" Secret tape reveals Tory backing for ban on gays"

Just some news from the Guardian/Observer that caught my eye today.

"The Tories were embroiled in a furious row over lesbian and gay rightson Saturday after the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, was secretly taped suggesting that people who ran bed and breakfasts in their homes should "have the right" to turn away homosexual couples.

The comments, made by Grayling last week to a leading centre-right thinktank, drew an angry response from gay groups and other parties, which said they were evidence that senior figures in David Cameron's party still tolerate prejudice"

At the heart of this issue lies the most fundamental and precious principle we have and that is the right of association. To tamper with this right, to force people together is the most grotesque and stupid attack on the very fabric of what makes a society tolerable at all. The Conservative Party, especially as we approach an election, should be championing that right and being open about protecting it.

No one should be forced to associate with people they don't want to. It needs no explanation, no annotation. No apology. It's a given.

Who is this 'modern' multicultural society actually for ? Is it bringing dignity to anyone, or is it making a ridiculous mockery of everyone ? While we all watch this elephant in the living room no one is supposed to talk about.

Presumably The Guardian/Observer think they have 'discovered' some way to attack the Tories in the lead up to the election but actually have done is shone the light on a slice of reality.

And this problem of creating a kind of ethno-sexual smog of 'tolerance' and 'diversity' is something at some point that, I'm sorry to say, is going to have to be sharply corrected into the reality it needs to be in, rather than the completely grotesque and painfully stupid one it is today.

Jade Goody was "sacrificial offering"

The other story from the Guardian, is not a new story but is at least a retrospectively bizarre piece of video with the publicist Max Clifford talking about Jade Goody, it's about a month or so before she died, where he says "Jade was a sacrificial offering". I think he's supposed to be talking about something that happened on the Big Brother show, but it's just very spooky.

It's not just the Labour regime melting down

Gordon Brown's government is just in total tatters.

I remember some time ago under Blair when Labour had a particularly bad day, the BBC's Andrew Marr said you'd have to go back to the days of Michael Foot to find a time when Labour had such bad publicity. I can't even think what would be a comparison now.

Labour are in massive trouble, and Gordon Brown, who I do feel sorry for, appears to be a complete lame duck just waiting to be hung out to dry. Apparently even the Guardian are calling for Brown to resign.

However it's important to realise that the MP's expenses scandal has not only damaged politicians, it has also massively damaged the media itself.

The Guardian have been hit very hard by this and are in a very difficult, very compromised position, and they can't create an adequate explanation to their readers why they didn't break the 'story' themselves.

And the problem is the entire journalistic establishment knew all about this for ever. They just didn't care a hoot. And they didn't care a hoot because, as I've said on here a number of times now: it's not a serious issue to begin with.

It's just not important.

Now's it been made important to get rid of the government and the rest of them don't know what to do, and are starting to look even more under strain than the politicians.

If you want to get a picture of how desperate this is for them, about a week and a half ago the Guardian published an article by Andrew Rawnsley claiming this cynicism about MPs is 'bad for democracy', and what I came away from that article is that they simply don't know what to say at all about this.

In the atmosphere surrounding this they can't explain to their readers adequately why they didn't break it themselves, but at the same time it's not a serious issue to begin with.

Now on top of that because it's gone the way it has, and because it's attached the usual childish fantastic reasons why it wants to believe this is a serious issue, The Guardian is actually in a state of real cognitive dissonance on this, and it's probably why they have gone even more potty, like a cat with worms, than they normally are.

So understand what the Guardian is doing. It's jumping just like the politicians have been jumping and it's trying to rescue its own battered credibility.

The Media's attack on Susan Boyle

Ok I'm sorry to do this, but I want to comment again on Susan Boyle and some of the stuff going on in the press, because it's actually gone out of control now, and it's starting to look ridiculous.

There's a considerable effort going on to manipulate this into something else from all quarters of the media which really concerns me. The level of rhetoric around this is actually frightening.

The Guardian has serious problems with Susan Boyle as we've already seen, so today let's start with Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, assuming she actually wrote this article it's so extraordinary.

