...think ahead a couple years to when mobile devices at least as advanced as the current iPhone are as ubiquitous as cell phones.This makes physical environments potentially dense with information, whether through particular function-specific channels (Zagat reviews), socially salient tags (3 of your friends had a comment about this restaurant), aggregative filtering (a comment about this location was voted above your Digg threshold), or some combination thereof. The purpose of this won't necessarily be to facilitate activism—people are more likely to want to look at reviews or know if there are better prices down the block. But it also means that political information can be embedded in a place without requiring a bunch of people with placards to spend their day marching around in front of a shop.
...the potential here is to drastically lower the information costs of consumer activism. Relatively few people are going to sit down and do detailed research about all the products they routinely buy. Many more, however, may be willing to whip out their phones and click a couple buttons. When the effort required to import political values into consumption decisions is dramatically reduced, the number of politically-conscious shoppers should increase significantly.
Shopping with an iPhone strikes me as a huge boon to both political and economic market efficiency.
I love the emails. It's wondrous to me how much time and effort people put into them when they know they will get no recognition - but that anonymity also brings out more honesty and passion. People write because they feel strongly about something and that comes across.
I think the dynamic of communicating with you through e-mail has always lended your blog a certain personal quality that I've never seen elsewhere. On most blogs where there are comments, I always feel I'm talking to an audience. But when I e-mail you I feel like I'm actually talking to you. So I find that much of the time I say things that I think you'll find interesting that aren't necessarily of interest to the world at large.
The end result is that I always feel a lot more personally engaged with what you write. I find I enjoy the writing of many other bloggers but that when I read your blog it's more like I'm reading something a friend has posted. Especially when you drift into topics like religion or conservative philosophy that I can't imagine appearing on just about any other major blog.
"The gold--or quicksilver--for which we are all panning lasts only a second, or a few seconds, but it is buried beneath years of longing. Every wave that is caught has a history, extending both outside and inside ourselves. Outside, its history reaches over the horizon to some distant weather event--the fact of a storm in the Southern Ocean setting off a chain of natural events that delivers a wave for me five days later in Sydney is still something I find, frankly, miraculous; a gift from heaven.
Inside myself the layers of history behind a wave are even more important, because whenever I start paddling in front of that green wall of water, hoping I have timed my line so that I will arrive at the exact point and angle to maximise my speed and stability on take-off, I hold within me the years of having admired surfers before I did it myself; the defiance of doubt that such a complex act, balancing on a moving fibreglass board upon a moving, shifting shape of a liquid substance is possible at all; the years of practice and frustration; the aches and injuries; the disappointment of so many crap or crowded days; the clashes and intimidation from tougher surfers--all of this lies behind me as I paddle for this wave," - Malcolm Knox, Intelligent Life.
Kim Keever's landscape photos have more in common with landscape painting than modern photography. A description of the work:
...the large-scale photographs of New York based artist Kim Keever are meticulously created by photographing miniature topographies inside a large fish tank. The pictures appear to be based on traditional landscape paintings, but the process is any thing but traditional. keever sculpts miniature landscapes inside the tank, which is then filled with water. coloured lights and pigments creates dense, atmospheric environments that make the small scenes come to life.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
Matt Welch tangles with Larison, a Kossack, and me:
Obama is skillfully turning the meaning of the word "bipartisan" into "the coalition that agrees with my magnanimous self." All this "political suicide" talk serves his conscious goal of peeling off enough scared and/or squishy Republicans to turn his already impressive majority into something positively Reaganesque. So that he can even more smoothly carry out the urgent bipartisan business of installing Big Labor in the West Wing.
...no one can stand in the face of [the American Zionist lobby's] unlimited greed. They want everything: wealth, power and advocates. And if the president does not work to their benefit, they will “politically assassinate” him or bring his life to an end. This is exactly what happened to late Democratic president, John Kennedy, in the ‘60s. So, we do not have to feel exceedingly optimistic.
An Iraqi Army soldier gestures from the top of a Humvee parked outside a polling station which will be used in tomorrow's election on January 30, 2009 in Basra, Iraq. Security in Iraq's second city is being increased with a curfew and total vehicle movement ban imposed from this evening in an attempt to ensure the elections run as smoothly as possible. Many areas in Iraq are preparing for provincial elections which are being closely watched as a way of evaluating how peaceful and stable the country now is. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.
