Amran Mahamood, who has made a living for 15 years by circumcising young girls, looks into a piece of a mirror in Hargeysa, Somalia. The centuries old tradition of female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation (FGM), is on the decline in northern Somalia, though it continues to have some of the highest rates of women who have undergone the practice in the world. By Nichole Sobecki/AFP/Getty Images.
“The pastoral practice of the Church must begin from the premise that cohabitation and civil marriage outside the church have become the norm. In developing a pastoral orientation, it is perhaps important to recall that the only time in the gospels that Jesus clearly encounters someone in a situation of cohabitation outside of marriage (the Samaritan woman at the well) he does not focus on it. Instead, he respectfully deals with the woman and turns her into a missionary,” – part of the response of Japan’s Catholics to Pope Francis’ questionnaire on family life.
According to the Japanese bishops, Humanae Vitae, the encyclical barring artificial contraception, is barely known among Japanese Catholics, let alone followed.
Michael Moynihan thinks the arrest of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez exposes the country’s government as a faux democracy:
If you doubted that Maduro was presiding over a rotting Potemkin democracy—kangaroo courts packed with loyalists, a neutered media, violent street gangs beholden to the government—witness his Mussolini-on-the-piazza performance yesterday, when he announced Lopez’s arrest in front of a crowd of regime loyalists. Maduro told the assembled that President of the National Assembly (and the one of the country’s most powerful and recognizable chavistas) Diosdado Cabello had personally driven Lopez to jail, in a bizarre, professional wrestling-type victory lap for the regime: “At this moment, Diosdado Cabello is driving his car and taking Leopoldo López to a jail outside Caracas,” Maduro announced, assuring his supporters of “the surrender of the political chief of the Venezuelan fascist right wing, already in the hands of justice.”
The Daily Beast translated the speech Lopez gave just before being arrested. It begins:
Today, I show my face before an unjust justice system, before a corrupt judiciary and before a justice system that does not pass judgments in accordance with the constitution and the laws.
But today, I also offer you, Venezuelans, our deepest commitment that, if my imprisonment helps awaken our people, if it is good enough to finally make Venezuela wake up so that the majority of those of us who want change are able to effect that change peacefully and democratically, then this infamous imprisonment that Nicolás Maduro wants, so openly and so cowardly, then for me it will have been worth it. This is the biggest example of how there is no separation of powers in Venezuela. How many times did Maduro say he wanted me in jail? How many times did he say he was giving instructions for our arrests? What is a president doing giving instructions to a district attorney, or to a court? Those actions are the best examples of how there is no justice in Venezuela.
Uri Friedman translates the tweet above from Lopez, which was written on the day he was arrested:
I’m disconnecting. Thank you Venezuela. The change is in each one of us. We will not give up. I will not do it!
(Photo by Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
That’s a major coup for First Look.
There’s a retirement palace being built for the archbishop of Newark, while the diocese has closed a critical school for lack of funds.
I know the danger to gay people remains great, and I don’t want to minimize the impact of living in a state where businesses of all kinds are empowered by law to put “No Gays Allowed” or “No Gays Served” in their best practices. But in America in the 21st Century, the movement that seeks to legislate outright discrimination against a tiny minority is doomed to bitter failure. It’s doomed because the principle of non-discrimination is now endemic in American culture – and among the younger generation the first article of their civil religion. Such a principle became embedded in the national identity in the Civil Rights era, where the evil of Jim Crow laws was exposed with fatal finality.
Now, the Christianist right is putting its full weight behind legal discrimination against any groups or individuals who might offend someone’s sincerely held religious conscience. Arizona’s Senate just passed a new bill expanding the concept of religious freedom from being the province of “religious assemblies and institutions” to a much broader category that includes “any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution, estate, trust, foundation or other legal entity.” So rights once accorded to purely religious institutions are now for anyone – any business, any teacher, any pharmacist, any florist, any hotel-owner and on and on.
I’ve had my say on this, but it’s worth reiterating that this bill has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. It is, rather, is an attack on Christian principles and a betrayal of the Gospels.
If there was one aspect of organized religion that Jesus opposed, it was its attempt to draw lines around the unclean, the marginalized and the sinners. Among his radical acts was immersing himself with sinners of all sorts – prostitutes, lepers, and collaborators with an occupying power. Segregation – the placing of a group of unholy people outside of mainstream interaction – was anathema to Jesus and should be to all Christians. To construct a legal regime in which those people are fair game for outright ostracism and segregation is a disgusting inversion of both democratic and Christian values.
I was struck recently by the massive show of support that Michael Sam received from his Missouri peers when the Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket the university with signs decrying “fag footballers and their enablers.” They formed a line 2,000 strong to block the protest from view. Many of the students backing Sam were devoutly Christian. Here’s how they explained their position:
Yes, practicing homosexuality is a sin. But so is lying, so is cheating, so is coveting. I sin every day. God hates the sin, not the sinner. If God hated all the sinners, he’d hate me!
When will the generation of bigots and Christianists cede to a new generation of citizens and Christians? How long do we have to wait? And how long do we have to tolerate a political party that, far from taking this on, merely aids and abets its poison?
(Painting: Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns. Jesus calls Zacchaeus, a tax collector for the Romans, down from his height in the tree and asks to stay with him in his house.)
