say.
You know, it would be nice if exposing our vulnerabilities to terrorists actually made people fix the damn things when they could.
That said, it's unreasonable to expect the two-month-old Transportation Security Agency to have done much of anything, really. They're still trying to figure out exactly what it is they're supposed to be doing.
Posted by iain at 06:26 PM
Just a small warning: do NOT visit www.troma.com. I was going to try to link to something there (never mind what), and I discovered that, as they state on their front page, that they've added "one or two advertising popups to pay costs". Which is understandable, if a pain.
Oh, my is it a PAIN.
The first page has one, and only one, popup.
The second page, after the "18 and over" warning on the front, has ... well, I stopped counting after a second or two. Not only that, but some of them have Java. Not only that, but at least two of the popups tried to install software on my computer, one of which triggered my firewall. Really, it was just quite a lot of fun.
Posted by iain at 06:18 PM
Someone more insane than Tyson himself.
I mean, seriously, no brain cells. Not one.
And a devout massochist withall, clearly.
Posted by iain at 06:14 PM
Netscape 7.0 heats up browser wars
Good heavens. I didn't know they were doing a Netscape 7. If they can make it take a smaller memory footprint, now THAT would be good.
According to CNET, it won't work with Mozilla installed on the same machine. That can't be a good thing. (And apparently, it's based on Mozilla 1.0 PR candidates. Netscape is pulling a version numbering fast one, hoping to get their version 7 out ahead of IE7 when it comes out at the end of the year.)
Posted by iain at 05:55 PM
Un-Orthodox Behavior: "These are our files," says Cappy Larson, opening a desk drawer in the attic of her Haight District home. "Don't look closely." The drawer is stuffed with folders, neatly arranged. Inside, Larson says, are letters from the hundreds of people who have contacted her in the past 10 years claiming they were sexually abused by Orthodox priests. [...] For years, Vrionis preached at a church he had founded in Queens, a fact that reveals an odd wrinkle in Orthodoxy. Simply put, Vrionis had no business being a priest. In 1970, he was convicted for sexually abusing two other 14-year-old boys while a priest at a Greek Orthodox church. The Greek church defrocked him, Vrionis served his sentence (a small fine and 23 months' probation), and that should have been the end of his ecclesiastical career. But a diligent Orthodox priest can do unusual things. A priest removed from the Catholic Church can't start a maverick Catholic diocese, at least not credibly. But Orthodox priests with questionable backgrounds have routinely launched their own churches and attracted flocks. And when something goes wrong, as it has, assigning blame is an open question. [...] It is in those unaffiliated churches that many of the recent sexual abuse problems have occurred.
It seems there are actually advantages to the Roman Catholic Church's medieval (literally) hierarchy. It means that, much as the Church would like to jump around and say, "No no no, not our fault that we reassigned a known criminal and he reoffended" (really, that's their stated position) you can actually point to the person doing the assignment and say, "You. It was your responsibility. You knew and should have done better." Apparently, that's not possible with Orthodox Catholic churches many times.
The ongoing disaster in the American Roman Catholic Church may actually prove somewhat salutary for other religions with a tradition of secrecy. If nothing else, it demonstrates that in today's media-saturated times, your sins will come home to roost, and then they'll make a big public mess that you just can't clean up. (Can I strain a metaphor, or can I strain a metaphor, eh?)
To be sure, it's not just the flavors of Catholics that are having problems.
Posted by iain at 04:50 PM
By Wallace Matthews: The following is a column I wrote concerning the Piazza-Is-Gay rumors that the Post refused to run because it was critical of Neil Travis' deplorable journalism in Monday's paper. I always knew the paper had no integrity. Now we know it has no balls, either.
Bobby Valentine may turn out to be everything he thinks he is: baseball
genius, restaurant innovator, all-around Renaissance Man.
But on one issue, he is wrong, dead wrong.
Major League Baseball is not "ready'' to accept an openly gay player, as he told Details magazine in an upcoming issue.
Nor is the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, the PGA, the USTA or professional boxing.
If they were, Mike Piazza would not have found himself thrust into in the awkward position of having to address rumors concerning his sexuality before the start of last night's Mets-Phillies game.
If the fans were ready, the Mets would not care if it became known that their entire roster was made up of gays, because it wouldn't matter.
And if the rest of society were ready, I wouldn't be writing this column right now.
Mr Matthews is reportedly now looking for another position.
The Sporting News: Responding to questions and rumors about his sexual orientation, Mike Piazza said Tuesday night that the major leagues are ready for gay players but he's not one of them.
"I'm not gay. I'm heterosexual," the New York Mets All-Star catcher said before playing the Philadelphia Phillies.
Piazza, who wanted to set the record straight about his sexual orientation, said he's aware of the rumors but doesn't know why they started.
"I can't control what people think. I date women," Piazza said.
He also agrees with Mets manager Bobby Valentine that players can accept an openly gay teammate. "In this day and age, it's irrelevant," he said. "I don't think it would be a problem at all."
Right, babycakes. This is why you actually answered that question instead of saying, "None of your damn business," and letting your conduct answer the question. Because it wouldn't be a problem in baseball.
There are still no homosexuals in baseball. Not officially, anyway. [...] For a ballplayer to acknowledge otherwise, of course, would be committing professional suicide. [...] The most encouraging thing about the whole episode is how little attention it's generated. Reporters who questioned Mets general manager Steve Phillips got this answer: "If statistics hold up, in every clubhouse there is somebody who is gay. So what? Who cares?"
At least two wire service articles, independent articles on both the Sporting News and ESPN, a planned story on how this got so blown up also on ESPN SportsCenter, a rather resigned column over at OutSports ... and this is only a "little attention"? I mean, yes, it could have been worse -- and was worse last year when Lemon ran off at the editorial -- but it's not exactly as if this surfed entirely under everyone's radar, as it should have if it wasn't really a big deal. The answer to Phillips' question "Who cares?" is transparently, "WAY too many people to make it comfortable or possible for someone to come out voluntarily."
Frankly, I don't expect the first out-professional athlete to come out voluntarily if they're already in pro sports. Either it will be someone dragged kicking and screaming out of the closet who finally just gives up the bad fight, or, in the best of all possible worlds, someone coming up from high school and college who has always been out, and who is so overwhelmingly talented that professional sports simply can't take a pass. That's been the model for ethnic minorities -- only the outstanding get in at first -- so there's no reason at all to believe that it would be different for anyone else. (Aside from the kicking-screaming possibility.)
The sad thing is, given recent Vatican comments, this headline wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Posted by iain at 09:39 PM
U.S. to sue Fla. counties over vote: The government will file three lawsuits against Florida counties alleging voting rights violations resulting from the bitterly disputed 2000 election, a Justice Department official said Tuesday.
TWO OTHER LAWSUITS also will be filed, in Missouri and Tennessee, by the department’s civil rights division, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The lawsuits will allege disparate treatment of minority voters, improper purging of voter rolls, “motor voter” registration violations and failure to provide access to disabled voters, Boyd said.
Ah. Irony. Shrubya's government is effectively suing Shrubya's brother over the election of said Shrub.
From what I understand, the voting rights violations in Tennessee were considerably more egregious than those in Florida ... which is saying something, really.
And just when the Democrats were feeling that they could get all fuzzy and warm, saying nasty things about the Republicans and What They Did in Florida and Tennessee, somebody noticed that what happened in St Louis wasn't really all that kosher, either. (Although there is a nice little sidelight with Ashcroft himself being accused of campaign fundraising violations.)
The truly odd thing is that it's come after Democrats realized that, due to Bush's recent popularity and their reluctance to attack a sitting war leader, they could not touch the past Florida election in the upcoming elections. Couldn't go near it. Mentioning it would have been considered unpatriotic. And here, Shrubya's own government hands them this gift. Depending on how it plays out, they don't need to say a word; they just wait for the government to announce its suits.
Ol' Lady Irony, she wields one damn big anvil when she wants to.
My goodness, but this is going to be tactfully gory.
Posted by iain at 05:52 PM
College recruiters look to gays. But schools see problem in identifying students. [...] ''Schools are inviting these students because they question the norms,'' said Judith Brown, director of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center at Tufts. ''They make people question their own assumptions, and that's a key to learning and growing as people.'' But as college officials strategize privately about how to recruit gay and lesbian high-schoolers, they are confounded by one question: How do you appeal to a population that, unlike minorities or athletes, isn't clearly identifiable?
I should think they would have a problem there, yes.
And no, they're not looking at those students because they "question the norms"; they're looking at them as warm bodies with money to contribute to their bottom line. Whether you consider this type of recruiting effort a good thing or a bad thing or just a "thing", it doesn't serve anyone to get unnecessarily silly about it.
Unfortunately, a targeted marketing effort like this is pretty much doomed to fail. For one thing, no target. Gays do not have, for example, rainbow-striped or pink skin (not that many of us don't seem to try). Apart from the issue of visual identification, kids in high school pretty much either aren't certain or don't want it broadly known that they're gay; they're not going to respond well to a campaign that feels like it's pointing a finger and saying, "HEY! YOU! Yeah, YOU! The gayboy over there! and that lesbo next to you! We got a proposition for you!"
To be sure, emphasizing in their literature any organizations and special services they may have is a good thing for a college to do. That said ... Look, the issue is that being gay is, in fact, a subcategory of every other category. You recruit nonminorities, you recruit ethnic minorities, you recruit men, you recruit women ... you're pretty much going to get the gay students. Targeted marketing is solidly unneccessary. And, as mentioned, no definable target.
(The concept of the check box is vastly amusing. Although, somehow, I expect it will come to be, because that's the way college admissions offices think. But still, the very idea of a "Gay? Straight? Check one" place on the application.... and what do you do with the understandably offended bisexual? Apparently nobody wants them. Poor bisexual student.)
Posted by iain at 03:05 PM
Poll shows fall in Palestinian support for suicide bombings: An overwhelming majority of Palestinians support reform of the Palestinian Authority, according to poll taken last week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which is headed by Dr. Khalil Shakaky. The poll showed 91 percent in favor of "fundamental changes" in the PA, with 85 percent backing unification of the myriad security services, 95 percent for sacking ministers, 83 percent for early elections and 92 percent for adoption of the Basic Law, or constitution. In the latest poll, 48 percent favored, and 43 percent opposed, changing the Palestinian system to divert power to a prime minister, leaving the presidency now held by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat a largely ceremonial post.
Interesting. I rather suspect that last item makes the whole thing something of a nonstarter, though. I mean, seriously, even if Arafat were serious about reform, can you imagine that he would allow himself to be shuffled into a "largely ceremonial" post? After all these years?
Majority of Palestinians still support suicide attacks. Support among Palestinians for bombings inside Israel has fallen although a majority still backs such attacks, a public opinion poll showed Tuesday. Support for bombings inside Israel fell to 52 percent from 58 percent in December. But 86 percent of the 1,317 adults polled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip opposed arresting those behind such attacks, while 67 percent, up from 61 percent in December, believed that armed action was more effective than negotiations.
That, unfortunately, is going to be a problem. I suppose it's not terribly surprising, but as long as those behind such attacks feel certain not only of majority support, but of being hidden by those people, the attacks will probably continue. Which means Israel will continue to mete out harsh punishment for those attacks. So the core issue will come down to: will the punishment break the will of the people to support attacks?
Posted by iain at 12:08 PM
Merrill Lynch, Spitzer Reach Settlement: Merrill Lynch & Co. agreed to pay $100 million to settle allegations that the firm's analysts misled investors with their stock ratings so the company could win lucrative investment banking fees.
My my my. Merrill Lynch was very naughty, to tell people that stocks were good when they were, in fact, pretty damn bad. Lots of people lost because of this poor advice.
As part of their penalty, Merrill Lynch had to make a Statement Of Contrition: Merrill Lynch would like to take this opportunity, as part of the agreement reached with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and other states, to publicly apologize to our clients, shareholders and employees for the inappropriate communications brought to light by the New York State Attorney General’s investigation. We sincerely regret that there were instances in which certain of our Internet sector research analysts expressed views that at certain points may have appeared inconsistent with Merrill Lynch’s published recommendations.
Now, just go back and read that again. Go on, I'll wait .... Now, Merrill Lynch never actually says that they're sorry that they did make poor recommendations, do they? It doesn't take a major effort to parse that first part of their "Contrition" into, "We're sorry that our analysts sent those emails, and we're sorry they got caught." Seriously, back when you were a kid and said or did something that your parents said that you had to apologize for, would THAT have satisfied them? "I'm sorry I communicated inappropriately or got caught saying something that you didn't like." Wouldn't that just seriously piss the hell out of your parents? And yet, somehow, it's enough for the Attorney General of New York. Curious, that.
