Pure Ecstasy

Another one of those "a picture is worth..." moments.

A lucky photographer captures the moment as a wave of utter ecstasy sweeps across the face of pope Francis as he poses for the obligatory snapshot with the Cheeto Benito, his frau, Melania, and his daughter-wife Ivanka.

While they refused to wear head coverings in Saudi Arabia, the ladies got them on quick enough to see the Man in White. They also chose matching black dresses, a tribute, perhaps, to the Inquisition? However Melania clearly wasn't about to waste one of her remaining smiles on the guy in the white beanie. Trump, meanwhile, grinned like a trained seal.

Pope Francis Calls Out the Media

The head of the Roman Catholic Church warns that the mass media has become scatalogical.


Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with excrement, Pope Francis says.

Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio that spreading disinformation was "probably the greatest damage that the media can do" and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin.

Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

I was going to make a snide remark about Ezra Levant and his Rebel Media but - oh wait, I just did.

What Does the Pope Know About Climate Change? Plenty.

We know the Holy Father has a background in science and a chemistry degree but just what does he know about climate change?  Lots - lots and lots.  The IPCC may have been around about two decades but the Vatican has had its own outfit, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for 400-years.

The Academy boasts some seriously brilliant and accomplished scientists.  Guess what?  Their ranks include loads of non-Catholics.  There's even a Hindu.  These guys know that the pope has a lot of clout and they want to see that clout well informed.

Besides it turns out the pope chose to name himself Francis after Roman Catholicism's first environmental radical, Francis of Assisi.  That's starting off with a bit of street cred, no?

The full academy meets every two years and is often granted an audience from the pope. In the stretches between the biannual sessions, scientists hold workshops and produce reports on whichever topics they agree are most important for the pope to understand. “The pope has his own experts, who are completely secular,” said Ramanathan. “Not all of them even believe in a god. They are there for pure scientific excellence, and they are not co-opted by any country. They’re not co-opted by the United Nations.”

Reaching the pope is one thing. They also wanted to reach everybody else. Ramanathan and a coterie of his colleagues endorsed a follow-up plan. They would bring leaders of reason and faith together under one roof to talk about the most consequential risk humanity has had to confront since the advent of nuclear weaponry.

That’s why in April, the Vatican invited representatives from the world’s religions — including Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians — to a symposium discussing climate science and the ways religious leaders might lead on the issue.

More than a dozen faith leaders heard from one of the world’s top climate scientists, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, about how the earth went “from glacial chaos to climate paradise” during the last big climate transition 12,000 years ago, and what we may be in store for next.

They heard from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who popularized the notion that human industry has shoved the world into a new geological phase — the “anthropocene,” or in plainspeak, “the human age.”

And they heard Jeffrey Sachs, prolific writer and Columbia University economist, say that “we can still, but just barely,” avoid pollution levels that lead to dangerous climate change risk.

So when Republican denialists like Senator James Inhofe or that weirdo Santorum or Bush the Chubby, tell the pope to bugger off and stick to things he knows about, they're just blowing smoke.

I agree, the pope was wrong to slam the door on the overpopulation problem but if he can kickstart some meaningful action on carbon emissions and our insanely destructive over-consumption, that'll be more than just about anyone else has managed.

Too bad their info session was limited to "leaders of reason and faith." That pretty much rules out prime minister Bullwinkle.

"Man Has Gone Too Far." Pope Francis Comes Out Swinging.

What better place to speak out against climate change than the severe storm ravaged Philippines?

Wading into the climate change debate on board the papal plane, the Pope told journalists he hoped negotiators at the next round of climate change talks in Paris in November would take a courageous stand to protect the environment.

"I don't know if it is all (man's fault) but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps down nature," he said.

"We have in a sense taken over nature. I think we have exploited nature too much."

The comments were Pope Francis' clearest on the environment since he pledged to make the issue a priority on the day of his installation as Pope in 2013.

"We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth," said the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, who has in the past spoken about the need to protect the environment.

The Exorcism of Stephen Joseph Harper

Steve, He's Coming for You

Stephen Harper has a problem.  The Holy Father is coming for him and the rest of his ilk.  This time it's not a legion of scientists who can be gagged and dismissed or a bunch of whiny Third World leaders up to their knees in rising sea water to be ignored.  It's Pope Francis, indisputably the most powerful living religious icon on the planet.  And it's not just Catholics who love this guy - the rest of us also like him just fine.

This year Pope Francis is on a climate change crusade to drive out the carbon demons that have crawled up the ass of Harper and company.  Steve can't duck this one.  His permanently coiffed hair is the telltale sign of demonic possession.

