A reader in Germany writes:

After lunch today I walked down to the Central Station to pick up a copy of the Sueddeutsche. There must be more than 10,000 words on the child abuse scandal in the A section, many jarring details, maps show how these problems were recurrent all over the country, especially in schools for young boys. These scandals progressed in America and we read about them, a reporter writes, but it turns out that exactly the same thing was going on all over Germany--but the German church was better able to keep it all under wraps.

They have a summary of an interview with the Regensburg Bishop, Gerhard Mueller, who says "Leutheusser is a liar," referring to Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the Justice Minister. He goes on to says that the justice minister is part of a dark and secretive conspiracy led by Free Masons who want to bring the church down. This guy is just nuts. But how revealing of their strategy. Presented with undeniable evidence of abuse, they claim to be the victims!

The original interview is in La Stampa in Turin. The Sueddeutsche's editorial, penned by Matthias Drobinski, says that the scandal plainly now affects the pope directly since much of the worst abuse occurred during his tenure as archbishop of Munich and Freising, and his claims not to have been involved simply aren't credible.

I've explored its flaws here and proffered an alternative. DiA gets to the point more succinctly here:

The point is that the map fails to distinguish between land that is owned by Jews or Palestinians, and land that is controlled by Jewish or Palestinian political entities.

My previous defense of the map against Goldblog's outrage is here.

"If this bill passes this year, children with pre-existing conditions will now be covered, there'll be an end to lifetime caps and annual caps on what the insurance companies will cover, so if you get sick you won't go broke, if you get sick they can't throw you off your insurance.  The doughnut hole will be filled in so senior citizens will save hundreds of dollars on their prescription drugs, the life of Medicare will be extended, and on and on and on.

So, if the Republican Party wants to go out and say to that child who now has insurance or say to that small business that will get tax credits this year if he signs the bill to help their employees get health care. If they want to say to them, "You know what? We're actually gonna take that away from you. We don't think that's such a good idea." I say, let's have that fight. Make my day. I'm ready to have that. And every Member of Congress ought to be willing to have that debate as well," - David Axelrod.

It gets really good around 1:20:

Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world. Petraeus was so disturbed by a recent trip to the Middle East that he asked a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen, and asked that the region be made part of his command:

The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders.

Tapper asks the question: does Netanyahu's contempt for the US administration and continued expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem put US troops at risk elsewhere in the war on terror?

Well, it won't work to balance the budget, even after two generations. Paul Krugman:

What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population.

Naturally, Ryan’s response to these revelations has been a hissy fit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which has always, in my experience, been impeccably honest and careful in its work — does the point by point rebuttal.

At some point, fiscally conservative Republicans, if there are any real ones left, are going to have to deal with raising taxes. Just call it following Reagan and Bush I, if you really can't bring yourself to give Clinton any credit.

What is happening in Germany with respect to the Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis right now is what happened in America after the first revelations came out of Boston. Instead of the Boston Globe, we have the Süddeutsche Zeitung. What's staggering to me is the Vatican response - which is the same as the Boston church's first reponse. Even now, even after all we have learned and seen this past decade, their response is to say it is primarily part of a campaign to vilify the Pope. Yes, despite hundreds of claims of sexual abuse against children, it's the Pope who's the real victim here:

In a note read on Vatican Radio on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was “evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.” He added, “It is clear that those efforts have failed.” 

Again, it is the reputation of the church and the Pope they care about first, not the welfare of children. In today's developments, the entire question of whether celibacy might have something to do with the stunted sexual and emotional development of priests (you think?) - let alone whether the repression and oppression of homosexuality contributes to psychological damage - has been ruled out of bounds of legitimate discussion by the Vatican:

Trnava, Slovakia, 11.50 am

Wow. Did I get a blast from readers for posting the map that was merely designed to illustrate the current Israeli government's indifference to the US and apparent determination to annex all of Jerusalem and the West Bank permanently. The main and valid criticism is that vast parts of the map designated 'Palestinian" were actually just desert and run as public lands by the Ottomans and the Brits. The map, I'm told, has been used by anti-Zionists, but my intent was to show just how an apartheid system could become inevitable, if it isn't already, if current policy continues. So below is what a reader proffers as a less inflammatory map. Think of it as the difference between the cruder red and blue maps in US elections, and the maps that show shades of purple in every state. It's also clearer about land-ownership.

