And flat Earthery and geocentrism rear their hydric heads...

Was listening to a short talk online about Our Lady of Guadalupe.  It was interesting at first; a little bit of history, some claims about the apparition being an answer to the Enlightenment, and then...the usual stuff I hear about Genesis when someone who doesn't understand Genesis or his interlocutor's opinion of it blindly tries to disprove everything in it.

This makes me sad.  As Catholics, we have nothing to fear from the truth, no matter its apparent source, no matter its apparent meaning.

The priest giving the talk went on about how the Renaissance may have uncovered a few good things that ancient pagans had come up with that had fallen into obscurity with Rome's political might, but it ended up glorifying a lot of garbage also, like humanocentric philosophy.

All right; seemed a bit of a stretch from "mankind is the pinnacle of creation and what God made He saw and proclaimed was good," but the seeds of modern evils were clearly germinating, so it didn't seem fitting to debate the point.

Then he takes on Copernicus.  A Catholic in good standing who had apparently come up on his own with an idea the ancient pagans had considered:  Earth went around the sun and did not have pride of place in the universe.

At least Galileo was a jerk about the idea, but how are you going to pull at this thread without unraveling all the bishops and philosophers who weren't suckered by you're-not-specialism but still recognizes that the different senses of scripture didn't have to agree even while they were consonant?

He (the priest giving the talk, again; not Galileo) took a crack at relativity, conflating it with relativism, and then went to quote some modern atheistic astrophysicist-types (one of whose quotes referred to Darwin, so we get a dig at evolution too) who liked to talk about how humble a home we have.

To be fair to the priest, these scientists do have jobs that lead them to face the wonder of creation on a daily basis, so while perhaps we should give them a little bit of slack for waxing philosophical, we should also keep in mind that they are not philosophers, and that the holes in their lives left by the forsaking of religion will tend to let idols of a sort rush in to fill the vacuum.

Before I say what's wrong with all this, I want to say again:  We have nothing to fear from the truth.
So if it looks like we are clever apes who had slime for grandparents and occupy an obscure planet orbiting a disregarded yellow sun swinging around the unfashionable arm of some galaxy, then there is nothing wrong with saying "Yep, it sure looks like that."

Because it does look like that, regardless of whatever it actually happens to be.  Spiral galaxies are not rare.  The sun is not large--neither are we compared to the nearest tree, a man once said, but so what?

It is not wrong to say "Epidemiology is a branch of applied evolutionary biology that allows us to get vaccines for the right strain of influenza most of the time," because that happens to be true, whether  we were made from clay directly or via trillions of transitional states.

If we're honest and not fearful, we can say "Sure, the state of the biological arts suggests that modern organisms exist because of the variety of selection pressures on disparate populations of organisms, but if a flat reading of Genesis 1 is true, we should eventually find a way to reconcile them."

Insulting the intelligence or impugning the integrity of people who happen to specialize in the fields you don't is not charitable, honest, or helpful.

An honest scientist will admit that all theories based on empirical data (or completely whiteboard-and-imagination theories; I'm talking loop quantum gravity rather than Pythagoras, here) are conditional, that they describe reality to a degree of accuracy but cannot be proven true in a lab the way the square root of 2 can be proven to be irrational or the way God can be proven to necessarily exist.  But he may deserve an explanation from you for how, if he's so wrong, everything based on his work hangs together like he's really not wrong.

GPS units work.  Flu shots work.  Does God mess with the orbit of Mercury to maintain the appearance of gravitational time dilation?  Did God give man and ape similar DNA because He wanted us to think we came from the same place, and apes didn't just come from the earth in Genesis 1:25 in much the same way as we did in Genesis 2:7?

That last part may be an important theological matter.  In the Incarnation, Jesus became man via a woman, not just to fully share in our human experience, but so He would actually be one of us in kind.  This is getting outside of my wheelhouse, but philosophers in the past have posited that it would not have been sufficient or appropriate for the Son to simply construct a human body directly from clay again or straight from nothing and hypostatically unite with that; much like how each angel, having been created directly by God, is its own species.

But back to my point:  beware your own preconceptions when you have to fall back on the "whom are you going to believe, me or your own lyin' eyes?" argument.  That way lie reversed Jack Chick tracts when impressionable believers of immature faith find out that some scientists are atheists but in their day jobs generally are not talking at all about the same things you are even if they're looking for excuses to shore up their unbelief, and at their first crisis of faith reject everything you taught them, bathwater, baby, and all.

An honest scientist can even say "Well, we can't disprove a mathematically consistent model of the universe, but it leads to distasteful questions I want to avoid," although maybe he's leaning over the line there, but if you add enough layers of epicycles, you can't really disprove that all heavenly bodies have perfectly circular orbits of a sort, either, and is that really where we want to go?  Insisting that your pet theory can't be disproven even though it's so complicated it looks almost exactly like something else we're already using to great effect?  At what point did you stop saying "as scientists get more data and construct better models, the truths of Canaanite cosmology and Hebrew biology will become obvious" and start saying "Nothing is holding up the edifice of their errors but a superstructure of lies?"