In a shocking commentary, Platell suggests that it was inevitable that this "middle-aged woman with learning difficulties" (again constantly reminded about this -j) would "unravel before our very eyes" , that she would 'break down' (really not sure what this means) and that this would create more 'freakish' spectacle. Ultimately Platell concludes, it was "wrong to take an awkward, 48-year-old virgin with a good but not great voice, (but clearly demonstrating worrying signs of stress) and thrust her on to the national stage ".

Does this sound like someone normal, someone reasonably comfortable with themselves and their life writing this ?

Platell even says that isn't it good that "David Wilson, Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University, warned in last week's Mail that Susan was too fragile to take the pressure."

Professor of Criminology ? What was Susan's crime ?

And I find it mindboggling that Platell suggests that Boyle is 'not qualified' or you have to be a certain sort of person to be allowed to perform or something and that certain sort of person will be able to deal with the stresses of fame afterward.

There's many top name celebrities who really haven't been able to deal with the rigors of incredible success either, long before Susan Boyle came along. If Amanda Platell had a memory longer than a few minutes she might like to check the Daily Mail's archives. I'd say Boyle is doing rather well.

A tiny bit of what Platell is saying about Cowell is true. No question that Cowell and his researchers knew exactly what was going on very early on, and loved what they saw and went with it. No question there's been 'presentation' shall we say. But you know something ? That's not the crime here. And as far as I can tell from what I've read, that presentation, although by no means should be seen as the entire person, seems reasonably in accord with Susan's background.

And I should say as well, if it's that crooked in the way Platell suggests, then guys, you can't help but ask the question, why not make it so crooked that she just wins ? You see that's what's missing here. That's what's conspicuous.

Of course the other thing that's very conspicuous are these pages and pages of astonishing vitriol written about this woman. Which as far as I can see, a lot of journalists want to deride Susan Boyle through various articles designed to not look like they are trying to do that, by seemingly chastising others for doing so. The mysterious: 'them', 'those people', 'them out there' are doing it. Or in particular 'we' did this to Susan or 'we' did that. I'm not aware I've done anything. Amazing. And they don't think anyone is seeing straight through it.

You see, if you really think she is pathetic, why are you writing this stuff? That would say a lot more about you than Susan Boyle. There's a clue guys to one of the big issues in this.

They want us to believe Simon Cowell is bad, for in their analysis, creating a 'freak show', which I think is a seriously unpleasant injection, and just not correct in Boyle's case. I'm just not aware of Susan Boyle being a 'freak' in a 'freak show' other than the likes of Amanda Platell wanting to tell us that.

And what Amanda Platell in the Mail, Tanya Gold, Joan Smith et al in The Guardian and others like them don't seem to understand is Simon Cowell's not putting a gun to your head making you repeatedly write this shit over and over. And folks I'm not defending Cowell who's clearly a very slippery and shadowy character.

He's not making you tell us again, and again and again and again, how she 'should' suddenly be defined at the outset by her alleged learning difficulties. And then you tell us she is 'cracking up', 'breaking down' and we are failing our 'duty of care' then you repeat stuff about 'hairy angel', 'spinster', 'vulnerable', 'insecure', 'wanting to fit in' (which I don't agree with) and the that whole thing has been a 'freak show after all' and all about humiliation, is akin to 'bear bating', and presumably she's the freak either way even if the creation of the freak show is not her fault. Platell tells us the dream has become a nightmare. Apparently she can't win.

I just find this extraordinary. It's so utterly vile, so difficult to disguise as anything other than bitter poisonous vitriol it really makes we wonder about those writing this stuff, apparently trying to feel better about themselves at Susan Boyle's expense.

And what's fascinating is Platell is effectively asking us to believe Susan Boyle doesn't exist, but guess what folks ? Platell starts her article by telling us how Diversity (with that name to boot) does.

You see this is what's wrong guys. You can't have it both ways.