Rod Dreher has an enjoyable rant against the worst:

I have a perverse fascination with ugly churches. They're supposed to lift our eyes toward heaven, and to help us connect to God. It is vitally important for churches to be beautiful, no matter what style (and many different styles can be beautiful ... though not all styles are). Given the stakes, when churches fail aesthetically, they fail epically. Consider Our Lady of Chernobyl, in suburban New York, or the Florida church complex that looks like an bologna ziggurat sculpted by Oscar Mayer, next to a giant tortilla warmer. This is what happens when people forget what church architecture and design is for, and when insecure clergy and church lay leadership get fugaboo'd and intimidated by architects who want to make a Statement.

Jonah Lehrer has a guess:

I've been recently been reading some interesting research on close, interpersonal relationships (much of it by Ellen Berscheid, at the University of Minnesota) and I'm mostly convinced that there's a fundamental mismatch between the emotional state we expect to feel for a potential spouse - we want to "fall wildly in love," experiencing that ecstatic stew of passion, desire, altruism, jealousy, etc - and the emotional state that actually determines a successful marriage over time.

"Time to feel insignificant … in a good way."

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

The BPS highlights a study:

When it comes to avoiding infection, a growing body of evidence suggests we don't just have a physiological immune system, we also have a behavioural immune system - one that alerts us to people likely to be carrying disease, and that puts us off interacting with them. Indeed, there's research showing that people who are more fearful of disease tend to hold more xenophobic attitudes and to display greater prejudice towards people with outwardly visible disabilities. Now Chad Mortensen and his co-workers have extended this line of research by showing that a disease-themed slide show makes people feel less sociable and extravert, and primes their motor system for repelling other people.

Here's Walt Whitman's alternative to Hitch's revision - a more positive version of commandments and more than ten, and all about what we should do rather than what we shouldn't.

God I love that man and all the America he represents:

Jonah Lehrer responds to this post:

A new paper published in Psychiatry Research sheds some light on this phenomenon, or why smoking weed seems to unleash a stream of loose associations. The study looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming, in which the activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word "dog" might lead to decreased reaction times for "wolf," "pet" and "Lassie," but won't alter how quickly we react to "chair". Interestingly, marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends outwards to distantly related concepts. As a result, we hear "dog" and think of nouns that, in more sober circumstances, would seem to have nothing in common.

He warns that "you don't want too much hyper-priming, or else everything seems connected; the web of associations becomes a source of delusions." Vaughan Bell has more along those lines.

The above image is a photograph by Alexa Meade. How she describes her work:

Alexa Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her background in the world of political communications has fueled her intellectual interest in the tensions between perception and reality. Alexa Meade's innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships.

More images here and here. Another Dish fave:

Scientific American checks out research on the subject:

As diverse as people are in ascribing sacred status to possessions, they are equally varied in which values they consider sacred, a diversity that can breed substantial conflict. The abortion debate, for example, often presents a divide between those who consider woman’s “right to choose” sacred versus those who consider a fetus’ “right to life” sacred. A recent study in the journal for Judgment and Decision Making assessed how the Iranian nuclear defense program has become a sacred value and how this affects negotiation over Iranian disarmament, an issue of growing global concern.

Hitch gives it a go:

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?

Angie Hobbs, a University of Warwick fellow who "has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship," discusses Plato's Lysis:

[Socrates, Lysis, Menexenus, and Hippothales] examine a variety of models for why individuals form friendships. The protagonists consider the idea of like being attracted to like, which is a pre-Socratic idea from Empedocles, but reject it on the grounds that such a friendship would produce too much competition and rivalry. They wonder about the Heraclitian view that opposites attract—which was a popular proverb for the ancient Greeks, as it is for us—but throw that out on the grounds that it would mean that the good is attracted to the bad, or the just to the unjust, and that can’t be the case. The model to which they appear most sympathetic is that of friendship between two good people—not because they are alike, but because they are attracted to each other’s goodness.

A reader writes:

As I'm sure you know Rowe's argument is explicitly made by Friedrich Nietzsche, who calls the doctrine "the eternal recurrence" thesis. The problem is, it's provably mathematically false. In mathematics all sorts of things go to infinity without ever repeating.

Another reader:

The idea that you would have to lead your life over and over he thought would be a spur to living a more authentic life. There are problems with this idea.

Jonah Lehrer points to studies finding that qualities like generosity, obesity, and selfishness move through social networks. He pulls this quote from James Fowler on what this means for free will:

Everyone always tells me that this research is so depressing and that it means we don't have free will. But I think they're forgetting to look at the flipside. Because of social networks, your actions aren't just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I'm not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I'm also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.