I can accept that modern science is wrong in some ways, that its conditional "truths" are less accurate than they seem.  There have even been times (albeit few; I am not sure if that is good or bad) I have had to hold my beliefs up against doctrine that was new to me and say "Well, I don't see how I could be wrong, but I know that it happens sometimes, and this is clearly an argument that I am," and I've had to change my position.  But I am not going to discard the fruits of reason and take up gratuitous assertions that serve my day to day life more poorly while also not helping me spiritually.  The "Axis of Evil" in the cosmic microwave background could be evidence that the universe is...well, probably not orbiting a static Earth, but oriented relative to it in some way that is meaningful like how finding a 6000 year old body of a man with no navel would be meaningful; but it might also be a coincidence, or an artifact, or an error in analysis.  But what it's not is a smoking gun, and it's not the preponderant straw of evidence that broke the camel's back, either.

These guys aren't just making shit up to fool their consciences while they lure people into hell.  These guys are taking what you decry and building your airplanes and skyscrapers and smart phones, they're designing your artificial joints and your suspension bridges.  Can you even tell me where the line between here and there is?  Have you tried exorcising any of your devices to see if demons have trouble keeping up the charade?

Back off my tangent, relativity is not relativism.  Relativity makes your GPS work and can be demonstrated in a high school science lab.  Relativism just happened to come along around the same time and pretends to be, ahem, related in order to steal its legitimacy.  By perpetuating this confusion, you are doing their propaganda for them.

Jesus was born to humble means in an obscure backwater.  Even the Bible tells us people sometimes scoffed at how prosaic He seemed, so there's no sense in debating the point.  Why, then, should we reject the possibility that He not only embraced humility all the way down, but also that He embraced it all the way up?  Maybe Earth is special like the ancient pagans and Christians and Jews (yes, pagans too!  Where's your reluctance to agree with them now?) thought, but just in ways that aren't obvious to us through current technology.

Finally, it helps no one to get the ancient cosmologies mixed up.  Pagans tended to think of the Earth as the center of the universe because everything in the sky looked like it was going around the Earth--well, over, but the sun and moon were pretty recognizable, and the planets had patterns of appearance that were pretty predictable even when they didn't have distinctive colors like Mars, so closed loops instead of arcs seemed reasonable.  The ancient Jews, on the other hand, viewed Earth as being at the bottom of creation, not even as part of a sphere, with the only thing lower than Earth being hell.  So if you're going to go all flat-Earth on us, you have to give up pride of place in exchange for an ignoble configuration that demands things that neither the Bible nor science has room for but can be disproven by two people and a shovel.

And after all that, nothing in the talk was about Mary correcting the empirical errors of contemporary science.  Plenty about the miracles surrounding the tilma, some interesting symbolism in the pattern of stars on her mantle, but nothing particularly combating the idea that humanity is meaningless and not just humble.  So now I'm sad twice.


And lest we get too prideful in brushing off yet more hordes of squabbling ultracrepidarians, I want to close with a word of warning regarding a comment left on the web site criticizing someone who was defending Copernicus and more modern scientists.

The comment said a few things about the foolishness of listening to modern scientists who basically paint themselves into a corner trying to gin up evidence against God, and then said of Copernicus' defender, "You are not of God."

Someone else chimed in to warn him against judging the fellow, and he responded with "I don't judge, but when someone is wrong, I correct."

No, jerk, you judged, and your smugness may have lost a soul this day.  "You put too much stock in the worldly 'wisdom' of men, and not enough in God" is a correction, of sorts.  "You are not of God" is a judgment.  You can condemn his actions, his words, maybe his thoughts if your'e circumspect about it, but not his person.

I think it's past time to stop saying "F Nazis."

I mean, I get it, but it's gotten so tired that people who think it's important to keep the momentum up are starting to sound like they're trying to normalize or otherwise advocate for some obscure fetish.

Not a good look.

Just consider it.

Some people use incredulity towards Transubstantiation as an excuse to abandon religion

I don’t know why, though. I mean, yeah, in particular it’s a tough doctrine; it has been since the beginning (see John 6 for an early account). But to doubt some mystical paradox just for not fitting into a tidy, cozy mindset?
God is transcendent. Some things are supposed to be beyond normal understanding.
I mean, sometimes General Relativity and quantum mechanics freak me out--what is matter, why is there such a thing as phase velocity beyond mathematical tidiness?--but when I get close to a mental BSOD, I stop thinking about it and go do something else; I don't start doubting my Garmin.
Okay, relativity and electronics are on some practical level comprehensible, quantifiable, but I think what's going on is ex-Catholics are just disenchanted and Transubstantiation is just an excuse.  After all, it's the Catholic Church that is big on the Real Presence, so if that's not real, who's to say I can't use birth control?
I have some sympathy, if not in that last case.  It's a critical tenet and the New Testament even talks about people who take ill and die for receiving unworthily, so people who abstain in good conscience are just being honest and humble.
So maybe I do know why.  It's just usually not packaged up with the excuses I do hear.

So Stephen King recently tweeted that he considers quality, not diversity, when picking award nominees...

and predictably the twittersphere put words in his mouth so they could punch him in it.

There was the usual "White people are racist, men prefer to read about boobs" prejudice they had to inflate with zero evidence regarding King's actual nomination choices, but my favorite was one that went something like "your assumption that quality and diversity are mutually exclusive is part of the problem."

