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TSA Won't Grope John Boehner

Shortly after the election, incoming House Speaker John Boehner burnished his common-man cred by pledging to fly commercial, instead of using the private military plane afforded him. Nice. But he'll still be able to bypass the TSA's molestation routine.

In case you haven't heard, airplane passengers are now required to either take naked photographs for the Gizmodo blog to post or be fisted by a TSA employee before boarding an aircraft. Only now, after the Internet has converted this latest annoying security ramp-up into a meme about leaving someone's "junk" alone, are more Americans realizing that the panicky way we've responded to every terrorist scare since 9/11 has been pathetic and unsustainable.

But where were we again? Oh yes: John Boehner doesn't have to get photographed naked or fisted before boarding airplanes:

As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate. Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bags and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal. It was unclear whether any passengers waiting in the security line, including Representative Allen Boyd, a Florida Democrat who lost his re-election bid, saw Mr. Boehner.

Why do they assume that John Boehner isn't a terrorist? If you have rich orange skin, shouldn't that be rounded up to "brown," which automatically requires 20 minutes of violent fisting? What a world.

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Study Says Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick

Wi-Fi, sweet deliverer of information and porn, may be killing trees. A study by a Dutch university suggests that Wi-Fi radiation causes weird abnormalities in trees. This is disturbing, as we love both Wi-Fi and trees.

The dutch city of Alphen aan den Rijn commissioned the study five years ago to figure out why their city's trees were developing weird growths, according to PC World. The study, conducted by a researcher at Wageningen University, found that 70 percent of trees in urban areas exhibited similar symptoms today, while only 10 percent did five years ago. What's to blame for the increase? Wi-Fi, maybe.

From PC World:

The study exposed 20 ash trees to various radiation sources for a period of three months. Trees placed closest to the Wi-Fi radio demonstrated a "lead-like shine" on their leaves that was caused by the dying of the upper and lower epidermis of the leaves. This would eventually result in the death of parts of the leaves. The study also found that Wi-Fi radiation could inhibit the growth of corn cobs.

But when bunch of media outlets picked up the story and were all, "BREAKING: Wi-FI IS AIRBORNE DEATH," the Dutch Antennebureau cautioned that these are only initial results, and previous studies showed Wi-Fi was harmless."There are no far-reaching conclusions from the results. Based on the information now available, it can not be concluded that the WiFi radio signals lead to damage to trees or other plants." (Isn't that cute? The Dutch have entire bureau dedicated to antennae.)

In conclusion: Wi-Fi signals will make your baby's arms turn into trees.

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Pope Cool With Condoms — as Long as You're a Male Prostitute

In a new book, Light of the World, Pope Benedict XVI tells a German journalist that condoms are okay, as long as they're used by male prostitutes to prevent the spread of HIV. Otherwise, wrapping it up remains super unholy.

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Why Does the Pope Hate the Internet?

I don't hate the Pope. Hell, I hardly even know him. Couldn't pick him out of a crowd of old German dudes wearing mitres and carrying jewel-encrusted wands. So why's he going around shit-talking people who use the Internet?

Today, Pope Benedict XVI warned that the Internet is making young people lonely and confused:

"A large number of young people... establish forms of communication that do not increase humaneness but instead risk increasing a sense of solitude and disorientation," Benedict told a Vatican conference on culture.

Oh no, His Holiness did not just say that. You know what else makes young people lonely and confused? Catholicism. Have you ever met someone more internally conflicted than a young devout Catholic? (I think the millions of 13-year-old Catholic boys desperately trying not to masturbate would agree.) Actually, you've probably never met a young devout Catholic, because they spend all their time in the confession booth, praying and going to church instead of engaging in fun leisure activities like premarital sex and Bocce.

That's not the only beef the Pope has with the Internet (and, by extension, me.) The Pope also said that the Internet was "blurring the boundary between truth and illusion." Hahaha. Have you ever read your own Bible, Pope? At least on Wikipedia if a drunk person writes a bunch of made-up stuff about magic ghosts someone else will eventually come around and correct it.

Listen, The Pope, I don't go around writing pithy blog posts about minor Catholic doctrinal changes; you should not be making declarations about the Internet. Perhaps some day I will start an Internet-based religion, or you will launch a Pope-based gossip blog. (VaticanWag?) Then—and only then—will we meet as equals on the field of battle. In the name of the Facebook, the Link and the Holy Foursquare, Amen.

(Catholic priests could not be reached for this article because they were too busy planning their big exorcism conference in Maryland. Because demonic possession is real, unlike everything on the Internet.)

[via Buzzfeed, Image via Getty]

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Investigation: Many Convicted Pedophile Priests Are Still Priests

Just in time for Pope Benedict's taxpayer-funded trip to Britain, a Channel 4 investigation shows that at least 14 priests who have served time for molesting children remain in the clergy, and some even made it into the Church's yearbook. The report, which will air tonight on Britain's Channel 4, is the result of an investigation into public records and court documents detailing 37 crimes involving child molesting priests in England and Wales. Besides the rampant sex abuse by members of the clergy, recommendations made by a judge that offending priests be "laicised," or dismissed from the priesthood were ignored by the church. Of 22 priests who have served a year or more in jail for child molestation, 14 are still priests and 10 of them appeared in the latest edition of the Catholic Directory. But hey, they've been punished! And they're probably very remorseful. The Pope is due to meet victims of sex abuse during his trip, but if it's anything like a 2008 meeting between Benedict and American victims, they will have to sign confidentiality agreements before meeting him. [Image via AP] Send an email to Jeff Neumann, the author of this post, at jeff@gawker.com. Read more at gawker.com

 

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This Mexican Narco-Bling Will Make You the Envy of Your Crime Syndicate

This week, the Mexican government auctioned off a cache of narco-bling seized from drug lords in Mexico City. If you were in the market for a $25,000 rosary, this was the place to be! Here are the craziest pieces:

1 2 3 4 5 6

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Mexico sells off narco-bling seized from traffickers

Authorities auction confiscated watches and gems, with proceeds to be ploughed back into offensive against the cartels

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City

One of the pieces offered during an auction of goods confiscated from drug traffickers in Mexico. Photograph: Sae/AFP/Getty Images

Going, going, nearly gone. Hands stayed conspicuously down and eyebrows in control when the Mexican government tried to auction off a huge diamond ring assumed to have belonged to a leading drug trafficker. "Buying that would be too risky," said a man who identified himself only as Patricio. "You might find an armed convoy at your door sent to get it back."

The man's ring was supposed to be the star attraction of an auction of watches and jewellery confiscated from organised crime, the proceeds of which are to be ploughed back into the government's offensive against the cartels.

With a diamond over half an inch in diameter and 48 smaller gems encrusted into an 18-carat gold setting, the ring was successfully used to promote the auction, but its fame seemed to put off bidders in a hall also filled with reporters. Even if its starting price of 1.4m pesos (£70,000) was, according to the experts, a steal.

The opportunity to buy narco bling accounted for just a small proportion of the two-day auction of 12m items ranging from scrap metal to cuddly toys, mostly confiscated at customs posts or in lieu of unpaid taxes. But it grabbed all the attention.

Mexican drug traffickers are known for gaudy displays of wealth in their mansions, and famous for gilding their favourite guns, some of which are displayed in a military museum. Their taste in personal adornments had never been put under such scrutiny or under the hammer before. And if the ring failed to get the hall going, bidding was brisk on other glittering items of illicit luxury, particularly the more anonymous ones.

An 18-carat gold Audemars Piguet Swiss watch was sold to a gentleman in a tan jacket for around £44,000. He secured the piece when a baby-faced young man with a bleached quiff, black suit and scarlet waistcoat bowed out of the contest. "It's worth much more than that," Lorenzo Huerta commented from the sidelines. He had just placed the winning bid of around £9,000 for a gold Rolex.

Huerta said that while the fact that the jewels had once belonged to kingpins added a certain frisson to the occasion, for serious buyers the auction was about obtaining opulence at knockdown prices: "There are some bargains around today." He was buying items to sell on to clients, and would not reveal what kind of people they were.

Although gold and diamonds were the dominant theme in both men's and women's watches, bracelets, rings and the like, the auction suggested drug traffickers also have a penchant for sapphires, emeralds, rubies and religion. Religious images ranged from numerous crucifixes, gem-speckled images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and many an official and unofficial saint, inevitably including the apocalyptic figure of Saint Death. Animal representations were dominated by felines, such as the bracelet clasped by sparkling jaguars.

The auction was due to continue today when lots included a fleet of luxury vehicles and three Cessna light aircraft, all probably seized in anti-cartel operations that have intensified since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the traffickers four years ago and organised criminal violence ballooned.

Blaming the need to protect the security of the bidders, the authorities refused to reveal the origin of any of the items, which opened the door to speculation.

An obvious candidate was Sandra Avila Beltran, who was detained in 2007 for allegedly trafficking cocaine through Mexico with 169 fine jewels in her possession. "I can't resist them," the middle-aged beauty dubbed the Queen of the Pacific told Mexican journalist Julio Scherer in a series of prison interviews in which she insisted her only crime was to be part of the narco-social scene. "My husbands, my boyfriends and, when I had them, my friends, gave me a lot of jewellery."But only a few of pieces from her collection, that Scherer enumerated in his subsequent book on her, matched those on offer at the auction. The original owner of that diamond ring, and almost everything else that sparkled in the auction, seemed destined to remain a mystery. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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Facebook-Banning Pastor Had Sexy Three-way with Wife and Male Assistant

New Jersey pastor Cedric Miller banned Facebook from his church because of its many carnal temptations. Miller knows about carnal temptations! In 2003 he admitted to having a threesome with his wife and a male church assistant. (via Christian Nightmares)

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Insider Trading Charges Coming for the People Who Ruined the Economy

Brace yourself for some shocking news: The feds are preparing "vast" insider trading charges against a slew of investment bankers, analysts and hedge fund executives. Included are some loose-lipped Goldman Sachs bankers who leaked health-care merger information to benefit investors.

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The government is decentralising civic powers. Why not welfare too?

Greg Clark's localism bill will let neighbourhoods run underused assets. Someone should tell Iain Duncan Smith

Iain Duncan Smith's planned welfare reforms will give control of housing benefit, tax credits and social security payments to the Department of Work and Pensions. Photograph: Geoff Newton/Allstar Picture Library

Greg Clark, the brilliant minister in Eric Pickles' department charged by David Cameron with decentralising the central and bureaucratic target-driven UK state will soon go further even than Francis Maude's "John Lewis" co-operatives. Clark's radical new localism bill will give communities the right to buy or save an asset that should not be lost to their neighbourhood, and the legal right to challenge to take over a part of government that they believe they could run more effectively.

Imagine the possibilities here. A local swimming pool could be saved and re-launched in community ownership as a centre for "wellbeing and social action". Co-located onto its premises could be one of the GP-led practices proposed in the government's NHS white paper, and alongside it could be NHS social enterprise dental clinics whose rents could help keep the show on the road.

From such a civic hub, social workers might establish a spin-out mutual enterprise providing hi-tech, highly personalised care that allows those with frailties or chronic conditions to live more independently. Meanwhile, the cafe and education rooms would be a hive of activity and could even include one of Michael Gove's "free schools". In some areas it may not be the swimming pool that needs saving: imagine a reinvented use for a large old church, a disused fire station, a community centre, or even a village hospital.

Churches and other religious communities ought to be at the forefront of this revolution. They have relatively under-used buildings to bring to the conversation, so developing the potential for collaboration. Many of them also believe that they and their allies could run some services better than the inflexible local offices of the "welfare" that their parishioners have to contend with – at least, that they could not run them worse. One vicar on the south coast even built an £11m social enterprise doing just that.

But there is one serious problem: just as Clark and Maude are driving power, resources, opportunity and civic action to the most local level, Iain Duncan Smith has set off in the opposite direction.

Duncan Smith's welfare reform white paper will unleash a new drive to centrism: the (huge) Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will now take central control of housing benefit, tax credits and other social security payments. The upside of this is that a single point of contact will be established for those in need. The downside is that all benefits (including housing) will be controlled inflexibly from the centre. Specifically, they will be capped at £500 a week, which is the national "mean" household income of those in work.

While bringing down the huge welfare bill is essential, £500 in parts of the north-west does not have the same purchasing power parity as in Guildford or Ascot where food, rents and clothing all often cost more. The intense centralisation of the "flat rate" in effect becomes a tax on the poor who survive on the margins of the wealthy south and in Conservative heartlands. What is worse is that the DWP is simultaneously outsourcing its work programmes in contracts which are so large that they in effect shut out the charitable and civic sectors from this part of the war on need and public sector reform.

But this where the churches could step up to the challenge. In Austria they have developed social enterprise banks which include financial counselling. In Spain, such initiatives are backed with circles of personalised support for those trying to get off welfare and survive in work. In these and other cases, the move has been made from one size fits all to flexible, prudential and individual challenge and welfare support. So religious leaders ought to be arguing that we need the civic "right" to decentralise, run and transform welfare reform too.

After all, fixing "Broken Britain" is going to take all the mutual aid that all of us can muster. Extreme centralisation and transferring a public monopoly of work provision to a private one will only stifle the most energetic at the outset, and in the process shrink the "big society". Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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