Part of Platell and the others must also really think Simon Cowell is wonderful, as his evil machinations have created such an easy target for them to bash. Platell and her ilk thinks it's safe territory and won't reflect on them, and because everyone is doing it in the media that makes it ok.

Wrong. Everyone isn't doing it. Everyone isn't calling Susan Boyle every name under the Sun and thinking that behavior is normal. Same way everyone isn't saying how terrible the MP's expenses scandal is either. I'm not. And Platell who I who I once used to like, should be very careful of copying others, you may just fall off a cliff and embarrass yourself.

You claim that Susan Boyle was humiliated. Funny. I see it the other way round. I see journalists humiliating themselves over this in trying to tell us this stuff. You claim Boyle 'didn't know what she was doing'. Funny. I see it the other way round and you don't know what you're doing or you just wouldn't be doing it.

What Platell doesn't get, she really doesn't get, is who's being manipulated here. She just can't get it. They all think they are powerful and telling the 'truth'.

What happened with Susan Boyle was a phenomenal thing, perhaps one of the greatest pieces of entertainment media in a very long time. It was brilliant and astounding and an amazing global success, with a wonderful message to it. I just wonder if that message became a little bit dangerous, and later down the line there was an attempt to reel it back in at least as far as this show goes, with dubious headlines being leaked out about Boyle, and a new atmosphere that would be fed to the press. And I just don't think a lot of people in the media understand this.

The level of this everywhere from the Guardian to the Mail is what's really bizarre, and maybe it's because Boyle represents a complete rejection of most of these journalist's lives, and she makes them very uncomfortable. This is then spun maliciously into a list of flaws about Boyle, which we are now suddenly 'supposed' to see her through, despite her incredible achievements on that show.

I very much doubt Amanda Platell, Tanya Gold and Joan Smith are ever going to hold themselves up to that criteria, and would see it as 'completely unacceptable' and an outrageous 'moral abomination' yet they are quite happy to hold Susan Boyle to it.

I said this at the time. People like Boyle are not well liked because they are a bit quirky or whatever, I actually think they are seen as slightly threatening.

There is a strength in her image and meekness, and it's symbolic. And that initial performance that captured the imagination of the world reminds everybody that the world is a complex place rather than a world of brainless stereotypes. A little bit of that may be ok, but in the end it's not liked. Power wants a world of brainless stereotypes, and from any angle Susan Boyle doesn't represent one of their 'cool' ones.

And that's why she was punished in the final. And everything she stands for, her background, her Britishness, her independence and incredible popularity can all be trumped with a 'modern' meaningless nothing word like 'diversity' as a far more suitable message to everyone.

There is a mistake people make, especially people in the alternative news. Not everything the media does is bad. Sometimes light breaks through, but it typically doesn't break through for very long, and may indeed break through for other reasons that we can all easily be too cynical and circumspect about later on, but it breaks through nonetheless.

And in the end, the Simon Cowells of this world don't decide whether people have talent or have a special gift or not. Their talent, their gifts, their personality and their soul stand up all by themselves.

The things that are underhand, cynical, and outright twisted about all this are that Susan Boyle didn't win Britain's Got Talent and that the British media have been so easily manipulated into attacking her, and exposed as ridiculous, insecure bitter cretins in doing so.

Media ignores Torture Photos showing Prison Guards Raping Children

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com 21/5/09: "The real reason behind Obama’s reversal of a decision to release the torture photos has been almost completely ignored by the corporate media - the fact that the photos show both US and Iraqi soldiers raping teenage boys in front of their mothers.

The Obama administration originally intended to release photos depicting torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq by the end of May, following a court order arising out of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit first filed by the ACLU in 2004.

However, a reversal of Obama’s decision was announced this week, after he “changed his mind after viewing some of the images and hearing warnings from his generals in Iraq and in Afghanistan that such a move would endanger US troops deployed there,” according to a Washington Post report.

In response, the ACLU charged that Obama “has essentially become complicit with the torture that was rampant during the Bush years by being complicit in its coverup.” The Obama administration has also sought to protect intelligence officials involved in torture from prosecution at every turn.