Posted by iain at 11:09 AM
Four Sue LA Cardinal Mahony, Priest Over Sex Abuse: Four men who were allegedly molested by a Roman Catholic priest as boys sued him, the Los Angeles Archdiocese, and Cardinal Roger Mahony on Monday under federal racketeering laws, claiming that the church acted as a criminal enterprise in covering up the abuse.
... Well, that didn't take long, did it?
I wonder if they'll pull the evidence from the Massachusetts case into this one. Since this is federal and not state, it may be more possible. Without that evidence, or that type of evidence, it's a desperately weak RICO case, although strong enough as a standard civil tort case. And even with it, the case would still be short a couple of predicates.
Posted by iain at 05:41 PM
Abortion Rule Snags Bankruptcy Bill: ... Lobbyists for the banks and credit card companies that stand to gain financially from the bankruptcy overhaul are fuming. After spending years lobbying for the bill--and funneling millions of dollars in contributions to the politicians considering it--they are seeing their legislative priority ensnared by one of the nation's most emotional, divisive social issues.
You know ... I can't find it in me to feel in the least sorry for the lobbyists. I mean, I wouldn't anyway, but this just makes you want to laugh.
Thing is, if the abortion rule manages to survive committee, that almost certainly means that the law itself may not pass constitutional muster. There's no legitimate government purpose served in excepting one class of legal defendent from the rules, and not another. It's a denial of due process and equal protection on its face. (One might add, it's also desperately bad law. Basically, it rescues credit card companies from the mess they themselves created by being profligate with credit cards. To be sure, people didn't have to use them, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that if you hand out credit willy-nilly to people in "subprime" lending categories, you're going to reap a lot of bankruptcies.)
Posted by iain at 05:25 PM
Two of the latest chapters in the ongoing self-destruction of the Catholic Church in these United States:
A popular Los Angeles priest told Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in 1986 that he molested young boys, but was reassigned to parishes and allegedly continued his sexual abuse of minors for more than a decade, documents and interviews show. Mahony later approved a secret $1.3-million payment to two men who said they had been abused by the priest, Father Michael Stephen Baker, from 1984 to 1999. The cardinal arranged for the priest to quietly retire from the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in late 2000.
Mahony also wrote a letter to the archdiocese priests trying to explain his conduct. Mahony justifies his protection of Baker by staying that he hadn't been found guilty of a criminal act, but how could he possibly have been found guilty when the archdiocese refused to report him to the police? (Apparently their archdiocese attorney at the time fully expected that they would call the police; I suspect they were rather surprised when that didn't happen.) It's also clear that Mahony thought that if he handed over the three priests that were making all the headlines when the LA scandal first broke, he could hide the rest of the names from the police. If his emails hadn't been stolen and distributed to the press, he would likely have gotten away with it, too.
Previously sealed records in the case of defrocked pedophile priest James A. Porter show Catholic church officials - including Pope Paul VI, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros and top aides to Richard Cardinal Cushing - knew of and took part in the coverup of cleric sexual abuse as far back as 1964. ... The file, obtained by the Herald through a court order, also reveals that diocesan officials are required by canon law to maintain "secret archives'' that have over the years become a hidden repository for sexual abuse allegations. The documents contain hundreds of pages of Porter's personnel file, including details of his assignments and attempted treatments for his sexual assaults on young boys. The entire, previously secret file, along with a 17-page letter from Porter to Pope Paul VI, was forwarded to the Vatican when Porter petitioned for laicization in 1973 after being caught in Minnesota with a young boy.
The concealment of evidence in the Los Angeles case and the one cited in the above-linked Boston Herald article leads to a more startling conclusion: the Church may very well be a corrupt organization, as defined by federal RICO statutes.
Many of the proper predicates for a RICO case are now in evidence. (Note that the Massachusetts case in the Herald article is not a RICO case; however, other lawsuits against the Church are making the attempt.) The RICO statutes require not only an ongoing pattern of criminal activity, which the molestation alone would make a given, but a clear attempt to cover up the criminal activity, directed in a coordinated way. The Vatican, by using canon law to dictate that the archdioceses of the US maintain these secret archives of evidence and by keeping these archives secret, dictated the concealment of crimes. (Leaving aside for the moment the utter moral bankruptcy of such a policy ... WHY would you want to retain these archives anywhere? Why wouldn't you dispose of them somehow, if you were knowingly committing this sort of criminal act? Yes, you might want to know about a given priest, if you retained them in the priesthood and reassigned them to other parishes, but the evidence was so secret that even other parishes never knew about these men. If you refuse to use it internally, why keep it?)
Two issues still remain as obstacles to proper RICO cases. One predicate which has not been satisfied is the requirement of material injury in one's business or property. (That requirement may or may not be satisfied in Anderson's case; it depends on how seriously the court takes the claim that his client planned to be a priest before he was molested. The simplest defense to that is that children and adolescents change their idea about what they want to be when they grow up all the time; there can be relatively little credence given to that position in and of itself. The fact that apparently many priests were abused as children -- frequently by other priests -- would also constitute a novel, if probably unusable, defense; after all, being molested didn't stop them from becoming priests. Of course, they also seem to have gone on to molest other children. As I said, probably an unusable defense.) There are also issues of a strict statute of limitations, but it's possible that both of these may be waived or that the judges involved may consider that the ongoing patterns of concealment caused both material harm and extended the statue of limitations. We'll see.
There are jurisdictional issues, to say the least. For one thing, some of these cases seem to be trying to pull the federal RICO statutes into state court in a way that's not normally done. For another, the Vatican is a foreign government, and all cardinals are considered to have dual citizenship; this may be true of priests as well. (Cardinals are as a matter of law considered "princes" of the Vatican. Until Cardinal Law's deposition, this was not generally known; I can imagine that it will only cause trouble now that it is. This means that technically, foreign members of state are wielding power within US territory over US citizens. I wonder if this means that priests would be considered as dukes or lower members of the "nobility". But I digress.) Can these "princes of the Vatican" be held responsible as US nationals if what they were doing is not only not illegal, but required under their second country's laws?
Nonetheless, the evidence for at least the beginnings of a very nasty RICO case does exist. It can't be long before one of the archdioceses finds itself up in front of a judge who allows a RICO case to proceed so that all of the evidence can be seen. (To be sure, any such decision would be appealed to the Supreme Court. The one thing that can be counted on is that these cases will be in the court system for an appallingly long time.) I can't imagine what it's going to be like the first time the archdioceses of the US have to defend themselves against charges of being a corrupt organization that furthered criminal purposes.
Imagine what will happen if they're found guilty.
And you know the truly sad thing about this mess? The Vatican still doesn't understand. They dragged all the cardinals to Rome, had that big meeting to inform the Vatican of the issues ... and they still do not understand what they did wrong.
Roman Catholic bishops should avoid telling congregations their parish priests sexually abused someone if the bishops believe the priests will not abuse again, a Vatican official said. The Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda also said in an article to be published Saturday that church leaders have no legal or moral responsibilities if such abuse does occur. "From a canon law perspective, the bishop and the superior are neither morally nor judicially responsible for the acts committed by one of their clergy,'' said Ghirlanda, dean of canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. [...] He added, "The cleric's right of good name must be protected by the bishop and superior."
Canon law isn't the issue, you moron. And surely the cleric who commits abuse gives up his "right of good name" by his own actions.
If the Vatican wants to make certain that the Church in America is utterly destroyed, its spokespersons should just keep making statements like that. What sort of moral authority will Rome be able to assert when they say something like, "Well, our bishops are not responsible," when it's quite clear that they are responsible for these people being able to continue their predations, that their actions made it possible? Had "the bishop and the superior" not kept transferring these people from parish to parish in full compliance with the abovementioned canon law, had they submitted these people to civil law as yet another part of the canon law demands that they do, then this wouldn't be happening, now would it?
On the other hand ... It must be wonderful, if you're a cardinal or a bishop or some abuser's superior, to realize that you're off the hook, theologically speaking, when canon law says that it's purely the responsibility of the individual priest. And, of course, the individual priest does make the choice about whether or not to act; it's not as if the bishop or superior says, "Go. Have sex with kids. No problem." Of course, canon law also apparently tells the bishop or superior that they need to move people around and keep their past transgressions secret even from other priests and bishops. It must be wonderful that canon law says they're not responsible ... else how could they sleep at night knowing what they've done?
Posted by iain at 12:50 AM
ABCNEWS.com : With Chavez Away, Venezuela VP Rejects Coup Talk
... what, ANOTHER one?
My, but that looks like a fun place to be these days.
Posted by iain at 12:31 AM
... there are WORKSHOPS for this?
Mind, I suppose it's the sort of thing that being in a group of other similiarly afflicted people is useful for, maybe, kind of.
THERE'S AN INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THIS!? I mean, geez, it's a survivable problem! all you have to do is go home! or, you know, wait a little and something else will become available!
A convention. In Las Vegas. Well, of course. Where else would you put it?
It is NOT like alcoholism. Yeesh.
But can you just imagine the twelve-step meetings?
Posted by iain at 06:46 PM
Canonizing Pim Fortuyn: It seems to me that the conservatives' interest in legitimizing Fortuyn-to the point of getting down on their knees for a Dutch backroom cruiser-is in the service of elevating the entire issue of regulating and barring Arabs and other Muslims, and perhaps even rounding up such people here. When the dirty bomb goes off, this is the repressive direction conservative pundits are going to go (and it's not inconceivable that in these times fearful Americans won't be as receptive if not more so than the so-socially conscious Dutch). Fortuyn is their dress rehearsal.
If that is not the case and if I have erred gravely, then I would like to see an unequivocal statement from such conservative pundits stating that they have no interest in seeing such policies here, and explaining just what their true interest is in this obscure political figure.
You know, I'd wondered about that myself.
I also wonder if they'd be so rah-rah enthusiastic about him if they'd known about his articles on the subject of pedophilia. I mean, just imagine the Wall Street Journal saying, "Oh, we think it's tragic! This far-right (well, we think so) politician assassinated! This person who was in favor of halting immigration ... and in favor of talking about the legal issues of sex with children. Oh. Well ... so, how 'bout them Mets?"
Posted by iain at 02:05 PM
The Legal Fiction of "Diversity" - Good intentions and the unraveling of affirmative action. By Dahlia Lithwick: This week, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a district court's finding that the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action policy was unconstitutional. In upholding Michigan's affirmative action program, the Court of Appeals, by a 5-4 vote, took another jog in the twisting national highway of race and education. Because this new opinion directly conflicts with affirmative action decisions handed down by other courts of appeals -- such that what's unconstitutional in Texas or Georgia is now permissible in Michigan -- it raises questions that can only be answered in the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Supremes have consistently declined to revisit their own baffling affirmative action jurisprudence. Not just because the issue is fraught with political and ideological ugliness, of a sort that makes Bush v. Gore look like a walk in the constitutional park, but because the debate isn't even about "affirmative action" anymore, as most of us understand that term. Instead, the affirmative action debate has become the illusory, impossible attempt to define educational "diversity."
It will be interesting to see what the Supremes do with this, if they do anything with it. (If they do, I expect they'll bundle it with the case about undergraduates, since it's essentially the same issue and the same university.) I mean, that's the question, isn't it: does the state have any constitutionally justifiable interest in promoting a "diverse" student body, and if so, does the state have any constitutionally justifiable interest in defining what it means by "diverse" so that its policies don't get turned inside out by people taking them at their literal word?
As Lithwick notes, the idea of "diversity" is by far the weakest of the legal arguments that affirmative action cases could have rested on. In terms of justifying affirmative action -- without stating whether or not it's a good or bad thing to do so -- I have never understood why it would not be sufficient -- and was not sufficient for Powell -- to say, "Society has a compelling interest in increasing the number of minority professionals -- in large part because our society being what it is, they're the ones most willing to serve in minority neighborhoods -- and society may have a compelling interest in increasing minorities in education and other professions as a remedy for past historic underrepresentation caused by discrimination." That said, there are problems with both aspects of that argument.
The first strand of that argument, involving essentially whom people prefer to serve and residency patterns, basically requires the Court to admit that, no, this is not a racially integrated society in all ways and it may never be such. Although this is entirely true -- not only due to any unlawful discrimination but because of pure and simple choice by all parties involved -- no court in this land could ever bring itself to say so. To do so is to admit that the ideal of the melting pot is absolutely false on its face -- a more proper metaphor would be a chess board, with the black squares being many other colors as well. The ideal of the melting pot is so cherished to many that no court could ever bring itself to say to the country, "People, just GROW UP! It's not going to happen! That's not the way things are, and it's not the way most people want them to be ... and as long as we can all do our best to give everyone a fair shot at the best life they can have, regarless of those factors, it's all right." That's simply never going to happen.
