Cardinal Pell finally charged with sex abuse

"Today Victoria Police have charged Cardinal George Pell with historical sexual assault offences." @VictoriaPolice pic.twitter.com/5MyYVlHPa8

— ABC News (@abcnews) June 29, 2017

In the news: Australian Cardinal and Aide to Pope Is Charged With Sexual Assault

Australia’s senior Roman Catholic prelate, and one of Pope Francis’ top advisers, has been charged with sexual assault, the police in the Australian state of Victoria said on Thursday.

The prelate, Cardinal George Pell, became the highest-ranking Vatican official in recent years to face criminal charges involving accusations of sexual offenses. The case will test the credibility of Francis’ initiatives to foster greater accountability after abuse scandals that have shaken the church around the world.

“Cardinal Pell has been charged on summons, and he is required to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court” on July 18, Shane Patton, the deputy police commissioner, said at a news conference.

The charges were served on the cardinal’s legal representatives in Melbourne. Commissioner Patton said there were multiple complainants but refused to provide further details about them, including their ages ....

Man, this has been a long time coming! There was a furor when Pope Francis, knowing of the terrible reputation Pell had on sex abuse, hired him to be on of his gang of eight. The Pope's own sex abuse commission in 2015 advised that Francis fire Pell (read what Marie Collins had to say), but the pope ignored them. Now that Pell is officially under investigation and charged with returning to Australia, will the Pope finally send him packing, or instead will he refuse to fire him and instead keep him safe from prosecution in the Vatican as he did with Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski?

More from Andrew Sullican: The Pope’s Pedophile?

And more on Pell from my past posts ...

February 26, 2014: Cardinal Pell

March 18, 2014: Cardinal Pell and the Ellis sex abuse case

March 26, 2014: Pell, sex abuse, church money

April 3, 2014: Eureka Street and David Marr on George Pell

May 21, 2015: The continuing badness of Cardinal Pell

May 31, 2015: 60 Minutes: Cardinal Pell and sex abuse

March 7, 2016: Editorial on Cardinal Pell

Here's a really interesting video interview from a few years ago with journalist David Marr on Cardinal Pell and sex abuse. It is really worth a watch .....

More Moodies

I don't know about you guys, but when things get depressing I often turn to music to try to change my mood. Today I came upon a couple of Moody Blues songs, the versions of which I hadn't seen before. This first one is Tuesday Afternoon sung by Justin Hayward at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 ...



And this is Justin singing Nights in White Satin, same concert ...

Logan

Trail blazing reviews for #Logan pic.twitter.com/tFttRT5qwO

— Richard E. Grant (@RichardEGrant) March 2, 2017

This week's movie rental was Logan ...

a 2017 American superhero film featuring the Marvel Comics character Wolverine .... It is the tenth installment in the X-Men film series, as well as the third Wolverine solo film following X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and The Wolverine (2013) .... The film takes inspiration from "Old Man Logan" by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, which follows an aged Wolverine undertaking a final adventure in a dystopian future .... Hugh Jackman stars as Logan in his final portrayal of the character after having played the role for 17 years, with Patrick Stewart co-starring as Charles Xavier.

Basic plot: The year is 2029 and in this dystopian future, mutants are almost extinct. Logan/Wplverine has mostly lost his regenerative powers and is slowly being poisoned by his Adamantium-enhanced skeleton. He is working as a driver in Texas to save money so that he and Professor Charles Xavier, his friend and mentor, can escape to some safer place. Charles, the strongest telepath on the planet, is suffering from some brain trauma which affects his memory and which causes seizures that harm all those near him. Meanwhile, a sociopathic scientist has been using mutant DNA to create and raise new mutants to be used as weapons. A young female mutant created with Logan's genetic material escapes the lab and finds Logan and Charles, asking them to take her to a sanctuary in Canada. Charles talks Logan into this, but it puts them in terrible danger, as the girl is being hunted by the scientist's relentless henchmen.

I've been looking forward to seeing this film for some time. I've been a Marvel and X-Men fan since I was a comic-reading kid and I like the movies even better. I also like Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart and wanted to see them in this, their last appearance in the X-Men series ... the first movie was released in 2000, so they have been inhabiting their characters for 17 years.

The film is darker than many of the others in the series, and is rated R for violence and language, but though it has been touted by some as an unrestricted gore-fest, I think that it's the portrayal of the present state of the relationship built over the years between Charles and Logan that makes the movie as good as it is. So let's take a look back ...

It's hard to say when Logan and Charles first met. Was it when Logan was rescued from Magneto's bad mutants and brought unconscious to the school run by Charles (X-Men)? ....



Or was it when the young Charles and the young Eric (Magneto) were gathering together mutants to start teaching them at Charles' school to become the X-Men, and they approached Logan in a bar? ;) (X-Men: First Class) ....



Or was it when Logan time-traveled back into the past, to when Charles was a young man who had lost his way, in order to change a timeline that had become disastrous in the present (X-Men: Days of Future Past)? ...



At any rate, it was both touching and grim that n this future where Logan and Charles are among the last of their kind, the two of them are still together as their lives become ever more fragile ...



Once their dangerous road trip begins, it's not long before Charles is killed. Logan finds as nice a place as he can along their route to Canada in which to bury his friend ...



The movie got very good reviews. Here's a bit of the one from the Wall Street Journal ...

‘Logan’ Review: Violence and Drama That Cut Deep

The slashing starts early in “Logan”—no surprise, since it’s an R-rated action thriller about Wolverine, also known as Logan, the X-Men character with the tortured psyche and retractable claws. (He is played brilliantly by Hugh Jackman, who first played him 17 years ago.) The great surprise, which reveals itself gradually, lies in the depth and resonance of the drama. Yes, there is violence in abundance, sequences of spectacular mayhem that will thrill hardcore fans and scare off others. Yet this comic book epic, directed in masterly fashion by James Mangold, achieves a narrative grandeur ....

