Current Events: March 2009 Archives

Executives of AIG, the insurance company now firmly attached to the government teat, are in fear of their lives with death threats.

Now threatening someone with harm is wrong. Period. However I am not particularly sympathetic to this crew and I think it will serve as something to sober them up. Consider it a wakeup call. Yes, the American people are ticked, as well as you could expect when you ask for and receive a large sum of money to bail you out because you mismanaged funds and then you blow some of the money on large bonuses for yourselves. It should not surprise you that that will tick lots of taxpayers off, especially when you live a lavish lifestyle while the people who are funding you suffer. I've never had a bonus that wasn't tied in some way to my performance or the performance of the company. You should have predicted this.

Also I will note that empty death threats are fairly routine in situations like this. While you certainly need to be careful and prudent, I think the likelihood that someone will actually carry them out approaches zero.

The scary thing is that this resembles situations when societies have fallen and lawless mobs have gone after the decadent rich.

Guess what? According to Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, the pope is right on how to stop AIDS in Africa.

Let that sink in a bit.

Everyone's making fun of the pope, making him out to be some sort of laughingstock, as if he's arguing that there is no evidence smoking causes cancer or thalidomide is good for morning sickness. Yet here is no conservative organization but rather one dedicated to the cause of preventing AIDS (how liberal does that have to be?), associated with not only a liberal university but the best university in the country, not merely grudgingly conceding that it's theoretically possible that maybe some additional research might eventually give credence to something the pope said, but saying, outright, the pope is right. Period.

Wow.

The argument is credible. Gee, these are low-fat cookies, I can eat twice as many of them. (Never mind the fat is only reduced by 33%.) Wow, low-fat cheese, woo-hoo, let's go wild! And if I'm "protected" by condoms, I can let it all hang loose, do whatever I want. Never mind that one slips or breaks now and then. Or once in a while I forget it and I'm too worked up to back off.

I'll check the front page of the New York Times for this tomorrow.

... And promises to pay more attention to it. Wow, this may be what they call an "inflection point" — a point where the tide turns.

The context is the Bishop Williamson controversy, the bishop who denies the Holocaust and had his (along with three other SSPX bishops) excommunication lifted. The relevant quote is "That this overlapping of two opposed processes took place and momentarily upset peace between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church, is something which I can only deeply deplore. I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news."

This release is remarkable for its clarity, for its earnestness, and for its personal character. For example, the pope says, "I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility." I simply cannot imagine the pope before this point making such a statement; it's just so un-pope-like (in a good way, I think). Certainly not expected from a German pope. :-) The pope, in this press release, is painfully frank about his mistakes. And this, I think, is good, and will help in the healing of this pontificate admittedly plagued by more than one trouble.

I anticipate soon the pope will be speaking l33t.