The second argument, about remedies for the past, requires the Court to say to whites, "Yes, you will be experiencing reverse discrimination. This has nothing to do with your merits; it has to to with the historic structure of our society. This will cause you pain, and for that, we are sorry, but it is necessary for the good of all." This Court will never say that; I'm not sure that you could have gotten the Supreme Court to say that to society at large at any point in time, but this one especially likes to dodge the big-time pain. Another problem with that second strand is that it requires the Court to say to minorities, "Yes, we are allowing you into programs and positions for which you would otherwise be considered unqualified. We are doing this for the good of society at large. This means that sometimes, you won't know if you would have gotten these results on your own merits, and sometimes, you will absolutely know that you could not have. This will cause you pain, but it may be necessary." In short, the second argument -- which is really required as much as the first to sustain an affirmative action program -- manages to be unpalatable to just about everyone. This Court, at least, will certainly never say that; in part because it clearly doesn't believe that.
Thing is, I don't believe that the Court will ever bluntly and directly confront our national assumptions about these issues. Certainly not during my lifetime, anyway. The Court, this Court, and society at large have too much invested in ducking and dodging and trying never to discuss all these assumptions openly and honestly. After all, who knows what would happen if we did?
There are, of course, those out there who think that we've done everything we need to do in this area, that we can just let the market and merit handle absolutely everything from here on out.
In what could become one of the largest class-action suits against the federal government, black and Hispanic special agents from three agencies are joining forces to file a consolidated discrimination case against the Department of the Treasury. [...] The plaintiffs say that they were subjected to pervasive discrimination in a variety of employment practices, including hiring, training and performance evaluations, and that they were blocked from special assignments, promotions and awards. In addition to claims against individual agencies, the combined case lodges a broader charge of systemic discrimination and a "good old boy" network that permeates the Treasury Department. [...] The suit involving the black Secret Service agents was originally filed in 2000. The suit against the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau dates to 1990.
Hmm. Well ... perhaps not.
Microsoft: Internet Explorer Has Flaws: Microsoft Corp. has warned that its Internet Explorer software contains six flaws, some of which could give hackers access to -- and even potentially change -- personal information about computer users. The Redmond company, which called the severity of some of the flaws "critical," advised users of Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 to download a patch for the software from the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/security.
Sigh. Just ... sigh.
Posted by iain at 11:02 AM
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court has struck down a state law prohibiting same-sex solicitation.
You know ... I do wonder why they didn't write a law prohibiting offensive solicitation, period. (Because it would have been an unconstitutional infringement of the right to free speech, I would imagine; everyone does have the right to be offensive, up to a point.) Wonder what the people who wrote the law will do next? There's no grounds for appeal to a federal appeals court; absent a federal constitutional issue (and the only one that could be raised wouldn't augur well for the state), a state's supreme court is the final arbiter of a state's constitution.
Posted by iain at 05:42 PM
Gay marriage ban floated / Ire over proposed amendment to Constitution: Six House members introduced a proposed constitutional amendment Wednesday that would ban same-sex marriages, drawing a swift rebuke from supporters of gay and lesbian rights who said it sends a message of "intolerance."
Yes? And? Your point being ... what, exactly?
Hey, Shows may be a pig, but he's an accurate pig. the majority of people in the US probably do feel that marriage should "consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
Mind, unless this amendment gets downright picayune and starts defining gender as a matter of federal law, it would do nothing about the up-in-the-air situation of transsexuals, who seem to be limited, for the most part, to marriages that appear to be gay. And despite the somewhat over the top opinion of the ACLU, the Federal Marriage Amendment, in and of itself, wouldn't do a thing to various partnership laws in any state but possibly Vermont, because every single city or state with such laws has gone out of its way to make the explicit point that such laws are NOT legal marriage and do not carry those privileges, benefits or duties. (That said, it's fairly certain that conservative organizations would try to use FMA to get rid of those laws, but without a great deal more broadness and specificity in the enabling acts -- the laws that actually give enforcement to the various articles and amendments -- there's nothing in the one sentence of FMA itself that could be used to touch those laws.)
It's going to be interesting to see which way Congress runs on this one. The pundit consensus seems to be that it hasn't got a chance of going anywhere, but punditry has been wrong before, heaven knows. Will Congress feel that, in an election year, it's better to pander to the country's prejudices, or will it feel that it's better to keep a judicious silence and save it for another time. After all, people who have a fairly conservative district, but whose seat may be a bit shaky because they themselves are more moderate, can do themselves a world of good by voting for something symbolic but unlikely to actually pass. They can then go back to their district and say, "I voted for the amendment! It was those damn liberals that kept it from passing!" Honor -- of a sort -- will be served, their seat will be saved, and the Constitution is unlikely to have an amendment that basically says, "Yes, we're prejudiced, and we like it like that!"
I assume that the introduction of the FMA is a direct response to the reintroduction of ENDA, which was the subject of a truly remarkable press release from the Concerned Women of America organization.
Yahoo! News - Concerned Women for America: New Report on ENDA Bill Reveals Radical Homosexual Power Grab Undermining Civil Liberties, Employers' Rights
Yes! That's right! We are mounting a putsch! Now everyone knows what them two gayboys in Shrubya's administration are really doing there; they're behind-the-scenes fifth columnists for the Human Rights Campaign! Fear Us! (Not that anyone needs any help with that last, but, you know, had to run with the theme, there. And who knows? Maybe that IS what those two gays in the administration are really doing; heaven knows they're even more invisible than the Invisible Veep at an Undisclosed Location, and that takes some doing!)
(For some reason, in the last couple months or so, Yahoo has decided to include PR Newswire stuff in their alerts as though it were actual news. Basically, PR Newswire is just press releases from different organizations. But occasionally, you do come up with truly impressive gems like this one.)
Seriously, I haven't seen such fulminant slavering at the keyboard in I just don't know how many years. The one line that made me go into fits of laughter, the one line that is just so operatically over the top that you wonder that someone editing this didn't say to the writer, "Um, guy, turn it down a notch": "Senator Kennedy is trying to force every employer in America to adopt the hiring policies of the Archdiocese of Boston," said Michael Schwartz, CWA's Vice President for Government Relations.
... Senator Kennedy is trying to make every organization in America hire Catholic men to minister to the masses? What a ... unique interpretation of national law that would be! And it would go over so well at many organizations, now wouldn't it? (Yes, I realize that wasn't the point he was trying to make. That said, I want to see where it says in the Boston archdiocese hiring policies, "We only hire homosexual men who want to have sex with kids." I'm thinking that would be perhaps a step too far, even for Boston. Although possibly not for Los Angeles. But I digress.)
Oh, and there's the lovely part about bisexuality becoming a federally mandated right. And the part about the Boy Scouts being a target of federally funded lawsuits. (Been there. Done that.)
How to put this delicately ... CWA doesn't know how to use scare tactics properly. Theoretically, this would be aimed at conservative commentators to put on talk radio and elsewhere, I suppose. I mean, who else would use it? (Aside from we liberal -- er, pardon, liberally independent -- commentators who will lampoon it mercilessly.) The bulk of conservatives in this country actually have working brains -- I may not like the way they think, but they do actually think, most of the time. And most of them will look at this and understand that it's hogwash. (Quite apart from anything else, religious organizations -- which the Boy Scouts just won a Supreme Court case to be considered -- are specifically exempted from ENDA. Bill history and link to full text available at Human Rights Campaign's CAPWIZ)
Actually, the best case scenario for those who truly love irony would be for Congress to pass ENDA by a veto-proof majority (there is no way on this planet that Shrubya would sign it, what with having severe problems with the archconservative wing of his party already) ... and then for it to turn around and pass FMA. Seriously, it would be perfect. "We don't think people should lose their jobs or homes because they're, you know, funny THAT way. But we don't want 'em gettin' married! No, sir, we just don't like that!"
Posted by iain at 01:39 PM
Yasser Arafat moved to improve his tarnished position on the world stage yesterday by announcing his intention to reform the Palestinian Authority and to hold elections, although without saying when. In a move also intended to bolster his diminishing popularity among his own people, he admitted making mistakes during the intifada, and reiterated his commitment to the one goal that unifies his population – the creation of a Palestinian state.
Hostility to Arafat Grows Among the Palestinians By AMIR TAHERI, Amir Taheri is a writer for Arab News, an English-language newspaper in Saudi Arabia: Presented by his propaganda as "the renewal of the pledge between the leader and the people," Yasser Arafat's tour of Palestinian towns this week had been planned as a triumphal march for the self-styled president. Instead, it turned into a long-overdue exercise in humiliation for Arafat and provided further evidence of deep-rooted hostility to his leadership among Palestinians. [...] "Arafat is not interested in us and we are not interested in him," said Muhammad Abu-Ghalyoun, a former inhabitant of the Jenin camp. "He has no business in Palestine." [...] Is Arafat the "inevitable" Palestinian interlocutor that Secretary of State Colin Powell claims? The answer coming from the Palestinians and the Muslim world in general is an emphatic no. Arab and other Muslim leaders will not call for Arafat's demise as long as Sharon does. But there is a growing feeling that the Palestinians need a new, younger, better-educated and cleaner leadership.
The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), meeting simultaneously in Gaza and Ramallah Thursday, unanimously voted to hold elections for the chairman of the Palestinian Authority - the post held by Yasser Arafat - in the first quarter of 2003. The council also decided to hold general and local elections within one year. [...] The demand for far-reaching reforms of the Palestinian Authority gathered steam within Palestinian society Thursday, as a special committee set up by the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) met for a second day Thursday over a draft bill that will include reforms of the PA. [...] Others said they were skeptical Arafat would carry out any reforms, noting that the Palestinian leader has resisted change. "Yasser Arafat loves only Yasser Arafat, and his looking for personal benefits," said legislator Hassan Khreisheh.
The latter articles would suggest that that world opinion is not precisely the audience Arafat should be aiming at. It would also suggest that one thing that Israel could do that would be in its interests is to get Sharon to shut up about Palestinian leadership. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen. He clearly has an extremely personal dislike for Arafat (and vice versa), and he's also not particularly skilled in the art of judicious silence.
Somewhere in Ha'aretz, a while back, a columnist made the point that although Sharon is a good leader for this type of crisis, he has no sort of exit strategy or plan. If, let us say, the Palestinians manage to kick Arafat upstairs (ideally, they would separate their head of state and head of government and thoroughly restrict the power of the head of state to almost ceremonial use and nothing else) or get rid of him, Sharon has shown no particular inclination that he would like to make peace with anyone. And, of course, the Netanyahu branch of Likud has made the effort that much more difficult.
An interesting thing about the Taheri editorial: it doesn't appear on ArabNews itself. At all.
Posted by iain at 11:37 AM
Canada seems set to join the US in reneging on the Kyoto protocol on climate change - unless it is granted key concessions that the European Union adamantly opposes.
I do like the way they put that, don't you? I mean, how can you possibly "renege" on a treaty you haven't even ratified yet? In every country, signing a treaty is meaningless until it's ratified internally by whatever process.
I'm somewhat surprised that Canada actually signed, given that their emissions were actually increasing at the time. I wonder how effective it will be if yet another major emissions producer joins the US, Canada and Australia in refusing to ratify the treaty. Is there some mechanism for running around bullying nonsignatory emissions producers? I mean, the thing is missing almost an entire continent, here. And there can't be any industrialized nation where the producer industries aren't absolutely frantic about this thing and lobbying hard against it.
In any event, I expect the Europeans are saying truly nasty things about the ugly North Americans about now.
Posted by iain at 11:19 PM
Far Right in Europe - Fortuyn favoured depraved: PIM Fortuyn, the charismatic right-wing Dutch politician murdered last week was a powerful advocate or paedophilia, Scotland on Sunday can reveal. His controversial views on race, immigration, liberalisation of drug laws and his open homosexuality were well-known. But his approval of paedophilia, while not a secret, was ignored by Dutch journalists covering his election campaign. [...] In his article, Fortuyn wrote: "Paedophilia is just like hetero and homosexuality. It is something that is in the genes. There is little if anything that you can do about it or against it. You are who you are… sooner or later the proclivity makes its irresistible appearance. It is not any more curable than hetero or homosexuality. [...] After the invention of the Pill came sexual liberation. Gay sex became accepted, and why then should paedo sex not be allowed – under the strict condition that the child is willing and that there is no coercion? This enlightened point of view has meanwhile been abandoned, and under the influence of the ologists, the child is defined as totally devoid of sexual desires, at least where adults are concerned."