Uh, he didn't assume that.  He didn't even overtly admit it.  You and your thought fascists did.

All he said was they're not the same thing.  And the twittersphere proved his point by signaling to the world that they intended to make their choices of things, not by their own diverse standards of quality, but primarily by skin color and genitalia.

Sure, some of them dressed it up with "you just don't get minority art because you won't allow it to exist," but in the end, their motives were to pander rather than celebrate beauty.

This is not the old days when knowing Bruce Lee was Chinese behind his Kato mask or seeing Nichelle Nichols in a clerical position was a towering victory for representation.  We know Octavia Butler's opinion on this--and her name, even--because whatever her background, there aren't fat, cigar-smoking Stephen Kings in oak-paneled salons planning her career over scotch and cigars.

Funny how these people turn around and think that if they did such things, it wouldn't just be fair play but the only morally right way to run society.  They don't seem to se that these abuses can't happen--there are others, but they aren't political, and politics are all that concerns them, even above the actual victims when there are any--in a society where there are no such salons full of freemasonic string-pullers or whatever the going conspiracy theory is.

King isn't excluding the possibility of women or minorities being capable of good work.  He's just not patronizing undeserving tokens because we've known for half a century that affirmative action breeds distrust and mediocrity whether backed by force of law or unwritten policy.

Because if they can be that great, they can win without you being dishonest.  And if you're not honest, how will anyone ever really know?

"Imagine highways run by regulations written in 1791.  Imagine limiting yourself to medical care that was available in 1791.  The second amendment was written in 1791."

Socialized medicine didn't exist in 1791, and neither did compact fully automatic firearms.  Is your argument about technology, or about regulation?  Because you seem to be saying basically that regulation needs to keep up with technology, but your examples are contradictory.  Most of your examples are not based on principles enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but assume that technology will provide more options to citizens over time that not only need regulation but are good for citizens to have; but the same logic doesn't support the point you're really making, that advancements in firearm technology should not be regulated in a way that lets people have well designed guns but just shouldn't have them at all.

That's the problem with dishonest metaphors and analogies built around half truths:  it looks like you're making a point because of the symmetry in your argument, but it's got the same symmetry as "heads I win, tails you lose."

The problem with millennials is...

...we (or, their parents; whatever generation raised them) were a little too zealous in teaching them to pursue their dreams and prioritize their values.

These aren't bad things in and of themselves.  I'm actually looking forward to some serious disruption in the business world when companies that hide bad management and abuse behind "old school/hard core" attitudes find their pre-millennial headcount has dropped below critical mass.  And I'm not just saying that because I currently work for a place that can't keep an engineer for more than a year because they've drunk so much of their own Kool-Aid that they think making people work six twelve-hour shifts is righteous and they're the victims of a shallow hiring pool and can't staff three eight hour shifts, and that they think that people quitting before their first paycheck is funny, and that this is just how you keep your head above water instead of really trying to permanently solve manufacturing problems instead of...again, making people work 32 extra hours a week just to make up for all the bad product that got produced and to make up for all the overtime that has to get paid now to the people who are working all those hours.

Partly that, but not just that, see.

The problem is that we taught them the good side, and we seemed to have taught them a thing or two about hard work because they will commit themselves to their favorite causes, as least if you can get past the "retweet, put up a bumper sticker, show up in the streets but stay home from the polls" contingent, but we didn't teach them that "adulting" is hard and unavoidable.

,...I forgot where else I want to go with this.

Wait, I remember.  A thread on Pinterest:

"Millennial hate is a thing rich folks started because they're pissed we have unpredictable consumer habits."

There is a lot here and I would only amend one thing:  not "rich folks" so much as "marketing departments"--or "older generations," because there has never been one that did not lament the poor character of the newer generation (which I suppose is fair; if each one is worse than the last, it's because the last one had better mentors).  That's where advertising dovetails with social engineering.  Since consumer habits do seem to be changing--and you can take "seem" however you want for me to make my point--it's not unreasonable to report on it.

And for all you propeller-heads out there, yes, I'm simplifying.  Think of the story I'm telling as an example rather than an overarching narrative.

It's interesting how nobody takes the long view.  Millennials are the way they are because they were raised that way, by parents who were trying to pass on the hard lessons they learned growing up while trusting schools that have been encroaching on in loco parentis in ways Orwell might have predicted if he had written Winston Smith as a teenager.  But these parents work at companies that have said marketing departments, they see changes, and maybe they don't or didn't realize it's a result of how they raised their kids, maybe they don't see the connection between what their children tell them and how all the children of that generation eat and buy and live.  That's a pretty abstract thing for parents to be analyzing in their children, enough that it's hard to recognize before it's too late, but I would think our social so-imagined masters would be a little smarter about it...if, like I said, these weren't the same people.

So we're far enough into the Long March that "critical theory studies" is mixed into nearly everything that gets taught whether or not a student majors in it.  The elites--the ones who are raised by the people who are telling us what to think, not the ones who are told what to tell us to think; the ones who are above and immune to the tides of contemporary philosophy, not the ones who think by acting woke with enough zeal they can win some real security--are taught to feed it to America, not to eat it.  The rest of America is taught to eat it.  But are they allowing enough engineers to graduate and tradesmen to get certified who retain enough of a sense of objective reality and empirical data to keep our planes flying and computers running?

