War mincing - election mincing - abuse mincing ... all the same damned thing.

A trio of triplet policemen. New Jersey, 1981
Michael S. Yamashita / National Geographic /NG Gallery at UK Telegraph

hmm Jersey cops… I see they are sending Ob into NJ for Corzine. I assume the CW on the street is that Corzine squeaks out a “win”.

Carry on… what else to say. What waits for Corzine? A sex scandal (and they are so dreary, as they keep rolling out)?? … a pay-for-play scandal (more drear)? Union bagmen scandal (dreary!)? Another union babe mini scandal (double drear!)?

I can hardly wait…….. not.

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More (late in the day I posted a long comment in the last thread) of the Jane Mayer New Yorker interview which IS online, unlike her big article on the great expansion of drone sorties over Pakistan under The Peace Prize (those poor fucked up Norwegians).

How does the continued collateral damage from Predator drones square with General Stanley McChrystal’s order to the military to lay off the air strikes in Afghanistan and avoid civilian deaths?

Well, you could argue it either way. There is less collateral damage from a drone strike than there is from an F-16. According to intelligence officials, drones are more surgical in the way they kill—they usually use Hellfire missiles and do less damage than a fighter jet might.  . . . .

Oh, let’s have some more of that…

If the C.I.A. doesn’t have experience killing people, who is piloting the drones?

It doesn’t take as much talent or experience or training to pilot a drone as it does to pilot a real plane. The skills are much like what you need to do well in a video game. And the C.I.A. has outsourced a lot of the drone piloting, which also raises interesting legal questions, because you not have only civilians running this program, but you may have people who are not even in the U.S. government piloting the drones.

You mention in your piece that drone pilots, who work from an office, suffer from combat stress.

Someone sitting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, can view and home in on a target on the other side of the world with tremendous precision, even at night, and destroy it. Peter Singer, who wrote a book on robotic warfare, said that cubicle warriors experience the same stress as regular warriors in a real war. Detached killing still takes a tremendous emotional toll inside our borders.  . . . .

Weep for them.  Copiously.. so it gets noticed.

Meanwhile, keep breathing while waiting for The Big Transparency from The Peace Prize:

What would the outlines of a more transparent drone program look like?

Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, has noted that when the United States goes about killing people, we usually know who they can kill and where the battlefield is. International lawyers are calling for a public revelation of who is on this list, where can we go after them, and how many people can we take out with them. They want to know the legal, ethical, and political boundaries of the program.

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Update via TimesOnline on the Catholic M&A, LBO, whatever it is, of the Anglican dissidents.

Good comment from the thread…

Ros Roberts wrote:

You’re an Anglican? You want to become a Catholic? Nothing easier: all you have to do is completely change what you believe in: take on board transubstantiation, Papal infallibility, purgatory, things like that.

But if that is so easy for these people, why don’t they simply decide to believe that women are people too and can be bishops too?

October 21, 2009 9:28 PM BST

Farther down (at the bottom, actually) on the FP of the Times is this further story rising from the Irish Revelations… as the chapters and verses continue…

[T]he facts of Kathleen O’Malley’s life would probably not have been believed ten years ago, not before the dam finally burst on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

A long-awaited report into clerical abuse in the Diocese of Dublin is expected to be published this week and bishops are bracing themselves for another round of public anger. It will be a horror story of how known paedophile priests were shunted from parish to parish by their religious seniors. The number of children who suffered as a result of the Church’s cover-up could run into thousands.

It will also be another shattering blow to the moral authority of an institution that once ruled Ireland with an iron rod, following hard on the heels of the Ryan report, an independent tribunal that concluded in May after a decade of evidence-gathering that there had been “endemic and systemic” sexual, physical and emotional abuse of hundreds of thousands of Irish children in residential institutions run by religious orders. Four years ago, when Kathleen first told her story in her memoir, Childhood Interrupted, there were plenty of cynics around who were prepared to cast doubt on the extraordinary tale of suffering inside a system that seemed akin to the worst excesses of a totalitarian regime. . . . . .

What “blow to the moral authority”? Where is that blow?

As a mirror to the concrete entombment of the so-called political class (withhold the vote, FFS!) the ONLY thing the Church responds to is LESS MONEY in the collection plate and, FFS, withhold the children.

People won’t do that… They continue to fork over (really) the children to an abusive system.  With or without ritual sexual abuse.

[T]hat is small consolation for Kathleen O’Malley. “I don’t know at what point the religious gained their power, but they had total power and autonomy to do as they wanted. We were brainwashed to say that we were well-looked after.”

…

She is scornful of the progress Ireland is making towards righting these heinous wrongs. “They say they now want to put up a monument to all those who were treated badly. They had a garden party with the President of Ireland, to which around 130 victims were invited, but I wasn’t and neither were thousands of others. And that was like my evidence to the Ryan commission, which was ignored. I was never given the opportunity.”  . . . .

What “blow to the moral authority”?  Where?  From whom?!

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