Mohammed Hussein reports on Iraqi politicking before the big vote this weekend:
Stories about corruption and dreams of making billions boost many people who have not any idea about local government to nominate themselves to run elections for provincial councils, hoping that if they can reach posts in provincial councils maybe their dreams of power and wealth will come true. I do not want to be skeptical but I think that was behind the unexpected increase in numbers of candidates.
I don't remember ever hearing a straight guy introduce his fiance on a game show without the audience responding with an "awww" and an ain't-love-grand round of applause. Don't get me wrong: this was an exceedingly sweet moment, props to these guys for being out and engaged, and the kind of people who watch game shows—middle Americans, older Americans—are exactly the kind of people who need to be exposed to non-threatening gay couples in ugly sweaters. But the audience's silence is just as revealing, I think, as this Wheel of Fortune contestant's casual introduction of his fiance. We are outer than ever, more open than ever, and more integrated into the mainstream of American life than ever. But the mainstream—that studio audience—doesn't quite know how to respond to us yet.
"I believed all that stuff about how Michelle was an overburdened modern working mother, rushing from school dropoff to her high-paying, demanding work at the hospital, to dress fittings, to whatever it was she needed to do to support her husband's political aspirations, back home to take care of her daughters. Call me naive, but that model usually includes making dinner. And squeezing in a weekly grocery shopping trip. Especially for those fresh, whole foods that don't keep so long. Now I have to wonder who did the laundry, and the vaccuuming. Sure, granny helped—but I doubt she was the maid. Who was?," - Lisa Schiffren, upon learning that the Obamas have a chef.
James Carroll's 1999 article on the Holocaust and The Catholic church is worth a read in the context of the latest Benedict fooferaw. He explains what the campaign to elevate Pope Pius XII to sainthood means:
Instead of a portrait of a man worthy of sainthood, [Pius XII biographer John] Cornwell lays out the story of a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator who was prepared to lie, to appease, and to collaborate in order to accomplish his ecclesiastical purpose—which was not to save lives or even to protect the Catholic Church but, more narrowly, to protect and advance the power of the papacy. Pacelli's personal history, his character, and his obsession with Vatican prerogatives combined at the crucial hour to make him "the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable plan," Cornwell writes. "He was Hitler's pawn. He was Hitler's Pope."
I'm not a big fan of Carroll's columns, but his Constantine's Sword is a bracing read (my 2001 NYT review of it is here; a less enthusiastic review is here). He also has a new book coming out called Practicing Catholic. I got an advance copy and haven't been able to tear myself away. The man can write; and his evolution as a Catholic from devout youth to radical adulthood through the prism of the 1960s helps me better understand a generation (and America). Of course, I'm a sucker for anyone who loves Merton as much as Carroll does.
Scott Horton takes another look at the bizarre op-ed the war criminal just penned for the WSJ:
I’ve followed John Yoo and his writings with some care for a while now, and I think I finally understand what this is about. Namely, a pending probe by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is looking at serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions.
But the OPR probe is far from Yoo’s only or even most pressing worry. The likelihood that he will face a criminal probe and then possibly prosecution is growing.
The key issue is whether the cockamamie legal opinions Yoo delivered to his superiors were a sincere and genuine attempt to say what the law was - or obvious attempts to provide pseudo-legal cover for the war crimes the president and vice-president believed were necessary to save America. Horton again:
...it’s remarkable that in all this ado over our new commitment to ending oil dependence and addressing climate change there is no mention of land use patterns or the transportation choices that shape them. Why no mention of reduced transit funds in the stimulus bill, or the fact that the House is planning to give highways $30 billion to transit’s $10 billion? Why no pressure placed on Senate Democrats, who are busy revising transit’s share down even more, in their version of the stimulus bill? The bottom line is that if you increase efficiency and increase vehicle miles traveled, well, you’ve just spun your wheels. If the administration is going to get serious about these issues, it needs to take seriously the option of helping Americans to drive less.
Don George wants to work towards civil unions laws and marriage equality:
If we pursue marriage as the sole vehicle to achieve the 1100+ federal rights and benefits for our relationships (the ones that come with opposite sex marriage), we will effectively be throwing gay couples who live in the 30 states with constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage overboard. When everyone else gets marriage benefits, gay people who live in these 30 states will be left behind and get absolutely nothing. They will also have no hope of getting these benefits or protections for their relationships for a very, very long time.
I was unaware this was an either-or situation. And, in fact, the fight for marriage rights has made civil unions the moderate fall-back position. They have far more standing because of the fight for marriage equality than they had before. But a word of warning on those states that have jumped onto the ban marriage equality bandwagon. The forces against marriage equality are also adamantly against civil unions for gay people. And they have no intention of allowing gay couples any civil recognition, because we are an emblem of sin to them.
