Monkeyfister

The Catholic Diocese of Memphis settled a priest sexual-abuse lawsuit for $2 million, but now, a year later, the case is revealing a much broader and more detailed picture of abuse and secrecy in the diocese.

Records unsealed by court order Tuesday after 12 months of legal action by The Commercial Appeal show that at least 15 priests have been accused of sexual misconduct over some four decades in the Memphis diocese.

More than 10,000 pages of depositions, pleadings and documents also show abusive priests were moved quietly from parish to parish and diocese to diocese to avoid scandal and to protect the priests, the plaintiff's attorney said.

"Memphis was a microcosm of the overall scandal," said attorney Gary Smith, who represented the 14-year-old boy sexually abused by Father Juan Carlos Duran in February 2000. "Most of the victims don't come forward, but when they did, then Memphis handled it the way everyone else did: They swept it under the rug. They covered it up and did nothing or they'd move (the priest) somewhere else."

Labels: Catholic Sex-Abuse, Memphis, Why I Don't Blog Local News, Why I Don't Go To Church

We are heading toward economic, political and social collapse, and every day that passes brings it closer. But we just don't know when to stop, do we? Which part of "the harder we try, the harder we fail" can't we understand? Why can't we understand that each additional dollar of debt will drive us into national bankruptcy faster, harder and deeper? Why can't we grasp the concept that each additional dollar of military spending further undermines our security? Is there some sort of cognitive impairment that prevents us from understanding that each additional dollar sunk into the medical industry will only make us sicker? Why can't we see that each incremental child we bear into this untenable situation will make life harder for all children? In short, what on earth is our problem?

Why can't we stop? We can blame evolution, which has produced in us instincts that compel us to gorge ourselves when food is abundant, to build up fat reserves for the lean months. These instincts are not helpful to us when there is an all-you-can-eat buffet nearby that's open year-round. These instincts are not even specifically ours: other animals don't know when to stop either. Butterflies will feast on fermented fruit until they are too drunk to fly. Pigs will eat acorns until they are too fat to stand up and have to resort to crawling about on their bellies in order to, yes of course, eat more acorns. Americans who are too fat to walk are considered disabled and the government issues them with little motorized scooters so that they don't have to suffer the indignity of crawling to the all-you-can-eat buffet on their bellies. This is considered progress.

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The concept of competition seems to have first been elevated to cult status by games that were played as a form of sacrifice before gods, in cultures as different as ancient Greece and the Mayan civilization, where competitive events were held to please their various deities. I much prefer the Olympic version, where the object of the games was to express the ideal of human perfection in both form and function, rather than the Mayan version, where the outcome of the game was used to decide who would be sacrificed on the altar of some peculiar cultural archetype, but being open-minded I am ready to accept either as valid, because both are competitions in defense of principle. It was Aristotle who pointed out that pursuit of principle is the one area where moderation is not helpful, and who am I to refute Aristotle? But when moving from defending an ideal or a principle to performing mundane, practical, utilitarian functions it is the idea of competition itself that should be offered up as a nice, sizzling-fat burnt offering on the altar of our common sense.

If the goal is to achieve an adequate result with a minimum of effort, then why would two people want to compete to do the job of one? And if there is in fact work enough for two, then why wouldn't they want to cooperate instead of wasting their precious energies in competition? Well, they may have been brainwashed into thinking that they must compete in order to succeed, but that's beside the point. The point is that there is a major difference between competing for the sake of a principle—such as the perfection of divine creation—and competing for mere money. There is nothing divine about a big pile of money, and, just as with a big pile of acorns, the bigger the pile, the more "squirrels" it tends to attract. In fact, those who are sitting on some of the bigger piles of acorns often seem rather squirrely themselves. To mix metaphors, they also tend to be chicken-like, roosting on their acorns and expecting them to hatch into more acorns. But be they squirrels or be they chickens, or be they drug-addled mutant chicken-squirrels on steroids, they are certainly not gods, and their acorns are not worthy of our sacrifice.

Once we dispense with the idea that competition is in any sense necessary, or even desirable, new avenues of thought open up. How much is enough? Probably much less than we have now. How hard do we need to work for it? Probably a lot less hard than we are working now. What happens if we don't have enough? Well, perhaps then it's time to try working just a tiny bit harder, or, better yet, perhaps it is time to take a few acorns from those who still have too many. Since having too much is such hard work (mind the damn squirrels!) we'd only be helping them. We certainly don't want to keep up with them, because we know where they are headed—a quaint, exclusive little place called collapse. What we should probably be trying to do instead is to establish some sort of balance, where enough is, in fact, enough.

Labels: Collapse

When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012 (plus or minus) was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.

Official forecasts had no cognizance of it whatsoever. All were confident that oil supply would continue to grow steadily to 130 million barrels per day (mbpd) and beyond, at prices that would be considered astoundingly cheap by today's standards. Oil companies rarely mentioned peak oil, and when they did, it was in a casually dismissive way.

But as time marched on, the cornucopian arguments fell one by one. My longtime readers have seen the story unfold, but for the benefit of new readers, here's a quick summary...

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* Peak oil is either here, or close enough.
* Prices will have to go higher as demand outstrips supply.
* Governments will be forced to intervene to maintain critical levels of oil supply, and limit volatility.
* Rationing measures may be unavoidable.
* Electrification of transport must be pursued in order to reduce demand.
* Communities will need to work quickly to reorganize around walking instead of driving, producing food and energy locally instead of importing, and generally try to reduce their need for oil.

