Colombia Cardinal is not just despicable, he's also technically wrong

From the Washington Post:

A senior cardinal defended the Roman Catholic Church's practice of frequently not reporting sexual abusive priests to the police, saying Thursday it would have been like testifying against a family member at trial... "The law in nations with a well-developed judiciary does not force anyone to testify against a child, a father, against other people close to the suspect," Castrillon told RCN radio.

Um... Castrillon is 80 years old, so he probably is not familiar with the internet abbreivation, IANAL. But he should be. Because this statement was not just despicable, it was profoundly stupid.

There is a nugget of truth in this when there is no prospect for the crime to be repeated, i.e. a person would typically not be prosecuted for failing to report a past crime of their spouse after finding out about it. But if you know another crime is imminent, you are not off the hook, even if it is a family member. That's called "conspiracy".

And family members I am pretty sure can be compelled to testify. I mean, if a father rapes one of his children, and the mother was an eyewitness, do you honestly think she would be excused from testifying? Please.

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Comments are off for today

The terrorist won. For today.

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If you are over 50 and/or don't play video games, you are not qualified to talk about video games

Two otherwise very smart and insightful old geezers, Ebert and PZ, have decided to sound off on a topic on which they are completely and totally ignorant. It's especially galling coming from PZ, because he's always talking about how it's delusional when layman think they understand evolution better than evolutionary biologists, yet he thinks he understands video games better than people who actually play them.

I have no desire to take apart the argument point for point, because who would listen to either of these guys on this topic??? You might as well ask a dentist what he thinks about educational standards. Oh wait...

In a nutshell: Not all video games strive to be art, but some do and some achieve it. This is true both visually, and within the medium itself. If a piece of media makes you feel something in a deep way, how is that not art?

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Physics/religion joke

Just heard this from a co-worker, I love it.

A Higgs boson walks into a Catholic church and tries to take Communion. The priest says, "I'm sorry, you haven't been baptized, you'll have to leave." The Higgs boson replies, "But you can't have Mass without me!"

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Stupid probability question

I got conned into doing this Eat Well, Live Well Challenge where I work, and one of the things you do is try to walk 10,000 steps a day. So I've been walking to a place around the corner for lunch, which is about 5,000 steps round trip.

On my walk today, I was thinking about probabilities. Although it blew my mind at the time, I've come to accept that a probability of zero only means "almost impossible", not actually "impossible". The classic example is that if you pick a random point inside a unit square (0<=x<=1, 0<=y<=1), the probability of any given point being chosen is, necessarily, zero -- but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

Okay, that's great. Of course, you can take any continuous segment of the unit square and give the probability of that, e.g. the odds of landing in (0<=x<=0.5, 0<=y<=0.5) would be 1/4... right? Interestingly, the odds of landing in (0<=x<0.5, 0<=y<0.5) are also 1/4, I think, but that's okay, because the odds of landing exactly on the lines x=0.5 or y=0.5 are that whole "almost impossible" zero again.

So now let's extend it to, pick any random point on an infinite 2-dimensional grid. Again, the probability of choosing any given point is zero. No problem. But now, the odds of choosing any finite continuous segment are also zero... which I guess I can handle.

Okay, but now what are the odds that the point chosen will be in the infinite continuous segment x>0? I don't know how to show the math (I know it involves integration, but I can't seem to quite figure it out), but it's got to be 50%, right?

Okay... so what are the odds that the point chosen will be in the infinite continuous segment x>1? It's also gotta be 50%, right? I think? Which I guess is okay, because the interval 0<=x<=1 has our good old friend "almost impossible" probability of zero.

Can anybody who knows probability theory tell me if that's correct? And if so, how do you sleep at night? This will piss me off almost as much as the Banach-Tarski Paradox...

Edit: I'm guessing this is how I do the math, but I have to get off the computer now so many I can figure this one out tomorrow...

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Why they'll get away with it

Mark Morford writes (emphasis mine):

Perhaps, then, the only thing that can truly change the church is the revulsion and outcry of its millions of followers, demanding change, revolution, upheaval. And millions of Catholics worldwide appear to be demanding just that; the Vatican is under unprecedented pressure to make amends, modify its repellant ways, maybe usher in a true reformist pope in the wake of one of the ugliest "holy" leaders in recent history.

The word I put in boldface is why the Catholic church will eventually be able to shrug this off as if nothing happened. Even if 11 million Catholics angrily demand reform, that will mean 99% of them are happy to keep on paying tithes to child rapists and their protectors.

Even if we are wildly optimistic and hope that this scandal will bring about the effective death of Catholicism in the United States and Europe, this hateful villainous institution will certainly retain its grip on Central and South America, where they may actually have some success convincing people that the problem is homosexuality rather than child rape. And while currently only about 1/8th of the total number of Catholics in the world hail from Africa, this monstrosity is making rapid inroads there by infiltrating their self-destructive dogma on the backs of supposed humanitarian programs.

No, Catholicism is not in danger. As Morford observes, millions of Catholics are voicing their outrage... but who fucking cares? It will only be when hundreds of millions of Catholics are sick of being told right and wrong by self-serving sadists that there will be any chance of meaningful reform.

The best we can realistically hope for is to reduce the influence of the Vatican over Western politics. That's it, really. This beast cannot be killed, but at least maybe we can protect our own children from it's claws, even as we watch helplessly as this abomination claims countless new victims in the developing world.

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On the "Arrest the Pope!" thing...

Just a very brief comment on this: I agree in part with those naysayers who maintain that it's a futile effort. But the attempt needs to be made anyway. For one thing, it's the right thing to do. For another thing, whatever excuse is made to prevent prosecuting the Pope for his role in the cover-up, that will expose a deep hypocrisy and a shocking injustice for all the world to see. It will force the ICC and/or the gov't of the UK to in essence say, "We don't prosecute the Pope, ever." If you can force them to come right out and say that, that's a victory for secularism -- after all, you can't have a public debate to change that which hasn't even been revealed. Dawkins' and Hitchens' effort may not succeed in bringing the Pope to justice, but it will allow a public conversation to take place that was impossible before.

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