Yet more evidence that the Netherlands are very very VERY different. I cannot imagine a serious candidate for American or British national office publicly making such statements, let alone in print. And if they had made such statements in print, their opponents would be hammering them into the ground with those views; every speech, every campaign statement would have in it somewhere "Oh, and Fortuyn is in favor of kiddie sex."
The fact that such a statement is somewhat incomplete would not bother them in the least. It wouldn't matter that his views were based on his experiences (and just imagine what the fundies would do with a boy who was seduced into sex by a man and then later turned out to be gay). It wouldn't matter that he's not saying "Kiddie sex! Yay!" A person holding the view that the sexuality of children as it relates to the law should be a topic for discussion would simply never be able to hold public office in this country.
I wonder how powerful an advocate of a position he could possibly be if most people didn't know what his position actually was?
Purely as an aside, I do find it remarkable that Scotland on Sunday can clump together Fortuyn's views on various topics, stick them in an article that comes within legal inches of calling him a pedophile, and then still call him Far Right.
Posted by iain at 11:03 AM
... OK, that's a novel argument. Not going to work, of course, but definitely novel.
Marker pens, sticky tape crack music CD protection: Music disc copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200 and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and electrical tape, crackers have discovered.
Pardon me while I snicker.
I mean, blue marker pens and/or electrical tape? That's IT? that's all you need to defeat the latest, greatest copy protection scheme? Shouldn't there be more to it than that?
Posted by iain at 02:11 PM
Brazil...
Where hearts were entertaining June
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured "Someday soon..."
We kissed...
And clung together
Then...
Tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now...
When twilight dims the skies above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of
Return...
I will...
to old...
BRAZIL.
Eh. Feeling a mite whimsical today.
Bush and Putin to Sign Treaty to Cut Nuclear Warheads: President Bush said today that he would sign a treaty with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia next week committing both nations to cut their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200 strategic nuclear warheads, over the next 10 years. The three-page accord, however, does not require destruction of the warheads, essentially giving both sides the right to keep the weapons in storage where they could be reactivated on relatively short notice if either country faced new threats. [...] The accord Mr. Bush's aides negotiated gives the Pentagon enormous flexibility. In fact, the reductions do not have to take place before 2012, and the treaty expires that same year, if the two sides do not choose to renew it. In addition, both counties reserve the right to terminate the agreement on a short time frame, just three months' notice — half the ordinary notification period. (NY Times, registration required.)
So let me get this straight: Russia's most dangerous weapons remain in service, everyone's warheads merely go into storage, there are no new verification methods (although the verification methods from SALT and START are apparently to be used), neither the US nor Russia needs to do one damn thing before the treaty is scheduled to expire ....
What the hell was the freakin' POINT?
I have to admit, I actually agree with the unnamed members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who think that the warheads would be a damn sight safer for everyone if they were still attached to missiles. They're more difficult to remove, they're easier to keep track of, and Russia (and the US, for that matter) makes sure that the Russians have the funds and personnel to properly guard the things. For that matter, we don't have the resources to dismantle the things either, and Russia doesn't have the resources to even make the attempt at the moment.
Powell says that the Russians get predictability out of this, but what's predictable in it? We can (and almost certainly will) hide and store warheads, we can pull out at three months notice, and, as mentioned, we don't actually have to do anything for a full decade. Where is the predictability in that?
This treaty is a weird sort of face-saving window dressing, and just barely that.
Posted by iain at 11:15 AM
Japanese military hungry for bigger role: Japan's Defence Agency has asked for the first time to become a fully fledged ministry, saying the elevation befits the rising importance of defence in national administration. The seemingly innocuous request is part of a worrying nationalistic drift that has become more pronounced during the past few years.
You know, I kind of feel sorry for Japan on this subject. First, the US soldiers misbehave badly, to put it mildly, in various places, so the Japanese demand that we lower their profile and pull a few of them out. Perfectly understandable.
We, in turn, say, well, yes, but the region is key, and your forces are inadequate to even pretend to defend yourselves. You should make your defense forces stronger. Japan then gets a raging fit of multiple personality disorder, with Personality A pointing to the Japanese constitution -- which, leave us not forget, the US wrote -- which flatly forbids them from doing much more; Personality B says, Well ... maybe we can do a little more.
Every so often, Personality B wins the public debates, and they try to do more. At this point, Asia speaks with a remarkably unified voice and shouts NO NO NO NO NO! We do not want Japan to have a bigger navy and army!
Now, to be sure, the reasons they speak as one are not, in fact, all the same. China and Russia prefer to have the US' leading commercial and military partner in Asia as weak as possible, thank you kindly. But for them, as well as for everyone else .... Forty years of occupation and war, followed by five years of even more spectacularly gruesome war on top of that ... memories die hard, sometimes. (I believe, although I'm not certain, that Russia and Japan are technically still at war, and have been for 57 years. Japan wants its Kuril Islands back, and Russia has no intention of giving them back.)
Posted by iain at 12:41 AM
Jewish extremist network 'targeting Palestinians'
Well, I guess it can't quite be a surprise, really.
I do wonder what the Palestinian leadership, such as it is, will do if their people start getting targeted successfully from two directions. Granted that the Israelis have, for the moment, the political will to be considerably more effective than the Palestinians at stopping such things. What happens when they start failing, as they will if this is truly an organization? (Not, one assumes, as frequently as the Palestinians "fail" to stop people.) Then you'll have the Israelis officially targeting terrorists and Israeli terrorists targeting everyone else.
Posted by iain at 12:24 AM
Media Relations: grooming for straight men/ May 13, 2002
Posted by iain at 02:18 PM
You know, the fascinating thing about this is that Texas is appearing more and more as its own little country, in some ways. I mean, what else can it be called when essentially the Texas Dems are telling the national party and figures to stay away, and the Texas Republicans can't figure out of the national figures are a benefit or drawback? "We're Democrats and Republicans, but we hate you all so please keep away. Y'all don't come back now, y'hear?"
Posted by iain at 12:39 PM
The Liberal Blogosphere (via George)
Hmm. I'm vaguely tempted to nominate myself, except that means that someone would have to come by and examine my liberal bonafides, and I'm not sure I'd pass. Is it sufficient to call our leaders Shrubya, Our Lord High Minister of Injustice, and The Invisible Man at an Undisclosed Location? (OK, I just made that last one up. But really, doesn't it describe him pretty well? He only seems to come out of hiding for fundraisers. You wonder how many people even remember that we have a vice president; he seems to have taken veep invisibility to a new high.) God wot, I'm certainly not as liberal as TAP. For example, I'm occasionally willing to concede that Andrew Sullivan has a functioning brain cell. Occasionally. In the privacy of my own brain, thank you kindly. Especially since he typically follows those moments up with yet another very special Sontag award. (Good lord, man, get over it.) But I digress.
Posted by iain at 11:52 AM
Hope for New AIDS Weapon: AIDS researchers looking for ways to prevent more HIV infections have their sights set on a range of gels and creams that many believe will eventually offer uninfected people the best possible defense against the virus, short of a vaccine.
I wonder how this will work. A component in a lubricant, I suppose: Astroglide MAX: kills HIV dead! (OK, probably Astroglide doesn't need the help. But you can imagine the advertising campaign that would be unleashed on those late night ads.) I mean, otherwise, I can't see gay men, at least, even thinking about using the thing. "Oh, wait, I've got to put in the cream!" Um ... no. Probably not.
The other thing I wonder about is how phase III clinical trials in this sort of thing work. I mean, as a practical issue, the people in the trial ought to be having safe sex, because it's probably the best way to keep yourself around so that you can have sex in the future, so to speak. But you can't determine the efficacy of the substance if it never comes into contact with either semen or HIV. So what do researchers tell people to do? "Go ye and have safe sex! (But if you have unsafe sex, get back to the lab right away so we can tell if the thing is working!)" I mean, what?
Posted by iain at 10:50 AM
With Convert's Zeal, Congress Awakens to AIDS: Two decades into the global AIDS epidemic, an unlikely alliance of lawmakers is pressing President Bush to increase spending by hundreds of millions of dollars this year to help foreign nations grapple with the disease. [...] The reasons for the change in Congressional sentiment are varied, and even proponents of more spending disagree on how much money is needed and precisely where it should go. Some lawmakers have come to embrace the disease as a children's issue, citing predictions that the number of AIDS orphans will increase to 40 million in 10 years. Sandra Thurman, the former top AIDS official in the Clinton administration who runs a nonprofit group, the International AIDS Trust, said she began pitching the concept to Congress as early as 1999. "If you can't get Democrats and Republicans to agree on everything," Ms. Thurman said, "you can get them to agree on children."
Others, like Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, see the disease as a national security threat, creating political and economic instability that will breed the next generation of terrorists. Former President Bill Clinton, who has made combating global AIDS a priority of his ex-presidency, has made this argument in a series of speeches.
So.
We can apparently agree that saving children is a worthwhile goal. And we can apparently agree that national security -- extremely broadly defined -- is a worthwhile goal.
Apparently, treating and saving adults in this country who are principally of various minorities is NOT a worthwhile goal.
How very very special of Congress to help us all realize what our worthwile national goals should be. And only 20 years late, too.
Posted by iain at 12:06 AM
Gay men urged to get annual tests for STDs / Rising rates alarm federal disease fighters
Interesting. Most doctors I know who have practices with any noticeable number of gay men say that you should get tested every six months, and have for quite some time. I wonder why the CDC recommendation is behind that.
US to keep strong force in Afghanistan: The US and its allies must maintain conventional forces in Afghanistan capable of large-scale operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the American commander in the country said on Friday. Although US military officials have consistently reported that the tactics of their foe have evolved towards a low-level insurgency, and that they are unlikely to regroup in any significant way, Major General Franklin Hagenbeck would not rule out the possibility. "I'm not prepared to draw that conclusion yet," he told the Financial Times. "There are not at the moment large targets or formations. However, that doesn't mean that at some future date they may not have that capability again, so I believe we must maintain a coalition capability to execute missions across the spectrum of operations."
It can't make the administration terribly happy to have its leader on the ground saying what everyone else has been saying for ages.
I must admit, I've never understood the administration's position on Afghanistan. We don't want to participate in peacekeeping, but we'll protect Karzai's government. How can you protect his government if you don't do any peacekeeping? Moreover, without a fairly large occupying force in the near term -- at least until Afghanistan gets an actual national army up and running, if it ever does -- how can you hope to keep the country stable enough to keep terrorists out?
Posted by iain at 05:28 PM
Gay teen going to the prom
: A gay Ontario teenager cannot be barred from taking his boyfriend to the prom at a Roman Catholic high school, a judge ruled Friday.
Hum. So the state trumped religion, after all. Wouldn't have thought that would happen.
I wonder if the school will appeal. To be sure, any result would be too late for the current case, but they might want to see if they can get the precedent pulled off the books. Or even to clarify at the Canadian federal level precisely what is the responsibility of a somehow publicly selected board governing private institutions.
But it's still weird.
Posted by iain at 03:40 PM
Israel May Seek Extradition of Gunmen: Hours after the exile of 13 suspected Palestinian militants from Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, Israel said it had the right to seek their extradition from the countries that ultimately host them.
Well, yes, I suppose it does. But somehow, I didn't think that was the general plan when they started this.
By the way, did anyone notice that apparently Canada's one of the nations that's supposed to take in a few of these guys? I wonder why the administration didn't just lean over and say, "No. We just don't think so." Metaphorically speaking. I mean, for all that the Canadian border is getting noticed now, do we really want known terrorists being dumped up there? For that matter, why would Canada take them, given that they know they're a funnel, and an attractive target of sorts in their own right? (Of sorts. Although I'm not certain, I think that it would be worse for Canada if the Ambassador Bridge were to go away than for the US, just because of the relative sizes of the economies in question.)
Posted by iain at 03:34 PM
Only the appearance of U.S. involvement
What a remarkably cynical assessment of the situation with Israel. Mind, I don't think he's at all wrong -- the administration is only interested in pressing Israel insofar as Israel's current policies interfere with their desire to march on Baghdad -- but you simply never hear cynicism to that degree out of Israel these days. (Aluf Benn is cynical to the extreme in places; I would hope that Sharon regards the bombing of his citizens as slightly more important than that. To be sure, it will be interesting to see how they implement the decision between Israel and the US that the Palestinian Authority should be reformed and possibly disbanded, especially since the Palestinians themselves were not consulted in the matter. I would think they would object, somehow.)