The primary reason why Obama is now blocking the release of the photos is that some of the pictures, as well as video recordings, show prison guards sodomizing young boys in front of their mothers, both with objects as well as physical rape.

This horrific detail has been almost completely ignored by the establishment media in their coverage of the story this week, despite the fact that it’s been in the public domain for nearly five years, after it was first revealed by investigative [reporter] Seymour Hersh during an ACLU conference in July 2004.

“Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay?” said Hersh. “Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

Hersh’s contention that minors were raped by prison guards while others filmed the vulgar spectacle is backed up by a leaked Abu Ghraib memorandum highlighted in a 2004 London Guardian report, in which detainees Kasim Hilas describes “the rape of an Iraqi boy by a man in uniform”. The testimony was also part of the military’s official Taguba Report into the torture at Abu Ghraib.

“I saw [name blacked out] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass,” Mr Hilas told military investigators. “I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”

Another inmate, Thaar Dawod, described more abuse of teenage boys.

“They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer [Corporal Charles Graner, one of the military policemen facing court martial] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners,” he said.

A 2004 London Telegraph report also described photos which showed “US soldiers beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death and having sex with a female PoW,” as well as a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, which shows “Iraqi guards raping young boys”

Simon Jenkins on Swine Flu

Simon Jenkins/Guardian: "We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.

Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration"

Guardian: Polls: Tories on course for landslide

I'm not going to talk about the Swine Fever thing right now, I see plenty of other sites are.

Some light, but interesting analysis from The Guardian on the political landscape. Surely The Guardian, just as Labour, will seek to motivate their constituency, but it's nonetheless interesting.

I haven't been studying political polls for some time, but the trend is clear overall as I understand it being reported and started to become all too obvious some time ago. It's just such a shame that, by and large, that old adage about the party in power loosing the election rather than the opposition winning seems to be what we are looking at.

However, I reckon we will be able to rely on the media and the Labour Party doing everything they can to evade why they lost the election; to put it down to a bunch of spurious political reasons, and 'lack of leadership' and so on, while the attempt to create a shocking police state of bobbling slaves, the legacy and endowment of Tony Blair and complicity of Gordon Brown and others of the Iraq War, amongst other horrendous crimes will never even come into it.

Guardian: "We've now had three polls, from two different polling organisations, since last week's budget, and they're all saying much the same thing, which suggests that they are worth taking seriously. The news is dire for Labour: on current form, the Tories are heading for a landslide.

For the record, here are the figures:

ComRes in the Independent (published today)

Conservatives: 45 (up five from ComRes last month)

Labour: 26 (down two)

Lib Dems: 17 (down one)

Conservative lead: 19 (up seven)

YouGov in the Sunday People (published on Sunday)

Conservatives: 45 (up four from YouGov in the Telegraph last month)

Labour: 27 (down four)

Lib Dems: 17 (no change)

Conservative lead: 18 (up eight)

YouGov in the Daily Telegraph (published on Saturday)

Conservatives: 45 (up four from YouGov in the Telegraph last month)

Labour: 27 (down four)

Lib Dems: 18 (up one)

Conservative lead: 18 (up eight)

I've fed the ComRes figures into two websites that provide election predictions on the basis of share of the vote numbers, Electoral Calculus and UK Polling Report. Electoral Calculus says the Tories would have a majority of 186. UK Polling Report, which uses a slightly different methodology, predicts a majority of 170. Either way, it's still pretty big"

Fight against terror 'spells end of privacy'

I guess that's that then.

"Privacy rights of innocent people will have to be sacrificed to give the security services access to a sweeping range of personal data, one of the architects of the government's national security strategy has warned.

Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data - including travel information, phone records and emails - held by public and private bodies and admits: "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.

His paper provides the most candid assessment yet of the scale of Whitehall's ambitions for a state database to track terrrorist groups. It argues that while the measures are essential, public trust will be maintained only if such intrusive surveillance is carried out within a strong framework of morality and human rights" (Guardian)

As we said before, it's like a child. In this case a child that wants to do something but is embarrassed or shy to do it, it keeps getting closer to what it wants to do, then runs away again and if asked by an adult the child would say 'no I don't want to do that thing' when it's transparently obvious to any adults in the room that is what the child is trying to do.

