Ugg

As I noted in an email to Dr. Tighe, idiocy like this makes me want to just rip my toenails out by the roots.  Dr. Tighe's assessment was wonderfully pithy while hitting the nail on the head.  The gentleman in question is mad.

Progress Reported In Resolution Of Georgian-Armenian Church Disputes

The Armenian Apostolic Church said over the weekend that its supreme head, Catholicos Garegin II, reached agreements with Georgia’s political and spiritual leaders that will help to resolve its long-running disputes with the Georgian Orthodox Church.

Garegin met with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II at the start of a weeklong visit to Georgia on Friday. The two pontiffs held a more detailed discussion in the presence of high-ranking Armenian and Georgian clerics on Saturday.

Garegin expressed his satisfaction with the meetings as he and Ilia made public statements at the Georgian patriarch’s official residence in Tbilisi.

In a separate statement, Garegin’s press office said the two sides agreed that the Georgian authorities should finally grant a “legal status” to the local diocese of the Armenian Church. Like Georgia’s other minority denominations, the diocese has no official registration and is therefore not treated by the Georgian authorities as a single legal entity.

Read the rest here.

Liberal (heretical) U.S. Catholics say Church not listening

DETROIT (Reuters) – Members of a liberal group of U.S. Roman Catholics on Sunday called on Church leaders to open talks with their members on controversies ranging from the ordination of women to allowing priests to marry.

Members of the American Catholic Council, meeting in Detroit, said they had grown concerned the church's hierarchy was not listening to its members on issues such as the role of women, married clergy and the treatment of homosexuals.

The meeting comes as the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is struggling with a sexual abuse crisis, loss of membership and a dwindling number of priests.

"When in God's name are the conversations going to begin?" asked Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun who addressed the meeting of about 2,000 people -- part of a liberal wing that represents a minority in the 1.2 billion-member Church.

She likened the structure, with bishops and archbishops answering to the pope in Rome, to "a medieval system that has now been abandoned by humanity everywhere, except by us."

Read the rest here.

See also this gem from the National Catholic Fishwrap on Hans Kung's call for a revolt against the tyranny of Rome.  Yes, he is still alive (barely) and no I am not kidding.

Over the weekend Fr. Z put up several amusing (and depressing)  blog posts about these tie-dye dinosaurs.

Royal Navy Chief: Britain too weak to support Libya operations

The British military intervention in Libya is unsustainable, the head of the Navy has said.

Adml Sir Mark Stanhope said the campaign would have been more effective without the Government's defence cuts.

The aircraft carrier and the Harrier jump-jets scrapped under last year's strategic defence review would have made the mission more effective, faster and cheaper, he said.

Sir Mark warned that the Navy would not be able to sustain its operations in Libya for another three months without making cuts elsewhere.

The First Sea Lord's comments will stir the debate over defence cuts that have left Britain without a working aircraft carrier and forced the Royal Navy's Harrier jump jets to be mothballed.

Highlighting military anger over the shrinking Armed Forces, another admiral warned that "comical" defence cuts would leave the Navy without enough ships to be effective.

Read the rest here.

What I wonder, would Britain do if they were suddenly obliged to fight someone other than a 5th rate military power?

Bill Gross: US in worse shape than Greece

When adding in all of the money owed to cover future liabilities in entitlement programs the US is actually in worse financial shape than Greece and other debt-laden European countries, Pimco's Bill Gross told CNBC Monday.

Much of the public focus is on the nation's public debt, which is $14.3 trillion. But that doesn't include money guaranteed for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which comes to close to $50 trillion, according to government figures.

The government also is on the hook for other debts such as the programs related to the bailout of the financial system following the crisis of 2008 and 2009, government figures show.

Taken together, Gross puts the total at "nearly $100 trillion," that while perhaps a bit on the high side, places the country in a highly unenviable fiscal position that he said won't find a solution overnight.

"To think that we can reduce that within the space of a year or two is not a realistic assumption," Gross said in a live interview. "That's much more than Greece, that's much more than almost any other developed country. We've got a problem and we have to get after it quickly."

Read the rest here.

HT: T-19

Help Wanted: Hangman- must be handy with rope and not squeamish

MEERUT, India — India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman.

Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India’s president unexpectedly rejected a last-chance mercy petition from a convicted murderer in the Himalayan state of Assam. Prison officials, compelled to act, issued a call for a hangman.

No one answered.

Not initially.

The nation’s handful of known hangmen had either died, retired or disappeared. The situation was not too surprising, given the ambivalence within the Indian criminal justice system about executions. Capital punishment was codified during British rule, with hanging as the chosen method, but recent decades of litigating and legislating limited the actual practice to “the rarest of rare cases.”

Read the rest here.

I am opposed to capital punishment. But if you're going to do it, hanging (done correctly) is probably the fastest and most humane modus other than the French method.

Scenes from the consecration of Bishop Pavel and the Kneeling Vespers

Scenes from the All Night Vigil for Pentecost

AXIOS!

To Father Al Kimel (aka the Pontificator) who is to be ordained tomorrow, the Feast of Pentecost, as a priest in the Orthodox Western Rite under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.  This appears to be the culmination of a very long journey from the wreckage of the Episcopal Church (via Rome) to Holy Orthodoxy.  I wish him and his family every joy on this most special day.

May God grant him and his family many many years!
AXIOS! AXIOS! AXIOS!

Hat Tip: Owen White

Comments are now closed.

Acquittal for 70 Muslim extremists on trial for the Gojra massacre

Lahore (AsiaNews) – Pakistan’s fundamentalists are rejoicing following the acquittal verdict. The country’s Christian minority is “under shock” because, this time as well, the massacre of innocent victims done in the name of the infamous blasphemy law will go unpunished. The justice system also shows its powerlessness vis-à-vis extremists who can carry out heinous crimes with total impunity, whilst the government remains silent. Meanwhile, a Muslim religious leader publicly says that Christians “deserve” to be murdered.

A Pakistani anti-terrorism court acquitted 70 people who, in various roles, were involved in the Gojra massacre of August 2009 (see Fareed Khan, “Eight Christians burned alive in Punjab,” in AsiaNews, 2 August 2009). The anti-Christian violence broke out following blasphemy allegations. During a wedding, a group of Christians supposedly burnt pages of the Qur‘an, a pretext used to strike at the religious minority.

During the attack by hundreds of extremists (brought in by bus and trucks), ten people died, eight burnt alive. Four churches and various homes were also set on fire.

Following the Gojra attack, instead of arresting the culprits, police, twisting the facts, took into custody a number of Christians for attacking the “other group”. The unjustly jailed Christians were eventually released but after several months.

According to the court, the acquittal last Tuesday was due to the absence of Christian witnesses in the courtroom and the lack of evidence against the accused.

Sources close to the Catholic Church in Lahore, on condition of anonymity, said, “Christian witnesses were under constant threats meant to force them to withdraw their accusations”.

Two of the 70 people acquitted were released the day before the sentence. The other 68 had already been released on bail some time ago.

The main complainant, Phanias Masih, had to flee Pakistan last year along with his family, fearing more violence.

Fr Yaqoob Yousaf, vicar at Gojra’s Sacred Heart parish, told AsiaNews that “Masih and a couple of other key witnesses fled before February” when community leaders “reached a compromise to have the case withdrawn”.

Fr Habib Xavier, from the Diocese of Lahore, the verdict is “shocking”, similar to the Shanti Nagar affair in 1998 when a Muslim mob burnt 25,000 houses. At the time, the accused were also released on bail. “Today, we see the people who burn homes and kill the innocent go free. It was supposed to be fair trial,” he said. “Will minorities ever get justice?”

However, to understand the madness and power of the extremists, it is sufficient to listen to the words of Maulana Kashmiri, a Muslim leader in Punjab.

“There are no witnesses because they [the Christians] know that they are wrong. We got justice. Even though none of us did it, Christians still deserve it [death], because they are blasphemers.”

Source.

Report: The War on Drugs Has Failed (what was their first clue?)

The global war on drugs has "failed" according to a new report by a group of politicians and former world leaders.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

The US and Mexican governments have rejected the findings as misguided.

The Global Commission's 24-page report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.

It cites UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%.

Cesar Gaviria said the US came in for criticism

The 19-member commission includes Mexico's former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil's ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, as well as the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou.

The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, a former US secretary of state.
'No harm to others'

The authors criticise governments who claim the current war on drugs is effective.

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won," the report said.

Read the rest here.
Read the full report here.

HT: The Young Fogey

Finally some sanity on this subject.

Financial Markets: The hits just keep on coming

Wall Street limped to a six-week losing streak Friday, its longest since 2002, reflecting a gathering sentiment among investors that the economic recovery is going awry.

The losses, which pushed the Dow Jones industrial average below 12,000, have piled up after an exuberant eight-month run in which corporate profits and share prices soared. Retirement accounts of ordinary Americans began to look healthy again. The unemployment rate remained high but started to inch down.


Now, momentum from that stretch is fading fast, posing a headache for the Obama administration as it seeks to tout its record on the economy.

Recent data appear to confirm the turn for the worse. The jobless rate is rising. Housing prices have fallen below their financial-crisis lows. Gridlock in Washington over the nation’s debt is tying the hands of policymakers. Europe’s fiscal problems seem to have no solution in sight.

Given the news, many Americans no longer feel confident that the nation’s economic problems will work themselves out, analysts said.

Read the rest here.

Pakistan is passing intelligence to the enemy

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Twice in recent weeks, the United States provided Pakistan with the specific locations of insurgent bomb-making factories, only to see the militants learn their cover had been blown and vacate the sites before military action could be taken, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

Overhead surveillance video and other information was given to Pakistani officials in mid-May, officials said, as part of a trust-building effort by the Obama administration after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid early last month. But Pakistani military units that arrived at the sites in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan on June 4 found them abandoned.U.S. officials say they do not know how the operation was compromised. But they are concerned that either the information was inadvertently leaked inside Pakistan or insurgents were warned directly by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI.

A senior Pakistani military official said Friday that the United States had also shared information about other sites, including weapons-storage facilities, that were similarly found empty. “There is a suspicion that perhaps there was a tip-off,” the official said. “It’s being looked into by our people, and certainly anybody involved will be taken to task.”

Read the rest here.

Alamo Drafthouse: Them's the rules

(CNN) -- In the wake of the recent Alamo Drafthouse "Don't Talk" PSA that has been blazing a viral trail on YouTube over the past 48 hours, I was asked to expand on our other operational policies at the theater.

Most of them go back to 1996, when my wife and I were first getting into the business. Despite the fact that we had zero experience in exhibition, we decided to quit our "real" jobs and open a movie theater. We had no desire to make movies, but we sure as heck loved to go to the cinema and watch them in the right environment.

What drew us to open a theater in the first place is that we were finding a trip to the multiplex to be, more often than not, a disappointing experience.

Poor projection, bad sound and, worst of all, disrespectful patrons in the cinema were slowly eroding our fun, so we conceived of the idea of opening a cinema ourselves on our own terms. We could program the movies that we loved, create unique experiences around those movies and make sure people behaved appropriately.

In the first couple of months of operation, we came up with some very simple guidelines that all of our theaters still adhere to today. They were all born from our own reactions to experiences we hated and endured when we went to the movies. The insistence on these simple policies is one of the main reasons people are loyal to our cinemas today.

We also serve beer, and that helps.

1) We do not play ads before the film.

If I spend $9 or more to see a movie, I equate that to paying for premium cable. Paying for the movie means you get to skip the ads. If the cinema model were similar to Hulu, then sure, the ads are a means of paying for the screening of the film.

The barrage of ads used to be annoying enough when they were just slides projected on the screen. Now, with full audio and video, they are insufferable and should not be tolerated.

At the Alamo, instead of ads, we create customized video "preshow" content that is fun and entertaining and themed to the movie you are about to see. If there is ever an ad, it will be along the lines of a Japanese Charles Bronson Mandom cologne ad from the 1970s, not a PSA with fake-rock jams enticing you to join the Army. Our hope is that even if the movie you paid for is terrible, the preshow is awesome, you had an ice-cold beer and left happy.

2) We do not allow children under 6.

If the movie is a non-crossover kids movie, we sometimes flex this age down to 3 and up, and we also have select "Baby Day" screenings each week for infants and small children. If you want to take your 4-year-old to see "The Hangover 2" at 10 p.m., however, you'll have to go somewhere else.

3) We do not allow unaccompanied minors.

There are of lots of great, well-behaved 12-year-old individual kids, but assemble them in pods of four or more and drop them unaccompanied in a darkened theater, and they will pave a swath of destruction akin to feral hogs. We don't allow it ever. Minors must be accompanied by a parent or guardian, and if they act up, they will be thrown out.

4) If you persist in talking or texting, we will throw you out.

After the past few days, I think I've probably articulated our policy on this topic fully. If you talk or blatantly text, we will warn you to stop. If you persist, you will be asked to leave.

These policies (with the exception of the no-ads policy) have the same underlying rationale. When you are in a cinema, you are one of many, many people in the auditorium. When the lights go dark and the movie begins, every single movie fan in the room wants to be absorbed into and get lost in the flickering images on the screen.

A light from a cellphone, a screaming baby or a disruptive teen cracking jokes all pull you out of the magic of the movies. Providing an awesome experience for true movie fans is the reason we opened the first Alamo Drafthouse back in the mid-'90s, and it is the exact same philosophy we adhere to today.

Source

See also this gem.

I don't go to many movies.  But if they open a theater in my area, they will get my business.

