*C*'s Sharebook 

AG of the United States should prosecute those who covered up child rapes in the Roman Catholic Church

Why this is important

There is absolute, irrefutable proof, that Cardinals like Timothy Dolan, Roger Mahony, Justin Rigali, Bernard Law, and many, many other Cardinals and Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church knew about the children being raped in their parishes by priests and did nothing but moved these priests around, without warning the communities they moved them into, and then they raped even more children. They feel they are above the law. This is a crime punishable by Federal Laws.

18 U.S.C. § 2241– Aggravated sexual abuse
18 U.S.C. § 2242– Sexual abuse
18 U.S.C. § 2243– Sexual abuse of a minor or ward
18 U.S.C. § 2244– Abusive sexual contact

It is time to show the Cardinals and Bishops they are not above the laws of the United States and they should never escape prosecution for their crimes simply because they are from a religious organization.

This is a repost from one of my all-time favorite blogs . . . The Conflicted Doomer.  (Do yourself a favor and subscribe to it.  This lady is awesome!)

*C*

The Madness at the Center of the World

by theozarker

March 30, 2013

The snow and cold at the beginning of the week turned to rain and, with only partial sunshine, gradual warmth over the rest of the week. Perhaps that explains why, over the last two warm and sunny days, the inertia of the previous few days overcame me and I did not, could not, haul those forty-pound bags of manure out to the backyard and work on my garden.

Instead, I stayed inside and, between intermittent bouts of boring housework, tried to keep up with world news while pondering that growing madness at the center of the world, that news describes.

I’m not thinking here of the natural world, the closed system that meets the momentary madness of a species which grows beyond its food supply with die-off and, in doing so, tends back toward equilibrium within the system.

What I’ve been thinking about is the world of seemingly open, non-linear systems created by the madness of a species which believes it exists outside that closed system of the natural world – receiving (taking, really) energy and mass from the external environment, moving them through the various systems and exporting the spent energy and waste back into the environment without consequences.

Where did that madness come from? At the beginning of our evolution as a separate species, distinguished from our ape ancestors by the ability to walk upright and our opposable thumbs, we lived within the natural world. When did that change?

Perhaps the seeds of that madness were planted with the realization that, with our opposable thumbs we could create tools superior to those primitive twigs and stones and branches used by other big-brained species. Or, that animals we found and ate when they’d died could be hunted and killed for food. That they provided other useful items such as furs for warmth, bone for needles, or could be harnessed for load hauling or travel.

Perhaps it came later, as we learned we could gather seeds and plant them for a more permanent supply of food, or domesticate other animals. I wonder if the need to stay in one place and tend to our food supplies led us to settle in groups, build sturdier homes and enclosures, better weapons for protection – not only from other small groups of humans, but from nature, itself – infected us with the madness.

However the infection came about, since the dawn of the fossil fuel era we have exponentially expanded the systems and spread the infection worldwide. Because these systems are non-linear, they are sensitive to small changes occurring along the “edges” of the system. These changes can amplify and reverberate through the various systems because they are co-dependant. Over the last forty years, one such change has been the “usefulness” of the energy entering the system. Production of cheap, high EROEI crude oil has declined and is increasingly replaced with less “useful” oil and fossil fuels. Another change might be in the usefulness of the information transmitted through and among the various systems. In 2008, the unreliability of information transmitted through these various systems from the financial system sent reverberations throughout the various systems, “crashing” the aggregate (pushing it into a 'phase change'). What happened in Cyprus may very quickly push it into yet another phase change which will reverberate through the aggregate systems. Because the decreased amount of useful energy entering these systems is pushing them toward a drop to a much lower energy state, at some point these systems will not recover.

And we cannot make up for that drop in EROEI needed to maintain them in their current state with renewables. (Which, the longer we wait, require increasing amounts of that less useful energy to make the equipment to use renewables - which are themselves sources of less useful energy.) So, the madness continues.

I wish I could believe, we’d stop the madness before these various systems collapse, but I do not. Tomorrow when my son comes over to help me carry the manure to the backyard, I will spend the day getting my early garden in. I’ll continue to repeat this process of relearning my place in nature as long as I am able. That is my stand against the madness.

We have trashed our natural environment with the waste we’ve exported from these systems, but only in the sense of its usefulness to us.  Nature continues to fight back.  Whether, in our madness, we will trash our usefulness to nature remains to be seen. I am not hopeful.

This is honest. This is important. This is going viral.

Via truthdig.

"A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens,along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness."

TIME FOR PALESTINE

This is huge -- In days, the UN could vote to recognize Palestine as a state -- helping to end 40 years of repression and violence. And we could tip the balance for the vote.

A “yes” vote could lead to two states, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and security. But leaked memos show the US, captured by extremist right-wing groups that spend up to $100M per year on lobbying and elections, is quietly bullying Europe to crush this vote.

Polls show massive public support for a Palestinian state, and leading experts say it might be a last chance for peace, but weak European leaders are actually considering selling out both peace and their own democracies rather than stand up to extremists in the US. They think the public won't care if peace and the Palestinians are sacrificed one more time. Let's show them how wrong they are.


Petition Text:

To European leaders and all UN member states:

"We urge you to endorse the legitimate bid for recognition of the state of Palestine and the reaffirmation of the rights of the Palestinian people. It is time to turn the tide on decades of failed peace talks, end the occupation and move towards peace based on two states."