Another One

A priest who allegedly molested a girl in Minnesota and then decamped to India is no big deal for the Vatican. They declined to pursue the case as recently as 2006:

According to the 2007 criminal complaint, which deals with an episode in the autumn of 2004, Father Jeyapaul told a teenage parishioner to accompany him to the rectory or else he “would kill her family.” There, Father Jeyapaul took off his collar and began touching himself and groped the girl, and forced her to perform oral sex, the complaint says.

“The defendant told the victim that it was a sin if the victim did not touch the defendant,” the complaint says.

The victim, who is now 20, first spoke with criminal investigators in October 2006. The correspondence between Vatican officials and Bishop Balke of Crookston were released as part of the victim’s civil lawsuit against the diocese.

Taking Green To The Extreme

Lisa Hymas contends that "the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children."

The average American generates about 66 times more CO2 each year than the average Bangladeshi—20 tons versus 0.3 tons. If you consider not just the carbon impact of your own kids but of your kids' kids and so on, the numbers get even starker.  According to a 2009 study in Global Environmental Change [PDF] that took into account the long-term impact of Americans' descendants, each child adds an estimated 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to a parent's carbon legacy—that's about 5.7 times his or her direct lifetime emissions.

And a people-free earth would not have human-caused climate change at all!

The Lies Of The Pentagon, Ctd

A reader writes:

Soldiers are trained to kill and sometimes in the heat of combat they will engage in killings that are not strictly justified, for example, at Haditha.  But this — all of it — was simply gratuitous and the killing of the wounded journalist and the shooting up of the minivan trying to pick him up to save his life went beyond gratuitous and was just plain sadistic murder. 

Forty years ago, when Charlie Company went into My Lai to inflict some collective punishment, a helicopter pilot watching from above saw the carnage and did something to stop it.  Nowadays, helicopter pilots make movies of their killings and beg a wounded man to make a suspect move so they can pump more 1 1/4" rounds into him.  How completely depraved. 

I served four years in the Armed Forces of the United States and was always proud of my service.  Not anymore.

Who Are The Tea Partiers?

With the help of a Gallup poll, Ambers sorts it out :

It's true that just half of those Tea Parties surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion's share of the other half say they're independent. But they're not: they're Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don't want to identify with the party's brand. That's not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

What Motivates Us?

Laura Vanderkam reviews Daniel Pink's Drive:

The best motivation, [Pink] suggests, is intrinsic, that is, when people want to do the work because they find the work itself fulfilling. That doesn’t mean such workers don’t want to be paid well. They do, of course, and they also like free coffee and in-office massages as much as anyone else. But leaders who understand this higher level of motivation compensate people in a way that “takes the issue of money off the table, so they can focus on the work itself.”

They pay their employees well for their industry, but equally important, people aren’t pitted against one another through compensation schemes that pay some people way more than others for the same work. These leaders create an environment where people want to do their best. This involves giving people lots of autonomy over their time, their tasks, their techniques, and their teams; providing them an opportunity to work toward mastery of their professional craft; and imbuing their work with a sense of purpose.