"Keep in mind the subprime mortgage crisis was a shaping event in our generation's lives."

Yeah, fine, but you seem to have missed the historical lesson:  the government leaned on banks to offer nonviable loans.  I'm sure plenty of bankers were happy to get more payments than they would have otherwise, but I have heard firsthand that banks by and large didn't want to do it because they knew it would be bad for business--that people who hadn't been able to afford to buy homes previously were in that situation more often because they had money management problems, and less often because they had a streak of bad luck.  So don't think the government is on your side.  They'll tell you they're helping, but borrowers and lenders on the whole both ended up worse off than they were before.  We all felt it, and we all know what it's like to live through it.

"Boomers refuse to pay a living wage to anyone and then wonder why people don't buy anything."

Uh, no.  Boomers only refused to raise the minimum wage to what might be considered a living wage in some places before the rise in minimum wage increased the cost of living in ways no one could predict.  More money doesn't help you buy more if you still can't afford things.  And people were buying things on minimum wage long before you came into the picture, so how are you different on this point?

"Millennials value meaningful work over lucrative work."

That's great, and I'm not just saying that to be patronizing, but part of adulting is putting up with parts of your life--and that includes your work--that just aren't great.  Go ahead, blame your parents and teachers, but don't expect us to listen if you complain about it but never try to strike a reasonable balance.  Another part of adulting is taking on responsibility for things passed down to you even if they're not your fault; you're not being blamed or condemned for wearing cultural hand-me-downs, you're just getting all there is to give (and that is not a comment on how much more wealth your elders already have than you do; twenty years from now, you'll be twenty years down that path, too).

"Millennials do not deal well with their great ideas being shut down."

Okay, that's a partially valid point, whether or not it's really a pithy criticism of your attitude, but my experience has been the opposite:  throwing people barely old enough to drink into management positions and chasing whatever fad they were taught was the final key to permanent business success, until next year when they hire the next round of bright idea pimps.  But still, "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" is not always bad--someone came up with the term "standard practices" and the notion stuck for a reason--but it's not sufficient justification to refuse to consider change.  I have also literally heard this said as an argument against changing a workflow I'm part of where I work:  "But if we change things, then they'll be different."  Um, yeah?  They're supposed to be different because there are problems that are making us want to change what we do so the problems go away.

"I'd love to buy a house but I can't be certain I'll have the same income levels for thirty years."

This is interesting.  Things really are different from how they were before in terms of how people hold jobs.  I've changed jobs half a dozen times in the last twenty years, and the only times a change didn't come with an increase in income was when I was in a transitional situation, which seemed normal but might not be any longer.  But people are changing jobs more often these days because they are choosing to.  Layoffs and furloughs and downsizing are not new concepts.

"Why can't I build a little house on a tiny lot?"

There are lots available.  They're cheaper outside the city, so you'd have to drive, but at least your property taxes would be low enough that maybe you could swing a car loan.  They're cheaper than most houses.

"What about sharing a house with my friends?  The zoning board won't allow that."

The zoning board doesn't know how many guests you have, or how long they're staying, or whether they have any mail directed to you because you have enough trust to watch out for each other like that, or if they're helping you with expenses.  Just like how if you buy a house capitalism doesn't force you to buy new furniture.

"My old fridge was older than I was, and when my new one broke, they said I should have bought the warranty."

Not getting the warranty was probably foolish.  Disagree?  Do the math.  At some point paying fifty bucks for five years isn't going to be worth the hassle of a fridge that won't keep cold, and I do agree that it's unfortunate that things are designed to be replaced rather than repaired--but don't forget a repairman's labor is more expensive than a new appliance; I sympathize with the Maytag repairman but that clock has been running forward since before your time and you will be lucky (possibly bad luck) to see the day when that clock turns back.  Oh, did you do the math while I was ranting?  No?  Let me give you a hint:  it's usually cheaper to insure than to rebuy.  That's how health care got into the problem it, frankly, is still in.  When you do the math you'll know where the tradeoff is.  Maybe in your case it wasn't foolish, but if you couldn't be bothered to make an educated guess, that's really where your problem is.

"New fridges have a $400 premium to get a convenient configuration."

Oh, grow the fuck up.  This is why old people tell "when I was your age" stories.  You can't get the shelves where you want?  Why is it so hard to reposition the shelves yourself?  Did your parents do that thorough a job of teaching you the way to succeed is to find meaningful work and asking anonymous collective other people to deal with your #firstworldproblems?

"Entry level positions require 3-5 years of experience."

Old problem, also all perception.  LinkedIn is just one resource that talks a lot about how job postings go for two things, the ideal candidate and the one with the same profile as the person who just left the job.  If you can't figure that out from people telling you, we can't solve it for you as a society, no matter how much of your own soap you make and how much of your own vegetables you grow.  Although those are good things too; capitalism's great, but fuck consumerism.

"Even trades have a $5k+ investment for training and equipment."

