Issue 189

News: Two religious figures get their comeuppance and I want to see what happens next.
A few weeks ago, Anonymous, the socially conscious wing of 4chan, the same people to bring Christian Weston Chandler to the internet consciousness, apparently threatened to hack the many websites of the Westboro Baptist Church. Anonymous denied sending out the initial threat, but after they told Anonymous to "Bring it On," another hacker decided to take their sites down. Of course, this only lasted a short time. However, I saw something that happened later: during a chat between Anonymous and Shirley Phelps-Roper, who has become the de facto leader of the church since Fred got too old, Shirley proved to be so irritating and insulting that they actually decided to go ahead and hack the sites anyway. As of right now, The WBC's sites are offline. Now that Anonymous is apparently actually warring with them, I'd love to see what happens. It's not like the Phelpses have anywhere near the power of The Church of Scientology. And, on a related note, two Barvarian lawyers have apparently pressed charges of Crimes Against Humanity at the International Court of Justice against the Pope. The charges? Primarily the charges are in their apparent inability to keep their priests off the altar boys), and their longstanding opposition to condom use. If applied to the worldwide level, we have an organisation which has aided and abetted pedophilia on a worldwide scale (even if it did so on a level of naivete, assuming that moving priests would curb their desire to have sex with children) and has done more to increase the spread of AIDS than any other entity in the past thirty years. Even if this is a result of Naivete on the part of the Church, the fact that their ideas have done little to help with those problems, and their refusal to change makes them responsible for those problems. In this case, I would be curious to see the Pope being judged for this. Maybe the repercussions of this could be felt across the Abrahamic Religions: maybe many more conservative Christian denominations would (though likely not being judged) force themselves to re-examine their interpretation of scripture, or Islamic dictatorships (like Iran or Saudi Arabia) could actually be judged as well as the Pope. However, the charges have to be examined by the World Court's prosecutor, and that hasn't happened yet, and could very well never happen. And besides, Benedict could die before the trial starts (he is 83, after all.)

Review of the Day: Barney Ross. It's a book, unlike a lot of the things I've been reviewing in this blog, and a relatively short one at that. Simply put: it's the biography of a boxer, born in Chicago, grew up in the Jewish ghettoes of Maxwell Park, managed to become a big boxing hero (72 wins, 3 losses, 4 draws), eventually fought at Guadalcanal, developed a morphine addiction as a direct result of his Guadalcanal experiences, and kicked the habit. On the other hand, it's the story of a man who loses his faith in Hashem after witnessing his father's death, becomes a boxer in defiance of his faith, after the rise of Hitler, begins to play up his Jewishness, and eventually returns to the faith proper while trying to kick his Morphine habit. It's an amazingly powerful story, and it's moved me enough that, after the weather has stabilised, I'm considering visiting his grave in Rosemont. Hopefully, I'll find a good pebble for his grave in the interim.

Quote:
It was lucky for me. It wasn't lucky for the nine people that got killed and the 20 that were injured."
____________Barney Ross

Link of the Day: The video that has Anonymous hacking the WBC live.