Talking Truth to NATO

Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke bluntly to America’s NATO allies on Friday. They needed to hear it.

America’s key strategic alliance throughout the cold war is in far deeper trouble than most members admit. The Atlantic allies face a host of new and old dangers. Without more and wiser European military spending — on equipment, training, surveillance and reconnaissance — NATO faces, as Mr. Gates rightly warned, “a dim if not dismal future” and even “irrelevance.”

The secretary is retiring at the end of this month, which is likely one of the reasons he jettisoned the diplomatic niceties. But not the only one. As he made clear, this country can no longer afford to do a disproportionate share of NATO’s fighting and pay a disproportionate share of its bills while Europe slashes its defense budgets and free-rides on the collective security benefits.

NATO’s shockingly wobbly performance over Libya, after the Pentagon handed off leadership, should leave no doubt about the Europeans’ weaknesses. And while America’s NATO partners now have 40,000 troops in Afghanistan (compared with about 99,000 from the United States), many have been hemmed in by restrictive rules of engagement and shortages of critical equipment. Too many are scheduled for imminent departure.

The free-rider problem is an old one but has gotten even worse over the last two decades. During most of the cold war, the United States accounted for 50 percent of total NATO military spending; today it accounts for 75 percent. Mr. Gates was right when he warned of America’s dwindling patience with allies “unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”

Decades of underinvestment, poor spending choices and complacent denial about new challenges have created what Mr. Gates called a “two-tiered alliance.” He is right that too many of its members limit themselves to “humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks,” and too few are available for the combat missions the alliance as a whole has agreed to assume.

Libya, a mission much more directly linked to the security of Europe than of the United States, strikingly illustrates the consequences.

Fewer than half of NATO’s 28 members are taking part in the military mission. Fewer than a third are participating in the all-important airstrikes. British and French aircraft carry the main burden. Canada, Belgium, Norway and Denmark, despite limited resources, have made outsized contributions. Turkey, with the alliance’s second-largest military, has remained largely on the sidelines. Germany, NATO’s biggest historic beneficiary, has done nothing at all.

Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks.

That should frighten every defense ministry in Europe. What if they had to fight a more formidable enemy than Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fractured dictatorship?

Combat is not always the best or only solution. NATO needs those European development and peacekeeping capabilities. All alliance members must also have at least the basic military capacities to meet common threats. Without that, the alliance will grow increasingly hollow — a fact that enemies will not miss.

Mr. Gates was right to speak out. We hope his likely successor, Leon Panetta, will keep pushing hard. A two-tiered military alliance is really no alliance at all.

Source

It is not often I agree with the content of the NY Times Op-Ed page. Hence my posting in its entirety a well written and very reasonable editorial. My own view is that the time for pleading is over. I suggest that we give our "allies" a time frame in which to demonstrate (as opposed to giving assurances) a serious intent to assume their fair share of responsibility for the common defense. If they fail to follow through, then our next step might be to take a note from our French friends and pull a "de Gaulle." We can withdraw from NATO while remaining a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty.

Personally I am finding it increasingly difficult to justify NATO's existence in the modern world. There is a small part of me that hopes the Europeans just tell us to go pack sand in which case we can end our participation in this very expensive cold war anachronism with a clean conscience.

Redistricting plan shakes up California congressional map

Proposed political maps released today could shake up theCalifornia congressional delegation, creating new risks for a number of longtime and influential Democrats and Republicans in the state’s delegation.

The draft redistricting plan, released by a voter-approved citizens’ commission, dramatically reconfigures the political boundaries of districts represented by prominent politicians such as Republican David Dreier, chairman of the House Rules Committee.

David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, said the maps could boost the Democrats’ numbers in the state’s 53-member House delegation by four seats, identifying as among the biggest losers in the remapping proposals Dreier, of San Dimas, and fellow Republicans Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Gary Miller of Diamond Bar and either Brian Bilbray of Carlsbad or Jeff Denham of Atwater.

Congressional staffs and party officials pored over the maps today, scrambling to crunch the demographic and political numbers in order to get a better understanding of their political prospects.

The new maps promise to cause political migraines for a number of incumbents, including one of Los Angeles’ most enduring Democratic politicians, Howard L. Berman.

Berman could face a challenge from a well-known Latino if he runs in a more Latino east San Fernando Valley district carved from a chunk of the congressman’s current district, or a possible race against fellow Democrat Brad Sherman in a new district that includes Berman’s home and extends through the west San Fernando Valley.