If you aren't going into teaching, work training is usually cheap because your employer wants you to be highly competent and skilled; and either way, there are tax write-offs for personally covering work expenses.  And if you really just want to work, and don't find trades to be too drudge to consider?  take some shop classes in college, befriend the neighborhood gearhead, find the college grease monkey club.  Learn some Spanish and go to a Home Depot at four in the morning and ask the guys out front what it's like.  Follow them where they go and you'll learn a few things.  They won't buy you hammers and tape measures, but they'll have something you can borrow to start out, and if you pick something up quick on your own because you're a self-starter or because some grizzled master welder took a cotton to you and gave you a salty version of "how can I help you succeed at your job?" you'll get to the point where you won't need a $5k class, you'll just need a certification test.  Or you'll have the $5k, if you're planning ahead.

I'm painting with a really broad brush here and I'm sure there are many specific situations where it really isn't as straightforward as I'm making it sound, but my point is just that you're not helpless victims in a new world, you're just normal.

"Ask not what your economy can do you for you, ask what you can do for your economy."

There are people in the economy, not just commodities.  I thought you wanted to help people in a  collective style.  The heart of capitalism is finding people with an unmet need, finding a way to meet it, and offering to exchange what they need for what you need.

You want to condemn people who criticize children? Then stop hiding behind children.

Some time ago Greta Thunberg, Asperger's diagnosee and child of high profile dramatists, issued a preciously narcissistic and well sculpted wake-up call to the UN about climate change.

Some people called her out for speaking out of turn:  what does a teenager know, when adults can't even agree on the meaningfulness of consensus?  Are her parents using her as a prop for virtue signaling?  Why is this particular event worth making Greta miss days of school?

Other people called out those people for being mean:  Don't you know it's not nice or fair to talk to children that way?  Why can't you just listen to her message and get with the program and shrink your carbon footprint?

My opinion?  We should be encouraging our children to learn about and participate in matters of the world, in a way and to a degree that is appropriate for their level of development.  When they do well, praise them, but be constructive rather than obsequious.  If they don't do well, still be constructive, but be charitable.

If you're going to thrust them out into the professional league, though...be prepared for the fallout.

You're the parent/guardian.  It's on you if your prized, adorable shill comes home shamed and with emotional scars.  That's because you're the parent and are supposed to exercise some judgment in what your child is facing.  Stepping in front of the public eye isn't quite as foolhardy as dropping your kid over the wall into the pit at the reptile house for some good pics for social media, but everyone else except for tyrants and busybodies are going to assume that you're managing the situation appropriately for your child's maturity level and that you recognize that they do not answer to you.

So maybe in the past people were reluctant to criticize a teenager for her juvenile rhetoric out of a sense of fair play to her.  And maybe bystanders will rate that a win for you this time.  But next time they will remember that your arguments are childish and that you won't even defend them yourself.

And what about Greta?

President Trump tweeted at her thusly: Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!"

She replied by changing her Twitter status to "a teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend."


I'm not sure about this "up against a wall" thing, but I think she's going to be just fine.

Not so recently I was turned on to the long novenas of St. Bridget.

There's a one-year one consisting of 15 Paternosters, 15 Aves, and 15 particular prayers every day for a year.  There's another that consists of 7 and 7 and 7 that runs daily for twelve years.  Both concern the wounds Christ suffered during His Passion, and various promises of graces that convey holiness in this life, happiness in the next, and a commendable Christian death in between are attached to each.  The prayers for the former (there is a warning about the verbiage but proceed with prudence) are here.  A description of the latter can be found here.

Such undertakings daunt me.  Or, at least, they did.  I recently started saying the rosary on a daily basis, after some promptings I could not ignore, and when I realized I just needed to accept the time commitment it became easy (in the past I had tried to muscle my way through the fifteen minutes of sitting still and reciting Hail Marys, but now it can take 30 minutes and I hardly notice).  And I have been saying a decade of the St. Gertrude prayer daily since grad school, which was about 15 years ago, so if I had started the Bridgetine prayers at the same time I'd be done by now.

One thinks sometimes it would have been nice to be back in Biblical times to experience things firsthand (not the dysentery so much as the miracles).  I have at times been jealous of the grace given to people who were there to be recipients of it; I'm not cut out to be a bishop, but if I'd been in Palestine a couple thousand years ago maybe I could have been chosen as an Apostle, you know?

Yeah, that's not how it works and that's the wrong attitude, but jealousy isn't rational.

But recently a thought occurred to me:  whatever advantages people back then had, they didn't get all the same ones that are available to us now.  Look at some of the promises associated with other devotions that arose in the Middle Ages or later:

• The Rosary:  destroy vice, decrease sin, defeat heresies
• The Divine Mercy: even hardened sinners who say it will die a happy death
• Brown Scapular: None who die wearing it (non-superstitiously!) will suffer eternal fire
• First Fridays: all graces necessary to one's state in life and great blessings to all one's undertakings
• First Saturdays: Mary herself promises to assist by bringing the graces needed for salvation

Maybe this day and age is lean on living saints we can go to beg for prayers or miracles face to face, but these devotions can sure make up the difference.

The First Fridays devotion, also known as the Sacred Heart, is of particular relevance here.  It was presaged in the 13th century during a mystical encounter between St. John and St. Gertrude, whom the evangelist invited to recline on Jesus' chest as he himself did at the Last Supper.  When she asked why he did not elaborate about the experience in his Gospel, St. John explained that such was reserved for a time in history when the Church's love for God would have grown cold.  Four centuries to the day later, Jesus revealed His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary.

