ALL publishes disturbing report on Catholic Healthcare West

http://www.all.org/pdf/CHW_ALL_REPORT_20101220.pdf

Very distressing to hear this.  I thank God that Bishop Olmsted has taken action to repair the damage.

WT: Madoff trustee gets $7B settlement

Courtesy of the Washington Times

NEW YORK (AP) — The trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff's burned investors has reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the estate of a Florida philanthropist and businessman who had been the single-largest beneficiary of the fraud.

The settlement with the estate of Jeffry Picower was detailed Friday in Manhattan court papers.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called it "a truly historic settlement" and a "game changer for Madoff's victims."

Barbara Picower, representing her late husband's estate, entered into the agreement with the U.S. attorney's office.

She said in a statement that her husband was "in no way complicit" with Madoff's fraud. She said the estate would "return every penny received" through Madoff investments.

Picower drowned after suffering a heart attack in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion on Oct. 25, 2009.

A recovery of that size would mean that a sizeable number of Madoff's victims could get at least half of their money back — a remarkable turnaround for people and institutions that thought two years ago that they had lost everything.

Picower, who was 67 when he died, invested many years ago with Madoff. Court-appointed trustee Irving
Picard's investigators said that, over time, he withdrew about $7 billion in bogus profits from his accounts. That amounts to more than a third of the dollars that disappeared in the scandal.

That money was supposedly made on stock trades, but authorities said that in reality it was simply stolen from other investors.

Picower's lawyers claimed he knew nothing about the scheme, but the trustee argued in court papers that he must have known that his returns were "implausibly high" and based on fraud.

I must say, it's about time that the victims of this monstrous crime received some just compensation.  The sheer amount of unadulterated greed that went into this is staggering and makes me physically ill.  I harbor no ill will toward Mr. Madoff and I will pray for his coversion and repentance, but I thoroughly condemn the enormous fraud he perpetuated on innocent people.  Life savings were wiped out in his scheme, and I welcome this effort to try to make things right.

Let us continue to pray for these poor souls.  With God, all things are possible.

Pax Christi.

Pray for Ireland!

http://www.lifesitenews.com/?/news/irelands-pro-life-laws-violated-womans-rights-european-court

Pray for Ireland!

LSN: Man threatens to shoot Rockford pro-lifers outside abortion facility

LINK

ROCKFORD, Illinois, December 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A man accompanying a woman into the notorious Rockford abortion mill on December 3 threatened to shoot pro-life sidewalk counselors, according to witnesses.
Rockford pro-life veteran Kevin Rilott told LifeSiteNews that the incident happened on Friday, when a group of five abortion supporters from the Chicago area showed up at the Northern Illinois Women’s Center. They stood at the driveway to the abortion facility shouting at mothers not to talk with pro-life sidewalk counselors.
Pro-lifers had parked a free mobile ultrasound motor home near the facility. Rilott said it appeared that the abortion supporters had come to Rockford with the sole purpose of trying to block mothers from using the free ultrasounds. In an attempt to confuse and turn away mothers, the abortion mill security guard had even placed a sign near the ultrasound motor home that said, “Free Abortions In Motor-home.”
At one point during the morning the pro-life counselors were confronted by a man who was bringing a young lady into the clinic for an abortion. Rilott said that the man appeared to be “emboldened” by the shouting of the pro-abortion protesters.
According to multiple witnesses, the man reached into his pocket and pretended that he had a gun. He then pulled his hand out of his pocket in the shape of a handgun and looked directly at the pro-lifers and said, “What would you do if I pulled out my .45 and put a bullet in your head?”
The pro-lifers called the police and filed a police report. A representative from the police department told LifeSiteNews that it would take up to five days to obtain a copy of the report, but said that no arrest was made at the time.
Donna Modica, among many of the pro-lifers who witnessed the incident, said, “It’s clear these abortion supporters think that because they can kill a baby in the womb, they can do whatever they want to anyone. The violence of abortion breeds more violence.”
A witness at the Rockford abortuary said that later on the morning of December 3, the owner of the facility, Wayne Webster, came out and taunted one of the pro-lifers saying, “Maybe he should have shot you.”
There have been a number of serious cases of pro-abortion violence in recent months. Last week LifeSiteNews reported on the attack on the home of pro-life leaders Joseph and Ann Scheidler, who live close to Rockford.
The Scheidler’s front windows were smashed in with bricks of asphalt. One of the bricks contained a note that said, “We are crazy feminist bi***es who will destroy your sexist ideas.”