It also seems that a majority of Israelis may believe that withdrawing troops and settlements would renew the peace process. I wonder how, at this stage. To be sure, the settlements should be withdrawn; they're nothing more than a deliberate affront and provocation at this stage. Moreover, Israel can't really protect the people in them constantly or consistently. I would also like to see any Israeli government convince Shrubya that he should put a US-led force into the Palestinian territories. Seriously, given the acute lack of power that most international policing forces wind up with, that's basically putting them in there with a great big "Oh, just shoot me now!" target on them. They'd have to be in such numbers as to be a true occupying force to be effective, and how will that contribute to peace? It would mostly just redirect the Palestinians at us -- like we need that.
Posted by iain at 01:27 PM
Maryland governor issues temporary moratorium on death penalty: After granting convicted murderer Wesley Eugene Baker a stay of execution today, Gov. Parris N. Glendening went one step further and issued a moratorium on the death penalty in Maryland until a state-funded study on capital punishment is completed in September.
Interesting. I wonder what he'll do if the study does, in fact, find bias. It's going to be one of those confounding things, I suspect. I rather doubt that the study will find substantial bias in Maryland's application of the death penalty. (Which is not to say that there is NOT bias; I just don't think the study will say that there is.) The bias comes earlier in the process, in terms of who gets charged with what, who gets arrested, that sort of thing. And the study isn't designed to look at that aspect.
But still, if bias is found, will he simply extend the moratorium? What will he do? I suspect that even now, he's finding the same thing that happened out here: state legislators basically saying, "The process is fair! We don't care if we've released a bunch of demonstrably innocent people! We just want to kill someone!"
Posted by iain at 12:44 PM
US non-lethal weapon reports suppressed
Apparently, we're violating quite a few international treaties that we've signed. And have been for some time.
Yes, that's right. Clinton, our internationalist president, may well have authorized violating international treaties. (Would have had to, really, for this stuff. Mind, I don't say that he knew what he was doing. I sometimes wonder how much a president signs off on because someone says, "Oh, this is fine," and then it comes back to bite him on the ass because he's simply too busy to read in the detail he should, or ask for all the information he needs. But I digress.)
The nonlethal weapons lab apparently wants international treaties rewritten so that we have more freedom to develop these things. Thing is, the treaties couldn't be rewritten to give us more freedom without giving others more freedom as well, and given that we're all upset about Cuba having bioweapons already, I suspect that we might not like that very much.
I also suspect it's going to happen anyway, no matter what we want. It'll all just be under the table, where everyone can pretend it's not happening. Like our programs.
Posted by iain at 01:10 AM
Scotland to approve same-sex weddings: GAY marriages could soon be sanctioned by registrars in larger cities, allowing the public registration of same-sex relationships, The Scotsman has learned. ... councillor Archie Graham, Glasgow City Council's equality spokesman, said: "We tend to look sympathetically on any requests made by the gay community on the grounds that they are a group which is discriminated against. Therefore, we would be likely to look at least at the possibility of meeting their needs now that the issue is coming to the fore in England."
... Scotland?
Seriously, it's the only part of the UK that actually did repeal Section 28, and now this. And yet they have this reputation as conservative and dour. (Because you can't discuss Scots' reputation without using the word "dour". It's a legal requirement. Sorry.)
I wonder how that would affect things in Britain. Would England and Wales be required to recognize gay marriages made in Scotland?
But still ... Scotland?
A puzzlement.
Posted by iain at 12:17 AM
Mike Tyson may have disproved the adage that any publicity is good publicity.
The former heavyweight champion's PR agency evidently quit this week, a month before his lucrative title fight with Lennox Lewis. Tyson's profanity-laced tirades in a series of interviews arranged by New York-based Dan Klores Communications in Hawaii last week apparently prompted the company to sever its ties.
Hmm. Apparently obvious insanity does have its costs, after all.
Mind, I don't understand why this managed to get them to bail when nothing else in the past five years did, but ... whatever.
Posted by iain at 08:13 PM
Anti-discrimination law OK'd by council: The Dallas City Council on Wednesday sent a message that discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing and in public places won’t be tolerated. The council voted 13-2 for an ordinance that Mayor Laura Miller had promised to seek during her campaign. Violations of the ordinance would be Class C misdemeanors, punishable by fines of $200 to $500. “Let us walk out of the shadow of intolerance and bigotry and into the sunshine of human rights,” said council member John Loza, who is openly gay.
Texas Penal Code, CHAPTER 21. SEXUAL OFFENSES
§ 21.06. Homosexual Conduct
(a) A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.
(b) An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor.
So it is now illegal to discriminate in the City of Dallas on the basis of conduct and behavior that is in fact illegal in the State of Texas.
I'm thinking that nondiscrimination statutes in Texas are probably indifferently enforced, to say the least.
Gay teen 'free to leave the school,' court told
That prom thing in Canada just gets messier and uglier.
I do still think that as a religious institution, they're perfectly entitled to set these rules. No matter how inconsistent or stupid. (They have no problems with the kid's boyfriend attending basketball games, but object to the prom because it's a romantic setting. Yes. Sure. All-righty, then!) I'm less sure that the board has any such right, if it truly is a public institution. (And, if I understand things in this mess, the prom is sponsored by the board and not simply by the school, which adds another layer of peculiarity to it all.)
But the school and the board are managing to make themselves look truly and impressively hateful in defending their viewpoint. (Note that I am being linguistically precise. I do not mean worthy of hate, I mean full of hate.)
Has anyone noticed that all over the world these days, religion is conflicting with the nation with increasing frequency? Here, Canada, Britain, India ... it's happening everywhere. Religion seems, in many cases, to be coping with modern life and its demands very badly indeed.
Posted by iain at 01:46 PM
The New Republic Online: Zoned Out: One evening in late March a couple dozen students tried to stage a camp-in on the grass in front of Westcott, the main administration building at Florida State University. The students, members of an anti-sweatshop group, were trying to pressure the administration to join the Workers Rights Consortium, an international organization that monitors the conditions of Third World workers who make athletic clothing emblazoned with university names and logos. FSU has a $3 million-per-year endorsement deal with Nike that puts the Swoosh on all products worn by its athletic teams. Students were concerned that the university cared more about Nike than about sweatshop conditions. But the students had barely pitched their tents when campus police showed up and arrested twelve of them. They were, the cops explained, protesting outside of a designated "free speech zone."
Wait ... what? Isn't the entire country legally more or less a designated free speech zone? Yes, there are certain restrictions (and probably far more of them on federal property these days) -- but vast swatches of public institutions of education should not be part of that restriction.
And yes, we can all appreciate the thundering irony that those who were protesting for and using their rights of free speech everywhere they could in the 60s are now those who are restricting them frantically. Oh The Irony. Now STOP it.
(New Mexico State was actually one of the first instutions to abandon free speech zones. I'm impressed. Mind, I'd be far more impressed had they not adopted free speech zones in the first place. I mean, we're talking southern New Mexico, a city of some 50,000 or so. Just how much protesting could there possibly have been?)
Posted by iain at 01:05 PM
Education Suffers in Africa as AIDS Ravages Teachers: The virus that causes AIDS is spreading so rapidly in parts of Africa that it is killing teachers faster than nations can train them, undermining an international effort to enroll all children in school by 2015, a report by the World Bank said today. The report says that in parts of Uganda and Malawi, nearly a third of all teachers carry H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. In Zambia, teacher deaths nearly doubled, to 1,300 in the first 10 months of 1998 from 680 in 1996. In the Central African Republic, 85 percent of the 340 teachers who died between 1996 and 1998 had H.I.V., vanishing from classrooms an average of 10 years before they would have normally retired. [...] The report describes education as the developing world's best hope for fighting the spread of H.I.V., noting that half the world's 15,000 new infections each day occur among 15- to 24-year-olds.
One of those odd little side effects that you don't quite think about when you think of AIDS. All those plans and projects that had seemed as though they might actually be workable, in the future, if not now. Then you see that not only is the future compromised, but what you can do in the here and now is shrinking almost daily.
Young people in the Western world have become so complacent about safe sex that the AIDS crisis may be only just beginning, a report warned Saturday. Datamonitor said that the under-30s were still leading a lifestyle almost in ignorance of the threat of AIDS, with a new generation of teenagers believing HIV is not something that will affect them. [...] An estimated 900,000 people were believed to be HIV-positive in the United States -- but this number was set to double by 2010 if efforts were not made to ensure people realized the devastating consequences of contracting the disease.
I would say, "Let's hear it for the effectiveness of abstinence education!", but that would be entirely cynical of me, now wouldn't it?
India will have the largest number of people in the world infected with HIV/AIDS in a few years, overtaking South Africa, if steps are not taken to curb the deadly disease, UNAIDS chief Peter Piot said on Thursday. [...] "Ten years from now, there will be tens of millions infected in India," he said. UNAIDS is a joint organization of various UN bodies and the World Bank fighting the disease.
Posted by iain at 12:20 PM
U.S. Argues For Wider Gun Rights: Reversing long-held government policy, the Bush administration has told the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm that is not tied to the maintenance of state militias.
You know ... not that I have the least desire ever to give Shrubya or Our Lord High Minister of Injustice the least break. Not once, not ever. But I am impressed at how concisely yet comprehensively the headline misrepresents the administration's actual position. They're not arguing for wider gun rights; they're saying that the status quo is precisely what's intended by the Second Amendment. Please note that I am NOT saying that I agree with the administration; merely that the headline misrepresents both the administration's position and, indeed, the actual content of the article.
That said, I'm not particularly surprised that this administration would choose to change the government's approach to gun rights. I'm only surprised that they would choose to make the comments in the cases at issue, where such comments were completely unnecessary. After all, the government is only requesting that the Court uphold the appeals level decisions. Very loosely stated, the combined effect of the two decisions is only to say that whatever the right to bear arms actually is under the Second Amendment, that right can in fact be abridged in the case of a known and convicted felon (who forfeits many federal rights in any event) or a person named in an order of protection.
It will be interesting to see if the fact that the administration decided to reverse historical course on this issue makes the court respond to its statement. The court might well not have responded directly to the Second Amendment argument in any depth, since it's not required to deal with the substance of the cases at issue. (And, given the patterns of judgement exhibited by this Court, it's highly likely that they would have dodged the constitutional interpretation as much as they could.) Since the argument is now part of the government brief, they may feel required to respond in some way.
Posted by iain at 11:19 AM
The Big Lie
I've been in the public eye for more than 18 years, in Europe and the US. I've enjoyed fame and recognition, which comes at a price.
That price isn't privacy, as many would have you believe, the price is the cost of the truth.
New Dutch Gay Politician: Pim Fortuyn.'
It seems that when I called Fortuyn a far rightist before, I thoroughly wronged him:
Openly gay Dutch politician and sociology professor Pim Fortuyn has been assailed as a "right-wing extremist," as if he were Holland's answer to France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. The charge is absurd: Fortuyn has urged immigrants to embrace their adopted nation's liberal values of political tolerance, women's equality and respect for gays. Yet he, rather than the Muslim clerical leaders he criticizes, winds up getting tarred as some sort of reactionary or fascist.
And, apparently, a Marxist, at that.
It's terribly easy to turn what sounded like anti-immigrant bias into rightism. I can't imagine that we would be any more tolerant of immigrants who refused to accept key parts of American law and culture. (And, in fact, we're not.) That said, it's somewhat easier here; we don't seem to have a crime problem fueled largely by immigrants, and immigrants generally don't refuse to learn the language or assimilate to some degree or another. After all, that's partly why they're here.
It will be interesting to see how his party works with his policies, if they get enough of a presence in Parliament to have a substantial voice in things. It will be interesting to see whether or not his party actually is rightist, as opposed to the man.
Congressman Set to Introduce Web Privacy Bill: A U.S. lawmaker said on Monday that he would introduce this week a long-awaited consumer privacy bill covering Internet commerce. Florida Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns said he would introduce the measure on Wednesday, nearly nine months after releasing an outline of what the bill would contain. "Congress needs to address the American people's concern with the online and offline collection and use of personal information," Stearns said in a statement. [...] The measure would allow consumers to remove their names, addresses and other personal information from commercial customer lists that are commonly sold or rented to other companies, a Stearns staffer said. Conflicting state privacy laws that set a higher standard would be struck down, he said, and consumers would have no right to sue if their privacy were violated. The Federal Trade Commission would be responsible for enforcement.
Yes, I do agree that Congress needs to pass legislation addressing consumers' privacy interests.
This is not that legislation.
This bill is, in fact, unspeakably vile. Higher privacy standards would be struck down? No right of redress when your rights are violated? What incentives do companies have to follow the rules set down by this bill? Oh, yes, the FTC will fine them. Eventually. Sometime down the road. BIG whoop.
From the consumer point of view, it's actually worse than Hollings' bill, which is saying something quite remarkable.
Posted by iain at 04:15 PM
Arthur Andersen LLP was an astoundingly bad corporate citizen, it seems. While I do feel for all the people working for the company who didn't know about the misbehavior and had no role in it, frankly, it's beginning to look like it was time for the firm to go.
That said, Andersen had an astoundingly bad day yesterday. The trial, which they tried to avoid, has started. (Admittedly, most of their effort seems to have been rather last minute because they thought the government wouldn't go this far.) Right off the bat, , the judge ruled that prior Andersen problems could be told to the jury. Not only do they get to hear the Enron saga in what will be truly painful detail, but the jury will also hear about Waste Management, about Sunbeam, about Baptist Foundation of Arizona, about Boston Market, about Global Crossing ....
Oh, yes, and they will almost certainly hear about Peregrine Systems: Technology firm Peregrine Systems, which ditched Andersen for KPMG last month, said it was conducting an internal probe into possible discrepancies "totalling as much as US$100 million" (£68 million). Peregrine’s chairman and chief executive, Stephen Gardner, along with the company’s chief financial officer, Matthew Gless, has resigned . From Andersen's point of view, the timing on Peregrine's announcement couldn't be much worse; the only thing that will keep it from being utterly disastrous is if the jury is sequestered, which I don't believe they are.
Peregrine's shareholders are suing the company; I would imagine that a follow-on lawsuit against Andersen for either improper or incompetent accounting is pretty much unavoidable. Even if they don't expect to get anything back from Andersen, it was their responsibility to catch such things and report them. (I wonder if Peregrine was one of Andersen Consulting's clients. Bet it was. Most of Andersen's problems seem to have come from a severe conflict of interest; the consultants were telling them to do things that the accountants decided to ignore. And yet Andersen Consulting doesn't seem to have been blamed in this. Curious, that. I suppose it must be legal to suggest that they do something improper, but it's not legal to fail to catch or report the company doing such things.)
FYI, Andersen seems to have settled the Baptist Foundation case. AGAIN. I'm rather surprised that Andersen has $217 million to spare; I'd think as well that the lawyers for the Enron clients would try to attach the settlement, so that Baptist Foundation would get no more than any other client. (I would expect that attempt to fail -- it is, after all, independent of that case -- but I would think they'd try.) In any event, if the Enron trial drives Andersen into bankruptcy before the payments to the foundation trust are completed, the trust will become just another creditor in any event. It also seems that Andersen is self-insured, more or less, so they have to pay the insurance subsidiary so that it can pay the trust.
Posted by iain at 02:44 PM
Blair opens adoption up to gay couples: TONY Blair is risking a political outcry by considering a change in the law which would allow unmarried couples, including gays and lesbians, to adopt children. The Prime Minister may put down a last-minute amendment to the Adoption and Children Bill giving adoption panels the power to choose both gay and straight parents. He has been advised that if he proceeds, he will face full battle with the alliance of "family values" campaigners who defeated his plans to scrap Section 28 in England and Wales. [...] Mario Conti, the Archbishop of Glasgow, has already made clear his opposition to gay adoptions. A spokesman for the Catholic Church said it will pressure the Executive not to follow suit. "Gay adoptions introduce a sliding scale of instability. It has been shown to lead to psychological problems," he said.
Yeah, RIGHT. Psychological problems.
Since when does the British government pay attention to the Catholic church, of all things?
I wonder sometimes how Europe works. I mean, there are all these interdependent laws, but there are still various national assemblies making their own laws, trying to keep Europe in mind when appropriate.
Let's say, for example, that the Conservatives manage to defeat this bill. (I shouldn't think it would be very difficult to do, to be honest.) What I want to know is, does Britain recognize gay marriages made in the Netherlands or one of the other countries that has such things, even though they can't be done in England? (I'm not sure that Denmark counts, since they rejected Union.) If so, a British gay couple could go to the Netherlands, marry, and return to Britain and say, "If you don't allow us to adopt, it's unlawful discrimination according to EU laws."
It is remarkably progressive of Blair, especially considering that he couldn't get the Lords to override Section 28. (Which, as I understand EU laws, is also blatantly unlawful, but never mind.) I wonder why he's decided it's worth spending the political capital to make the attempt.
Posted by iain at 01:30 PM
Bishops must balance civil, canon law in sex cases: America's Catholic leadership may talk of zero tolerance for sex offenders in the priesthood, but bishops have a 100% problem with shedding such men. They can't. "These (sex abusers) are criminals, but they are our criminals and we can't lose them. Indeed, the bishops have a duty to try to save them," says the Rev. Reginald Whitt, professor of canon law at University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.
Given the rather sharp conflict between the two sets of law ... I don't know. Granted that the current sexual abuse crisis is of their own making, but the conflict between the different sets of rules isn't, quite. (And I would imagine that the procedure for changing canon law is arduous and time consuming, and that the Vatican would strongly resist changing canon law for what is still perceived as an "American" problem. Ireland and Australia would disagree with that conceit.) The problem for the Church is that they allowed this situation to sit and fester and now that it's ruptured all over the place, nothing less than "zero tolerance" will do for the public. The problem is, zero tolerance for what, exactly? How can the Church mediate between people who feel that once a priest has been accused of betraying a trust that they should be defrocked, and canon law that says that the Church cannot do any such thing?
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, my best friend and I have an idle bet about where and when the next official schizm from the Roman Catholic Church will happen. The assumption from both of us, well back in the 1980s, was that it would happen within our lifetimes. (Actually, come to think of it, if Asia or Africa doesn't break away in the next five years or so, he loses. HA!) I would be willing to bet that the US moves way up on that list, and up in the timetable, especially once the findings of the Conference of Bishops are formalized and ratified by the Vatican.
I wonder if the Old Catholic and American Old Catholic Churches (not the same thing as each other OR the Roman Catholic Church) are seeing gains in membership from this.
(And a final side note: I'm still constantly amazed that USA Today grew up into something resembling a real newspaper. Who knew?)
Posted by iain at 11:39 AM
The Enron Showdown: Joe Lieberman and the White House head toward war over Enron.
Role of Enron directors under Senate panel scrutiny
Senator says White House slow with Enron details
You know, it's fascinating to read the coverage of these stories. Even from the normally conservative National Review and the normally skeptical Reuters (the Forbes article), you get the impression that nobody quite knows what to think of this situation.
On the one hand, it really does seem that Lieberman .... if not quite overreaching, he at least doesn't seem to be setting things up properly. For example, it does seem that he apparently gave the White House a deadline for response that he didn't actually tell them about. That said, it also seems that the White House was hoping to move somewhat slowly on this. (THAT said ... it doesn't seem that a month and a half to gather information from everyone in the White House is particularly unreasonable, especially given that there are other steps that Lieberman wanted taken as well.)
On the other hand, people seem to feel that, although Lieberman may have gone about it the wrong way, the question is (1) very simple, and (2) probably relevant to his committee. The base question is simply, did you have any contact with Enron employees or directors, and if so, what was the content of that contact? Unfortunately for the White House, wound into all that is the issue of Cheney's little advisory committee, about which they've already run into trouble.
The question is, how much of this is for making hay, politically, and how much of this is genuine? Unfortunately for Shrubya, he has to actually answer the questions that Lieberman is asking before people will be able to see how much of this is Lieberman's grandstanding, and how much is legitimate inquiry.
Posted by iain at 11:20 AM
Medical Students Sue Over Residency System: Every March, graduating medical school students wait anxiously for Match Day, when a computer tells them where they will spend the next several years as medical residents in teaching hospitals. A class-action lawsuit to be filed in Washington today challenges the matching program on antitrust grounds. The suit says the defendants, including seven medical organizations and more than 1,000 private hospitals, have used the program to keep residents' wages low and hours long. Almost all first-year residents make less than $40,000 a year and often work 100-hour weeks. (NY Times, registration required)
Well, well, well.
I wonder what's going to happen with this. That there's collusion is absolutely unarguable (although they will, in fact, be arguing that point). Let's face it: when you've got a system in which the producers pick you and restrict you from entertaining another offer -- in fact, the producers work with each other to make sure you have one and only one offer which you MUST accept -- then that's prima facie collusion.
To be sure, the medical residency system actually is an extension of medical education. (I worked with residents for many a long year. There's a lot they don't know at that stage.) That said, it's primarily a source of relatively cheap, overworked labor for the hospitals. I know that in some ways, I would not mind a system in which residents were made to work fewer hours. It would be nice to feel more certain that your doctor is actually awake enough to be working with patients.
THAT said ... I'm not sure there's any way to fix the residency system without completely breaking the health care system. (Whether or not that should be a goal is another issue.) Hospitals are already getting a continuous full-court press from the government on various federal programs, from HMOs on reimbursements, and if this whole primary care thing really ever does catch on in this country (I don't think it will -- again, another issue), then hospital days will drop even more precipitously than they have already done. Add to that the idea that if students are successful in this suit, residents' hours will go down, their salaries will go up ... and hospitals will have less money to actually pay for all that.
I would imagine that under such a regime, these lovely newfangled hospital choice plans will become even more prevalent, and even more odious -- even low end hospitals will cost quite a bit more.
Posted by iain at 10:48 AM
BBC News | AMERICAS | US expands 'axis of evil': The United States has added Cuba, Libya and Syria to its "axis of evil" - nations it claims are deliberately seeking to obtain chemical or biological weapons.
Cuba.
CUBA.
You have got to be kidding.
I actually am not even vaguely surprised at the inclusion of Libya and Syria. In fact, I was only surprisied originally because they weren't included. After all, didn't we have evidence of those countries' invonvement in terrorism ages ago?
Even if you're not kidding about Cuba, though, what action do you plan to take? We already have no official trade with Cuba. (And yet their economy has unofficially dollarized. Curious, that.) We don't have any official relations with them. We occupy a corner of their island just because we can. (That is, notably, one of the very few colonial-age perpetual leases still unrepudiated.) The chances that we would actually invade Cuba are remote at best. What exactly do we do? What does it mean to have Cuba on the "axis of evil" hit list?
Posted by iain at 06:00 PM
Gay teen takes Catholic school board to court over prom date
May I just say that Canadian law appears to be an even more peculiar mess than American law?
Seriously, this case is utterly insane, and it's gotten more so the longer I've paid attention. As I understand it, the kid sued his school board to be allowed to take his boyfriend to the prom. OK. Fully in the US tradition for these things, even, so I have no problem understanding that.
Except.
He goes to a private Catholic school. Which, in both Canada and the US, would seem to trump his right to free expression of his inner gaiety at a private religious-sponsored event.
Except.
The Catholic school board governing the school is apparently a public institution.
What the ... how on earth do you have a public board governing private schools? WHY would you have a public board governing private religious schools?
Any road. Because the board is public, it seems that the board's religious obligations may be trumped by its constitutional obligations, which require them to let the boy and his boyfriend go to the prom regardless of the board's religious beliefs.
I suspect the kid will lose his court case, but this thing is so incredibly bizarre that I can't really tell.
Posted by iain at 05:55 PM
National Zoo Cites Privacy Concerns in Its Refusal to Release Animal's Medical Records
You know .... I'll admit that I'm a rampaging liberal, most of the time. (Except when I'm not.) I do in fact, believe in the right of privacy, that what happens between a person and their doctor should not become a matter of public record. Note that I said a person.
This ... this is just STOOOPID.
To be sure, I can think of all sorts of reasons that the Smithsonian wouldn't want to release the medical records, none of them good. Let's face it: the only reason to cite animal privacy, of all things, as a reason to withhold records is because the records have something that you don't want in the public record. At least, so it would appear.
If this is part of the pattern established by Shrubya's adminstration, it's a very stupid one. Oh, I can understand that he wouldn't want to create the precedent of any part of his government releasing information. (Despite the fact that, at least technically, it's our government, and he's required to release information. But never mind that.) In any event, it strikes me that this is just one of those weird little things that happens, rather than part of a pattern. After all, there were better reasons for refusing to release the records, as the article notes.
