Irony

Two dominant news stories:

1) Barack Obama is drawing heavy criticism for suggesting that during difficult times, some Americans may become frightened, disillusioned or even "bitter"and that they may "cling to religion" as a way of coping with these feelings.

2) The Pope is here! The Pope is here!

***************************************



Why I Hate The United Arab Emirates, #29,648




What is that building, above? It's Ski Dubai, an enormous indoor winter recreational park containing five ski slopes, a tobaggon course, a snowboard trail and a cross-country trail simulator.
It, of course, is located in Dubai, one of the seven theocorporate CityStates that comprise the United Arab Emirates.

The interior ( below) is kept at a constant 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Dubai is a desert nation and it's outdoor temperatures reach as high as 135 degrees F, so I don't think it's a real stretch to say that it takes an enormous amount of energy to operate this facility.


This winter playground opened in 2005. Something important happened in 2004 that made it much easier to build this enormous, frigid abomination.
From the CIA World Factbook:

In April 2004, the UAE signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement with Washington and in November 2004 agreed to undertake negotiations toward a Free Trade Agreement with the US. The country's Free Trade Zones - offering 100% foreign ownership and zero taxes - are helping to attract foreign investors.

Foreign investors such as Dick Cheney's good friends at Halliburton. Halliburton execs vehemently deny that they opened a new corporate HQ in Dubai in order to avoid U.S. sanctions that prevent U.S. companies from trading with Iran.

The Dubai move sparked controversy among US politicians last March. Senator Frank Lautenberg at the time accused Halliburton of going "to extraordinary lengths in the past to do business with the terrorist government in Iran".

Not only does Halliburton get to use Dubai as a middleman to establish and maintain a profitable trade relationship with our alleged enemies in Iran, they get to do so without paying any taxes!
With this in mind, it's very easy to see why the Neo-Cons and other BushCo thralls are so dead-set against opening any sort of diplomatic dialogue with Iran- an end to or modification of the current US sanctions against Iran could make the carefully constructed and hugely profitable loophole in the 2004 TIFA irrelevant.

Mind you, I'm not getting this information from a left-wing conspiracy site...I'm simply connecting information provided by our own Central Intelligence Agency.

Interesting facts from the CIA:

-The per capita GDP, U.A.E. : $55,200 (2007)

-The per capita GDP in the U.S.A. : $46,000. (2007)

- 81% of the the U.A.E. population is comprised of foreign workers

-78% of jobs in the UAE are in the service sector...this, presumably, includes the Pakistanis who operate the lifts at Ski Dubai.

What does the average UAE national do for a living?
Nothing.
They don't need jobs. The UAE 'government' gives the native-born citizens welfare checks drawn from the national oil revenue and the citizens, in turn, use the money to employ foreign-born dishwashers, valets, busboys, prostitutes and lift-operators.

An unemployed native of the UAE can afford to go skiing.
Indoors.
Downtown.

This is what an unemployed native of the USA can afford:


Did I mention prostitutes when I listed the job opportunities open to foreign labor in the UAE? I'm sorry.

I meant to say sex slaves.

From the CIA World Factbook:

current situation: the United Arab Emirates is a destination country for men, women, and children trafficked from South and East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for involuntary servitude and for sexual exploitation; an estimated 10,000 women from sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco may be victims of sex trafficking in the UAE; women also migrate from Africa, and South and Southeast Asia to work as domestic servants, but may have their passports confiscated, be denied permission to leave the place of employment in the home, or face sexual or physical abuse by their employers...victims of child camel jockey trafficking may still remain in the UAE, despite a July 2005 law banning the practice...

That's just a snippet of the egregious human rights violations committed in the UAE ...certainly there must be some repercussions to such flagrant abuse.

The total number of trade sanctions imposed on the UAE by the USA?

None.

Instead of sanctions, Dubai was rewarded with the 2004 TIFA and now they have ski resorts in the middle of the desert... during the hotter portions of the coming summer there is a good chance that you will be forced with a tough decision- can you afford to turn on the air-conditioning?

While you sweat, think of our good friends in the UAE and the gigantic indoor freezers that we bought for them. Think about how the money to pay for these indoor snowparks got from here to there. It drove.


Hot enough for you?

Everybody's Doing It

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Sexual abuse of children is not just a Catholic Church problem and other institutions should take steps to acknowledge and deal with such "wickedness" within their own ranks, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

The deal settles all 508 cases that remained against the archdiocese, which also paid $60 million in December to settle 45 cases that weren't covered by sexual abuse insurance.

Under the latest deal, the archdiocese will pay $250 million, insurance carriers will pay a combined $227 million and several religious orders will chip in $60 million. The remaining $123 million will come from litigation with religious orders that chose not to participate in the deal, with the archdiocese guaranteeing resolution of those 80 to 100 cases within five years, Hennigan said. The archdiocese is released from liability in those claims, Tamberg said.

Several religious orders in California have also reached multimillion-dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese. A judge must sign off on the agreement.

The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims so far.

I didn't know there was such a thing as 'sexual abuse insurance'.

I do know that if you build a house on the slope of an active volcano you will have a hard time finding an insurance carrier, and rightly so , because there are 10 million tons of boiling, roiling magma in your backyard and it's headed for your porch...so who the hell would insure Catholic priests against sexual abuse? That's a loser's bet.

It's come up again and again that the Vatican's policy of prohibiting it's priests from being married is somehow at the root of the Church's long history of pedophilia , but I don't think that is the cause of their woes- wouldn't a normal, healthy man just masturbate and/or have unmarried sex with a consenting adult? Yeah, I know the Church doesn't approve of those practices either, but wouldn't it be a lot cheaper than paying the premium on $227 million in sexual abuse insurance? As far as I know, Lloyd's of London doesn't offer 'wanking insurance' , nor are the hymens of nuns insured against breakage.

I would submit that the 'no-marriage' clause does not turn healthy ( read: non-abusive) men into sexual predators, it simply encourages deviants to enter the priesthood while simultaneously discouraging healthy men from joining. A sexual abuser, who cannot publicly disclose or indulge his fetishes anyway, is much less likely to be dissuaded by a vow of chastity than a man who prefers fornication of a consensual, adult kind.

The huge settlement seems to indicate that the no-marriage rule has become counter-productive. It was originally instituted to ensure that Catholic priests didn't produce heirs, as the heirs would inherit property that would otherwise remain in the Church. The chastity rule has nothing at all to do with morality and everything to do with economics, so it follows that if it's costing the Church hundreds of millions of dollars to protect child-molesters, it must still be cheaper than the cost of allowing priests to marry and leave estates to their potentially heretic children. That, I believe, is the main reason the Church remains inflexible on this issue- the entire patriarchal economic power-structure would have to be deconstructed and rebuilt at the expense of those enjoying the benefits of the current system. Hold your breath and wait for that to happen.

I'm contemptuous of the Church's attempt at misdirection:

...other institutions should take steps to acknowledge and deal with such
"wickedness" within their own ranks, the Vatican said ...

but sadly, there's also truth in it. Child-molesters are on quest for power and control, and what better position to find power, control and rationalization of criminal misbehavior than as head of a church?

There's always politics.