And these hypocrites say WE'RE the violent ones?

The violence of the abortion industry and its supporters knows no bounds!  May God have mercy on them all.

St. Michael the Archangel, ora pro nobis!

Yahoo News: 'Programming error' caused Russian rocket failure

MOSCOW (AFP) – A programming error may have caused a rocket carrying three Russian navigation satellites to fail to reach orbit, a Russian space agency source told the RIA Novosti news agency on Monday.
"A number of specialists think that mistakes in the programming of the onboard computer system of the Proton rocket led to the engines sending the rocket too high and onto a faulty trajectory," the source said.
The rocket carrying satellites for the Russian government navigation system Glonass, failed to reach the correct orbit Sunday after blasting off from Baikonur cosmodrome, the Russian space agency said.

Oops.

Back to the drawing board there, comrades.

British guy creates super-chili

Reading Yahoo news this morning directed me to an article about a British chili farmer who's created a new claimant to the crown of world's hottest chili... or alternatively, the only chili hot enough to destroy your colon.

Fiery food mavens seeking to one-up each other now have to gear up for a whole new test of culinary bravado: the world's hottest chili pepper.

Yes, the Naga Viper, the latest claimant to the world's-hottest-pepper crown, outdistances its predecessor, the Bhut Jolokia, or "ghost chili," by more than 300,000 points on the famous Scoville scale of tongue-scorching chili hotness. Researchers at Warwick University testing the Naga Viper found that it measures 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates heat by tracking the presence of a chemical compound. In comparison, most varieties of jalapeño peppers measure in the 2,500 to 5,000 range -- milder than the Naga Viper by a factor of 270.

You hear that right, it's a full 300,000 points ahead of the infamous bhut jolokia, or ghost chili, on the Scoville scale. The pepper clocks in at 1,359,000 Scoville units, which works out to about 270 times hotter than a jalapeno. This thing is so fiery, the military is investigating its use potential as a weapon.

I wonder how long it will be before Adam Richman features a dish containing this colon-destroying pepper on his show?

My thoughts on the recent Smithsonian "art" exhibit

Just recently, the National Portrait Gallery at the venerable Smithsonian Institution put on an art display entitled "Hide/Seek:  Difference and Desire in American Portraiture".  Sounds innocent enough, until you realize the whole thing is basically a display of homoeroticism mixed with anti-Christianity in the form of a video that shows an ant-covered crucifix.  The Smithsonian eventually pulled that, although the rest of it remains up.

I can't say that I'm surprised.  Modern art nowadays is geared toward maximum shock and offense.  If your work doesn't ruffle any feathers, you can't consider yourself an artist.  You can only earn that coveted title if you create something blatantly vile and offensive, trampling on the cherished beliefs and values of the community in the process.  Take Chris Ofili, for instance; his most famous work is a portrait of the Virgin Mary plastered with pornographic images and sprinkled with a liberal amount of elephant dung (I didn't even know that was an art medium; move over paint and sculpture, here comes elephant crap!).  Instantly he was hailed as the next best thing; not because his work was any good, but because of the fact that people expressed offense at his vile work.  That's what passes as art nowadays; the kind of vile garbage normally associated with the thought processes of a snot-nosed teenager scrawling vulgar graffiti on the stalls of a public restroom.  As a matter of fact, it wouldn't shock me one bit if a photograph of THAT would be hailed as the next big thing in art, along with nice fat government grants to go with the acclaim from "artists". 

The Smithsonian exhibit isn't the worst example, but it is indicative of the state of modern art.  It's an anything goes, vile free-for-all where anything can be considered a great work of art, so long as it is vile and disgusting and offends the values of the community.  The fact that our tax dollars pay for the display of this sewage is simply icing on the garbage cake.  Long ago, such trash wouldn't NEVER had been displayed in public.  Art a long time ago was about capturing the grace and beauty of creation, and for some, it still is.  But now, it's all bile, all the time, and it's not getting better anytime soon.