What devotions, what graces, will be made available to our distant descendants, who will be struggling to see Biblical history over the haufenmist of Modernism that looms in between, over our very heads today?

All right, I haven't seen this elsewhere yet and haven't had a chance to say it to anybody else...

...but why didn't they just refer to al-Baghdadi in his headline-eulogy as "someone who did something?"

It's close enough to accurate and rhetorically fitting.

A prayer after communion

Lord Jesus, I praise You and thank You for deigning to come to me in so lowly a manner, for allowing me to approach You and receive You in this way.  I pray that I receive You to my salvation and sanctification, and not my own condemnation; and may every grace You pour out on me beyond my ability to receive flow out to all of my prayer intentions.  

I pray also You never suffer me to be farther from You than I am right now.

Amen.

My goal when I started this blog was really not to devolve into some conservative curmudgeon...

...but maybe it's just that as I've moved through life, I've drifted away from places where badly formed unorthodox opinions are rampant, and toward places where underdeveloped political opinions are mixed at the deepest levels with other things I'm interested in.

I tire of it.  I don't have the power to change all the minds of everyone on the internet who thinks that Jesus wasn't real because some other yahoo on the internet made up lies that are easily disproven after five minutes spent in any grade school library's mythology section.  I have some hope when I see Copernicus mistaken for Leonardo in the debate about the two world views and someone else chimes in with "I looked into this, and that's not quite true."  I can still make my contributions but God will have to do the heavy lifting.

I tire of the same kind of crap as "astronomers calculated the positions of the stars and planets and discovered a missing day that proves Joshua 10:13."  Why people would lie about this, I don't know.  Maybe it's all false flag operations, but these things just...smell like well intentioned lies by people who don't have the foresight to ask "if they discover this isn't true, are they more likely to throw it all away in a fit of doubt than to forgive me for tricking them into getting saved/opening their eyes to scientific materialism?"

But my point was to touch on a couple semi political things and call it a night.  Today's topic:  common core.

I'm not going to go deep, just hit a couple factors.

Supporters dislike the idea of what they call "hyper localization," that is, the idea that communities even down to the county level should have a say in their own school's curriculum.  They blame that for the whitewashing of history, for such things as learning little or nothing about the history of slavery in America and the Civil Rights Movement.  They want it standardized across the nation.

Problem is, the non-academics in Washington or San Francisco who are really more interested in training compliant future high tech employees--they will admit this is their goal when they publicize their support of the program, if slightly less directly--are not in any way immune to propagating other swaths of ignorance when they develop curricula far away from classrooms.

There's no guarantee a nationwide curriculum will be any more truthful about Wilmington or Custer, because there's no reason to be.  It's easier to reinvent the past to explain away the historical artifacts you can't or haven't yet been able to destroy, than to erase it all at once and hope no one notices or remembers what came before Year One.

Typical:  see a potential problem, magnify it into a crisis, and demand federal intervention.  Sound familiar?

But all that assumes that the curriculum reinventors and textbook compilers have all the pertinent knowledge at their fingertips and are simply making different choices about what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what fits into the themes they want to teach and what doesn't, what themes ought to be taught and what are too difficult or inappropriate for each grade level, how to define the words "difficult" and "appropriate" in this context.

You get enough scholars and writers together, you'll have enough people who know enough that they do collectively have this knowledge (or at least have a passing familiarity so they'll be more effective at going back to do research to clear up the ignorance they know they bear), but there's no guarantee that this happened, and there's no guarantee that there are enough participants wise and sincere enough to make the optimal choices.

I went to a pretty good school.  Mostly we had pretty good textbooks.  But the time my history book spent on the Trail of Tears was about the same as that spent on the Grange, and while I recognized that both were just specific instances of bigger things, it wasn't clear how either fit into where the publisher put those few paragraphs.  The Trail at least was connected to some things I already knew about Indian reservations that still exist, but what I remember most about the Grange is being a boy sitting with book open to that page on my desk and wondering what it had to do with anything else going on at that time.

I have digressed, but permit me to regress.  I was going to say something about the statues of Confederate Civil War officers getting torn down.  Not about that, so much.  What I see a lot of here is a push to simplify history to singular ideas and motivations.  I may have written about this long before--or maybe I have a draft I never got around to publishing; been a while now--about how people will impugn the sincerity of someone who is trying to do the right things for allegedly the right reasons because they can imagine some other good that might come of it that would personally benefit the person trying to do the right thing.  Maybe that person recognizes the benefit but didn't have it in mind, maybe the person really didn't ever think of it and was trying to be altruistic because that's what virtuous people do, but it doesn't matter: an ulterior motive can be surmised, therefore the ulterior motive must be the only true one, and thus the virtuous person is just a hypocrite.  Utter bullocks, and the last rationalization of an insecure but happy vice-enslaved person.

I recognize how it is distasteful, to put it tastefully, to continue proudly displaying things that we as a society have come to recognize were not all that great after all.  George Wallace and Orval Faubus weren't just taking a principled stand against social decay, they were just wrong.  But I'd prefer to have things like statues of Robert E. Lee and George Custer put in historical museums where their real legacies can be depicted with some context.