And this has been the way of the Labour regime in trying to create a new social order, a new police state and to send the world backwards in time.

Now, like the small child as it's closer to its goal of a truly a truly radical pleb grid it's getting so emboldened it can just declare what it wants to do off the back of its previous efforts and the mess itself it has pooped out all over the place even though it said at every stage it wasn't trying to do it.

And we've seen this across the board with all of this menu of state terror that Labour have sought to deploy from ID cards, to the traffic spying grid, to this mass communications database it now desires and on and on and on.

I should say this is not strictly the Guardian's take on this. The Guardian's view is that David Omand, who they describe as a 'key architect of the national security strategy as it is now" is demonstrating 'great honesty' in telling us what Whitehall want to do.

The only problem with that is the police and security services have always had provisions to snoop and gather information where necessary in cases of serious crimes.

In the end of course it's not a question of the endlessly-repeated mantra about "maintaining security". If a civil servant like Omand were actually interested in that then he would have done well to take the advice of his colleagues in their own now infamous and rather obvious (yet feebly obvious warnings) about the invasion of Iraq.

Furthermore there is progressively becoming very little at all to 'secure' in the UK, it now represents such a damaged waste land. I think the real question is what is Britain, what are you protecting ?

Omand says, "This is a hard choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society - but it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights."

But that's not quite correct is it. Firstly it's not a 'choice' between liberty and security that's a false choice, secondly these spying and surveillance grids are the total undermining of the rule of the law by their very nature and presence, that's the whole point.

But what's even worse and actually breathtaking in its egregiousness is this notion, shared by the likes of Omand and elected politicians in the Labour government itself, of 'inevitable progression' and that this is something people will eventually 'understand as necessary' and just 'need to get used to', and then 'everything will be alright'. All of which accompanies the notion that it's simply a matter of the technology existing that decides if it should be deployed.

I don't think you could construct a more ridiculous, insane and dangerous error if you wanted to.

And if that's the case terrorism remains firmly a necessary tool of deception and staggering self-deception.

Sir David Omand, who according to the Evening Standard, was "among those to decide that [Dr Kelly] should be pursued for talking to the media about the Government's dossier on Iraq's alleged WMD" should be truly ashamed.

He has no business writing reports like this. He should instead be grovelling on his knees, begging for forgiveness for being the supine ridiculous wretch he is and that he has been a factor in taking things as far as they have already.

Omand needs to explain his macabre interest in creating a police state under a radical regime, and stop wasting everybody's time in trying to rationalise it. Instead the fact that Omand and those supporting him have produced this document shows how dangerously out of step with reality they are.

Perhaps the best way of summing this up though is in the editorial that goes along with this in today's Guardian, which is jokingly self-conscious about this itself and starts with the now all too familiar sentence we've all seen many many times:

"Britain is not a police state, but.."

Surely that says it all.

Stop Press: Catholic Church are behind the world's villainy!

It's struck me a number of times over the last year or so that there are a lot of basically good people out there who have acquired a kind of instinctive or reflex-like apathy, distrust or even repulsion toward religion but in particular Christianity, which, astonishingly is the main villain.

In America this is much worse where there appears to be a chunk of U.S society that has learned absolutely nothing from the last eight years and associates Christianity with Bush, and believes, amazingly, that Bush is the grand poobah mastermind behind the Iraq War and that the War in Iraq is some kind of Christian mission for Bush and Cheney.

I know it's amazing, and it's also the seeds of something potentially quite dangerous.

When you first see this it's so astonishing, it's so like a kind of 'backwardation' of thought, so tremendously saddening that's it's difficult to know exactly how to broach the topic, other than that you're dealing with some sometimes quite damaged and vulnerable people who want to believe something that suits them, and you when gently try to explain to them what's wrong, you can be met with a lot of anger, until reality starts to break through. And we're going to be talking more about that in detail soon.

