The Cardinals are lined up behind one another with pious looks on their faces, eyes sedately lowered or raised beatifically, shuffling along in their scarlet surplices with delicate lace trimming. And the gold thread and tassels, the gold or silver crucifixes dangling from their necks; the chunky heavy gold rings on their fingers (the price of which could comfortably feed and clothe every member of a poor village in India or Africa for several years in this capitalist world.)

One by one they place their hands on the open Bible and mutter, swearing their oath of secrecy and move on, sitting sedately in their pews, all having totally ignored the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:

“Swear not at all! – Let your communication be: Yea — yea; Nay — nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”

Such blatant disregard of the advice of their supposed lord is breathtaking.

And seeing those cardinals all dolled up in their majestic finery reminds me of Jesus” words:

“Why take ye thought for raiment? Take no thought saying Wherewithal shall we be clothed?”

But they do — all swanking about in the costliest, gorgeous dresses.

And now the doors close and they are isolated, each with his individual two room suite to relax and ‘take advice from the Holy Spirit” in. Twice a day they place their vote on a golden plate which is then tipped into an urn. When a two third majority is reached the holy smoke turns white; we”ll know that one of the “princes” of the Church has said “Accepto” and become the new King.

I found the funeral of the last one a sickening sob-fest. My favorite part was when the open book of the gospels placed on the coffin slammed shut in the wind.
Full Article:counterpunch.org

O yeah there they are with the bling in their tricked out cribs, rockin’ the Versace (or whoever designs their gear).

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Arch-conservative German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope on Tuesday in a surprise choice that delighted traditionalist Roman Catholics but stunned moderates hoping for a more liberal papacy.

Ratzinger, 78, the Church’s 265th pontiff, will take the name of Benedict XVI.

He is expected to defend Pope John Paul’s strict orthodox legacy and reject changes in doctrine, raising fears that divisions in the Church left by the Polish pontiff will widen.

Ratzinger is the oldest man to be elected pope for three centuries and the first German pontiff for a millennium.

The speed of the election, on only the second day of a secret cardinals conclave, and its result were both a surprise.

Many Vatican experts had said Ratzinger, John Paul’s tough doctrinal watchdog for 23 years, was too divisive and too old to become pope.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

Ratzinger was ‘unwilling participant’ in Hitler Youth
BERLIN (AFP) – Pope Benedict XVI, the former German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has said he was an unwilling participant in the Hitler Youth movement during World War II.

“As soon as I left the seminary, I did not go straight into the Hitler Youth,” Ratzinger said in an interview with German journalist Peter Seewald.

“And that was difficult because in order to qualify for the reduction in schooling fees that I needed, you had to prove you had paid a visit to the Hitler Youth.”

When membership of the movement became compulsory in 1941, Ratzinger’s older brother Georg joined and the future Pope Benedict XVI was then enrolled, against his will, he has said in a number of interviews.

According to the website of the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club, in 1943, with World War II at its peak, Ratzinger and the rest of his seminary class were drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps, the Flak, although he was still allowed to attend classes at high school in the southern city of Munich three times a week.

In September 1944, having reached military age, he was released from the Flak and returned home, only to be drafted into a labour detail commanded by men he described as “fanatical ideologues”, the website said.

In November 1944, he underwent basic training with the German infantry but due to illness he was allowed to skip the most physical aspects of military training.

As the Allied advance drew nearer, Ratzinger deserted the army and returned to the southern town of Traunstein where he had studied at the seminary.

When the US troops reached the town, they used Ratzinger’s house as their headquarters.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

And subsequently recruited for the OSS to join the vanguard of the global anti-communist (read fascist) movement? O well, they picked an old one who won’t be around for long. I’m sure the guy waiting in the wings is even more ghastly, a Catholic Netanyahu.

Washington, April 19 : New research suggests that the early universe was a hot, dense liquid made of basic atomic particles, overturning the widely held belief that fiery gas existed immediately after the “big bang” that created the cosmos.

Researchers from the High Energy and Nuclear Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, created quark-gluon plasma in a particle collider, Xinhua reported.

Quarks are the most basic particles that make up matter and they are normally bound together. But in their experiment, the researchers smashed two gold ions together at speeds similar to that of light and with such force that it allowed the quarks to separate and roam freely.