Image by Luke Surl via Crooked Timber.

A meta-analysis of 55 independent studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Review finds that religious devotion has a positive correlation to racist sentiment. John Shook is not surprised:

Let's read that conclusion again: "Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant." Why would religious agnostics be more humanistic and less racist? Religious agnostics would be people who combine a religious/spiritual attitude in living life with a humble admission that they don't know if their approach is the only right way. Religious agnostics are pluralistic -- they have no problem admiring how different people can enjoy different religious paths. And it is precisely this lack of dogmatism which permits humanistic values to shine through.

(Hat tip: Dan Savage)

"Most Israeli settlement announcements, including this one, are pure symbolism: No ground will be broken anytime soon, and even if the homes are eventually constructed they won’t stand in the way of a Palestinian state. By that measure, Biden flunked. Interrupted in the middle of what was supposed to be a day of love-bombing Israelis with speeches and other demonstrations of U.S. support, he kept Netanyahu and his wife waiting for 90 minutes into a scheduled dinner before issuing a statement that harshly criticized the interior ministry’s announcement. Biden chose to use a word -- “condemn” -- that is very rarely employed in U.S. statements about Israel, even though he and his staff knew that Netanyahu himself had been blindsided by the settlement announcement. So much for love bombs," - Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

Check out his columns here. One of his recent beauts: a diatribe against the "unlovable" Iranian Greens. Another: a dissent on any notion that the US should seek a moratorium on all new settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

A bleg: can anyone find me a regular Washington Post columnist - not op-ed author - who supported the Obama administration against the Netanyahu government on the question of a temporary total freeze on all settlement construction?

Lisa Russ Spaar is a reluctant sleeper:

Like many insomniacs, I always feel a bit of bully pride in getting by on a few fractured hours each night while others complain if they don’t get a full, conked-out eight. For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called “the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,” meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness. The daily nocturnal rest that presages the ultimate big sleep of mortality was for him a price both vexing and insulting, a “nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

A blistering editorial from Israel:

There is one reason for the crisis: Netanyahu's persistence in continuing construction in East Jerusalem, in placing Jews in Arab neighborhoods and evicting Palestinians from their homes in the city. This is not a matter of timing but substance. Despite repeated warnings and bitter experiences, he stokes the flames over the conflict's most sensitive issue and is bound to get himself in trouble. Netanyahu has made it clear by his actions that American support for Israel, especially essential now in light of the Iranian threat, is less important to him than the chance to put another few Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah or Ramat Shlomo neighborhoods.

“I would want to be free to attack the character of President Clinton — but this guy [Obama], he gives every indication of being a decent guy,” - Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Here's the beginning of my talk on the politics of homosexuality at Princeton. It's in two parts, one just below, and continued after the jump. It's an attempt to take the arguments of both Protestant Biblical literalists and Catholic adherents of natural law on their own terms and to show how they make no internal sense; how they are internally incoherent even on their own terms. My same dissections on the delusions of the queer left, middle-of-the-road moderate conservatism and Human Rights Campaign liberalism, will be posted in the next few days. The entire speech, if you have the time this weekend, can be seen here.

But here's my case against the Biblical fundamentalists:

I tackle the natural law arguments here:

And here's the clincher against the prohibitionist position that holds sway across much of the world today:

Tom Jacobs passes along some research:

According to one school of thought, this tendency to exaggerate the strength of our adversaries serves a specific psychological function. It is less scary to place all our fears on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated.

(Hat tip: MR)

People dressed in all white literally act out the role of sperm in the race to become one with the egg, running through valleys, squeezing through spirals, battling Leukocytes and much more. The impressive undertaking was completed with helicopter-mounted cameras, world-renowned scientists, CGI and over-the-top reconstruction of the sperm’s journey played out in real life by humans.

It airs tomorrow. More info here.

Simply stunning:

ICELAND from Gunnar Konradsson on Vimeo.

Pivoting off The Root, John McWhorter selects ten African-Americans he would like to see removed from Black History. His first pick is Malcolm X:

Yes, I understand that in Malcolm’s time, rage among black people was deeply rooted for fully understandable reasons. Yes, I know that near the end of his life he was preaching a more inclusive message. Still, the way he comes down to us in shorthand is as the one who taught black people to channel their inner Angry Motherfucker. Articulately so—the speeches still work. But the problem is what that does for us now.

Forty-five ways to enjoy drinking more.

I kid you not:

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office said the crisis appeared to be orchestrated by the U.S. administration.

