Holy smoke, or something.

For a couple of weeks I’ve had a mild cold and a stuffy nose, not bad, just annoying. But I’ve also had an awful chemical solvent smell in the back of my mouth and throat.

Years ago I complained to my doctor that I seemed to have a smell in my throat – like Araldite. He said, “Have you been using Araldite?”  I said, “Yes, I suppose so, but that was weeks ago.”

“Well, there you are,” he said. “These things linger in your nasal passages.”

Now I’m smelling a familiar but awful chemical smell all the time (right now!). I’ve been trying to work out what it is. It seems to get worse every time I go into the loo.

Suddenly today, it dawned on me: paint thinners.

A few weeks ago I had a couple of guys doing some painting for me (paid, of course). I cleaned the brushes afterwards in thinners and turps, then used detergent many times over, but always with that smell. Then like a fool, I poured the residue down the drains.

I suspect that the thinners and turps have formed a film or a flotation layer in my drains and are vapourising up into my nose every time I go near it. Ugh!

What to do? High pressure detergent down the drains? Thinking about it.

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Today I was listening to Radio National and I heard a guy being interviewed about tribal violence somewhere. I didn’t intially know where, but I assumed it was in the NT or Qld somewhere and involved aboriginal violence.

As the interview went on, I thought, Gee this bloke speaks well. Is he a policeman? The more he spoke, the more I thought, Gee, this is Aussie police at its best. Very articulate, very level headed, very common-sensical.

More and more, I realised he was well spoken even if in the broadest of Aussie Ocker accents, pronouncing all his words correctly first time, even using Latin law words properly. It was fluent, fluid, lucid, eloquent speaking.

Gradually, I realised it was a Torres Strait Islander, talking about domestic and tribal violence in the islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I was impressed! This guy knew his stuff and was a guy I would want on my side if I were caught up in anything there. His name: Bob Black. How ironic.

Hats off to him. I was proud to think of him as an Aussie. I have no idea of his skin colour, but I don’t care. What a good bloke.

“Suffer the children to come unto me …”

Suffer is right. Once again, the church has cost boys their lives and covered it up. Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, is in this up to his neck. This holy man! Holier than thee, Holier than me, Holier than thou.

He pontificates (top word) against abortion, contraception, gays and gay marriage, but he turns a blind eye to his priests buggering boys and driving them to suicide. I predict that some of the church leaders are going to see the inside of a jail cell. I think he should.

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SMH 23 June 2012

But the study finds that overall they are five times more likely than other members of the population to be charged with some sort of offence.

I previously missed the story about the Catholic Church being involved in child abductions in Spain. It’s been the subject of articles (e.g. here) and documentaries earlier this year. The allegations are that up to 300,000 children may have been taken away from their mothers after birth and then sold, all over a course of four or five decades.
This is a moral disgrace in addition to the existing Catholic Church child rape scandal, which is already raging. Here’s Austin Cline’s summary:

Apparently stolen babies purchased from the Catholic Church may have amounted to 15% of all adoptions (the term has to be used very loosely here) in all of Spain between 1960 and 1989. It wasn’t until 1987 that anything started to change, and that was only because the Spanish government began to regulate adoptions instead of the Catholic hospitals. In other words, the Catholic leaders and institutions never chose to change on their own and never acknowledged ever doing wrong.

Cline goes on to point out that this is not a Catholic phenomenon per se, but rather one associated with unaccountable power. However, it is also tempting to emphasize that the Catholic Church claims to be and is largely considered to be a global moral authority. It is hard to conceive what more it could do to prove otherwise, when one considers how it has treated children elsewhere (including the systematic covering up of what its child-raping priests did) and the Pope’s appalling stance on AIDS prevention (which amounts to telling the highest risk groups that contracting the disease is preferable to the “sin” of contraception).
Invariably horrendous crimes arise wherever there is unaccountable power, obviously including that which rests on ridiculous metaphysics, blind faith and sexual repression.
Catholics who understand that it is wrong to abduct and sell or rape a child should ask themselves why a good and loving God permits not only that this happens, but that it is carried out by his self-professed representatives on Earth. Why hasn’t God stopped them himself?

Religion is evil. All over the world, religion is costing children their lives. In the USA, a Catholic priest has recently been sentenced to a long jail term for abusing boys and lying about it for years.

Richard Dawkins is right. Atheism is the answer. We’ve been deceived for too long.