Virtually all of state’s House members gain new territory, forcing them to make themselves known to new potential voters fast before the 2012 election. Some are likely to have to go shopping for a new home. House members are not required to live in their districts but could face charges of carpetbagging if they don’t move into the districts where they run.

"It certainly means there will be a lot of battlefields inCalifornia," said Sherman, whose district was extended westward through the west San Fernando Valley into Ventura County to include territory he previously represented.

The map virtually ensures that California, often irrelevant in the national battle for control of Congress because of decades of maps drawn to protect incumbents, will become a battleground in the 2012 campaign.

But the maps could lessen the state’s influence on Capitol Hill by putting at risk a number of California lawmakers who, by virtue of their seniority, have gained leadership positions.

The districts of high-profile Latinos -- Democrats Xavier Becerra and Lucille Roybal-Allard, both of Los Angeles, Linda Sanchez of Lakewood and Grace Napolitano of Norwalk -- also undergo significant change under the proposed maps, possibly forcing the lawmakers to play what redistricting expert Bruce Cain ofUC Berkeley said would be a game of political musical chairs. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) also faces the prospect of running in a less friendly, though still winnable, district.

Source.

US Defense Secretary Blasts NATO

BRUSSELS — America's military alliance with Europe — the cornerstone of U.S. security policy for six decades — faces a "dim, if not dismal" future, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday in a blunt valedictory address.

In his final policy speech as Pentagon chief, Gates questioned the viability of NATO, saying its members' penny-pinching and lack of political will could hasten the end of U.S. support. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 as a U.S.-led bulwark against Soviet aggression, but in the post-Cold War era it has struggled to find a purpose.

"Future U.S. political leaders — those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me — may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he told a European think tank on the final day of an 11-day overseas journey.

Read the rest here.

US economy at risk of 'double-dipping', Robert Shiller warns

The US economy is at risk of double-dipping back into recession, according to a leading economist, intensifying fears for the global recovery.

Recent disappointments in American housing and employment figures suggest the world's biggest economy is at a tipping point, warned Robert Shiller. "Whether we call it a double-dip or not, I think there is a risk," he told Reuters.

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of US property values, which he co-founded, showed house prices dropped 4.2pc in the first quarter of 2011 against the previous three months, marking the biggest drop since the start of 2009.

A further fall in prices of up to 25pc in the next five years "wouldn't surprise me at all", Mr Shiller said, given the amount of unsold homes in the US and the thousands of people who are behind with their mortgages. Japan saw prices fall for 15 years, he noted.

Read the rest here.

The Newlyweds Step Out

Back from their postponed honeymoon The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince Harry attend Investec Derby Day at Epsom Downs Racecourse on June 4.

Photo Source
HT: The Monarchist

Serbian Orthodox Church under scrutiny over Mladic

SENIOR figures in the Serbian Orthodox Church are to be ques­tioned over allegations that the former general Ratko Mladic, who is sus­pected of war crimes, was shel­tered by the Church during his nearly 16 years on the run.

General Mladic is currently in prison at The Hague, facing charges of orchestrating the massacre of 8000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 — the worst civilian massacre in Europe since the Second World War.

The President of Serbia, Boris Tadic, has said that church officials will be questioned as part of the investigation, after reports in the Serbian press suggested that General Mladic was nursed by nuns through a stroke while he was supposed to be on the run.

The St Melania convent, which is 40 miles north of Belgrade, is said to have been one of a number of secret refuges provided by the Orthodox Church.

The Church has not made any comment on the allegations, or on the arrest of General Mladic.

Drasko Djenovic, who runs Cen­taur 9, an organisation set up to monitor religious freedom in Serbia, said that there was, as yet, no proof that General Mladic had been har­boured by the Church, as Radovan Karadzic had been. He said that priests had joined in demon­strations against Mladic’s arrest, how­ever, and a demonstration in Lazar­evo, the village where the General was arrested, was led by the local priest.

Mr Djenovic said: “For most believers, priests, and bishops, he is still a national hero, and his extra­dition to Hague court will just mean that more people will vote against pro-European parties in favour of nationalist parties.”

The Very Revd Aleksandar Zebic, of the Serbian Orthodox Church of St Lazar in Bourneville, Birming­ham, told Premier Christian Radio this week that General Mladic was now “answerable to God”.

The Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Revd Anthony Priddis, has wel­comed the arrest and trial. On his blog, he contrasted General Mladic’s treatment with the discovery and shooting of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

“Putting someone on trial matters because the truth matters. Trial is not about revenge but about justice. There may have been very good reasons why Osama Bin Laden, too, could not have been arrested and put on trial for his crimes, but we are not told them in any clear or persuasive way.”

Source