The intense collision briefly generated trillion-degree temperatures, an extreme temperature condition thought to have only existed microseconds after the “big bang.”

The researchers found that in this environment the quarks behaved like a “perfect” liquid instead of flying around freely like a gas as they expected.

By “perfect” the scientists implied that liquid had the lowest possible viscosity. Viscosity is an internal property of a fluid that offers resistance to flow.

Researchers said the findings had revised the belief of physicists that fiery gas existed microseconds after the “big bang”.
Full Article: news.webindia123.com

WASHINGTON (AP) – House Majority Leader Tom DeLay intensified his criticism of the federal courts on Tuesday, singling out Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s work from the bench as “incredibly outrageous” because he has relied on international law and done research on the Internet.

DeLay also said he thought there were a “lot of Republican-appointed judges that are judicial activists.”

The No. 2 Republican in the House has openly criticized the federal courts since they refused to order the reinsertion of Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube. And he pointed to Kennedy as an example of Republican members of the Supreme Court who were activist and isolated.

“Absolutely. We’ve got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That’s just outrageous,” DeLay told Fox News Radio. “And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous.”
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

So he should do his research by coconut phone? Delay is just incredibly stupid.

CHICAGO — Being overweight is nowhere near as big a killer as the government thought, ranking No. 7 instead of No. 2 among the nation’s leading preventable causes of death, according to a startling new calculation from the CDC.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated today that packing on too many pounds accounts for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States. As recently as January, the CDC came up with an estimate 14 times higher: 365,000 deaths.

The new analysis found that obesity — being extremely overweight — is indisputably lethal. But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.
Full Article: chron.com

by Sherry Wolf
“BITCH” HAS gone from a sexist epithet to the name of a popular feminist magazine. Liberal newspapers like the New York Times have declared that the latest women’s “revolution” is to opt out of the paid workforce and embrace full-time motherhood. Many feminists defend the war on Afghanistan for delivering “liberation” to Afghan women. And now Democrats like Hillary Clinton call for finding “common ground” with opponents of abortion rights. What the hell happened to the struggle for women’s liberation?!

Socialist Worker columnist and frequent CounterPunch contributor Sharon Smith doesn’t just go after the low-hanging fruit of the right wing to account for the miserable state of working-class women in the U.S., she handily dissects the failings and limitations of the politics of liberalism in Women and Socialism: Essays on Women’s Liberation (Haymarket Books, http://www.haymarketbooks.org). In a sharp departure from most current writings on women and sexism, Smith refuses to shy away from political theorizing and takes on debates in anthropology and foreign affairs with a journalistic style that is engaging, fact-filled, and often witty.

In her chapter on “The Origins of Women’s Oppression,” Smith challenges the main arguments against Frederick Engels’ Origins of the Family, State and Private Property and defends the Marxist understanding of the “world defeat of the female sex” as an outcome of the rise of class society. Debates that raged in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s over the origins of women’s oppression have long subsided and the view that sexism has always been with us because it is an innate feature of all men now reigns supreme. Many young progressives will be surprised to read that the theory of patriarchy is not the only–or even the most historically accurate–left-wing explanation for sexism.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

by John Ross
Andes Manuel Lopez Obrador looked out upon the sea of brown faces flooding the great Zocalo plaza at the heart of this ancient Aztec city and pleaded for peace. Within hours, Mexico’s political bosses would strip him of his immunity from prosecution (“el desafuero”), displace him as the extraordinarily popular mayor of the hemisphere’s most teeming megalopolis, and bar him from the 2006 presidential ballot ­ and his supporters were not at all happy about it. “No estas solo! No estas solo!” 300,000 throats roared over and over again,”You are not alone!”

The official police count for the April 7th Zocalo rally was 330,000, perhaps the biggest outpouring of support for a politician here since Lopez Obrador’s predecessor as the leader of Mexico’s electoral Left, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, was swindled out of the presidency 17 years ago.

To consolidate the parallels between then and now, AMLO as he is universally acronymed, would utilize the moment to announce his candidacy for the presidency of this long-suffering republic in next year’s elections no matter what his legal entanglements might be by then. The disclosure was anything but a surprise ­ AMLO has been leading his closest rivals in President Vicente Fox’s National Action PAN Party and the long-ruling (71 years) PRI since 2003 mid-terms by margins of 10 to 20 points in the most respected polls.

