A Catholic's Swansong

This noon, Pope Benedict XVI spoke his last angelus address in St. Peter's, in front of a crowd of around 200,000. Thursday will be his last day in office. This is his text, which I have taken (hopefully legally) in an English translation from the Vatican Radio's website:

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DEAR brothers and sisters!

On the second Sunday of Lent, the liturgy always presents us with the Gospel of the Transfiguration of the Lord. The evangelist Luke places particular emphasis on the fact that Jesus was transfigured as he prayed: his is a profound experience of relationship with the Father during a sort of spiritual retreat that Jesus lives on a high mountain in the company of Peter, James and John , the three disciples always present in moments of divine manifestation of the Master (Luke 5:10, 8.51, 9.28).


Photo: Altar bells, image by Eu. Hansen (2009)
via Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0 Licence)

War and Peace on the Автомагистраль

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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An insight into the dashboard cameras which are in fashion amongst Russian car drivers, which I am posting for entertainment purposes only.

From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, February 19, 2013

[Edited August 2023 for style]

Happy Birthday, Ansel Adams

"The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service. (79-AAG-1)
(Licencing: Public domain because it was taken while Ansel Adams was working for the US government.) 

More photos can be found at Wikimedia Commons. Above photo via Wikipedia.

Tip of the hat to Library of Congress (@librarycongress) on Twitter.

Ten Years After: The Path to Iraq and 'Hubris'

On Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT), a new MSNBC documentary will investigate the deceptions which the Bush administration used to go to war in Iraq. It derives from the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (2006), by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.*

For an article in Mother Jones, Corn describes doubts which prominent Bush administration figureheads held at the time, revealing this scene in the film about former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

[. . .] Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, recalls the day Congress passed a resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq:

Powell walked into my office and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, "I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?" And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I—I wrote that down on my calendar—as close for—to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Wilkerson also notes that Powell had no idea about the veracity of the intelligence he cited during that UN speech: "Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied, we did participate in a hoax."

In March there will be the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax" [Mother Jones], by David Corn (February 16, 2013) [Read February 17, 2013]

* Update: David Corn, of Mother Jones, has just won a Polk Award for his reporting in 2012, specifically for the '47% video' starring Mitt Romney at a fundraiser. ("LIU Announces 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism," February 17, 2013 [Long Island University])

Follow-Up: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

To recapitulate part of what I wrote in November:

It was in New York State where the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed into practice in 1973. Under these laws, anyone who was convicted of selling, for instance, 60 grams of marijuana would have to be sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years.

This measure was also used in future drug laws like the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

All of this legislation revived (as far as I have gathered) the mandatory minimum sentences which had been removed from federal law three years earlier.

Since then, 'mandatory minimums' have been seen as a problem because they force the courts to imprison convicted criminals for excessively long periods of time — without adequately redressing, or even exacerbating, crime rates.

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Forty years after the legislation, the American radio broadcasting company NPR (together with the North Country Public Radio's Prison Time Media Project) is running a series on the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Today it described the experience of G. Prendes, a native of New York State who was affected by the Drug Laws after he was arrested at the age of 23 and then jailed, convicted, and imprisoned for a fifteen-year term.

ACCORDING to the article,

in 1977, he made the big mistake that put him in the crosshairs of the new laws: He agreed to help with a drug deal, selling a pound of cocaine upstate in Rochester, N.Y. It was a sting.

[. . . The former prisoner,] Prendes was a first-time offender, and no one saw him as a kingpin drug dealer.

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The effects were harsh for him individually but they also victimized a broader sphere: