"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
this morning, one which mocked Catholic "doctrine" as being entirely nonsensical. I just didn't want to get into it, especially with someone who I doubt has the slightest notion of what Catholic doctrine is and how it differs from dogma or a pop cultural dog's lunch of Chick Publications' nonsense, for that matter. I think he thought it was going to upset me but, as he generally does, he missed.
As things progressed through a busy day I thought it was kind of funny because "Catholic doctrine" isn't what the Church is most importantly about, even for most Catholics, it's how we live that matters. I say that as I mention that that "Catholic doctrine" includes the social-justice doctrine that it's clear Pope Leo XIV has signaled will be a major focus of his papacy. If I had to choose between any secular doctrines, everything from market economics to a mixed system to the many socialisms that aren't absolutely wedded to a transcendent conception of human and other life I would say anyone who doesn't choose that "doctrine" is a fool.
I am always cheered by anything that advances people over other concerns.
It was when Good Pope Francis did that he got the right wingers, the Burke's the Sarahs, the Muellers, the Stricklands, Viganòs, and the EWTN, National Catholic Register (not to be confused with the generally excellent National Catholic Reporter) and the rest of the billionaire-millionaire financed "trad-cath" astro-turf LARP cult in a swivet. It got not a few of the Cardinal Electors in a swivet too, even some of them made it clear they didn't want someone who would carry on the work of Francis. Even some of those those who Francis showed his charity, such as the scandal plagued Cardinal Pell, turned on him because he cared more about People than abstract notions of purity in doctrine and dogma. Charity comes well down the list of concerns for such guys, even though it was the central teaching of Jesus. I would point out that one of the greatest ironies of the would-be "trad-Catholics" is that they're even more willing to overturn even the longest standing of those, like the U.S. Supreme Court in the hands of the American right, there is little apart from scolding other People over their sex lives that such are willing to overturn in service of their often blatantly corrupt ends. And when you mix in such stuff as American legal credentialing by the most elite of our secular universities, the trad-caths go full raving fascist loony.
The social media and other activity of the well-financed liars of the trad-cath right in the period between the papacy of Good Pope Francis and Pope Leo has been fully as bad as the worst of the Republican-fascist attacks on President Biden and then Kamala Harris, joined in by the commercial, secular media. I was glad to see that like Francis, Pope Leo has some familiarity with social media, he must be familiar with the worst of it. Which I don't think it will be possible to ignore. I hope, unlike Francis, that he is more willing to crack down hard on the lying cardinals, bishops, priests, etc. whose mother tongue isn't Church Latin but false witness. Such as Strickland and Viganò should have been shut down a lot sooner than they were. While I hope that such cases are handled with more justice than JPII and Benedict XVI often dealt with their critics, I hope Pope Leo understands the danger that they pose, not just to the Church but to secular politics in places where the cults that they sway exist. Doing justice is always a narrow path between caring about the rights of the individual and the danger they pose to the wider community or an innocent individual. I think, though Francis did, in the end, take means to protect the innocent, sometimes he should have acted faster.
WHILE POPE LEO has said things in the past that LGBTQ+ People like me wouldn't much like - and who knows how much he may have grown since he said them - the indications from his social media activity are really encouraging. Here's from a piece about that from the National Catholic Reporter:
There is only so much we can learn about Pope Leo XIV from his X account, an account in which he mostly retweeted others. But if we read between the lines, we can see a common thread of deep concern for the marginalized and the poor, and an emphasis on the role of government in ensuring the welfare of its citizens. For those who hoped for continuity with Francis' pontificate, Prevost's X feed is a reassuring, and downright hopeful, scroll.
Whether it's posting a Spanish language video interview condemning the death penalty with compassion and nuance, or resharing a stern rebuke of those who offer "thoughts and prayers" without policy changes in the face of mass shootings, our new pontiff has not minced words about the sweeping implications of nonviolence.
During the tumultuous year of 2020, he postedmultiplecalls for racial justice and promoted COVID-19 vaccinations as a means of caring for the vulnerable. (He was also seen wearing a face mask as late as 2022.)
It only takes one brief glance at Prevost's X profile to see that immigrants are particularly close to his heart. His last post before becoming pope, shared on April 14, was a retweet drawing attention to the suffering of the deported — and calling out President Donald Trump specifically for a lack of compassion. But this wasn't new for Prevost; he's been challenging Trump's position on immigration since before Trump even won the 2016 election.
But immigration isn't the only issue that compelled Prevost to speak out against Trump. In 2017 he shared a post by the Laudato Si' Movement pushing for the president to read Francis' climate justice encyclical, Laudato Si', and another by Catholic News Service Rome expressing concern about the environmental impact of Trump's policies.
Perhaps the biggest difference between our current American political leaders and our new American-born pope can best be summed up by a 2021 post that appears to bear an original caption from Prevost himself. Linking to a commentary on a homily on the Beatitudes delivered by Francis, Prevost wrote: "These beatitudes also highlight the temptations faced by bishops, like that of seeking power and a comfortable lifestyle."
I was kind of hoping he'd adopt the immediate shock-effect of Francis coming out in a plain white cassock as a means of reinforcing a rejection of "power and a comfortable lifestyle" but maybe he figures that point has already been made and he is saving his action for more serious fights.
People have been commenting on the widespread non-Catholic enthusiasm for the idea that WE have a Pope, some have said that even a lot of atheists and non-Christians have been enthusiastic about this choice as they soon became encouraged by Good Pope Francis. I don't think the a "trad-Catholic" choice would have had that effect, especially from the hard-core legalists - a canon lawyer would have been even more of a disaster than another academic theologian. I think the reason for that is that modern secular culture, modernism (in that sense) is as unfulfilling and unhelpful as reactionary "traditionalism." Reactionary traditionalism, as voiced by the like of J.D. Vance, other recent right-wing converts and the wealth-generated "trad-catholics" is ultimately as useless. Like the 18th century style of "liberalism" that sought to free the rich to enjoy their wealth as they rode roughshod over workers and others, as opposed to the original American form of liberalism that was based in the egalitarian economics of the scripture, the sterile, would-be scientific "modernism" that is what most people concentrate on is more a matter of wealth hoarding with permissiveness to those with that wealth than anything else. The long list of the icons of modernism who were enthusiasts for dictators, both of the right and the would-be left should make everyone's use of that term more careful about what they mean.
I hope that Pope Leo turns out to be another pastoral Pope who has the same orientation as Francis for the hunger, homing and material as well as spiritual welfare for least among us, for the environment, for those who are marginalized, for those who are in the worst parts of their lives. As I said, I hope he makes a radical decision to change the priesthood that will admit that the Holy Ghost hasn't seen eye-to-eye with Church tradition on an exclusively unmarried-male priesthood, turning back the Benedict-era policy of shrinking the church so as to make it more to the liking of those who yearn for a return to before Vatican II. I will say that noting that if you read even the reactionaries among past Popes after Leo XIII, pretty much all of them supported and reinforced the Catholic social teaching of that Leo, at least in their official documents. If you want to put their economic policy in terms of secular politics, it tends to radical equality BECAUSE IT FOLLOWS THE GOSPEL AND THE LAW. There are no egalitarian economics and, so, politics more radical than the Gospel of Jesus. It is an expansion of the already radical economics and politics of The Law of Moses. That might not be what the billionaire-millonaire astro-turf-high-visibility "trad-Catholic" cult wants but it is the heart of Christianity and the best of the Catholic tradition. The real one, not the one that lends itself to live-action-role-playing as seen in the movies and on TV.
POPE LEO XIII is universally acknowledged to be the initiator of modern Catholic Social Teaching. In one of the articles I read anticipating what names the new Pope might choose the author speculated that if "Leo" was the name of choice it would be a way for him to indicate that was what he intended to focus on.
In other articles, most of which said that it was a very long shot that an American might be chosen, Robert Provost was said to be someone known to be dedicated to continuing the process of reform and change that Good Pope Francis, now Saint Francis Bergoglio began.
I said something of what I hoped the new Pope would do, including complete equality for Women in the Catholic Church. I also said that I didn't expect that to happen. I'm hoping that he will open up ordination to married Catholic men, John Paul II opened the door by allowing disaffected Anglican priests who are married to become Catholic priests. Who knows if even that partial reform will happen?
But that's only some of the less important change that needs to be made. His many years working in Peru will give him a lot better idea of that than I'll ever have.
I'm provisionally optimistic but that makes me nervous. I'd been afraid of them electing someone who I knew would be mediocre to bad, though I was pretty sure the real disasters put forward as likely candidates would never be elected by two thirds. I expect that the integralist-fascist nutters are going to be splitting. After this I think it's pretty unlikely that things will go back to JPII-Benedict XVI.
I DON'T FOLLOW THAT FRAUD and, no, I wasn't aware he'd written a book allegedly about the Bible. I don't look at his stuff much because no matter what he's allegedly writing about, it turns out that it's really about his pathological view of sex. And even for a psych-guy, his is pathological. From what I gather, that's what his view of the Bible (really two books and a quarter of one from the Old Testament) is about.
Looking around and reading the reviews by some of those who are not a fraud in any way, such as the estimable Rowan Williams, it appears those who did the reading of it so I don't have to are not favorably impressed. I'll lean heavily on his review from the Guardian:
Two points to begin with. One is that Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver [never read anyone use that verb before, I'm impressed] as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.
The second point is connected. Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.
The effect is somewhat one-note; the actual way in which the stories develop, speak to one another, correct one another, handle internal tensions and debates is muted at best. This is the sort of thing that classical rabbinical exegesis in fact relishes, and that some more modern Jewish discussion – by Emil Fackenheim, Jonathan Sacks, Nathan Lopes Cardozo and others – models very powerfully. Peterson is rightly hostile to antisemitism, and this might have led him to engage a bit more with the rich world of Jewish interpretation. Instead, he relies a lot on rather dated Christian commentaries (and seems to have a limited acquaintance with Hebrew, a drawback for a project like this).
My guess is that Peterson knows crap all about Hebrew or Biblical Greek or about much of any Biblical commentary.
In fairness, he does pick out some distinct trajectories within the stories, for example, in the narratives about Moses. But the expositions constantly shade into meandering polemic about a range of modern issues, especially gender, on which Peterson has made his position pretty clear elsewhere. Eve’s yielding to the serpent’s temptation, for instance, is viewed as the characteristically female error of sentimental, pseudo-compassionate acceptance of the unacceptable that you see in bad parents, especially mothers, who “cripple their children so that they can make a public show of their martyrdom and compassionate virtue”.
This does tempt me to go to a library to look at the book to see if he works in the natural history of lobsters somewhere, something which has figured heavily in his prescriptions for the behavior of men and Women in the past.
Well, there is certainly a discussion to be had about toxicity in parenting, but finding it in the second chapter of Genesis requires impressive single-mindedness (and it is worth noting that Jewish exegetical tradition, unlike Christian, has never been that interested in Eve). Peterson claims that analysis of the patriarchal subtext of the biblical stories is a ridiculous distraction, observing that Genesis depicts both men and women negatively. What he does not seem to acknowledge is that discussing patriarchy is about recognising patterns of social power embedded in the stories, rather than whether specific men are painted in favourable or unfavourable lights. This makes it impossible for him to grant that such discussions can help us avoid some of the spectacularly destructive exploitation of biblical material that has reinforced the demeaning of women throughout Christian history.
Predictably (for those familiar with his online battles), he sees any qualification of the simple binary of gender identity as equivalent to denying the difference between good and evil, a refusal of the basic polarities of reality. But most serious discussions of gender fluidity do not deny evolutionary biology or sexual differentiation as such; they are asking for a more painstaking attention both to the social construction of roles and to the specifics of dysphoria. They deserve a better level of engagement.
I will break in here to say that I think everything Jordan Peterson does is to try to regain his place in bro-kulcha, the manosphere that he held in the 2010s, with his adoring online incel-boy followers and the wealth that having written a bogus best seller got for him. I will stipulate that Rowan Williams is a nicer guy than I am. Peterson is to Women as Jerry Falwell was to Black People, using misogyny the same way that Falwell used white supremacy to build an empire, though, clearly, Falwell was better at that than the Psych prof from the U. of Toronto has been. Maybe he realizes the potential to have a pseudo-religious movement behind such an effort, which would explain why, in his senescence, he is trying to take that marketing opportunity.
I do think the possibility of a Jordan Peterson holding down an alleged scientific professorship at a major English language university, albeit in an alleged science, should count as much in the discrediting of his field as the presence of such as Kevin MacDonald in an allied pseudo-science, "evolutionary psychology" should have served to discredit the scientific status of that ocean of bilge.
And so on, with other issues as well (most bizarrely, the conclusion of the Book of Jonah is made the occasion for a tirade about valuing the “natural” world over human life, which seems to have something to do with Peterson’s hostility to some kinds of environmental ethics; not really what the text is about). These rabbit holes do no great service to the broader challenges Peterson wants to draw attention to. There really are corrosive manifestations of hedonism, relativism and infantilism in our culture; there really is a mentality that deludes us into thinking that we can be whatever we want to be, and that any notion of short-term sacrifice for a more durable and fully shareable good is unimaginable.
I suspect that Peterson has put a lot of his money into the extraction industries - he is from the Texas of Canada, Alberta. I'd like to know just where his investments lie because I think that's where we will find the whole of his treasure does.
But the insistent contempt for nuance and disagreement (“idiotic”, “addled”, “egregious”), and the reduction of any alternative perspective to its most shallow or trivial form, does not encourage the serious engagement Peterson presumably wants. This is an odd book, whose effect is to make the resonant stories it discusses curiously abstract. “Matter and impertinency mixed”, in Shakespeare’s phrase.
I'll note that Peterson apparently wants his book to be taken seriously as a scholarly work by a university professor, I don't have such a purpose, all I am is a political blogger though when I do get more serious I use different language. That's my excuse. I don't think it would have occurred to me to make this last criticism that Williams does, though I think it's a fair one for him to make.
I looked at several things and listened to one. I'll leave you with this highly entertaining Youtube review which contains what I think is one of the most salient of uninvestigated questions about Peterson and his cult of manhood, WHY THOSE WHO WANT TO BE MANLY MEN HAVE INVESTED SO MUCH IN THE TOTAL, WHINY-WIMP THAT JORDAN PETERSON IS?
I think it's a good question? Why isn't the squeaky (one of the higher tenor voices before the public, these days) whoosie, psych-prof, dangerous-fad-diet endorsing (has he got money in his daughter's scam, too?), clothes-horse getting into fist fights? It reminds me of Bertrand Russell's comment on Nietzsche's advocacy of beating Women in Zarathustra, Nietzsche knew that if he ever tried to whip a woman, she'd get it from him and whip him with it. I understand Peterson is big on Jung. Probably a safe bet for a fraudster and scammer. As if anyone knows what he was talking about.
One of the comments puts it well, "Jordan Peterson is to religion what Jordan Peterson is to philosophy."
CONSIDERING HOW SOON we will likely have the answer to who the next Pope will be, it is really stupid how many stories making or pretending to be making predictions of that have been in the media. If there is one thing that isn't known, it is what the inclinations of most of the 133 or so Cardinal Electors going into the conclave is and even less so what happens within that closed system might change any minds from what they are today. Even some of the more level-headed people who know something about some of the Cardinal Electors and have some idea of the process are making predictions, such as that this is likely to be a short conclave lasting at most four days. Well, that may well be the case but given the inability of anyone to make predictions like that in the past, who could possibly know that well enough to make a confident prediction?
I would like it to be a law that media outlets that issue predictions have to follow up to see if those predictions came true or not. But that's not going to happen.
It's interesting how many non-Catholics seem to be getting into the act. It reminds me of one of my favorite examples of this kind of thing, Americans who go four years without ever watching a figure-skating spectacle immediately becoming self-appointed experts of the Winter Olympics figure-skating finals and having a totally convinced and righteous opinion as to who should win. Though in that case the silly phenomenon is harmless.
I won't make a prediction about the conclave but I will predict that if the new Pope doesn't open up ordination to married People, rather fast, it will be ever more a moot question because Catholicism is a sacramental religion and for those sacraments that ordination is required for, the most basic actions of being a Catholic will grow ever rarer for ever more of those who were baptized into the Church. I wouldn't expect the next Pope to do the right thing and open ordination to Women, and married People but if they don't do something rather dramatic to get more priests into the parishes, the Church will shrink very fast. It was one of the worst things about Benedict XVI that he was more than OK with that, he wanted to drive those who didn't agree with him out of the church - it should be a law that an academic theologian isn't electable as the pastor of the Church. JPII didn't do much to improve things, either. His scandal filled papacy during which the child abuse scandal broke drove a number of those Catholics I knew away from the church even before Benedict made that his policy.
I sometimes watch the mass from the Cathedral in Montreal. I wasn't surprised to see how few there were at weekday masses but seeing how few there were at mass at the Cathedral there yesterday really shocked me. It's not in the Bible Belt or some college town in the North East of the US, it's a major church in a province which was once synonymous with Catholicism. I don't know if having a larger number of priests, some of whom are married and, perhaps, often are more in touch with real life than so many of the unmarried me of the Church are but they've been praying for those vocations that have been drying up for decades, this month is dedicated to praying for that. While the Cardinal Electors are trying to discern what the Holy Ghost is telling them about a Pope they should understand the message of those prayers having been unanswered so definitively. Maybe they will, I was hoping Good Pope Francis would but he left that problem unsettled. I wouldn't begin to predict what's going to happen on that question.
THAT INTERESTS me about as much as someone bringing out an LP of Anita Bryant's greatest hits. I have no interest in what that LGBTQ+ slandering racist and misogynist would be poet laureate of the bro-kulcha manosphere has to say about anything.
Actually, I might be more interested in an Anita Bryant Greatest Hits album and I'm not interested in that at all. At least hers comes in at generally less than four minutes instead of wasting about two hours.
What the hell is a famous Walker Evans picture of an impoverished American mother and her children doing at this point in this video about Nazi sadists?
AI is so so stupid. Don't you guys ever fact check this junk? Artificial "intelligence" is going to be the total death of a sense of reality being reliably attached to reality. Unless law and deputedly democratic governments take serious action to stop it, democracy won't just be endangered, it will be impossible.
Built in 1909, the Johnson Public Library is a Carnegie-style brick building that sat between Railroad Street and the Gihon River. Johnson is a former mill town where two rivers meet. Over the years, countless floods have devastated the library and town, most notably in 1927, 1996 and 2023. The library lost 1,500 books in the recent flood and has been operating out of the basement of the nearby Masonic Temple. When they heard about a grant opportunity, library staff and town leaders worked together to apply, in the hopes that they could create a new future for the library and their town.
On April 25 and 26, the library was transported from its home of more than 100 years and carried half a mile away to higher ground to Legion Field on School Street, below the elementary school. The Herculean effort took all night and included dozens of community volunteers, utility and construction workers, road and moving crews, first responders and 28 bucket trucks. Route 15 was shut down for three hours, and the power lines had to be removed to make way for the formidable 40-by-45-foot library on wheels.
New England Building Movers used diesel-powered hydraulics and a series of six dollies to maneuver the library forward on 48 wheels. It moved slowly and got stuck turning tight corners — a few trees had to be cut down, and three inches were shaved from its eaves to make it fit. Despite the late hour, townsfolk lined the streets to see the slow parade of utility trucks and the glowing brick structure, which took up the entire road and was lit up with lights.
The library’s new location is outside the floodplain; it will be expanded with an addition that will include more space for community activities. This project is funded by a $1.68 million grant from the Vermont Department of Libraries through the U.S. Department of the Treasury Capital Projects Fund grant program. Community members applied for the grant, coordinated the all-night move and celebrated the library’s new home.
In the latest episode of “Stuck in Vermont,” Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger saw the library crossing the Pearl Street bridge in the twilight hours — it had to be lifted above the guardrails — and attended the community celebration in the afternoon on April 26. It rained all day, but no one had to worry about water in the basement at the library’s new home. Staff hope to reopen the new and improved library by the end of the year.
My sister and others I've talked to never had junk calls on their cell-phones until after Musk and his incel-boy army started stealing files in the federal government. I am going to assume they're selling the data they've stolen, including things like contact information. And I have no doubt that they are going to use it for far worse than to financially profit from it. The Constitution and the law has done nothing to prevent this when both should have prevented the executive branch irregulars stealing it to start with. This is a prelude to Communist China style control of the population, that's so obvious that mainstream journalists are noticing it.
if Trump and the Republican-fascists say that parents should replace the toys that won't be under the Christmas tree with guns. I mean, look how many of them have posed with guns on their family Christmas cards in previous years. That he might, and only a very remote might that is, be taken down by the disappointment his policies will cause during the Christmas season is something I might take but it is one of the most terrible of truths about the American public under our Constitution and the culture and legal regime it gave rise to. It should have happened far faster and over the intentional immorality and consequent amorality of Trump and his supporters and the media, the sacralized "free press," which did so much to impose Trump on us in the beginning and reimpose him on us after they sandbagged and forced out Biden, one of the most rarely moral and competent presidents in the history of the country.
Trump is the worst president in history, our Constitution is doing nothing to remove him as he brings on an economic catastrophe because he is too stupid to learn what a tariff is and how they operate as a consumer tax on the citizens of a country that imposes them - no doubt he learned everything he knows about tariffs from his corrupt fascist dad saying they should replace the income tax, something his idiot economic advisors, Navarro (his LARP name: Ron Vara), the idiot Howard Lutnick, the smiling idiot Kevin Hassett . . . tell him because they are whores of Trump and the billionaires who own him. I'll point out two out of just that three are, like Trump, products of Ivy League schools. Just to point out the role that our alleged educational elite played in this.
Whenever you hear one of the As Seen On TV lawyers talk about the Constitution saving us you should now start to believe they have gone from being naive to being liars because if the Constitution were going to save us from what the Constitution should never, ever have permitted to start with, letting an insurrectionist, a known asset of Vladimir Putin and whatever corrupt billionaire, despot or not who says they'll build a building he can put his name on, a criminal who stole and very likely sold some of our most important security secrets, . . . . . . . . . be nominated and elected as president after the most corrupt and criminal first go round, that would have happened long ago.
Our Constitution had corrupt features installed in it from the beginning, many obvious ones, many less obvious ones and some enhanced or installed later by, for example, Supreme Court rulings - never installed by Constitutional means, the absence of a provision forbidding the Court to do that one of those most dangerous of features - it will not save us. Republicans, their theorists and, most importantly of all LAWYERS AND LEGAL SCHOLARS have identified and weaponized every defect in that document, intended by the framer-slaver holder-financiers and the more subtle and Court invented ones to install corrupt politicians and TV stars to serve anti-democratic ends. It is a document and a political system AND A LEGAL SYSTEM which has been so weaponized and once that has been done, the thing cannot be turned back to something less bad that ran on the tolerance of a margin of corruptible voters of sometimes good will and the sense of "honor" among politicians and "justices" of that dangerous court.
If I sound like a broken record on that it is because you have to repeat the hard truth more times than even a flimsy lie constructed for easy sale in order for that truth to overcome even temporarily told lies. The lies of our Constitutional lore and civic religion are far more deeply embedded than that and getting that corrupt document changed AND REMOVING THE POWER TO OF THE SUPREME COURT TO AMEND IT AT WILL is going to be a huge job, one which I will almost certainly not live to see happen, short of a disastrous and bloody and catastrophically failed revolution that will teach that lesson faster. I doubt that will happen, a bigger miracle of a revolution coming up with something better is less likely than a divine miracle doing that. The putrid and lying civic piety that has been installed in the American public about the Constitution is, itself, a barrier to peaceful change. One of the reasons I had the reaction to the lying history of "Hamilton" was because it added a huge lie about one of the worst of the framers, one who at least one historian said was one of the three most dangerous men in the United States at the time of his death - his killer being one of the other two. But he was hardly alone in those who early on tried to game the Constitution they had constructed for evil ends, that is the real history of that document in the hands of the framers, themselves.
Update: I can't recall who the third one of the three named by the historian as being the most dangerous men in the United States in 1804 was but I'd put John Marshall, the author of Marbury v Madison the year before in that position.
IF I WASN'T AFRAID THAT I'D JINX HIM I'd announce that I am 100% all in on Pritzker for president.
Of those being often mentioned, he seems to be the best to me, so far. He seems to know what is needed whereas Gavin Newsome doesn't. He has Washington experience which I consider an absolute requirement for anyone who wants to be president. But I won't jinx him by supporting him until after the convention.
I DON'T WATCH movies about the Catholic Church because they're either nauseatingly and dishonestly pious or sensationally and dishonestly anti-Catholic. I never watch movies about real People because they are so unreliable and, so, inevitably bear false witness. That didn't bother me until I found out in conversations online that many PhD holding teachers at accredited universities and prep-schools mistake movies for history or biography. If they're so duped by Hollywood why should anyone expect those with lesser educations to make the distinction between reality and make-believe? Make-believe is dangerous when it's mistaken as reality.
In the many things I read and heard about the upcoming conclave and about the events leading to it, I was horrified to hear someone say how many People on their plane trip to go to Rome for the funeral of Good Pope Francis were watching the movie INCLUDING A BISHOP. I mentioned how I suspected the putrid and pious and grotesquely unrealistic "The Shoes of the Fisherman" led to the election of Karol Wojtyla as John Paul II - a really bad papacy - so hearing that bishops were watching that movie put me on my guard.
So far as I know, very little about what has gone on in any modern conclave has been leaked by a reliable source and what has leaked is often tainted by ulterior motives so I doubt much about it is accurate. Much of the lore surrounding the elections of Popes is sensational and even more obviously ideological and polemic so it's mostly useless if you want to really know. That is what happens when such a choice is made in secrecy by a small group of insiders - like the legendary smoke-filled rooms where presidential candidates of the major parties were said to have been chosen. Of course, back then we got a few good ones whereas today good presidents are even rarer than they once were, The well meaning democratic reforms of the primary system were more than swamped by the Courts opening up the airwaves to millionaires and billionaires flooding the American political system with lies so as to influence voters. I don't think opening up the choice of the head of the Catholic Church to that would be likely to make things better. Imagine if the likes of Tim Busch and the media operations like EWTN and The National Catholic Register (NOT TO BE MISTAKEN WITH THE GENERALLY EXCELLENT NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER!) and their like around the world flooded the airwaves with American style lying.
For some ideas of what might be an alternative to that but which is almost certainly not likely to ever happen, you might look at this piece at Religion Dispatches. Much as I favor democracy as the only potentially valid means of selecting a legitimate secular government, without major protections against the influence of lie campaigns and prejudice ruling, its capacity for producing better results drastically erodes. There is no world-authority who could do that for the Catholic Church. Hell, we can't even protect American democracy at home from it under our Constitution.
As I said, we'll have to see what the Cardinal Electors give us. If they give us someone at least as good as Francis was - and while I think he was a great Pope, he was hardly perfect - all well and good. If they give us someone as timid as Paul VI, as power-hungry and controlling as JPII or as incompetent as Benedict XVI (dear God, not another academic theologian!) that will be typical. There have been remarkably few great presidents of the United States, even though we get a new chance to get a new one every four years. There have been remarkably few great Popes though I think there have actually been a higher percentage of good ones than we've had good presidents. Some of them like Benedict XV have been far better than they have been accorded by history (the late Richard McBrien convinced me of that) some have been downright awful. Just like leaders in putative democracies are, it's a mixed bag.
It's a lot safer and easier for movie makers to make a sensational and false movie about the Catholic Church than it is about secular politics, the old idea that a Catholic audience is going to refuse to watch a movie if the bishop tells them not to was likely always exaggerated and is certainly not true today. I don't care to watch fiction when I can read about reality. I like fiction to be fictitious and not something that tries to risk rational people mistaking it for reality. I've heard at least two people who believed "Conclave" informed about the truth when it is reported to contain nonsense - an unknown Cardinal presenting himself to the Conclave as a Cardinal Elector when those qualified to participate have to be publicly declared by the Pope before hand and a Cardinal breaking the seal of confession - which would mean automatic and immediate excommunication if they did it and every other person in the Conclave would know that. Lord knows what's in it that I haven't read about, yet.
Here are words to live by, which come from my favorite comedy series, Corner Gas "MOVIES AREN'T REAL."
We continue to celebrate the memory of writer Jennifer Johnston who died on the 25th of February 2025. Best known for her novels including The Captains and the Kings, How Many Miles to Babylon?, Shadows On Our Skin (which was Booker shortlisted in 1977) and The Old Jest (which took the Whitbread Book Award in 1979), Jennifer was also a prodigious playwright.
Tonight Drama on One presents, Old Men Are Jealous by Jennifer Johnston - A reimagining of WB Yates's, Deirdre of the Sorrows
Eileen Colgan played the old woman
King was played by Ger Carey
Dee was Roxanna Níc Liam
Laurence Kinlan played Nick
The Dramaturg was Jesper Bergman
Sound Supervision was by Damien Chanel, and
the broadcast coordinator was Margaret Hayes.
Old men are jealous by Jennifer Johnston was produced by Kevin Reynolds
Old men are jealous was a commissioned response to WB Yates's, Deirdre of the Sorrows
The late Jennifer Johnston, gave the announcements to her play.
THE ADMIRABLE RMJ who is more qualified than I am to have an opinion on the topic has a critique of Jeffrey Pullum's video on the passive. It's certainly worth reading.
I still agree with the fuller arguments that Pullum made. Here's a post to what will play as a play list if you follow it up. It takes a few of the short videos to get to the heart of his argument.
who will be elected to replace Good Pope Francis but I doubt it will be the candidate I'm seeing pushed all over the trad-cath web, Robert Sarah, who has been rumored to aspire to be Pope Pius XIII. For one thing he's almost eighty, for another he was clearly an enemy of Francis and, indeed, of the entire last sixty years of modern Catholicism. I can't think of anything the Cardinal Electors could do that would more damage not only what Francis has accomplished but, in fact, every Pope since Pius XII. As I mentioned here the other day the real hard-core trad-caths think Pius' changes such as having the Epistle and Gospel read in a language the congregation could understand, who knows if someone as wacky as Sarah would try to go back even farther than that.
As I said the largely multi-millionaire-billionaire financed "trad-catholic" LARPing cult* will almost certainly either mount or force a schism between those who believe the Catholic Church is a Christian Church and those who don't have much need for Jesus other than the name and title and holy pictures and statues. If someone like Sarah became Pope those who take Jesus seriously would have no home in the Church.
I've read that the millionaire-billionaires have had hired hacks digging up dirt and rumors on alternative candidates and there are at least several of those who will be in the Conclave who would carry that into the meetings. They dug it up on Francis even as he was Pope, even some of those who he either appointed or kept in offices, Sarah's infamous book which he lied about Benedict XVI co-authoring was part of that kind of stuff. The late and scandal tainted George Pell anonymously during his life and explicitly after his death was another such prominent vilifier of Francis. He was often named as an alternative to Sarah in the dreams of the trad-caths, he definitely wanted to turn back to some of the worst of the pre-Vatican II church.
I would guess that by this time next week we will know who they've given us and within six months we'll have a pretty good idea of what they've given us. Till then, it's going to be a bumpy ride no matter who comes out a Pope and not a Cardinal.
* Every time I see a young Woman or Girl wearing a mantilla at mass (a good sign of someone trad-cath LARPing) I remember when, before they relaxed the rule about Women having their head covered in the 1960s the ones who wore the longest mantillas often had the shortest mini-skirts on. I'd forgotten that but it must have made an impression on me at the time. I should talk to some of them because I'd really like to know what they imagine they're getting out of it. Especially those whose families aren't affluent, I know what the affluent hope to get out of it.
Update: I forgot, they changed the rules so it will be a couple of weeks before we have a new Pope. The Conclave won't even have begun by a week from now, at least I think that's true.
HERE I AGREE WITH attorney Dave Aronberg in my extreme dislike of Sarah Palin and everything she stands for - or rather sinks to - while I think he, like the conventional lawyer's POV, entirely misses the real significance of her second loss in her lawsuit against the New York Times.
First I'll give him his say:
I analyze this differently, it's Sarah Palin getting bitten by a Supreme Court ruling and media practice that no side has benefited more from than her Republican-fascism and, especially Trumpism. If the Sullivan decision had been a loss for the NYT and the instruction was that they pay a nominal fine and court costs and issue a retraction the entire sixty years of Republican-fascist ascendancy through media lies about Democrats would never have happened. She and Trump and a series of the worst politicians in the subsequent decades would never have had political careers and the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts would likely never have been appointed to the Court. In no area is the legal profession as this one exposed as being supremely superficial and wrong.
Most consequential to our situation today, if the Sullivan Decision had never been issued, the New York Times would not have so freely slandered Hillary Clinton, they would not have issued lies about her immediately before the 2016 election, piling on with the Republican-fascist enabling and grotesquely sanctimonious James Comey to sway the election to objectively the worst president in American history, appointing the worst Supreme Court since at least the Taney Court of the 1850s.
If the Sullivan Decision and the line of those decisions building on it, Donald Trump would probably never have had a political career, he may have ended up sued into the flames of hell by those he slandered and libeled, including in a paid opinion piece published by the NYT as it published the original factually deficient ad that led to that decision.
Lawyers are not, it turns out, deep thinkers. Their ability to miss the ultimate consequences of their own profession's actions for the immediate benefits strikes me as more and more important. It extends to the senior ranks of the profession in the judges and, especially the "justices."
I'D RECOMMEND LISTENING to all six as a bare minimum. Then maybe we can have a brawl over it. I'd say easily 9 out of 10 times when someone pulls the old "passive" on someone they don't even know what passive mood is.
Update: I'm surprised you didn't catch my mistake, I meant "voice" not "mood". I guess I should have taken more than a minute to respond to the criticism. Actually, that's a lie, I'm not surprised.
Our "unique constitutional system" produced Trump and permitted him to not only misrule once THEN MOUNT AN INSURRECTION TO KEEP POWER ILLEGALLY, it let him off and permitted him to do it again . The American "free press" invented the monster and promoted him politically TWICE as it sandbagged the most competent president of my lifetime, Joe Biden. Without addressing that and, frankly, the disaster of allowing the Supreme Court to re-write the Constitution (such as the 14h Amendment) without any means of recourse, we're assuring that the world will be right if they judge the United States to be unreliable and that they have to treat us more like Putin's Russia than a reliable democracy.
Everything he's done, including crimes of the most serious potential and likely factual consequence that he has gotten away with only to gain power again HAS BEEN, IN FACT, PERMITTED UNDER OUR DANGEROUS CONSTITUTION AND THE "RULE OF LAW" AS IT IS DEFINED BY THE COURTS AND, ESPECIALLY THE CORRUPT ROBERTS COURT. To merely want to go back to 2014 and do the typical American thing of refusing to learn the lessons of the most dangerous experience, relying on the failed 18th century theories embedded in the U.S. Constitution only means that our recurring though ever worsening history will continue to spiral.