At Claremont-McKenna College last night, my thoughts on the stimulus package vote this week crystallized a little - they can do that when a bunch of feisty undergraduates are asking good questions. On the one hand, I'm delighted that the GOP has rediscovered fiscal conservatism after a long period of Bush insanity. On the other hand, they may have chosen the one moment in recent history when fiscal conservatism could be disastrous. Yes, I can understand why Obama's bizarre idea of having Rahm Emmanuel deal with the House GOP back-fired (shouldn't he just run the White House?). But I also see that Obama won the last election, the public rightly expects a real boost to demand, and more tax cuts simply won't do enough.
Instead of fighting Dems on the dollar amount of spending, knowing that
we would lose that fight in any event, we could have stood with Obama
and called for large high-tech infrastructure projects that would
employ large numbers of minorities in construction and white collar
suburbanites in development. These projects (high speed rail corridors
as an example) would also capture the imagination of the green close-in
suburbs that are turning viciously against the GOP and have the
strategic benefit of jamming up the young Dem members
(Webb/Warner/Hagan/McCaskill) who depended on these voters for their
victories.
A protest, in a way, against the tin-ear and reactionary compulsions of Pope Benedict, the German Pope who just brought anti-Semitism back into the church. Or can the truth ever be a protest?
I've been a little awed by the email responses to the recent discussions about faith, doubt and atheism. They have swamped the in-tray. One recurrent theme through the emails is actually very encouraging to someone like me: it is that doubt and darkness are not the antithesis of light and faith. Here's a striking passage by a Benedictine nun, Joan Chittister, from "In My Own Words" that resonated:
It has not always been easy—I went through a terrible period as a young
sister—to the point that I thought I would have to leave religious life
because I doubted the divinity of Jesus. Only when I realized that I
did believe deeply and profoundly in God could I come to peace with the
fact that faith in God would have to be enough. It was a dark, empty
time. It threw me back on the barest of beliefs but the deepest of
beliefs. I hung on in hope like a spider on a thread. But the thread
was enough for me. As a result, my faith actually deepened over the
years. The humanity of Jesus gave promise to my own. Jesus ceased to be
distant and ethereal and “perfect.” Jesus let no system, no matter how
revered, keep him from a relationship with God. And that union with
God, I came to understand, was divine. Then I also understood that
questions are of the essence in a mature faith.
I don’t fear the questions any more. I know that they are all part of
the process of coming to union with God and refusing to make an idol of
anything less. The point is that during that difficult time I didn’t
try to force anything. I simply lived in the desert believing that
whatever life I found there was life enough for me. I believed that God was in the darkness. It is all
part of the purification process and should be revered. It takes away
from us our paltry little definitions of God and brings us face-to-face
with the Transcendent. It is not to be feared. It is simply to be
experienced. Then, God begins to live in us without benefit of recipes
and rituals, laws, and “answers”—of which there are, in the final
analysis, none at all.
"No one knows who will live in [the Iron Cage] in the future, or
whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new
prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and
ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a
sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this
cultural development, it might be said:
'Specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained
a level of civilization never before achieved,'"
- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.
Your philosophy student reader's email did a wonderful job of finding three
ways to say the same simple point: Christianity is more than an
infatuation with God as Deity. I think most atheists understand and
accept this and a moment's time exploring the writings of even the
spittle-flecked atheist agitators shows
that they understand that life still presents significant questions,
both moral and existential, that religions claim to answer.
Your previous reader letter raised a similar point concerning the
seeming lack of positive propositions from atheist thinkers, but the
philosophy student goes a step further and insinuates that perhaps
"real atheism" is close to impossible unless one can otherwise justify
all of one's existential beliefs without God.
Both of these
readers, I think, conflate atheism with too much else. Atheism is a
simple proposition: Sufficient, convincing evidence for existence of
the Supreme Being(s) is lacking and claims that rely on the existence
of God for their validity are therefore false. Atheism is not the idea
that morality does not and cannot exist, it is simply the idea that God
does not exist. To use your previous reader's metaphor: Atheists claim
we all actually live in the same country, but that our country is not God's country even though most people believe that's where they live.
For some truly disturbing video, watch a man who once--and apparently still does--crusade against gays, on Oprah talking about seeking therapy to curb his attraction to men. It may not be me right, but I felt enormously sad for him, and even sadder for his wife.