What the National Zoo needs, it would seem, is a better public information officer, who would know better than to say something that irredeemably dumb.
Posted by iain at 05:27 PM
Right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose anti-immigration party stunned the public with its strong showing in local elections last March, was shot six times and killed Monday as he left a radio interview. Dutch television said the 54-year-old politician was shot in the head, neck and chest. The attack came nine days before national elections, and opinion polls had predicted Fortuyn would lead one of the largest parties in parliament. [...] The radio reporter who interviewed Fortuyn said police with dogs chased and captured a man with a gun. Other witnesses said the gunman was chased by at least four people after the shooting. Police had no immediate comment.
I wouldn't have thought such a thing would happen in the Netherlands. On the other hand, given that it did happen, I'm not at all surprised that it happened to him.
I wonder what the person who killed him intended to happen with this. Unless it was done by a far-rightist that felt he was betraying the cause somehow, I suspect that the results won't be as intended. Fortuyn's party is likely to pick up even more, as people who might have sympathized with him but didn't intend to vote will now want to make a statement. People who were on the fence about who to vote for might also want to make that statement. And since it's a parliamentary system, in some ways, it doesn't actually matter who is the head of the party. There will be a far-rightist in the party to take over for Fortuyn.
Posted by iain at 02:37 PM
I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor: In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works. But to a growing number of critics, this statement is viewed as a shocking admission of prejudice. After all, shouldn't all patients be treated equally, regardless of the color of their skin?
You know, I just don't get this. Surely treating patients as equal regardless of the color of their skin doesn't mean completely ignoring racial differences when they're medically relevant. I should hope that my doctor would look at who I am and say, "OK, most blacks can't metabolize a particular medication as effectively, so maybe we'd better try something else," if such is indeed the case. (You do wonder that the New England Journal of Medicine managed to publish, in the same issue, both an editorial stating that race doesn't matter and a correctly done study indicating that it does.)
Using racial profiling in social ways may be completely wrong -- for example, deciding that someone must be a criminal because they're black is idiotic, and yet happens witn some frequency. But when it comes to medicine, when you have studies indicating that there are biological differences in how given races react to various treatments, why would you then turn around and say, "Oh, no no no. We must treat them like everyone else," -- effectively saying, "We must treat everyone medically as though they were white," which is simply not true.
The problem is, you have two issues that are being conflated into one. There's the "access to care" issue -- that is, people being denied care, or access to levels or types of care, due to their race. That is utterly and absolutely wrong, and I don't think most would argue with that. Then there is refusing to take racial differences into account when they make a difference in how and how effectively someone is treated, and that is simply stupid.
Posted by iain at 02:24 PM
Integration finally gets a dance card at Georgia prom: Like other spring-giddy graduates across America, high school seniors are ready to be footloose at a prom here in Butler. [...] But today, there's a new twist to this tuxedoed tradition. Although most of the teens have gone to school together since kindergarten, this evening's fest will mark the first time black and white students have danced together in a formal setting.
In 2002!!?? Good grief.
At one point, a frustrated student hisses at an unwelcome reporter: "It's just a prom!"
Well, yes ... but unfortunately, it's one of those things that's going to be seen as symbolic, whether it is or not. Of the last gasps of the old guard, and the first sign of the new.
The last paragraph of the article is just sad, though. The plain fact is, if it happens again next year, nobody outside the town will notice or care -- you won't get the media blitz. However, if it doesn't happen again next year, the media will descend in droves to find out why not, and the picture that's painted of the town will probably be both relentlessly inaccurate and terribly ugly.
Posted by iain at 05:20 PM
"My main objective in the fight is to be a professional but to kill him." [...] "He should have died that night, his two guys putting their hands on me like that. If I had been with the right crew, those guys would have been finished right there." [...] "If I put a camera on your face for 20 years I bet you might be a homosexual. Just think about it. I'm on television since I was 13 and since you don't like the way I carry myself you make names up for me, and I become insecure about that. Then I realise everybody white is fucked up to me. I can't help it if you're a victim of your colour."
OK, and the reason that Mike Tyson is neither in prison nor in an insane asylum is .... what, again? Oh, yes, he's a relatively wealthy boxer who gets paid to exhibit controlled fits of insanity. Controlled. Almost any other person talking like that in front of the press would be taken off somewhere to get himself sane again.
And did he just say that because he'd been on television for most of his adult life that he was homosexual? I mean, I'm quite sure that that isn't what he meant, but I'm pretty sure that is what he said. (Also: the Guardian actually put the word "fucked" into a newspaper article. No asterisks or anything. Egad. The world must be ending.)
You know, the sad thing is, I'm pretty sure he really will kill someone before people decide he's a danger. Already he gets to rape with impunity; how long will it be before he really does kill someone at a press conference?
Posted by iain at 03:21 PM
A Cancer Grows (1): ... Although the silent and insidious killers of women--breast, ovarian and cervical cancer--are finally commanding pink-ribbon attention and activism in the outside world, inside prisons, women might as well be living in the dark ages. Healthcare for prisoners, male as well as female, is decidedly subpar, but women face exceptional hardships in a system based on a military design, with young and healthy men as the treatment model.
You know ... granted that young and healthy men are the treatment model, but frankly, I'd be shocked if women actually do receive substantially different care than the men in this matter. Granted, women have a much higher incidence of breast cancer, and granted that men can't get ovarian, uterine or cervical cancer; instead, they get prostate cancer and hyperplasia. I can't imagine that prison authorities care if a guy is starting to experience prostate cancer symptoms, or showing lung cancer symptoms. I'd expect that they confiscate a male prisoner's medications just as readily as a woman's, and ignore needs for chemotherapy. The problem isn't simply that women prisoners health care needs are ignored by prison authorities; the problem is that prisoners' health care needs are considered unimportant, regardless of who the prisoner is. If you die -- especially if you've been sentenced to a lengthy prison term -- why would they care? Just one less prisoner to deal with. They're actually fairly unlikely to sue; there will never be any certainty that treatment would have helped, or that it could have been maintained. There's simply no incentive for prison authorities to improve medical care, and every incentive to let it limp along this way when it comes to cancer and other expensive diseases to treat.
And leave us not simply blame the prisons. Society at large would certainly feel that it's not a good use of resources to spend money on prisoner treatments. After all, the prisoners are unlikely to spread cancer and such diseases in the community after they get out of jail; those diseases don't work that way. Unfortunately, this attitude means that diseases that do work that way, such as AIDS and tuberculosis or hepatitis C, don't get treated well, either -- again, it requires guards to monitor medication, and it's not cheap -- and many prisoners with those diseases do get out and spread them into the community. (Generally into the poor and minority sections, however, about which, again, we just don't care all that much. If they die, they die. C'est la vie and all that.)
Posted by iain at 01:34 PM
It has a weblog. There are cases and news coming frequently enough to justify a weblog.
It's enough to put you off religion altogether.
Posted by iain at 12:47 PM
How Saddam reaps illegal oil profits
Our causus belli, I presume.
Or at least, it would be if our own companies weren't involved.
Not maintaining the embargo is asinine, as a matter of both politics and military policy. Why should we allow our companies to prop up the man we're looking to get rid of? Mind, someone else would certainly step in to fill the gap. The point is, we don't have to do so. Russia, Norway and Mexico (and, eventually, Venezuela after it gets over its entirely justified snit) would be happy to jump in to make up the difference. (Saudi Arabia would find itself in an interestingly ambiguous position, I suspect.)
I'd still love to know what the administration plans to do with Iraq once Saddam's gone, though. Granted, he's no friend to Islamist extremists himself, and happily executes them along with everyone else. Once he's gone, though, they're likely to come spilling out of the woodwork.
Posted by iain at 12:33 AM
Enron to show restructuring plan to creditors: Enron will on Friday present its latest restructuring plans to creditors as new management attempts to salvage a viable company from the wreckage of the bankrupt energy trader. The company refused to comment on the details of the plan following reports that the group would reorganise itself as a smaller, traditional provider of electricity and gas.
Oh, I don't think so.
I mean, sure, they need some sort of corporate shell to drift through bankruptcy, right. But does anyone think that after shareholder lawsuits of various sorts, there will be anything left of the newly constituted shell? Why would there be? Between wronged shareholders, wronged employees, various investment funds, lawyers fees out the wazoo ... how exactly does Enron think there'll be $10 billion left to run a company with? (We'll leave aside the concept that they'll be trading in commodities and territories in which other companies have been reducing their exposure. SS Suicidal Financial Plan, that's Enron.) The lawsuits are, and will continue to be, just flying through for quite some time.
And speaking of Enron and its codefendents, the news continues to get bad for Arthur Andersen LLP. The list of clients jumping ship continues to lengthen, and to date, Andersen has lost a breathtaking $731 million in billings. (Good land, Forbes is keeping a running financial losses tally now.) In the past week alone, they've lost Mrs Fields, Cinergy and a biggie: UAL, corporate parent of United Airlines, after a 67 year relationship. That one had to hurt a lot. (And they're involved in the Worldcom mess? Is there any major corporate meltdown in the past few months that they haven't been involved with?)
Posted by iain at 12:12 AM
... how accurate is the claim that the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin? At best the record is ambivalent. There are seven biblical passages that are regularly cited by fundamentalist Christians and their fellow travelers to justify their condemnation of homosexuality. Three are in the Old Testament and four are in the New Testament. However, three of the four found in the New Testament are highly suspect and appear to refer to sexual anomalies such as temple prostitution, pederasty or forced sexual activity which are quite unrelated to homosexuality. So the biblical texts that actually condemn homosexuality as we today understand it, are only four in the entire Bible and none of them, interestingly enough, is found is the Gospels. According to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus never said a word about homosexuality.
Oh, I should probably mention that The Position is a site for adults only. And now that I've said that ... My, my, my. A very interesting little article indeed.
I have to admit, the concept that the person who wrote this article was once the Episcopal Bishop of Newark is just kind of difficult to wrap my own mind around. (He's also got other columns on Beliefnet. Read fast; Beliefnet lost its funding and could go away any day now. There's also an interview at the Australian Broadcasting Commission site (RealAudio required) about the problems Christianity has historically had with discrimination and inclusiveness, and how some positions violate the mandates of the Christian Gospels.)
That said ... my own opinion is that he rather understates the opinion of religious conservatives regarding women and regarding homosexuality. It's not that they think that calling for the execution of homosexuals wouldn't be tolerated; in fact, I imagine it would be tolerated quite well, really. It's that the average guy on the street would think they were a complete and total fruitcake. As it is, they have, in fact, said (in more or less muted terms) that the concept of women as subservient to all things that men want -- as property, essentially -- is peachy keen cool with them! (Vide the Southern Baptist Convention.)
I've wondered about the story of Lot myself, ever since I read it in the Revised Standard Version Bible during a sermon one day. (Oh, and if you ever want to embarrass the heck out of someone, ask them in the middle of a sermon what on earth sexual intercourse is ... hey, I was ten at the time. And they were so happy that I was just reading the Bible and sitting quietly that it never occurred to them to wonder what parts of it I was reading. Could have been worse. Could have been Song of Solomon/Songs, and I could have been wondering why the Queen of Sheba's breasts were bouncing like roes. But I digress.) The story is clear that it's the sin of inhospitality that's being punished with the destruction of Sodom. It's also clear that Lot is a somewhat reprehensible person, what with the "Gang rape my daughters, please!" thing and the having sex with his daughters thing. (Mind, they got him drunk for the latter; it wasn't his idea. But still.) And I've always wondered why the dietary laws -- which Jesus himself would probably have observed, if you're going to be that way about it -- weren't considered important enough to matter.
Then again, you wonder ... if a bishop feels that the Bible contains "dubious ethical teaching" ... then why is he a bishop? Why would he do anything at all with the book? What gives? (And as far as the Pauline epistles go ... really, more people ought to study how the Bible was put together. The struggle that both the Catholic Church and King James' scholars went through to try to deal with him is vastly amusing. Basically, they all thought Paul was a complete and total basket case. But unfortunately for succeeding centuries, he was an important complete and total basket case in the history of Christianity, so they had to include much of what he wrote.)
Posted by iain at 04:29 PM
Poll: Calif. Race Initiative Favored: Conservatives champion the "Racial Privacy Initiative" as a step toward a colorblind society. Liberals blast it as an attempt to undermine anti-discrimination laws. It would ban state and local governments from recording race on everything from high school dropout rates to whether a city's police force is as diverse as its population.
I really wish Connerly would just go away. And I'm glad that he's plaguing California and no other state. (Although Texas has shown an alarming tendency to think he's wonderful. Then again, Texas is generally alarming.)
