Category Archives: History

Church ‘failure’ in abuse scandal

Deutsche Welle: Thousands of sex abuse cases in German Catholic Church – report. “More than half of the victims were younger than 13 and predominantly male. The study’s findings were based on documented cases that occurred over more than six decades.”

Deutsche Welle: Jahrzehntelanger sexueller Missbrauch in Bistümern. “1670 Priester haben 3677 minderjährige, meist Jungen, im Zeitraum von 1946 bis 2014 vergewaltigt oder missbraucht. Laut einer Studie vernichteten Bistümer viele Beweise. Die Dunkelziffer liegt wohl höher.”

“Mehr als die Hälfte der Opfer war demnach zum Tatzeitpunkt maximal 13 Jahre alt. In etwa jedem sechsten Fall kam es zu unterschiedlichen Formen der Vergewaltigung.
[…]
Für die Aufarbeitungsstudie wurden mehr als 38.000 Personal- und Handakten aus 27 deutschen Diözesen untersucht und ausgewertet. Diese Zahlen würden als konservative Annahme betrachtet, man müsse wohl von einer hohen Dunkelziffer ausgehen, heißt es in den Medienberichten.

Das der DBK vorliegende Datenmaterial war nämlich nur lückenhaft. So sind nach Informationen der Katholischen Kirche Akten über den sexuellen Missbrauch von Kindern und Jugendlichen vernichtet worden, berichtet “Die Zeit”. In der Untersuchung heißt es demnach: “In einigen Fällen fanden sich eindeutige Hinweise auf Aktenmanipulation.””

Zeit online: Sexueller Missbrauch: Das Ausmaß des Verbrechens. “Über vier Jahre lang haben die deutschen Bischöfe sexuelle Gewalt in der Kirche systematisch erforschen lassen. Wir veröffentlichen erste Ergebnisse der Studie.” Von Evelyn Finger und Veronika Völlinger.

” Zum ersten Mal gesteht die katholische Kirche in Deutschland ein, was sie erst jahrelang vertuscht und dann weiter beschönigt hat. Zum ersten Mal ließ sie den Kindesmissbrauch in ihren eigenen Reihen flächendeckend untersuchen. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung liegen der ZEIT exklusiv vor. Sie zeigen: 1670 Kleriker wurden zwischen 1946 und 2014 als Missbrauchsbeschuldigte innerhalb ihrer Kirche aktenkundig. 3677 Kinder und Jugendliche wurden nach Lage der Akten mutmaßlich zu Opfern. 4,4 Prozent aller Kleriker sollen im genannten Zeitraum Minderjährige sexuell missbraucht haben. “Diese Zahl stellt eine untere Schätzgröße dar”, heißt es in einer offiziellen Zusammenfassung der Studie. “

“How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.”

Vox: Read the full transcript of Obama’s fiery anti-Trump speech. “This is not normal.”

“People ask me, what are you going to do for the election? No, the question is what are you going to do? You’re the antidote. Your participation and your spirit and your determination, not just in this election, but in every subsequent election and in the days between elections. Because in the end, the threat to our democracy doesn’t just come from Donald Trump or the current batch of Republicans in Congress or the Koch brothers and their lobbyists or too much compromise from Democrats or Russian hacking. The biggest threat to our democracy is indifference. The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism.

Cynicism led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on Election Day. To all the young people who are here today, there are now more eligible voters in your generation than in any other, which means your generation now has more power than anybody to change things. If you want it, you can make sure America gets out of its current funk. If you actually care about it, you have the power to make sure what we see is a brighter future. But to exercise that clout, to exercise that power, you have to show up. […] This whole project of self-government only works if everybody’s doing their part. Don’t tell me your vote doesn’t matter. “

Link via MetaFilter.

Science Podcast

Motherboard: Science Solved It podcast.

“I grew up on shows like The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries. I checked out books on UFOs and Bigfoot from the library. I was fascinated by all of the wondrous, unexplainable things in the universe. And I still am. Only now, as an adult, a science journalist, and a skeptic, I’m much more interested in the explanations behind these mysterious phenomena.

That’s why I created Science Solved It, a new weekly podcast from Motherboard. Each episode, I explore one of the world’s greatest mysteries that was solved by science. I talk to the actual, real live scientists who cracked the case, while also indulging in some of the bizarre conspiracy theories that accompany these mysteries. Throughout the season, you’ll hear about unexplained, underwater noises, floating lights, moving rocks, and even a cartoon that gave people seizures.”

I found the podcast via this MetaFilter post: Science Solved It: theories and solutions to strange occurances, which has links and summaries to all the episodes in the first two seasons. I especially liked the episodes about the underwater flies at Mono Lake and the moving rocks in Death Valley, because I’ve been to those places years ago – plus, now I want to go see albino redwood trees (which probably won’t happen, as their location is being kept secret for good reasons).

I’ve got a cold at the moment and spent the past two days on the couch binge-listening to all 14 episodes in the first two seasons. Highly recommended!

“To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.”

The Atlantic: The Education of Bill Oliver. “How a letter to Barack Obama tells the story of two strangers who became family, and one lifelong Republican’s journey to a new kind of patriotism.” By Jeanne Marie Laskas.

“Word came that President Barack Obama wanted to see some of the mail just the day after he took office. Mike Kelleher was the director of the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). He got the call from the Oval saying the president wanted to see five letters. Then they called back with a correction. The president wanted to see 15 letters. They called back one more time. He wanted to see 10 that day, and every day.

“It was a small gesture, I thought, at least to resist the bubble,“ Obama later told me. “It was a way for me to, every day, remember that what I was doing was not about me. It wasn’t about the Washington calculus. It wasn’t about the political scoreboard. It was about the people who were out there living their lives, who were either looking for some help or angry about how I was screwing something up.“

And why should the president be the only one reading 10 letters a day? What about everyone else in the West Wing? Surely Obama’s advisers and senior staff could benefit from seeing this material.
[…]
Fiona Reeves, an OPC staffer who soon became the office’s director, developed a distribution list, kept adding to it. Letters to the president, dozens of them, just popping into people’s inboxes. Why not? And not just the 10LADs—the president’s 10 letters a day—but also others from the sample piles. “We send out batches of letters we think are striking,“ she said. At first she worried about being an annoyance, but then she got bold. “I hope people read them; that’s why I spam them. But I mean, they don’t have to read them.“

They did. Soon people started asking why they weren’t on the distribution list. The people in OPC came to know which people in the West Wing were particularly tuned in to the letters. The OPC staff came to regard these people as special agents, ambassadors, and they had a name for them: Friends of the Mail.”