I watched the whole thing. I feel for Haggard - because he is trapped between who he is and his internalized belief that God cannot love him for who he is. But God can love him for being gay. And does love him for being gay. This is hard, I know. Accepting God's unconditional love for me was the hardest part of keeping hold of my Christian faith. My childhood and adolescence were difficult to the point of agony, an agony my own church told me was my just desert. But I saw in my own life and those of countless others that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing gay people into molds they do not fit helps no one. It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.
Haggard's betrayal, his lies, his compulsions, his deceits are the excruciating function of this human dead end. What we have to do as Christians is open up this always-closing door, to find a way past the abstractions and neuroses of fundamentalism to a more honest and more human acceptance of gay people as God-like. Gay people, like all people, need love. We need family. And yet we are uniquely and cruelly denied these things. And no love and no family can be genuinely based on the deceit or self-hatred that are the alternatives.
That is why I am so insistent on marriage. It alone heals this deep wound and brings gay men and women into the human family where they can finally be allowed to flourish for who they are, rather than to become the contorted, distorted shapes the rest of the world is comfortable with. Anything else actually sustains the wound, because it imprints the indignity and perpetuates the pain.
'[...] Do you want to see my vagina? Have you ever looked at one?'
'Of course.'
'Why 'of course'? Many men haven't. Straight men. They're scared to. It's the Medusa's head, that turns them to stone. Uh-oh. You're losing your stoniness. I guess you're not ready to think about vaginas yet.'
'No. I am. I'll get ready. But - '
'I know, darling. I know.'
She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he
came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her
lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had
wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the
spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn't
know what name to call her. 'Mrs Rougement' was the name he had always
known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face
gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on
the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic
relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on the
pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism.
Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he
needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. 'Call me
Sukie,' she said, having read his mind. 'I sucked your cock.'
We take it for granted. In China, not so much. Liu Xaobo was arrested last December for signing a petition calling for peaceful reform of the Communist dictatorship. PEN is organizing online to seek Xaobo's freedom. You can read the text here. More info, including a sample letter to the Chinese government, here.
...how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic's health, is in jeopardy? I'm sure that Williams-generated nostalgia in the emotional lives of wealthy people is hard to underestimate, but still...
"Mr Thiessen has written in to let us know that he certainly does not consider "enhanced interrogation" or the treatment of Abu Zubaydah torture, and we should not have implied as much. ABC News has reported that Mr Zubaydah was "slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds [sic] he begged for mercy and began to cooperate". (Mr Kiriakou says it took about 35 seconds.) So, for the record, we want to clarify that Mr Thiessen should not be attributed with the argument that torture is effective because he does not believe that these techniques are torture. The Economist disagrees on that last point," - The Economist.
Thiessen's position is that of the Gestapo. The United States has executed war criminals who once did exactly these things to prisoners.
It's not just the goose egg that the House Republicans laid on the
Democratic stimulus package yesterday: Boehner's Boys have been equally
uncooperative on other matters. Case in point: a bill yesterday to delay the transition to digital TV. This measure was approved unanimously by the Senate; every Senate Republican gave it the green light. But 155 out of 178
House Republicans voted against it, which resulted in the measure's
defeat since a two-thirds majority would have been required for passage
under the House's suspension of the rules.
Or, take the
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a seemingly fairly popular/populist (if not
inscrutable) piece of legislation on gender-based pay discrepancies.
This was something that Barack Obama whacked John McCain on
on the campaign trail, with McCain offering little rebuttal. In the
Senate, five Republicans -- out of 41 -- voted with the Administration
on Ledbetter, including all four Republican women. In the House, just three Republicans did -- out of 178.
Obama is said to be taken with Summers's intellectual nimbleness; it's
not hard to imagine how the Harvard Law-grad president might be
flattered to receive a daily economic briefing from the former
president of Harvard, a ritual that began shortly after the
inauguration.
This is from Noam Scheiber's new piece defending Geithner's clout. Worth a read for the junkies.
Or not so lucky? Joe Klein grades Obama's first week:
Obama will win a great victory on the stimulus plan. But it will be his last for a while. By June, there will be grousing that Obama hasn't pulled us out of the recession yet. By December, there will be complaints that his diplomacy hasn't achieved breakthroughs. The President's best-case scenario is similar to Reagan's: that the bad news will begin to dissipate by the midterm elections of 2010, limiting the Democratic losses, and disappear entirely by 2012. Reagan was lucky in that way. Obama is facing more difficult problems and might not be so lucky. But at least, for the moment, he is paying his public the great compliment of taking his job seriously, focusing on the long-term substance rather than the bread and circuses that masqueraded as leadership in the recent past.