Frankly, I don't entirely understand why he's opposed to the state gathering such information. The only reasonable interpretation is that he wants to eliminate redress for discrimination, and by eliminating the data collection point, the state will thereby be immunized. After all, how can you prove discrimination if the state doesn't know who's gotten a job or been promoted or dropped out or whatever?
That said, the principal difficulty with this initiative is that if the state and cities stop gathering such information, they run into immediate trouble with the federal government, which requires such information. (A version of this happened with student loans back in the 80s, where universities were forbidden by one part of the federal government for asking for demographic information required by another part of the federal government. It was vastly amusing ... if you didn't happen to actually have anything to do with financial aid at the time.) Not collecting the information will put California into violation of federal law and endanger federal funds from all sorts of sources, from Medicare/Medicaid to Education, even highway funds. I would imagine that aspect of things has been carefully minimized by Connerly and his minions.
Posted by iain at 01:06 PM
HDTV: a 'revolution' in search of couch potatoes | csmonitor.com ... "You can see the patches of sweat forming underneath Tiger Woods' arms," says Cecil Houston, director of communication, culture, and information technology at the University of Toronto.
You know ... perhaps it's just me, but somehow, that really doesn't strike me as a selling point. Tiger Woods' sweat can keep itself out of my television forever, and I could thereupon die a happy and contented man. Really.
Let's face it: a combination of a lack of programming and startlingly high prices (a month ago at Best Buy, I didn't see one for under $1,000) will pretty much kill consumer interest every time. It's also true that because digital television comes in two parts -- the receiver and decoder are frequently separate devices -- people are often upset to discover that their $1200 HDTV doesn't actually receive HD signals. That sort of bad publicity gets out. (And, on top of that, broadcasters and media suppliers have only recently agreed on the encoding standard itself, so that content can't be "stolen", however you would manage to steal broadcast signals.)
Posted by iain at 11:54 AM
Arafat, citing the suffering of Palestinians and their resistance to IDF troops during the recent Israeli offensive in the West Bank, said that Jenin, site of the fiercest fighting, would now be called Jeningrad, a reference to the bloody Nazi siege of the Soviet city of Stalingrad during the Second World War.
I did mention that the propaganda loss for Israel on this was going to be a bad one, didn't I? ... Just checking.
That said ... Arafat doesn't have an ironic bone in his body, does he? I wonder if he realizes that calling a town "Jeningrad" makes him sound like an unreconstructed Communist? (After all, Stalingrad isn't even called Stalingrad now; it's Volgograd.) In any event, his historical analogy is false. Yes, Stalingrad was reduced to rubble; however, the siege lasted nine months, not a week. The Russians also anhilated a 300,000-strong German army (as well as apparently another half-million Axis allies -- Romanians, Italians and Hungarians) in the process and used that as a springboard to march west and push the Germans out of their country. It would be difficult to use Jenin as a springboard to ... anything, really, except a propaganda blitz.
Posted by iain at 10:19 AM
Unable to win Israel's cooperation, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Security Council on Wednesday he planned to disband a UN mission to look into what happened in an IDF assault on the Jenin refugee camp. [...] Officials in Israel fear that if the UN fact-finding mission over IDF operations in Jenin refugee camp is disbanded, the Security Council - which was scheduled to meet late on Wednesday - may decide to appoint a broader and potentially more damaging commission of inquiry which Israel would be forced to accept. [...] Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Tuesday that Israel's main condition for allowing the fact-finding team to arrive was that Israel would decide which Israeli witnesses would testify before the UN team. An Israeli official said the government wanted guarantees that witnesses would be immune from any war crimes prosecution arising from their testimony.
Oh, for the love of ...
So basically, the UN creates an inquiry committee -- containing a known antiSemite, for heaven's sake -- that Israel doesn't like and won't allow. After days of negotiating, the UN throws up its hands and says, "Fine! We're taking our toys and going home." And then Israel says, "No! Wait! Um ...." Yes? And? What on earth can they offer? The UN will not and should not compromise on the content of its committee nor on its committee's brief. (We shall leave aside the issue of whether or not they should have picked the people they did; frankly, I'm not sure that the committee could have completed, or even started, its work no matter who was on it in the current political climate.) Aside from simply giving way and letting the UN do as it will, there's nothing that Israel can offer to prevent a more punitive inquiry commission from being constituted.
I can't imagine that the Security Council will decide to conduct a larger and more damaging inquiry. For that matter, I can't imagine that it can; given that the US has (more or less) supported Israel through this, any expanded brief that came up in council would surely be vetoed.
Well, if nothing else, this demonstrates why the International Criminal Court is pretty much doomed to be a failure. (Didn't expect that veer, did'ja?) One of the few areas over which it has specific jurisdiction is war crimes -- which some Israeli soldiers have admitted committing. Now one of Israel's conditions for allowing the inquiry to proceed is careful selection of witnesses and immunity to charges for any war crimes that may have been committed by people testifying. In other words, only those civilians who will say, "No, I didn't see anything," will be allowed to testify, and those soldiers who can say, "Yeah, I used civilians as human shields, and we mowed down a few noncombattants deliberately," will only be allowed to testify if the commission, which is constituted to see if there are actions that should be punished, cannot submit them for punishment. Oh, yeah, this is all going to go well, isn't it?
Basically, this means that Israel is going to have to live with the fact that the world thinks its soldiers committed war crimes more severe than those they actually did. Which means that Jenin will probably join Sabra and Chatila as rallying cries for the Palestinian fighters, however deserved or undeserved it may be, unless some sort of outside inquiry and verification can be done. (Sharon himself is reported to bear indirect responsibility for the 1982 Lebanon disaster.)
A tactical victory, of sorts, but turning into a propaganda disaster.
Posted by iain at 06:18 PM
Sex act perv does a runner in just his green boxer shorts
The Sun just has a way with headlines, doesn't it? Between that, and the Page Three girl, no wonder it's so popular!
Apparently, there's just something about being a male chef in Britain that brings out a latent fascination with livestock. (Hey, at least this one's straight, that's all I've got to say. Well, that and ... they pixellated the picture to protect its identity. Yes. Right. Well. Quite. And did DNA tests, too.)
Posted by iain at 05:03 PM
Another Go at Kid Porn Law: ... "I hope this legislation meets the standard set by the Supreme Court," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida). "Pedophiles do not have a First Amendment right to gawk over exploited children, real or virtual."
And yet once again, Congress demonstrates that it misses the point completely.
OK, numbnuts: The Court didn't say that people have the right to look at "exploited children, real and virtual". The Court said that nobody has the right to look at exploited children, but that when no real children are involved, banning either the viewing or the expression comes perilously close to being a "thought-crime" and THAT is what's unconstitutional. You cannot ban the thought or expressions of the thought in which no real children are involved.
"First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end," the justices said. "The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."
The problem is, of course, that the yobbos in Congress would dearly love to ban your right to have a dirty thought. Any dirty thought. (Note that I said YOUR right. Congress being what it is, they would like to preserve THEIR right to dirty thoughts. They would also like to preserve their rights to unconstitutional labor discrimination, abusing pages, using their staff as their own personal sexual outlet ... have I missed anything?)
Posted by iain at 03:25 PM
Manganese Might Be Able To Stop HIV In Its Tracks
This is actually fairly startling. It would seem to indicate that simply putting people with HIV on a supplement with manganese in a form that can be metabolized would be a way to control the disease. Assuming that it doesn't interfere with current treatment drugs, it might be possible to use the supplement in combination with sharply lower doses of current drugs for HIV treatment. That would reduce the sometimes vicious side effects of the various drugs, and might broaden the number of people who could take them. It might also dramatically lower the costs of treating the disease ... which is probably why drug companies may well drag their heels on working with this treatment.
As far as I can tell from a cursory search here and there, the only major side effects to manganese itself are for diabetics; it can do odd things to blood sugar levels. (Unless you inhale manganese dust, in which case it can do seriously nasty things to you, but I wouldn't think they'd put it in an inhaler, somehow.)
Colon Cancer Is Deadlier for Poor Blacks in US: A study of colorectal cancer patients in the Harlem region of New York City suggests that US blacks living in poverty are more likely than others with cancer to end up dying of the disease.
And can I hear a DUH!
I mean, let's get real, shall we? I'd imagine that if you track any given cancer across ethnicities and income groups, the poor in all groups will be dying of cancer considerably more frequently than the rich. Kind of comes with the territory, it do.
OK, I do understand why they did the study. After all, without additional evidence, you can't get funds to go out and try to fight the problem. But still, this is the sort of thing that you'd think you could present to grant agencies and say, "Guess what? The poor are sicker than you and me!" and the agencies would say, "Oh, yes. Of course they are. Here, have some money." I know it doesn't work that way, but still ...
Posted by iain at 11:48 AM
Wide Racial Disparities Found in Costs of Mortgages: (NY TIMES, registration required) A far greater share of black and Hispanic homeowners with above-average incomes still have mortgages with higher interest rates than whites with comparable incomes, according to a study to be released today. The research suggests that conventional banks, despite recent progress, have failed to reach many minority borrowers who would qualify for good mortgages based on their salary and credit history, housing experts said.
I would point out that nothing in that first paragraph (or, indeed, in the entire story itself) justifies the conclusion reached in that last sentence. In fact, the only conclusion possible to reach, based on the evidence presented in the story itself, is that nobody knows why this is happening. The conclusion that it's the borrowers' doing is especially unjustified when, as the story states, the differences become more extreme as income rises. Education also rises with income (and vice versa), so isn't it reasonable to think that wealthier minorities would have a better idea of what options were available, and how to go about finding them?
I must admit, I'm puzzled by the stance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the issue of predatory lending. Their stated reason for opposition -- that curbing predatory lenders prevents people who are better credit risks from getting loans -- makes absolutely no sense. Why would it? How could it? The bills simply regulate how lenders handle the "subprime" market.
Posted by iain at 11:19 AM
Judge Rejects Jailing Of Material Witnesses: A key legal tactic employed by the government in its post-Sept. 11 war on terror is illegal, a federal judge ruled today, delivering a potential blow to the Justice Department's methods of detaining suspects and gathering evidence. The judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that the Justice Department has overreached in imprisoning as "material witnesses" men the authorities believe might have information for grand juries investigating terrorism. She dismissed perjury charges against a Jordanian student, Osama Awadallah, 21, concluding that the information the government collected in its investigation must be suppressed because the suspect had been "unlawfully detained."
It will be interesting to see what comes of this, and how long it takes. Congress clearly never envisioned the material witness statute being used in this way -- if they had, and they had passed a law stating as much, it would have been struck down as unconstitutional in the first place.
The Justice department will appeal, of course; they have no real choice. Too much of their investigation into terrorism has involved them holding people who have not been directly accused of or charged with any crime. I must admit, predicting which way the Court will go on this one is almost impossible. I would predict that Scalia and Rehnquist will say, "Why of course you can arrest innocent people, if you think they have relevant information!" Their love of order seems to allow them to bend the law in order to reach their goals. The rest of the justices, though ... who knows? Thomas has been showing an unruly independent streak of late, and the rest ....
In any event, the final decision in this case will also have bearing on the secret evidence detentions (or vice versa, depending on which cases get to the Court first). After all, if you cannot be held as a material witness because they think you have information but cannot prove it, how can they hold you without charging you when they won't tell you what the evidence is so that you can disprove it? They all revolve around the same general Constitutional principles.
In the meantime, Ashcroft has indicted a Colombian terrorist group for the murder of US citizens who were in Colombia at the time. This administration is extending the government's disturbing tendency to consider crimes against Americans as crimes against America -- that is, treating the crimes as if they had occurred in the US, where they would be subject to US law. As with Daniel Pearl's murder, there is no legal way the government should be able to sustain this indictment. Yes, crimes were committed against Americans, but law is a matter of territory and not nationality. We would be rightly offended if Americans were indicted (and "extracted", as the US is wont to do) for crimes committed in this country against foreign citizens. To the best of my knowledge, when thugs in Florida were running around murdering German tourists, Germany never demanded that they be handed over to face German charges; we would have laughed in their face. Of course, Colombia won't do so -- and probably won't even fight if we capture and "extract" a few of those charged -- because we're basically financing their corrupt little government. Not only that, but we provide all sorts of fiscal and logistic support for Colombia's fight against FARC and other groups (as long as Colombia sprays the odd coca leaf every so often). It's very hard to say no to someone when they hold pretty much all of the pursestrings.
Posted by iain at 11:01 AM
