The Sacrament of Confession

I'd like this digression on obscenity to be about the abuse of language or politics or aesthetics or justice or the even the environment. But no.

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people

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The only thing in any sense just about this is that the Catholic Church worked so hard so keep this quiet in service protecting its reputation. And we get to see how nicely that worked out. It's the apotheosis of moral corruption, and hopefully the long-arc subtext of any and all retellings of what is unfortunately certain to be an ongoing situation. Any assumption that it is not is just more of the same. And as any Calvinist can tell you, even the church will get what it deserves.

Monocultures of any kind, actually

From financial wunderkind Felix Salmon, via Grist, on how monoculture is like triple-A collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), i.e., agricultural innovation as harmless as the financial innovation. ah, insight:

The point here is that a disease-resistant crop is a lot like a triple-A-rated structured bond: they’re both artificially engineered to be as safe as possible. That would be a wonderfully good thing if no one knew that they were so safe. But if you’re aware of a safety improvement, that often just has the effect of increasing the amount of risk you take: people drive faster when they’re wearing seatbelts, and they take on a lot more leverage when they’re buying AAA-rated bonds.

The agricultural equivalent is the move to industrial-scale monoculture, “safe” in the knowledge that lots of clever engineers in the US have made the crop into the agribusiness version of a bankruptcy-remote special-purpose entity.

But the problem is that bankruptcy-remote doesn’t mean that bankruptcy is impossible: just ask the people running Citigroup’s AAA-rated SIVs. If and when the unlikely event eventually happens, the amount of devastation caused is directly proportional to the degree to which people thought they were protected. When something like that goes wrong, it goes very wrong indeed: artificial safety improvements have the effect of turning outcomes binary.

Essentially, you’re trading a large number of small problems for a small probability that at some point you’re going to have an absolutely enormous problem.

GMOs make sense only from a profits standpoint - production costs minus the cost of labor = profits. In no other way does monoculture - the practice of growing a single crop year after year over a wide area - proffer anything but a route to a quicker spread of blight. Which itself is another way to say 'seeing everything from a profits standpoint.'

What could be more blighted than that?