Claims like "It was all about ending slavery" or "it had nothing to do with slavery; that was tacked on later" are wildly oversimple.  People are complicated and life is complicated and so is history.  I'm not expecting students to go to any historical museum and come out thinking the guys on the wrong side were all vilified angels, but I do want them to come out with a sense of these complexities, and some enhanced skill at looking at a story from both sides and seeing the truth and propaganda that each side relies on.

(and I realize I appear to be foisting myself onto my own petard.  Indulge me a bit more; I am not a historian and do not want to bore you in a bog of footnotes and tangential analyses)

Not just for the sake of history, either.  Yeah, Sherman might have been a horrible person for his practice of total war and his lack of enthusiasm for abolition, but he's not a monster.  And by that I mean "a horrible person is not an inhuman monster no matter how horrible," not "he wasn't so bad."

And if we can teach our students not to write off the villains of history as monsters, but to recognize them as fellow humans with motivations that are complex and often conflicted even when not wholly erroneous, then we will be teaching the next generation real lessons in how to understand and love one another.

I was going to make this a separate post, but i think it will be more fitting to finish this one with the following.

"They asked me if I was going to let politics get in the way of my friendship.  You're damn right I will.  I will not tolerate the presence of racists and homophobes."  This in response to the criticism that certain political strains tend to make everything political, that there are people you can't have a normal human conversation with because they are always having just one conversation whether you're part of it or not.  Zeal for one's principles is nice, but there's a problem with being the kind of person Winston Churchill described as being folks who won't change the subject.  It's the same problem the Pharisees had when they criticized Jesus for supping with tax collectors and sinners.

I don't need to spell it out, do I?

"It is possible to be pro-gun and pro-gun-control. As a gun owner with a clean record and a sound mind, why would I oppose legislation that does not affect me but has the potential to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a threat?"

1. Red flag laws.
2. "First they came for the socialists ... then they came for the trade unionists...."
3. Has the "potential?"  Now we're supposed to pass laws based on what we hope they might accomplish?  Laws have been overturned for being ineffective--recreational marijuana will probably be the next obvious example to make the history books--but we don't even have to entertain bills that have a reasonable expectation of achieving their intent with minimal side effects?  Well, I guess not; so much political posturing in Washington and the media is so ridiculous I doubt one person in twenty would believe a word of it if they got past how it makes them feel....
4. (added August 2020--can't believe I didn't think to include this originally) Being pro-gun and pro-gun-control just puts you in the same boat as politicians and celebrities who talk about how we really don't need guns, in a rather "let them eat cake" tone, but surround themselves with walls and gated communities and armed bodyguards.  That canard has been beaten to death, so I'm just going to leave it at that for you to chew on.

"If owning a gun were an effective means of self defense, insurance rates would go down, but they don't because you're more likely to shoot yourself than an attacker."

Insurance companies aren't concerned about crime, they're concerned about paying out on life and health insurance policies; if they're involved in any social engineering, you can bet it's not going to be in support of any actuarial data that show personal gun ownership stops home invaders and other criminals from causing harm, which we know is true--it's just more newsworthy to report "Joe Blow was apprehended by authorities, full stop" than "Joe Blow was arrested fleeing the home of Benny Hanna; police caught him running out the back door after hearing Hanna, 42, rack his shotgun."

My chances of drowning at home are much higher because I have a bathtub, but since my bathtub poses no political threat to busybodies and tyrants, the fact that having a bathtub provides benefits that outweigh the risks is not controversial.

"Alabama, get your act together. No state that bans abortions but is in last place for education and has had four mass shootings alone in 2019 really cares about kids."

Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.

What about next to last place?  40th instead of 50th?  Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.

I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.”  Wow, way to set the bar, there.  It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.

As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama.  These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics:  124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church.  For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings.  All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools.  I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.

Another sign I'm on the right side

I mean, yeah, sometimes even on the Internet I find my echo chamber pierced like a bubble and find facts and logic and decent human beings that don't fit my paradigm, and I wonder if maybe I just have a few good intentions but am largely mistaken.

But then something else happens.

A number of something elses, actually, but I'll talk about how 90% of the violence is either physically on the other side or exists only as rhetoric and accusation and invention but still is on their side later.

It’s not that both sides don’t have solipsism and myopia. It's not that both sides don't have some facts and logic to support their positions (gun violence is never a good thing, even if you can justify its necessity; rationalizing its expansion despite any consequences is inhumane and as bad as the argument that is aesthetic rather than moral that "guns are bad so it doesn't matter if they reduce violence overall").  It’s that on the libertarian side, problems tend to be self limiting; large scale benefits perpetually promised by socialism might not be possible, but neither are tyrannies that keep said promises poorly and then bring more problems.  So when I see situations as I describe below, I find them to be evidence that such beliefs are more dangerous than my own, instead of less.

A coworker of mine--I'll tell you more about him later; he's fun--was lamenting that unemployment was as low as it has been lately.  He has nothing against people working, mind you, and he recognizes that some unemployment is natural as it accounts for people who are willingly between jobs and are not suffering in any way. But his contention was that as unemployment drops below this natural level, competition for workers goes up and that translates into higher wages meant to entice job seekers. And the money for higher wages has to come from somewhere, namely, the price of whatever goods and services are sold by companies that are raising their wages. Thus we end up with inflation hand in hand with wage increases. Okay, that’s not the best situation, although on some level that’s just a tautological opportunity cost—even if the money came from nowhere, prices would go up because the supply of money was higher.