“I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America,” – Ted Nugent, last month.
“If [Greg Abbott] is good enough for Ted Nugent, he is good enough for me,” – Sarah Palin, yesterday.
https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/statuses/436272165592125441
Facebook announced last night that it is buying WhatsApp, whose mobile product allows users to send unlimited text messages using data rather than SMS, for $16 billion in cash and stock plus another $3 billion in restricted stock. Why does Zuckerberg want the company so badly? Its user base, for one thing:
In December, WhatsApp announced it had reached 400 million active monthly users, with 100 million of them having joined since just September. It’s now up to 450 million monthly active users. According to Facebook’s Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 70 percent of those people are active on a single day, and 1 million people download WhatsApp every day.
That’s 315 million people using WhatsApp every day. In the same filing, Facebook claims that the amount of data that passes through WhatsApp rivals “the entire global telecom SMS volume.”
The acquisition will also help the social media giant penetrate international markets where WhatsApp eats its lunch:
Facebook Messenger is big in the USA but not in other countries. In key markets like India and South America WhatsApp is MUCH more popular than Facebook Messenger. And this is where, we think, the majority of the immediate real value is: the global turn to mobile is quite evident and Facebook wants to be a part of it as soon as it can.
John Cassidy looks at how Facebook was able to spend the equivalent of Honduras’ GDP (or 271 Boston Globes) on the deal:
If the owners of WhatsApp had demanded an all-cash payment, it’s highly doubtful that Facebook would have agreed to pay up to nineteen billion dollars. But Facebook has an extremely highly valued currency—its own stock—that it can use in acquisitions. As I pointed out in a post about Internet stocks a couple of weeks ago, Facebook isn’t the most overpriced one around, but it’s still some wonderful wampum; in the past eight months, it has tripled in value, and by the close of business on Wednesday, it was trading at a hundred and eleven times earnings and forty-one times its cash flow. (For comparison purposes, Apple trades at thirteen times its earnings and eight times its cash flow.)
For a company that is valued at roughly a hundred and seventy billion dollars, as Facebook was on Wednesday, issuing fifteen billion dollars in stock doesn’t seem like such a big step to take. In fact, the logic may go the other way: Why wouldn’t you do such a deal?
Larry Dignan explains why the acquisition was attractive to WhatsApp, “(beyond $16 billion in cash and stock of course)”:
Facebook doesn’t go crazy with integration. WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook’s board. WhatsApp will run as it does today. And Facebook has no plans to integrate WhatsApp and its Messenger service. In other words, Facebook won’t force things. That approach is appealing to startups looking to be acquired.
Jay Yarow wonders if Facebook will maintain WhatsApp’s principled aversion to ads:
WhatsApp promises that it will never have advertising, even after being bought by Facebook. Facebook is almost entirely ad supported. WhatsApp charges users $1 annually. At least, in theory it does. It has 450 million users, but Forbes says it only did $20 million in revenue last year, so it must not be charging everyone. For Facebook, this will be an experiment to see if it can support a non-advertising based business. For WhatsApp, it’s odd that it wanted to join an ad-based company considering how much it hates ads. We suppose $19 billion makes it less odd, but still.
Yglesias questions the scalability of WhatsApp’s model:
Mobile phone operators aren’t really selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service. They are selling access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to maximize the value they extract from consumers. In a world without WhatsApp, selling SMS separately from data is the best way to do that. Then along comes WhatsApp to exploit a hole in the pricing system. But if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change. You stop selling separate SMS plans and just have a take-or-it-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn’t doing anything.
Here you have it: all the bizarre reasoning, the creepy philo-Semitism, the non-sequiturs and the quest for world domination. Yes, the Jews created Superman and that’s how they controlled the greatest super-power on earth. From Hezbollah TV.
Greg Scoblete slams Eric Cantor’s claim that “given the opportunity, Iran’s leaders would make good on their call to wipe Israel off the map”:
What Cantor is clearly implying is that once Iran obtains a nuclear weapon (if they do decide to build one) they will use it to wage a suicidal attack against Israel. This is an extraordinary claim, given that no nuclear state has launched an unprovoked nuclear strike against another country no matter how bitter the rivalry. Of course, it’s possible that Iran’s leaders may decide to do something that’s clearly insane, but the weight of historical evidence against this claim is enormous and self-evident. Pakistan has not nuked India (or vice-versa). The U.S. and Soviet Union avoided nuclear war, despite some harrowingly close calls. States that obtain nuclear weapons, with the single exception of the United States during World War II, do not use them.
Larison piles on:
More than a few Iran hawks find the idea that Iran’s government would intentionally commit suicide more plausible than the idea that Iran’s leadership is capable of rational decision-making. Add in a major misinterpretation of the regime’s ideology, and you get the “martyr-state” myth that Cantor and many other hawks take for granted. This is how Iran hawks can imagine that a regime that is concerned above all with its own self-preservation would commit an unprecedented act of self-destruction: they ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence that undermines the myth, and then simply assert falsehoods as fact because there is no real political penalty to be paid for making things up about an unfriendly government. Thus the “martyr-state” myth survives and keeps being recycled among Iran hawks despite the fact that it makes absolutely no sense.
The Dish 