And actually there are some interesting polls on this kind of thing, cited on a dreadful and almost otherwise worthless, but extremely revealing page on Wikipedia:

"David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Institute, and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project published a study of attitudes of 16-29 year old Americans towards Christianity. They found that about 38% of all those who did not regularly attend church had negative impressions of Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, associating it with conservative political activism, hypocrisy, anti-homosexuality, and judgmentalism.[5] About 17% had "very bad" perceptions of Christianity" (my emphasis -j)

Yeah we are gonna talk about this more directly at some point. Actually the Wikipedia article does a lot of the work for us.

And bringing this up to date there is little question that this height of irony, of letting 'Christianity' take the blame for the Iraq War has been allowed to fester in the minds of some vulnerable folks and go uncorrected in the dwindling months of the Bush presidency, if not outright brewed.

Christian fundamentalists/Christian Zionists in America are one thing, but the Catholic Church is also conspicuously regularly a subject of scorn, mistrust, ridicule, or spurious and inapplicable or juvenile moralising or even theorized as as some shadowy hand shaping events.

Most people have their own reasons about how they view religion that are personal to them, they may have had a religious upbringing, not all of them are exactly 'enamored' with every single experience of it, it's a mixed bag as it would be for everybody whatever the culture.

Others simply don't care for religion and so on. But then that brings up the question if they don't like religion and are not involved in it, where does the particular culture of dislike and scorn come from ?

As I said at the outset this can be a challenging topic for people new to it, but broadly radical hostility towards Christian institutions has a long history and irrespective of whether or not you feel about religion, in the 20th and 21st centuries the media has done a very effective job of setting up attitudes towards the Church, that are often distorted, skewed, provocative or Orwellian (note NYT's use of lanaguage) are just out and out attempts to demonize it.

And it's doing it constantly. Constantly the Catholic Church is framed and attacked (as is this extreme psychotic example) as a stuffy old villain or inanely being told it ought to be struggling with some crisis that is the fault of its own moral retardation.

And it's not lot like this stuff has gone unnoticed or something:

"The archbishop of Westminster declared that he feared contemporary society is increasingly marked by "secular dogmatism or cynicism" toward Christians. He stated: "So when Christians stand by their beliefs, they are intolerant dogmatists. When they sin, they are hypocrites. When they take the side of the poor, they are soft-headed liberals. When they seek to defend the family, they are right-wing reactionaries."

And it's funny that a lot of folks proudly claim they are 'freethinkers', and 'unencumbered' of institutional brainwashing, some even declare how they don't trust the media when it comes to something that Bush said about Iraq, or if it comes to the economy or crime statistics or this or that.

But when it comes to this they trust the media, and they trust the media's motives ?

And I've just linked to two examples, but the easiest way is just to carry on taking a look, and this is not exhaustive, this is a very very clumsy and crude quick glimpse at this:

But we are going to go with something a little different before we get back onto the mainstream, and it's something that was quite influential on me and a brilliant piece of alternative radio. Some people may say well Mr Jultra you're undermining the obvious point that you're making by choosing something like this. Well let's see.

There is a very famous debate in alternative news circles from May 16, 2006 between a fellow called Eric Jon Phelps who believes that the Vatican and the Black Pope and the Jesuits are controlling the world and perhaps one of the most interesting and perhaps one of the best non-mainstream serious political researchers and writers in the America, also a world expert on the JFK Assassination that's Michael Collins Piper.

And I should point out Mike Piper is 'controversial' as it were, and you may even find the topic of the debate they agreed to puerile or vulgar, but whatever you come away with you will not come away thinking the Vatican is behind all the bad stuff in the world and you will come away thinking Phelps probably shouldn't have come to that debate, and should be taking some medication.