Of course it is. That's no reason to ban it, control it or worry too much about it. Bruce Schneier tells everyone to take a deep breath:
Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven't seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water, and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are - by and large - small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular. And while terrorism turns society's very infrastructure against itself, we only harm ourselves by dismantling that infrastructure in response - just as we would if we banned cars because bank robbers used them too.
You write that you yourself would have voted against the stimulus bill; and then, a few posts later, observe that the unified opposition of House Republicans indicates that the "remaining rump will seek ideological purity and attack the president from the get-go."
That's not the debate to which I listened yesterday. What I heard was a Republican Party united in its opinion that the stimulus package was misguided, but reluctant to attack either the motives or the character of its chief proponent. That's a striking change in tone and rhetoric.
The real reason John Yoo wrote this foolish, inaccurate piece is in the hopes of gathering around him some support for his illegal actions.
I've been traveling and just caught up with it. According to Yoo, restoring the ancient ban on torture for prisoners means an end to all useful intelligence on al Qaeda:
Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists.
Is
Yoo saying that the US has never gotten any useful intelligence from Jihadists without
violating the baseline Geneva Conventions? I
mean: it's torture or a touchy-feely seminar? Really. Just go read Matthew Alexander's book
on how he successfully interrogated and broke Qaeda members in Iraq.
It's called Western warfare and smart interrogation. And it served us
extremely well for centuries before academically-cocooned goons like Yoo were brought
in to give Cheney pseudo-legal cover for whatever he wanted.
Weil speaks for me as well, but with a little more of the dark night thrown in and less of Jesus.
As a Catholic, I recently decided to be honest with my profound doubt and attend mass in that state of acknowledged doubt (bordering on utter disbelief and bemusement). I am sure you appreciate the spiritual peril this entails to some who aspires to orthodoxy in word and deed.
Astonishingly, never before has the beauty of the Mass been so visible to me, never has Jesus seemed more accessible. The thought occurred to me that atheism honestly held can be a perfect expression of Faith.
A Palestinian boy plays with a Hamas flag on January 29, 2009 in a street of Gaza city. US envoy George Mitchell called for a durable truce in Gaza as spiralling violence threatened to shatter ceasefires that ended a devastating war in the Hamas-run enclave. By Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images.
Marc Lynch comments on the showdown and offers a smart and pragmatic solution of his own:
A "down payment" of a public, significant drawdown in the early spring would send the correct signals to all relevant actors, while allowing plenty of time for commanders in the field to assess the impact and adjust accordingly. I hope that Obama is able to head off a battle with the military -- and the military, a battle with Obama -- by working together on such a strategy.
The administration radicals believe it is time to invert what they see as another fundamental flaw in Bush policy – tying US interests to reactionary Sunni regimes in the Arab world as a bulwark against Shia militancy. Tehran is militant, the new thinkers argue, but it is at least a rational state actor, with defined goals and interests, and therefore ultimately more amenable to cool discussion and engagement.
The more cautious wing warns against hasty interference in an opaque political system with all the unintended consequences that might entail.
The last thing we want, in my opinion, is to be on one side of the Shia-Sunni split, especially if that makes us de facto propper-uppers of Arab autocracy and drives the Iranian people into the arms of the mullahs. Persia remains the prize. And America is Persia's natural ally.
I come from a family of life-long Republicans, and after this last
administration, every one of us has bailed. As a collective, we can't figure
them out. Either there is something WRONG with these people, or they're
the Borg.
A 22-year-old college grad with a BA in Women's Studies is selling her virginity. The bidding is up to $3.8 million. Her logic:
...it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that
valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine,
after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men
cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my
virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity
from men. I took the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is
priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism.
"They can cram down a stimulus package without Republican support," said Kyl, "but if that happens, then when, as we believe, in six months or so, when the American people say, 'Wait a minute, we're not better off. In fact, we're worse off than we were six months ago. Who is responsible for this and what can be done to fix it?' Republicans then are going to be in a position to say, 'We didn't have the input in this and that's why it didn't work.'"
They really should just go pull a Cheney. This is governance as talk radio.
“While I renew my affection for and complete solidarity with our Brothers of the First Alliance, I urge that the memory of the Shoah lead humanity to reflect on the unforeseeable power of evil when it conquers the Human Heart. May the Shoah be a warning to all against oblivion, against denial or revisionism, because violence committed against any one single human being is violence against all humanity,” - Pope Benedict XVI.
January 25, 2009 - January 31, 2009
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