Deutsche Welle: Pope tells Vatican to appoint lay women and men to Curia

Francis laid out 12 principles Thursday that he wanted to see, one of which was making Catholicism "all embracing." Francis called for an end to promoting unqualified or problematic staff to a higher office, calling it "cancer."

The pontiff expressed dissatisfaction with resistance to his proposed reforms to the Catholic Church that he laid out in 2013. He said the resistance from Curia members hampered his reforms so much, that the reforms were seen as a "facelift…to embellish the aging body of the Curia, or as plastic surgery to remove its wrinkles." Francis warned that Curia members should not fear "wrinkles" in the church, but its "stains."

Francis has made similar statements during previous addresses to the Curia during his time as pope. In 2014, he accused the Curia of suffering from "spiritual Alzheimer's," and listed 12 guidelines for reform and being open to "the signs of the times." Francis told the Curia in 2015 of a "catalogue of virtues" that the church was supposed to show, including honesty, sobriety and humility.

read the article 

Bloomberg: The Politics of a Constitutional Crisis

Many constitutional systems around the globe have been tested in 2016. Turkey, Poland, the UK, the U.S. -- each case sheds some light on how different constitutional arrangements respond to the challenges of political factions. [...]

But the failed coup this past summer changed Turkey’s constitutional landscape drastically. Not only did Erdogan purge the military, but he took the opportunity to purge the judiciary, too, badly undermining the rule of law. The purge was based partly in party politics, and partly on the religious-cultural movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish leader in exile in the U.S. whom Erdogan blames for the coup attempt.

The lesson is that when a government believes one faction is trying to bring it down undemocratically, it will be sorely tempted to suppress that faction outside the constitution. Although Turkey’s constitution has been fairly functional, the country’s prospects for remaining democratic have been weakened considerably. [...]

Poland’s constitutional system may rally if international support and civil society can pressure PiS to respect political liberties. The next year will be crucial -- and if the system doesn’t succeed, Poland could become a victim of gradual constitutional failure, like Turkey and closer to the heart of Europe. [...]

In comparative constitutional terms, this may seem like progress -- but it’s probably regress. Faced with a deep political divide over Brexit, Britain is relying on new constitutional technologies rather than its own traditions, which have historically handled partisan division well.

read the article 

The Huffington Post: Blaming Terrorist Attacks On Refugees Isn’t Going To Make Europe Safer

Terror arrived in Germany long before the Berlin incident. But it was the first in recent times that caused such significant casualties. This is very tragic, but to exclusively blame it on Syrian refugees defeats the purpose of trying to understand how to combat terrorism and prevent future attacks from happening. The suspect, Anis Amri, who was killed in a shootout with police near Milan today, was a Tunisian who came to Europe in 2011, entering through the Italian island of Lampedusa. This was back before the Syrian civil war had become the regional conflagration that it is today; it was also during the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when order in some countries in northern Africa was on the verge of collapsing. How many asylum seekers came to Europe then with bad intentions? How many of them were already eager and keen to become terrorists? The honest answer is: we don’t know.

But the right wing’s take on the Berlin attack is shortsighted. As a matter of fact, when southern Europe groaned under the pressure of refugees, the rest of the continent was indifferent about it. Europe’s refugee policy is flawed. The continent needs to get its act together: the regions around it may most likely remain in upheaval and turmoil for quite some time. Not having done so yet has nurtured the rise of anti-establishment activism, right-wing parties and xenophobic violence across the continent.

For now, Angela Merkel’s fate depends on how she handles the crisis in her government and the reaction of her electorate unfolding after the Berlin attack. Politicians from her Bavarian ally party, the Christian Social Union, already toured TV and radio stations showing little solidarity with the chancellor. Their fear is that the AfD may gain voters from the CSU and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in the federal election next fall.

read the article 

Salon: Conservatism turned toxic: Donald Trump’s fanbase has no actual ideology, just a nihilistic hatred of liberals

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decades to come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

But it’s also important to notice that Donald Trump’s election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals — whatever their stereotype of a “liberal” looks like — is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction. [...]

But what’s fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump’s fans on Twitter don’t seem to think that he’ll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really. In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he’s an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

read the article 

The New York Times: Pastor, Am I a Christian?

What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity. [...]

Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19). [...]

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

read the article 

Bloomberg: Germany Gets Free Power for Christmas as Wind Power Set to Surge

The price of power for delivery on Christmas Day in Germany turned negative as a surge in wind generation is forecast to boost supply.

Prices may be below zero for hours or even whole days during the holiday season as German wind output is predicted to climb to near-record levels and temperatures are set to increase more than 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above normal.

The negative prices are “driven by low power demand during the holiday season when factories are shut, and people go on vacation or visit their families,” Elchin Mammadov, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence said. “There are far fewer outages this year than the same time last year and wind availability is expected to be high.”

Germany’s grid operators can struggle to keep the network balanced when there are high amounts of wind generation that need to be moved from the north to demand centers in the south. Negative prices mean that producers must either shut down power stations to reduce supply or pay consumers to take the electricity off the grid.

read the article 

Vox: A law professor's warning: we are closer to oligopoly than at any point in 100 years

In the early 1900s, the biggest monopolists of the day had virtually complete control of their markets. Standard Oil. US Steel. The American Sugar Refining Company.

Today we don’t so much have single companies dominating an entire industry as much as a handful of extremely powerful ones. Over the past few decades, the number of markets consolidated by a few mega-companies has skyrocketed, according to Columbia law professor Tim Wu. [...]

Wu points to the beer industry as a perfect example. “People may not realize this, but domestically, there are two companies that sell 75 percent of the beer in the United States — Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, both owned by foreign companies,” he says. “That is an industry that used to have five or six actors and now has two.” [...]

It is essentially a battle between the economists and the lawyers. The economists do believe we should have no sense of right and wrong, but that it’s about economic performance. The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called “bad guys” — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy. So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.

The opposite tradition I’d associate with [Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis, who took the antitrust law not as merely an economic tool — though it was that — but a promotion of certain values he thought were central to the American public, like decentralization and a certain kind of virtue in business. Brandeis believed business could be a profession and pursued in a virtuous way. He also thought that the whole goal of the American Republic was to inculcate virtue and good character in people.

read the article 

Quartz: Data shows that using science in an argument just makes people more partisan

If only we would all just use our rational, scientific minds. Then we could get past our disagreements.

It’s a nice thought. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Yale behavioral economist Dan Kahan has spent the last decade studying whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces partisan beliefs. His research shows that aggravation easily wins. The more we use our faculties for scientific thought, the more likely we are to take a strong position that aligns with our political group. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives. [...]

Kahan’s research began as a challenge to the contention of some behavioral economists that public policy disagreements are the result of an over reliance on emotion-driven decision making—what the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1” thinking. These researchers argued that public policy formed by experts using deliberate, analytical decision making processes (“System 2” thinking in Kahneman’s lingo) would be better and less partisan. [...]

Perhaps Kahan’s most disconcerting finding is that people with more scientific intelligence are the quickest to align themselves politically on subjects they don’t know anything about. In one experiment, Kahan analyzed how people’s opinion on a unfamiliar subject are affected when given some basic scientific information, along with details about what people in their self-identified political group tend to believe about that subject. It turned out that those with the strongest scientific reasoning skills were the ones most likely to use the information to develop partisan opinions.

read the article