"With the knowledge of the current pope, in the 80s a previously incriminated (charged with child molestation) priest was moved to Munich. There he abused more adolescents--and he continues to work today as a priest in Upper Bavaria."

The London Times puts the news bluntly enough:

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal last night as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The cleric went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as a priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for therapy in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, who was then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as H, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined DM 4,000 (£1,800 today). There have been no formal charges against him since.

But the victim of this abuse found out as late as 2006 that the priest

was still working with parishioners, including children.

The Vatican is claiming that Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, had no clue about any of this:

A single-serving blog that pours through old issues of Wired. From the mission statement:

This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central, picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now, and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get a perspective on the present.

So, will this blog tell you if the iPad is the next big thing? Or if Twitter is dead in 3 years? Nah. But hopefully it can shed some light on what similar ideas of the past worked out, which didn’t and why.

Hobart, Tasmania, 12 pm

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow propose that the government stop prison rape:

Sexual abuse in detention is a human rights crisis in this country. Reform is urgent, and the commission makes clear how to achieve it. No one expects or wants Attorney General Holder simply to accept the commission's recommendations without question, but it is worth emphasizing that a bipartisan, government-appointed commission has already spent years developing standards to prevent prisoner rape. Its proceedings were inclusive, responsible, and exhaustive, and the standards themselves products of compromise among experts, reflecting the best practices already in place at our best facilities. If Holder needlessly delays in approving these standards, or ones very much like them—worse, if he strips them of their force because of pressure from corrections leaders—then tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children will continue to be raped while in the government's care, when we could have prevented it.

(Hat tip: BF)

R.L.G at DiA interviewed Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi last weekend:

[Ebadi] was 100% certain that the democratic movement in Iran would eventually succeed—but the trick is that she could not say when. It would depend on the American relationship, the nuclear negotiations, the price of oil, and Russia and China's role, she said. She supports sanctions like those that would deny visas to the Revolutionary Guards and other regime figures, and confiscate their foreign holdings. But she opposes sanctions that would hit the population as a whole (presumably including refined petroleum sanctions, though she did not mention them by name).

Ms Ebadi repeatedly compared the green movement to the struggle for black civil rights in America, and was convinced it would triumph in the same way.

The maps above cause a conniption at Goldblog, prompts another claim to authoritah (a sure sign that someone has a weak argument) and ascribes to me all sorts of views I did not write in the post. (Despite Goldberg's claim, by the way, I did cite a reference - to Juan Cole's blog. Goldberg is free to take up the particulars with Cole if he so wishes - but I really wish he'd fact-check before making statements like that before he blogs.)

I will respond merely to the criticism of the Dish. First, the map was not discussed except as an historical illustrative context for the way in which the Netanyahu government is intent on aggressively expanding Israeli settlement even further in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This matters because as that famous anti-Semite, Joe Biden, said yesterday

“This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

Yes, there's a huge amount of historical context on the last sixty odd years, and, as I wrote in my response to Goldberg's luke-warm defense of my not being a bigot:

Like America's founding, [Israel's] was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies' anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable.

But that was scarcely the point of the post, and we can go on for ever on the subject. But some specific charges:

The intent of this propaganda map is to suggest that an Arab country called "Palestine" existed in 1946 and was driven from existence by Jewish imperialists. Not only was there no such country as "Palestine" in 1946, there has never been a country called Palestine.

Of course not. But there was a place called Palestine (among other things) under mostly Ottoman or British rule for a very long time before Israel came into existence. Wikipedia tells us that in 1850, for example, the population of the area comprised roughly 85% Muslims, 11% Christians and 4% Jews. In 1920, the League of Nations reported that 

David Gelernter contemplates the state of the Internet:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world’s attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this.

Nick Carr:

But, [Gelernter] suggests, we can correct that bias.

A bill passed this week would amend the constitution to reserve one-third of national and state legislative seats for women:

Opponents of the bill say that it will favor wealthy upper-caste women at the expense of the lower castes and Muslims. “We are not against women reservation,” said Lalu Prasad Yadav, leader of one of the parties seeking to block the amendment. “Give reservation to poor India, to original India. Ninety percent of the population is deprived in India.”

Critics of the amendment say that it will only worsen what is already a big problem — powerful men substituting their daughters, wives and sisters as proxies in political office. 

Aparna Ray has an extensive round-up of opinion on both sides.

(Video: "Agitated lawmakers opposed to the tabling of a women's reservation bill created a commotion and tore a copy of the bill, in the upper house of the Indian parliament.")