The debate is fascinating listening and I think as far as we are talking about it's pretty well summarized when Mike says:

"The Civiltà Cattolica* which is a Vatican approved newspaper even went so far as to suggest that a lot of the newspaper over-emphasis on some of these sex scandals in the Vatican and in the Catholic Church which are rightly being reported I might add, they said that the over-emphasis on that was because of the mass media being disturbed about the fact the Vatican did not support the war against Iraq" (4:00+)

(* And I think I've got the name of this right, someone correct me if I haven't)

Let's look at something else, something more up to date, and bear in mind the above as we do so.

In Sunday's Guardian/Observer the Pope is reported as bringing back some bishops, one of which who held some controversial views on the Holocaust. Doesn't have to be the Guardian, Fox News has the same slant, which is far more extreme, perhaps the most extreme is the New York Times, which is almost beside itself with glee.

Of course he's not being welcomed back because of that, the fact of which may as well be a side issue or non-existent wherever this story appears, however it contains a very sensitive topic so lets have a look at some of the rhetoric from The Guardian:

"Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church will "cost" the Vatican politically."

and note this that's found it's way into the same article:

"Israeli officials recently protested when a senior cardinal said Israel's offensive in Gaza had turned it into a "big concentration camp"

A big concentration camp ? I think a lot of people would find that's a very polite and rather diplomatic understatement and it gives us a clue about what is being obscured here, after all it's not like the world doesn't understand the situation in Gaza, or that we need to look far for corroboration and we can just take out pick from anywhere. For example in 2006, special UN envoy John Dugard described the situation in Gaza as one where:

"Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians
and have thrown away the key," adding that "in other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing" (ynet news)

More recently scholar and expert Norman Finkelstein, who last time I checked is not a Catholic described the situation in Gaza as a 'holocaust' and Israel a 'Satanic state' and goes on pithily:

" This state invaded in 1978, again in 1982, again in 1993, again in 1996, again in 2006, and 2008, and it always destroys, destroys and destroys. And then these satanic narcissistic people throw their hands up in the air and ask, “Why doesn’t anybody love us? Why don’t our neighbors want us to be here?” Why would they? "

So it's rather difficult to take that line of protestation by Israeli officials seriously when it comes to trying to aim it specifically at the Church.

Or try this for framing an issue also from the Guardian:

"The pope sparks controversy by defending heterosexuality!" Gosh what a monstrous thing to do. How evil and outrageous and wicked the Pope is I can't believe it. How dare heterosexuality be defended, it can't be right.

A few years ago such a headline would have been a spoof, and we'd all be laughing at it. Maybe we are supposed to be today ?

Or read some of the tone in this CNN obituary about Pope John Paul II, loaded with phrases like 'controversial', and 'moral opinions alienated many' (who? why ? Pope John Paul II was one of the popular Popes in modern times)

And this is not peculiarly about your view of religion. And it's not about trying to cover up where institutions have had people in them who have done immense wrong either. And if you want more conservative critique then here is an interview by Alex Jones with Hutton Gibson.

But there is no question media perpetuates an insidious culture of this which seems to be intended to become a cultural norm among the public, and certainly there is a chunk of the public that seems to go along with it, and yet declares they are enlightened in doing so, and it's little surprise because that's how it's sold to them.

And we could go on with examples all day long about this in the media. All of which seem to be designed to obscure and play down and attack the Church, its mission, its people, its works, its cultural influence and which politically has pitted it against the monstrous horrors of communism (CNN article again - don't be too happy with anti-communism), the atrocious crime of the Iraq War (take any pick), made Latin American Catholics the subjects of assassinations and attacks for delivering the liberation message of Christianity under a reign of state terror, received upon itself horrendous massacres and tortures of Catholics in Spain at the hands of communists, to something like today of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor fighting for all our basic freedoms (note the first comment on the article - is it a real person ?) and on and on and on.

No the Catholic Church are not a force for bad in the world. The Catholic Church are not 'bad' because they don't support abortion or homosexuality, because the media 'says' that's bad.

To put it simply the Catholic Church are rightly a hugely influential force for infinite good and reason and human dignity in the world and irrespective of individual faith, that's why they are demonized, marginalized and subject to ridiculous ongoing puerile critique in the media.