More reviews: Wired: Logan Review: This Is How Wolverine Was Supposed to End ... The Verge: Logan review: not just the bloodiest X-Men movie, but also the saddest ... Forbes: Review: 'Logan' Could Be First Superhero Movie To Get Best Picture Nomination

And here's the trailer ...

Can Democrats and Republicans come together?

In the wake of the terrible shooting of Republicans at a Congressional baseball practice (What We Know and Don’t Know About the Shooting of the G.O.P. Men’s Baseball Team) there has been much in the news about the great divide between people in either party .... more and more people no longer just disagree with or distrust those in the other party, they now often think of them as "evil". There have been calls for unity and for an emphasis on the values we have in common with each other, but I have to wonder how realistic those are.

Here's a bit from last year's Pew Forum article Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016: Highly negative views of the opposing party – and its members ...

[S]izable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger. More than half of Democrats (55%) say the Republican Party makes them “afraid,” while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party. Among those highly engaged in politics – those who say they vote regularly and either volunteer for or donate to campaigns – fully 70% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party .... Fully 70% of Democrats say that Republicans are more closed-minded than other Americans. .... While more than half of Republicans (52%) view Democrats as more closed-minded than other Americans, nearly as many say Democrats are more immoral (47%), lazier (46%) and more dishonest (45%) ...

When politicians call for unity, I despair because the things that divide many Republicans and Democrats are not superficial or academic.

Imagine that the secret Republican health care bill in the Senate turns out to be as bad as the one in the House, and it passes. Imagine that your asthmatic child isn't covered because of that pre-existing condition, or that your elderly parent has to go to the emergency room but has no insurance because the premiums for older people are too expensive for them to pay.

Think of the coming Republican budget, the one that will cut the Meals on Wheels meal your elderly aunt may need or that cuts the after-school program that cares for your kids while you are at work or that cuts the money your disables sister needs to live on.

Imagine a friend deported, your property polluted by coal waste, your self not being able to use your MediCaid at a Planned Parenthood anymore.

The differences between the political parties are about deeply held values .... do all people deserve health care as a right .... should we rape our environment or care for it ... are money and power and luck really the final determiners of worth ... if we can't agree on this stuff, stuff that impacts ourselves and those we love in intimate and powerful ways, stuff that actually defines who we are, then unity seems like a pipe dream.

11.22.63

The latest tv series I'm trying out is 11.22.63 ...

an American science fiction thriller miniseries based on the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and consisting of eight episodes.The series is executive-produced by J. J. Abrams, King, Bridget Carpenter and Bryan Burk, and produced by James Franco, who also has the main role.

The basic plot ... a man travels back in time to 1960 in order to discover who killed JFK and to save that president's life, all to make the world in the present a better place. I do like it so far, though it's pretty dark and grim. It kind of reminds me of King's novel/movie, The Dead Zone (I posted about that here), in which Christopher Walken's character asks the question of whether one should kill Hitler if they could go back in time.

Here's a review of the show in The Washington Post ... What Hulu’s absorbing ‘11/22/63’ tells us of the harm of dwelling in the past

And here's a trailer ...

My Governor :)

Vicky/possum

Here's Vicky, ignoring the baby possum while he grabs a few snacks ...



And here's another of the little possum. Possums have human hands = eeek! ...

The Last Ship

One of the tv shows I especially like is The Last Ship ...

an American action-drama television series, based on the 1988 novel of the same name by William Brinkley .... After a global viral pandemic wipes out over 80% of the world's population, the crew (consisting of 218 people) of a lone unaffected U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-151), must try to find a cure, stop the virus, and save humanity.

The executive producer of the show is Michael Bay, the director of a couple of my favorite movies - The Rock and The Island - but he's also the director of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi ... he's a political conservative who makes films with lots of military and lots of explosions, so political liberal and semi-pacifist me feels sort of conflicted about liking his work.

I really like the post-apocalyptic nature of the story ... a virus destroys most of the world's population and the doctor who's working on a cure is aboard one of the last US navy ships, in the Arctic. They do eventually tame the virus but by then the government has collapsed and the social structure that's held society together is unraveling. What stops things from complete disintegration is that ship, its crew, and most of all, its captain (Eric Dane as Captain Tom Chandler) who's the story's moral compass.

I've just watched the last episode of the third season, and it ends with the captain leaving the navy after having turned his back on his own principles by murdering someone in revenge. He doesn't know who he is anymore and we faithful viewers are left wondering how he can ever come back from this. I guess this is mostly why I like the show ... yes, I do like the tech stuff, the action stuff, the sci fi stuff, but even more I like that the characters are very morally distinct ... people are good or they are bad, but very rarely ethically neutral or "complicated". So this last twist in the story, the captain losing his way, is both disturbing and compelling. If you guys haven't seen the show, you might like it.

The Beatles

It was 50 years ago today ....



Strange to think I used to have all the albums of the Beatles. Even stranger - I still know all the lyrics :) Now it's actually kind of hard to find their songs on YouTube or Vevo. One way to find some of their songs is to look for those in movies, like this - I'm Happy Just to Dance with You - from A Hard Day's Night ...



Or this - You're Going to Lose That Girl - from Help! ...



Their songs that touch me the most are the earliest ones like Things We Said Today or Any Time at All or Don't Bother Me or From Me to You ... they aren't necessarily the best of their songs but I guess they remind me of a time when I was pretty hopeful about life.

For those interested, Wikipedia has a bunch of brief Beatles song samples here