According to The Guardian, Francis is going to issue a Papal edict on climate change, a call to arms to the world's 1.2-billion Catholics.

"...can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

"It looks as if he will give it a go.  In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world's main religions."

What's that, a "summit of the world's main religions"?  Francis is planning on uniting not only Christendom but also the Muslims, Hindus, and  Buddhists behind climate change and squarely against our own Steve and the rest of the Carbon Clique.


It'll be the Fossil Fuelers versus God in all his/her iterations.  And among those who'll be hearing the message will be a goodly, God-fearing chunk of Canada's electorate.  Oh my, my.  Talk about Divine Intervention.

Given Pope Francis' already impressive batting average, it doesn't look good for Sideshow Steve and his Carbon Demons.  You might say the Vatican is planning to give him a high colonic exorcism.

Update:

Fanciful as this might seem, a bit of Google research turned up some interesting facts.  Roman Catholicism is the given religion of 38.7% of Canadians which is about the same as the percentage of votes cast in the last election that handed Harper his majority.  Canada's progressive Protestant churches make up another 15-20% of the population.  You can pretty much count on those Protestant churches to support the pope on climate change.  Even Harper knows not to expect much support from the fact-based outlook of the non-religious.

I think it's certainly possible that a good, climate-change nudge from the nation's pulpits could cost Harper his crown.  Watch for the CRA to crack down on our churches.

Pope Warns We May Already Be In "Piecemeal WWIII"

Has the world already stumbled into a third world war?  Pope Francis thinks that could well be the case.  Denouncing war as "madness", the Pope made his remarks while visiting Italy's largest military cemetery.

In Saturday's homily, standing at the altar beneath Italy's fascist-era Redipuglia memorial - where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed during WWI are buried, 60,000 of them unnamed, the Pope paid tribute to the victims of all wars.

"Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep," he said.

"Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction," he said.

I don't know about you but I'm thinking Francis might just be right.  What's going on today around the world, the brutal chaos, the clash of state and non-state actors, the "new war" type of warfare is very much in keeping with the models of warfare for the 21st century canvased in a recent course I took from the war studies department of Kings College London.

Gone are the days of Haig and Kitchener, Rommel and Patton.  Gone are the days of massive armies clashing over reasonably understood objectives.
Gone are the days of victors and vanquished, of declarations of war and treaties of peace.

Today's warfare sees parties mix and blur, sometimes drifting in and out of conflict, with often ill-defined objectives or no particular purposes at all. Conflict has become more fluid, actors are apt to change sides or vary allegiances.  The distinctions that once separated crime, terrorism, and insurgency are increasingly meaningless.

The Afghanistan debacle demonstrates how ill-prepared the West is for this transition in warfare.  Despite our claims to the contrary, we went into Afghanistan to fight a conventional military war - heavy on firepower, weak on troop strength.  It wasn't for lack of bombs or strike fighters, tanks, artillery or any of the other accoutrements of modern warfare that we failed to defeat a bunch of illiterate farm boys equipped with Korean war vintage rifles and light machine guns.  We failed because we stupidly never had remotely enough soldiers to fight their war and because they chose, not stupidly, not to fight ours.   At the end of the day the only war that mattered was theirs, the only one still in play when the clock ran out on our war.

Wars of theology seem to have supplanted wars of ideology as the new expression of nationalism.   The rise of religious fundamentalism as a driving force even in the halls of grand palaces and national legislatures has introduced a new element of zealotry and an acceptance of brutality that might have been unacceptable previously.  Who needs morality when you follow the fierce burning light of religious extremism whether Muslim, Christian, Judaic, Hindu or whatever?

Warlordism and tribalism often frustrate both the ability to conduct an effective war and any prospect for achieving peace from conflict.  We in the West have exacerbated those tensions by the manner in which we carved up so much of the world as our spoils of war, drawing lovely neat borders to suit our convenience and without concern for the ethnic realities of the people we were corralling together.

In contemporary warfare before the turn of the 20th century, fatalities were roughly 85% military, 15% civilian.  A century later those ratios had been reversed.  Today the brunt of warfare is inordinately borne by civilian populations as the laws of war intended to protect them are routinely flouted by non-state actors and state actors alike.  Even in Canada we sit by complacently as our allies deliberately target civilian populations with impunity.  They do it and, by our silence, we condone it and become complicit in it.

Morality has gone straight out the window.  There are more failed and failing states, ever more illiberal democracies (we're not all that far off either) ushering in a new era of authoritarianism.  And we have collectively arrived at this tragic place just at the moment when we must decide if mankind can find some means of equitably and peacefully sharing this biosphere, our one and only habitat, through what promises to be an increasingly challenging and dangerous century.