The victim is the Pope

Who is the real victim of all of that sexual abuse inflicted by Catholic Church clergy upon German children? The Church claims that the Pope is the victim. Andrew Sullivan disagrees:

[I]t is the reputation of the church and the Pope they care about first, not the welfare of children. In today's developments, the entire question of whether celibacy might have something to do with the stunted sexual and emotional development of priests (you think?) - let alone whether the repression and oppression of homosexuality contributes to psychological damage - has been ruled out of bounds of legitimate discussion by the Vatican.
According to Sullivan, the Church strategy is to "blame others before taking responsibility," a strategy that it used so incredibly unsuccessfully in the United States.

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Why politicians like to keep “terrorism” vaguely defined

Why don't politicians clearly define the word "terrorism," the alleged principle on which they allegedly based so much national policy? As he does so often on so many topics, Glenn Greenwald hits the mark:

[T]he word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State -- Terrorism -- is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word. It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user's own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify . . . The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.

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How unique are you?

How unique are you? Or, rather, how unique is your name? I have a rather unusual name. I was wondering whether any other person has my first and last name. I visited a site called "White Pages" and found out that there seems to be only one other person in the United States who shares both my first and last name. There are more than 9,000 people with a first name spelled "Erich." If you'd like to find out how unique (or common) your name is, as well as the states where your namesake(s) live, visit White Pages and click on the "Name Facts" link (located over the field for "City, State or Zip." Hint: If you leave that field black, you'll retrieve information for the entire United States. If you enter a state in that box, you see only information for that state. I found out that there are at least 870 people in the U.S. named "George Washington." There seems to be only one person named "Barack Obama." There are more than 20,000 people named "John Smith." There are more than 500,000 people with the last name of "Martin." There is one person in the U.S. with the first name "Sardine." More than 90 people have a first name of "Music." More than 700,000 people have the first name of "Jose." The most popular male and female names in the U.S. are "John" and "Mary." The site indicates that it gets its information from a variety of sources:

This is what it sounds like: information that's available to the public. It includes addresses, street names, cities, states and ZIP codes. Other examples of publicly available information include published phone directories and information published on the Internet, such as publicly available social network profiles.

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The Onion presents the formula for bullshit stories

A few weeks ago, I posted on a terrific video on a tried-and-true formula, "A Standard News Report," used by television "news" stations to package non-stories in order to present them to the public as "news." Now, The Onion has presented its own version of packaging used by television "news" stations for presenting non-stories as "news" stories. Quite funny, yet serious and well-concocted. The Onion's video looks like a news story about non-news stories, yet it presents a topic that is certainly newsworthy. Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere Speaking of The Onion, check out a new written Onion story on bigotry. Here's an excerpt:

A coalition of the nation's most fervent bigots convened in Washington Monday to address growing concerns that the production of hateful new racial slurs has failed to keep pace with the rise in mixed-race births.

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Dangerous Intersection is 4 years old!

Back on February 21, 2006, I created the first post for Dangerous Intersection. Somehow, it got to be 4 years later all too quickly. Since that first post, DI authors have now published 3,840 posts. And many of you have created one or more of those 18,913 comments that you can still read at the site (all of our posts and comments are available at DI). Our traffic indicates that we're not small and we're not big (yet). We typically get about 140,000 visitors per month (about 5,000/day-- 1.7 million visitors over the past 12 months), including about 85,000 monthly unique visitors. Over the past 12 months, we dished out more than 7 million pages. Quantity doesn't mean much, in and of itself, of course. But I'd like to think that those of us who have participated in the writing and reading at this site have also learned some important things along the way, along with more than a few laughs. I'd also like to think that DI offers some perspectives that you don't find in most other places, and that we have contributed to the blogosphere and beyond in a significant way. My plan is to carry on, to learn from past mistakes and to make the site better in the future. One thing I've learned during the past few months is that digging into the news cycle too hard and too often can bring me way down, and that's not good for anyone. Therefore, when I'm feeling a paroxysm of cynicism in the future, I will make sure that I pull out of the news cycle for awhile in order to detoxify (thanks, to Ebonmuse for the encouragement and the terminology). In the future, I will also try harder to think of a take-away for those posts that concern ignorance, corruption and incompetence. It's not that we're going to solve society's big problems quickly--most of the time, it's going to be about baby steps if we see any progress at all. That's not going to be an easy task to present a take-action to every one of society's woes, but I'm going to give it more effort. The ultimate goal should be to figure out how to make some real-life progress whenever we identify social dysfunction. I'd like to give thanks to each of the authors, Mark, Brynn, Mindy, Dan, Erika, Mike, Lisa, Ebonmuse, Tony, Tim, Zoevinly, Grumpy, Hank and all the rest for provoking us with your postings and musings. And I really need to thank all of our comment-writers of whom there have been so incredibly many thoughtful people who have offered their own writings to keep the DI authors honest (special commendation to Niklaus). Yet I do know that there are many of you out there who read but don't write--thank you so much for visiting! Maybe this will be the year that you jump in and write your first comment (remember that you can do so anonymously, if you wish--many comments are anonymous). Almost all of the submitted comments get published (I even publish some of the comments that tell me that I'm going to go to hell!). If nothing else, post a comment to this post just to say hello and join in this modest fourth year celebration. I would ask for two little favors. If you know someone who might enjoy the kinds of writing you find at this site, please consider sending our home page link to them. Equally important, if a particular post seems well-written to you, please do follow the green-colored directions on the right side of the page and recommend that post to one or more social sites (e.g., Facebook, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon). Doing this really kicks up the traffic. It brings a wider (and hopefully a more diverse) audience to the site, which can benefit all of us thanks to more diverse comments. A larger audience would also help me to pay for the hosting costs and the other expense of running this site. I'll be candid. My hosting costs $100/month, and I'm extremely happy with it (thanks, Josh). The ads you see on the site recoup about 75% of that cost. It would be nice to break even financially, and that's my main financial goal here. BTW - none of the authors is paid. None of us has made a cent from writing at this site. All of us have day jobs--writing for DI is purely a labor of love. My overall goal is to present information and opinions that you can trust, but that also challenge you, even though you might disagree with us. In fact, when I tell people on the street about DI, I tell them to visit the site and to comment "especially if you disagree with us." One of my favorite in-person comments came from a well-accomplished lawyer who was also extremely conservative. He said, "Erich, I sometimes visit your site. It is fascinating and well-written. But I disagree with almost everything you say." That comment was a prelude to a good conversation over lunch--this kind of comment often is the beginning of something interesting. I'll end this "happy birthday" post by suggesting that I love to get email with interesting links. I know that this is true of all of the authors. If you find an good link, do write to us and you'll likely see it published at DI. Many of our email addresses can be found at the "About" page. Considerable amounts of the links you see here have been recommended by our readers. My own email address is erichvieth@gmail.com (You can also hit the "Contact" link at the top menu). If you want to reach one of the other authors, but you don't see their email addresses, send me an email and I'll pass it on. Once again, thank you. It has been a privilege to write as part of this thoughtful, iconoclastic and kind-hearted community.

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