Responding to a swelling tide of outrage at the rapes and other sexual abuses perpetrated by many thousands of his pedophile priests, Pope Benedict XVI said at a Vatican mass on April 15, 2010:
Now, under attack from the world which talks to us of our sins, we can see that being able to do penance is a grace and we see how necessary it is to do penance and thus recognize what is wrong in our lives.
During the recently completed Easter/Passover season there were a great number of headlines in the various media sources I was following about the latest episode of the Roman Catholic Church and the illicit appetites of its clergy for pedophilia. This time around the scandal of Catholic priests sexually abusing children was stunning Europe. The media has been talking about incidents in Ireland and Germany where, it seems, some are questioning whether the current pope was actually involved himself in covering up some abuse cases that happened there, during the time he was in charge .
If you believe mainstream economists, we are on the path leading out of “The Great Recession.” But even if this is true, there are a whole lot of jobs in North America, millions of jobs that need to be re-created just to get back to pre-2008 levels.
Supposedly, human resources—people, moms and dads—are one of the critical elements of any corporation’s success. Just listen to this 2009 testimony from two CEOs of America’s largest companies. “We value our dedicated employees,” declared General Electric’s Jeff Immelt. “Loyal and committed employees are critical,” stated the Pfizer’s CEO Jeffrey Kindler. But one has to wonder about the sincerity of these two very well-paid guys.
“The right to liberty… guarantees a degree of personal autonomy over important decisions intimately affecting his or her private life. … The decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount to that of the state.” (Morgentaler et al. v. Her Majesty The Queen, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30 at 37)
If you love James Bond movies or follow the American TV series Burn Notice, the real-life, continuing news story about the January 19th assassination in Dubai of the Hamas intelligence (terror) chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh makes for fascinating reading and viewing to both Middle Easterners and Westerners. Who hasn’t been fascinated to watch the hotel CCTV tapes broadcast worldwide by the media that purportedly show the hit squad stalking their kill.
Most everyone assumes the hit squad is Israeli. Like everyone else, Israel doesn’t publicly acknowledge its secret ops successes or failures—at least not for a generation or two. I’ve known a couple of people connected to intelligence work and truly mum’s the word.
During the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, as in all other professional or amateur athletic competitions, it is easy for participants to confuse what it means to have the right stuff with just plain old being stuffed—with ego and pride.
The Canadian Olympic Committee, VANOC, and Canada’s sport federations established the Own The Podium program five years ago with the goals of winning more medals than any other country at this year’s Olympics. The Canadian public spent heavily for the opportunity to thump our collective chest: a total of about $117 million was spent on athletes, equipment, facilities, and support organizations—$66 million of this was taxpayer dollars.
This week Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper and French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Haiti to pledge, together, more than half a billion dollars in aid for the earthquake devastated Caribbean nation. Will this money make much of a difference in the lives of desperately impoverished Haitians? Will Haiti’s future get better due to the outpouring of help from Canada, the U.S., France, and other concerned nations?
NOT LIKELY according to one knowledgeable “free market do-gooder” who visits the various hell-holes on this planet. Doug Casey of the Casey Research financial newsletter believes that it doesn’t matter how much aid you shovel down Haiti’s bottomless pit, the long-term outlook for average Haitians will remain grim. Oh yes, today’s flow of aid will alleviate temporarily some suffering. A band-aid, a bottle of water, or a gangrenous leg cut off today is better than no help at all. But Casey predicts that utterly ruthless Haitian officials will siphon off into their secret bank accounts most of our well-intentioned donations.
Last week I wrote a column objecting to the premise of a campaign being pushed on our community by Victoria’s sole daily, The Times Colonist. This premise asserts that selling sex—prostitution—should be treated just like any other business regulated and protected by government. I can see it now—El Gordo benevolently smiling as B.C. balances its books with the HST windfall generated by the sweating backs of its whores.
But it seems that I wasn’t the only one unhappy with the newspaper’s favoured position. On Friday, Feb. 5, the newspaper published their riposte, “Time to reduce sex-trade risks,” in order to counter the objections they received. The TC editorial board thinks:
In Victoria’s Time-Colonist newspaper (Jan. 31, 2010 issue) the article “Victoria brothel film makes its debut tonight” recounts the backstory of a documentary that premiered in this year’s film festival entitled, The Brothel Project. The film documents the attempts of a local social activist and a retired prostitute to open a co-op brothel. They wanted to achieve legitimate business status for the brothel and benefits for its “sex workers.”
I guess there is no shortage of potential co-op sex trade workers for such a venture. The newspaper says there are 1,000 licensed escorts in the greater, or maybe more accurately, the lesser Victoria region. When it comes to anything dealing with sexuality we, North Americans, love our euphemisms. We prefer to beat around the bush and see in print words like “sex worker” or “escort” rather than the plain old English words “prostitute” or the more edgy “whore.”
Last week was really busy for me. On Wednesday I took the ferry to the mainland to meet with my distributor. We needed to discuss our next step to find the right broadcaster for our HD documentary about the iconic B.C. painter E.J. Hughes and the art conservator Cheryle Harrison, who literally worked wonders to restore one of Hughes’ rare surviving murals that had been walled up and forgotten for 50 years. After that business was discussed we started talking about my next possible documentary project.