Elections are over

You may have noticed an absence of posts in this blog as per lately. This is not because I refuse to talk about elections, although I'm pretty sure that apart from Financial Times editorialists few individuals abroad have been spending their first springtime days searching for controversial opinions on the duel of the sectuagenaries (as you'll remember, both Prodi and Berlusconi were born in the 1930s).

Instead, I've been busy nurturing a springtime flu and putting the final touches to my doctorate thesis, which is now very near completion. Hence the silence.

And amidst all this pain, the elections have gone, Prodi's centre-left coalition has won but hasn't really won, and Berlusconi's centre-right has lost, but not quite. You don't understand? don't worry, it's Italy we're talking about.

And since elections are over, what better than our lovely, election-hassle-free, second government, also known as the Vatican, to fill the headlines? Here's a few entertaining bits.

First, let's start with their new foreign policy in a nutshell: Church will speak to Hamas government

In this brilliant piece the Custodians of the Holy Land (but where's that again?) say that:

"Contact with Hamas?For the time being it’s only informal. But the Church will certainly speak to the new Palestinian government. It’s inevitable"

Sure. No matter about the poor people in Israel who had relatives and friends injured or killed in the last Tel Aviv bombing. But there's still an objection:

"Obviously, there is a problem with the fact that until a few months ago, Hamas was sending its suicide bombers to blow themselves to pieces on buses in Tel Aviv."

A small problems indeed. But it can be solved:

"... But we are not a government. We don’t choose our interlocutors”.

Sure. Except they fail to say who chooses them.

Before I puke, let's get to something else:

Archdiocese will pay $300,000 to settle last of sex-abuse suits

Interesting. So they do have somewhere to put that 0.8% of our tax that we are almost forced to pay them every year thanks to one of the stupidest laws in the world. Interesting to say what the plaintiff said about this:

"In the end, I knew I wanted to show what the archdiocese did was wrong," he
said. "Clearly a $300,000 settlement shows they acknowledge something there."

Yes it does, and it shows they have money, since he was not the only one that got compensated for bad priests behaviour at school:

Burden was the only eligible plaintiff to opt out of a $25.7 million class-action settlement between the archdiocese and 243 other plaintiffs.

But all is well what ends well:

Burden's settlement is more than three times the median payment -- just over $85,000 -- that the class-action plaintiffs received. The highest individual payout in that case was $218,801.

Now that's quite a number. I know the median is not the average, but I could very well have been molested by a priest whose dick does not even harden for that sort of money. I may start going to church again after all!



But here's my favourite bit for the day, coming from no less than my personal idol, cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (depicted above in his most exciting day of life), formerly archbishop of Milan, currently unemployed and seeking not to be kicked out by Pope Benedict's sweep of cardinals:

Cardinal Martini on AIDS –Condoms Lesser of Two Evils

This is about the fight against AIDS, which the Popestate is deliberately spreading in Africa and other less evil countries by actively discouraging the use of condoms.

Hear the words of wisdom:

"the progress of science and technology creates frontier zones or grey areas” where “it is not immediately evident what is the true good of man and woman”.

Erm... excuse me, his excellence? can you speak clearer?

It is therefore “a good rule not to make hasty judgements and to discuss calmly so as not to create futile divisions”.

Ah, ok, I get it. You don't want us to speak about it? well, sorry, but the re-immigration cannot be quiet. After all, this blog is evil as well.