That’s why modern first world countries have the richest citizens in human history and the truly (even the marginally) destitute are not proportionately large in number.

But the kicker? He’s down with a “living” minimum wage.

That’s right. It’s not good for labor prices to rise from natural market forces because it will push inflation, but artificially raising it and letting inflation happen for the very same reason is A-OK. Whether this parallel is unimagined or there is an implicit assumption that enough wisdom and economic controls can be made implemented quickly enough to stave off a crisis, I have no faith that the outcome would be better than not interfering.

"Don't slutshame. Sex isn't meant to have kids. Children are an occasional side effect of sex."

I could say a lot here--I don't want to go off on a tangent about how to discuss things that are inherently shameful, and how shame is not a social construct--but I will restrict myself to this:

If conception is an accident, a rare coincidence, then why is failure to use contraception in 100% of sexual encounters (y'know, just in case it's that one occasion) described as "not being responsible?"

A bit heavy-handed and transparent, no?

So two years ago Trump is elected president.

Like the mirror image of Obama being awarded the Nobel prize before taking office for the great humanitarian things it was presumed he would accomplish, the usual suspects and their useful idiots started crying for Trump's impeachment before taking office for the great humanitarian crises it was presumed he would create.

This didn't go far by itself because being uncivil, being a jerk, being disliked, having differences of opinion, and even using rhetoric that is inflammatory but would have been unremarkable two hundred or a hundred or twenty years ago are not impeachable offenses.  But the Russian collusion thing quickly picked up some steam and for two years eclipsed it--they could always impeach him for that, since the "but I didn't get what I wanted this time!" wasn't working on its own here or against the Electoral College.

Fast forward through two years of investigators spinning their wheels, finding little more than a past her prime porn actress, and reminders of smoking guns found in the hands of at the wrong targets, and finally a few weeks ago they decide to acknowledge that there's no "there" there.

Immediately cue up Amendment 25 rhetoric.

Really?  President not fit to execute his office?  Did everybody just not notice before?

Everybody was sure hopeful to throw everything at the wall during early talks of impeachment to see if they could get enough to stick (as if it were a matter of quantity of dirt thrown and not actual high crimes and misdemeanors; one would have through they learned that lesson, but then came along Brett Kavanaugh and all his accusers who waited until the last minute to stage a wave of protests and then claim that that meant something above than the theatrics they so patently were).  I'm honestly surprised, looking back, that they didn't try some "he colluded because he was incompetent, not just because he was evil and too unpopular to win an honest vote" double play.

Someday some trick like this will work against some president.  And then the other side will turn that trick against them, and everybody will be shocked when another obamassiah is kept from taking office by a conspiracy that has learned that double edged knives cut in both directions.  And then we will have the world's largest banana republic.

And maybe that's what they want.

I don't know what to call it.  It's not envy because they don't want to destroy something good someone else has because they resent not having it; they want to destroy it on behalf of people who don't, except for the little bit they think will still exist for them to keep for themselves.

If the government can just print more money whenever it wants some, has a budget shortfall, recognizes a contraction in the money supply...

…why are there still taxes?


I mean, not to lessen the pithiness of that question, but where do people think money goes when it’s taxed or spent?

You know what really gets me?

It's that all the protesting, all the rhetoric, all the drama when something is built up into a crisis....they all act like we're finally on the cusp of turning human society around, how with the next judicial appointment or the next presidential election or the next symbolic bill going to the floor for general voting, everything is going to turn around, and if life doesn't just suddenly start coming up daisies, at least all our social ills will just start dissolving like a sugar cube in hot tea: rape will drop off and alpha males will suddenly start crying tears of joy, black people will stop getting murdered and will start having cushy jobs drop into their laps as white people move into the back woods and inbreed themselves to extinction, people will come out as gay or trans by the millions, and other things less obviously in the fantasy genre.

One lady quoted by an NPR reporter after the Kavenaugh confirmation: "Are we going to be out here for another 30 years? I don't have 30 years left." Lady, what were you protesting that you thought 30 years of standing in streets with signs was going to change? The Civil Rights Era was over more than 30 years ago, and sorry to say but the last few years of what amounts to "This is the same thing so let us have it!" just doesn't close the argument.  Or was there something else? Abortion? Legal more than 40 years; it's the pro-lifers who are protesting that. Something else? Something more fundamental to the human species, like the propensity to be inconsiderate, invasive, rude, predatory? Sister, no amount of legislation is going to fix nature. Schools and parents have been trying to civilize children for a lot longer than 30 years, and considering we have to start over with every generation, I am surprised you ever thought you'd live to see the day when we finally succeeded once and for all.

Megan Kelly, NBC employee...

...was somehow unwoke enough to suggest that blackface or anything short of racist fawning wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

She apologized on her show, and it wasn’t good enough.

Trump is somehow more responsible than the media who go around constantly calling half the country racist and sexist and homophobic and Islamophobic, but somehow not being responsible for the outrage that sometimes spills out into physical violence that is positively condoned in many corners of the public sphere (corners, sphere...YKWIM).

 Maybe NBC needs to reconsider how it vets its long time employees. Good luck.