The Dish

The mother of all misprints in a cook-book. (Yes, they pulped the whole run.)

A leading Mexican bishop goes there. The reaction to the latest round of horror is in some ways more soul-crushing than the revelations themselves. They reveal a hierarchy so massively out of touch with reality, so fathomlessly self-interested, and so bad at even p.r. that it's no mystery why so many of us are in despair about the leaders of the church. Not the lay people, or the vast majority of religious who still do extraordinary work across the world, just the crew of self-serving, screwed up authoritarians telling us about a world they know nothing about. As Nick Kristof rather movingly wrote yesterday:

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty. This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives. […] So when you read about the scandals, remember that the Vatican is not the same as the Catholic Church.

How do we get the hierarchy to reflect the real Catholicism that still flourishes in the real world? I'd start with ending celibacy and allowing women to become priests. And watch the sanity flood in.

"The leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority. The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.

Since this very quality of uninhibited but largely associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it may well indicate weakness rather than strength. The fascist agitators' boasting of strength is indeed frequently accompanied by hints at such weakness, particularly when begging for monetary contributions – hints which, to be sure, are skillfully merged with the idea of strength itself. In order successfully to meet the unconscious dispositions of his audience, the agitator so to speak simply turns his own unconscious outward.

His particular character syndrome makes it possible for him to do exactly this, and experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their innervations and sensitivity. Without knowing it, he is thus able to speak and act in accord with psychological theory for the simple reason that the psychological theory is true. All he has to do in order to make the psychology of his audience click, is shrewdly to exploit his own psychology," – Theodor Adorno.

The above image on the CO2 implications of the volcanic eruption is from InformationIsBeautiful. It comes via Fallows, our in-house aviation maven, who is all over the volcanic ash story. Here's his FAQ on ash and airplanes. Tyler Cowen flags an article claiming that air freight "is responsible for a quarter of the value of all goods moved into and out of the UK". And Yglesias asks the important question: how to pronounce "Eyjafjallajökull." He links to audio of the name being spoken but it isn't much help. John Conway has a solution:

Okay, I have tried, but pronouncing this one eludes me…I think it needs a new name. (Simply “Kull” might do.)

A snapshot of the other England – the conservative England. Money quote:

One 57-year-old local businesswoman, whose son is a school head of department, has found herself contemplating the unthinkable. "Voting for the Thunderbird puppets," she confides. "You know, Brown with his big head, and Darling with his stick-on eyebrows. We've always voted Tory. But we're just not convinced by Cameron. I mean, he's lovely. His wife is gorgeous. But there's too much of the salesman about him."

Yes, it's a class struggle – but so esoteric it is only truly apparent to Brits. One went to Eton, the other to Westminster. Dominic Lawson explains it all for you.

Alex Tabarrok posts the above picture of "Chauncy Morlan (1869-1906) who, because of his 'freakish' weight, people once paid good money to see as he toured Europe and America with the Barnum & Bailey circus" and asks:

What would the circus goers of 1890 have thought if they were told that in the America of 2010 Chauncy Morlan would be unremarkable?

Scott Adams muses:

I'm always fascinated when society decides to label some type of behavior as a mental problem. For example, Tiger Woods is allegedly being treated for sex addiction while his real problem is some sort of unusual blindness to risk and consequences. The common name for that is optimism. That optimism is probably a big part of what makes him a spectacular golfer. No one would practice as much as he did from an early age without some sort of crazy optimism that he was The One. And it has to help your nerves in critical situations if you are optimistic that your putt will go in. If Tiger hadn't succeeded in becoming the greatest golfer of his day, he'd be the crazy caddy with delusions of greatness. The only difference between crazy and confident is that the confident guy was lucky enough to have the resources to pull it off. Somewhere in China there's a guy with just as much golfing talent and optimism as Tiger. He's a bus boy. And a virgin.

South Park got there first.

Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, says body art predates cave paintings:

(Hat tip: 3QD)

If rural towns are going to count "the involuntary presence of convicted prisoners inhabiting the correctional facilities in their districts as constituents" Serwer thinks prisoners should get a vote:

The proper thing, in my view, is to allow prisoners to vote, as they do in Maine and Vermont. Counting people who are unable to vote from their home address strikes me as only slightly fairer than counting them from where they are incarcerated. I see the reasoning behind removing the right to vote during incarceration, but if people literally can't vote it's not really fair to count them as a constituent, and not counting them isn't a viable alternative either. There also isn't any real civic benefit from felony disenfranchisement — it doesn't deter crime, it's a purely punitive measure that uses criminal liability as an excuse to take away the votes of people who don't have much of a political voice anyway.