Labels: Collapse, Peak Energy, Peak Oil

"Oh, yeah-- those are weapons."

"Hotel Two-Six: Crazy Horse 18"

"Fuckin' prick."

"Have five to six individuals with AK-47s. Request permission to engage." (Reality: two Journalists with cameras, and their unarmed crews)

"Roger that."

"Keep Shooting."
... .... ... ... .. ....
"Keep Shooting."

"Nice"

"You keep shooting, and I'll keep talking."

... ... ...... ... .. ... ......

"Nice."

Good shooting."

Thank you."

"Got a guy crawling around down there."

"Roger that."

"I think I ran over a body!"

"giggles all around"

Labels: Bush Administration, Support The Troops, War Crimes

Labels: Catholics, Pope Benedict-- Nazi Youth

Labels: Community, Peak Energy, Permaculture

Labels: Permaculture

John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy.

Greer wonders why people don't put more work into organizing communities; after all, this is what has worked in America in the past and how a representative democracy is supposed to function. All it should take is hard work, so why don't we hop to it? To me, this smacks of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — roughly speaking, that just because different objects at different times carry the same label ("America"), they are somehow the same object. How representative a democracy the US ever was is rather beside the point; the point is, it was once a country where people could successfully and openly self-organize, and now it isn't. Once there were strong, cohesive communities in the US, which could organize and bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. And now, as described in Robert Putnam's widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), there are no such strong, cohesive communities in the US, and so... they can't organize, because, I would think, there is nothing for them to organize. Existence of communities allows communities to organize; lack of community prevents communities from organizing. That's a bit of a tautology, is it not?

As an aside, I'd like to point out that the US is not much of a representative democracy any more. It's more of a hokey-pokey-ocracy: in one election cycle, you throw your right bums out and vote your left bums in, and in the next election cycle, or the one after, you do the exact opposite. (And you shake it all around in the meantime.) The bums — the Republicans and the Democrats, that is — are perpetually locked in a loving embrace, for they truly complete each other. The Democrats tend to believe that government is there to help people, which is of course impossible for a government that's chock-full of Republicans who believe in limiting the scope of government and sabotage all such efforts. The Republicans believe in limiting the scope of government, which is of course impossible for a government that's chock-full of Democrats who believe that government is there to help people, and sabotage all such efforts. You can vote for either party if you want it to fail while producing an ever larger and more useless government.

Both parties agree that the government should serve corporate interests. They are both skittish when talking about the rights of citizens, and prefer to talk about "consumers" rather than "citizens". As a nation of consumers, people in the US have no choice but to be consumers. The ones that don't have the money still get to consume things like orange jumpsuits and prison food. Foreign non-consumers also get to consume — things like depleted uranium and white phosphorus ordinance. Being a non-consumer is not an option, and the whole world must be made safe for consumerism. Organizing against consumerism amounts to biting the corporate hand that feeds you — an ungrateful and self-defeating thing to do. So you want to organize a third party? Be my guest; see you later.

Astyk makes the excellent point regarding the destruction of community through overwork and the herding of women out of the home and into the workplace. Women can't just be (unless they are rich) — they have to have an occupation, and the default occupation — "homemaker" — carries a bit of a stigma. Women have always been the backbone of any community, and the regimentation of women's lives was a brilliant move in the direction of totalitarian consumerism, because it allowed relationships even within the family, such as child-rearing, to be commercialized. Once all social interaction is centered around consumption patterns, community as a notion becomes little more than an advertising gimmick, and self-organizing properties of society become restricted to pursuing the latest commercial fashion.

Hopkins raises an interesting issue when he mentions the common criticism of intentional communities and the Transition Towns movement that it is predominantly white, educated, and middle-class. This is hardly surprising, since these are the only people who have the resources and the connections to do pretty much as they please. They can create their alternative arrangements out in the open, as long as they don't actively threaten the status quo. They can build an entire Garden of Eden if they so desire, provided they can line up the financing and pull the construction permits. That is the essence of consumer choice, isn't it? The rich get to play, while other, less privileged parts of the population, such as the immigrants, the squatters and the homeless, the chronically unemployed or underemployed, the bums (the real ones, not the ones in government), simply don't have the same options. At the same time, their need for community is much greater, and so they spontaneously self-organize, network informally, and defend their interests as best they can. They all know that "a nail that sticks up gets hammered down" and so they don't advertise their efforts or make them official or explicit.

Hopkins also makes the excellent point that the entire approach of "creating community" is patronizing and ineffective. Community regenerates spontaneously, given time, space, a commonality of interest, provided it is not too oppressed. As industrial economies continue to shrink and shed jobs, more and more people will be squeezed out to the margins of the consumerist universe, and, finding more time on their hands than they know what to do with, will start to reengage with other people in similar situations. Since their needs will often be coincident or complementary, they will form various types of temporary and informal groups. There is certainly a great deal that all of us can do to help, but "organizing" is not one of them. First and foremost, we should stop working so hard on destroying community, as we have been doing by leading overwhelmingly regimented and commercialized existences. And let's quit it with the political hokey-pokey — it's much too undignified

Labels: Community, Transition Towns