Mexico’s civil society has often responded en masse in the face of myriad injustices perpetrated by the nation’s political class but the size of the turnout in defense of “El Peje” (for “Pejelagarto”, a gar-like fish native to his home state of Tabasco) was remarkable because it came early in the official mourning for Pope John Paul II in a country that insists it is 93% Catholic (Lopez Obrador is himself a member of an Evangelical church.) Despite papal media saturation, the dead pontiff played second fiddle to El Peje in Mexico April 7th.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Mexico’s Fox Won’t Pardon Leftist Mayor
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s government has ruled out a pardon for the country’s most popular politician in the event he is found guilty in a land dispute case, which would prevent him from running for president next year.

Days after a presidential spokesman floated the idea of a pardon for Mexico City’s left-wing mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the government quashed it on Monday.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

After a game in Toronto last week, Indiana Pacers all-star forward Jermaine O’Neal was asked a blissfully simple question about NBA Commissioner David Stern’s desire to see players banned from the NBA before their 20th birthday. A Canadian reporter queried, “Is it because you guys are Black that the league is trying to put an age limit on the draft?” O’Neal, maybe because he was feeling the cool breezes of social democracy, responded freely, without a censor, without a filter, and without approval from his sneaker company.

He said, “In the last two years, the rookie of the year has a been a high school player. There were seven high school players in the All-Star game, so why we even talking an age limit? As a black guy, you kind of think that’s the reason why it’s coming up. You don’t hear about it in baseball or hockey. To say you have to be 20, 21 to get in the league, it’s unconstitutional. If I can go to the U.S. army and fight the war at 18, why can’t you play basketball for 48 minutes?” Now the harpies of sports radio have descended upon O’Neal like he tipped over the Pope’s coffin in Vatican City. He has been called stupid. He has been told to “just shut up.” He has basically been treated like Joseph Massad at a JDL meeting. All of this because he spoke a truth that made much of the US sports media squirm.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

The last two presidential elections revealed that American democracy is in distress. A full public airing is much needed and the stature of the Carter-Baker Commission promises to garner the national attention and respect required to truly grapple with the scope of the problem. That is, until people begin to look at the make-up of the Commission and it’s agenda.

Perhaps the hottest issue in election reform is making sure that votes are counted accurately. It is now widely understood that paperless computer voting systems are vulnerable to human error, computer failure and malicious tampering and therefore verification of the vote is essential. Paperless electronic voting vs.voting with a voter verified paper ballot (VVPB) is now an issue under consideration in state legislatures across the country. So far, 14 states have passed laws requiring a VVPB, two of those are awaiting the governor’s signature.

Sadly, the Carter-Baker Commission has compromised itself at the outset by including a figure with an embarrassing corporate conflict of interest on the key question of vote counts. Ralph Munro is the Chairman of VoteHere, a company with millions invested in the ‘vote verification’ market. VoteHere is literally banking on the successful marketing of their cryptographic product as the verification method in spite of the fact that voter-verified paper ballots are the solution most recommended by independent computer security experts. Munro should recuse himself to save the Commission from further awkwardness. And, Commission Co-Chair James Baker is invested of the Carlyle Group which owns another voting machine company. The Commission should avoid such improprieties.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Remember Brimstone Baker fixed Florida for Bush in ’00’…

Construction of large dams in developing countries would be subsidised under European commission proposals, despite protests from environmental groups and institutions such as the World Bank.

The large-dam subsidy is part of a package of proposals to give better treatment to renewable energy projects, including solar, wind, tidal, wave and small hydro projects provided to developing countries. It will be presented at a meeting in Paris today of the export credit agencies of the world’s 29 richest countries.

Article continues

The proposals, put forward in an EC document marked “confidential” but leaked to the Guardian, suggest that the normal 10-year repayment period for such projects be extended to 15 years so that developing countries can afford the repayments. The export credit agencies, which are subsidised by taxpayers, will guarantee the bills if the countries default.

The proposals include large hydro-electricity projects, which environmental groups and the World Bank do not regard as renewables.

Evidence presented to the World Commission on Dams in 2001 said that methane releases from drowned vegetation in large hydro-schemes adds more global-warming gas to the atmosphere than is saved by not burning fossil fuels in conventional power plants.

The dams commission suggested a number of safeguards, but the World Bank and others have refused to back large hydro projects.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk