Ireland gets bail-out, but will it help avoid bankrupcy in the end?

The problem of a heavy debt from the previous loans is solved by giving Ireland another loan - fine. But does it change anything fundamentally? If Ireland's come to be unable to pay the old debt, why should one think that it will be able to pay the new even bigger debt? More to the point, the artificial support of government bonds of Ireland will allow the country to continue to borrow money from banks. In the end it will be taxpayers of other European countries who will pay the bill, and banks will be the winners - to big to fail as ever. That's the European socialism of the 21th century. Germany produces, Ireland consumes and is called with the fabulous name 'Celtic tiger' for the indomitable pace of consumption. The problem at root is that Greece or Ireland just cannot fairly have the same leverage ratio as such developed economies like Germany, but in practice they have because they are considered equal members of the euroclub. So their bonds are considered something quite the same as debt papers of the Netherlands or Germany.

The Pope belatedly approves the use of condoms

The Pope used to complain much about so called relativism, but nothing will change with the "sexual impasse" of the Catholic Church until it relinquishes its own relativistic attitude to sex: sex without pregnancy is bad, with pregnancy good, life without kids is bad but if in monastery then good etc. In essence Catholics follow the ideology of 'lesser but inevitable evil'. But they just refuse to recognize it - its own relativism.
Even more serious consequence of this is the notorious unconditional celibacy of all priests - a huge problem which is now presenting existential threat to the Church itself through the killing of reputation by the day on account of sexual crimes by the clergy

War in Afghanistan

Now a majority of TV and radio programs dedicated to the topic of Afghan war try to discuss whether or not it makes sense to increase the number of troops there, whether or not it's worth to leave that country and what would be the best strategy to train Afghan army. Unfortunately the media is markedly falling behind the reality: the Afghan war has already been lost, and the exit in a 'cut-and-run' mode is inevitable. To transform Afghanistan into a country (which it is not), especially a stable one the world should have pumped into it not billions, not even trillions, but TENS of trillions of dollars, and now the humankind is still just not enough developed technologically and financially to create new countries from scratch. From the very first it was a game at the expense of taxpayers in monetary terms and at the expense of lives of the young boys in uniform who decide to join the army not based on rational knowledge and analysis but based on their blind trust and believe in the demagogy of politicians whom they mistakenly identify with their country.
The only practical question is how to minimize financial and human losses and - for politicians - how to leave in the most 'face-saving' way possible. How sharply to cut and how fast to run - that's the only headache of those who make decisions. That's all. Game over. Shedding tears about the actions of the US and its NATO allies is long irrelevant - it would have made sense not even yesterday, but the day before yesterday. But what really may be of some concern is rather ineffective tackling of this problem by the media, which continues to discuss the problems which must be left to historians to deal with.
What one would really like journalists, publicists and politics pundits to knock around in panel discussions is HOW to prevent the repetitions of the similar wars (including Iraqi one). How come that a whole bunch of so called developed democracies so easily and rashly involved themselves in such a preposterously catastrophic device? How could it be, that "mother of democracy" Britain just rushed headlong to wage a war against... Taliban after US declared its aim to catch... Osama?! For that matter, UK - parliamentarian democracy - plunged into Iraq war a couple of years latter only because it's PM for some absolutely unknown reasons individually decided to do so - how come?! With more than 80% British population against the war too! Is there really not a single tool or mechanism left even in the most advanced democracies to prevent them from the wildest most obvious and most dangerous war sprees?! Even when the most of the population of those democracies openly express their discontent and disagreement with the 'decision'? HOW COME - that's the first question. And what needs to be done to avoid throwing similar tantrums in the future is the second question. What Afghan and Iraqi campaigns brought to light is not the question of how we should transform those countries but the question of how we must transform our countries and political controls to avoid suchlike follies in future. Many publicists notice, and rightfully so, that the actions of the US and their many western allies were catastrophic for the countries invaded, but even more catastrophic they were for the those 'liberators'. Things that must not be possible in the 21th century for the western democratic world have happened to be quite possible, and that must sound the real alarm of the western media. That's where the main focus of the intellectual elites must be on, because if such absurdly uncontrollable and stupid things are possible we can only guess what comes next. It's a very big disappointment.
Emanuel Kant expected that democratic countries based on the concept of civil society are less inclined to wage wars, but, unfortunately his thesis so far has not been clearly and definitively proved in practice. Quite likely not because this German visionary was mistaken in his assumptions but because the real democracies are still very much underdeveloped. If the key decisions of war and piece beyond the country borders were taken only after a plebiscite British troops might have not ended up in Afghanistan or Iraq. All this dramatic happenings would have been even more unlikely if before such a plebiscite the people had been entitled to the full detailed information based on which such decisions were recommended, or, at the very least, parliamentarians had been given the pass to "the vaults of state secrecy".