Science! Weasels! And Not Just the Human Kind!

As always, surfing the Google news Science! feed:

1.  Weasel knocks out CERN’s powerful particle accelerator. I think there’s nothing more to add.

2.Yay, Webb! NASA is testing it now. Here, they expose the lovely gold-plated mirrors.

They have to be very careful not to break the mirrors, because they are made of beryllium. As we learned from Galaxy Quest:

Computer, is there a replacement beryllium mirror on board?

Negative. No reserve beryllium mirror exists on board.

No, we have no extra beryllium mirror on board.

Set to launch sometime in 2018. I can hardly wait.

3. To sleep, perchance to dream – of eating black soldier fly larva and turnip greens as likely as not. Yes, somebody, in the name of Science!, slapped electroencephalogram headgear – tiny, no doubt terminally cute electroencephalogram headgear – on the noggin of a bearded lizard. Seems, contrary to expectations, the lizards showed evidence of the kind of sleep patterns one finds (when one has slapped enough tiny, adorable electroencephalogram headgear onto the heads of small helpless animals)  in birds and mammals.

Headgear. Neither tiny nor adorable.

Why, exactly, one would even have expectations about what one would find when one finally gets around to checking out brain activity in largish, pointy lizards is not explained. One would think that prudent restraint on expectations would be called for. But hey, nobody’s ever funded my research into brain activity, so what do I know?

4. Japan loses a space telescope. Bummer. Go, Webb!!

Have a nice weekend!

Cultural Data Point?

On the phone with a friend, who is one of those wonderful converts who know and love the faith much better than us spoiled cradles,  where she told us she is working with the faith formation/RCIA group at her parish in a big midwestern college town. One project she’s on is a series of evening discussion groups designed for the professors at the University. They have been quite successful, with enthusiastic participation by a number of faculty members who, even though pressed for time, were looking forward to doing it again, and doing even more, next year.

So, first, hurray! Thank God for sending the Church enthusiastic and educated converts! As an aside, almost, she mentioned an oddity: that those participating seemed to all come from the math, engineering and science departments.

This may just be an artifact in the Small Sample Size Theatre, but I suspect not. To recap a point made before on this blog, university faculty fall roughly into two groups: those who got their positions at least in part because they had mastered an objective discipline, and those who got their positions because they conformed to the beliefs of those already in the department, despite there being no objective way to determine if those beliefs are true.

Objective disciplines are those where one can judge success or failure by reference to something other than the feelings of others in the field. A good engineer can design buildings that don’t fall down or machines that actually work; a good chemist concocts mixtures that do what his theories say they’ll do. And so on. I or anyone else who is not an engineer or a chemist can still, at least in theory, judge whether a given engineer or chemist is any good simply by looking at the results: The Bay Bridge is still standing; Round Up does kill the weeds.

Then there are those fields which have metastasized in our modern colleges and universities, and successfully invaded  even once honorable fields like English and History, in which success is measured entirely by how well the aspirant conforms to the established orthodoxy. Thus, a sociologist may or may not actually know anything about society, but may still hope for a academic job based on how well he applies critical theory, class dynamics and historicism to the Australian aborigines or Amazonian Yanomami. His knowledge, such  as it is, is largely irrelevant: if he fails to apply the proper Hegelian/Marxist hermeneutic, he has practically no chance at an academic job in any major public or private college or university.

Job qualifications in these cases is completely self-contained and circular. You get the job by demonstrating that you think exactly like other people who have similar jobs. It is not possible that you, the job applicant, are looking at the same *external* evidence as the job holders in your field and have come up with a different theory – that you and they agree on the observed, objective thing, but disagree about how it is to be understood. Nope, historicism teaches that all understanding and all observation are contextual, are informed entirely by their historical context. Of course, the current enlightened historical context, that held by the current bodhisattvas embodied as university professors and their mewling sycophants, is conclusively presumed to be, for lack of a better word, “true”. Thus, your success or failure in getting a university teaching job depends entirely on how well you conform to the beliefs held by those already holding those jobs.

In my experience, you’ll rarely come across more insecure and twitchy folks than college professors in the humanities and soft sciences.* On some level, they know they got their jobs by conforming and so lack that confidence that comes from true competence. Maybe. An even smaller sample size here.

Back to my friend’s discussion class. If you throw a discussion together about Catholicism, are insecure people who are professionally required to think they know everything there is to know about the Church (that it is evil, reactionary and counter-revolutionary) going to come? What if their coworkers were to see them? Or are those who are accustomed to seeing their ideas and works tested out in the real world more likely to be interested? Different ideas, in themselves, threaten one group; different ideas are measured against reality by the other.

* To be fair, this no doubt has something to do with me – I tend to be not very awe-struck by fancy degrees and prestigious jobs, and want to talk about the stuff they are experts on. So, imagine you’re some junior professor and you give a talk on something I know something (however little) about. I’ll tend to walk right up, introduce myself and start right in as if I’m an actual human being just like the prof. So perhaps I’m totally wrong about professorial insecurity, I’m just perceived as rude and their (generally snide) reactions do not express a need to establish pecking order. I don’t think that’s it,. though.

Earth Day: A History of Violins

Musing on this most holy of days:

1. People like a tidy planet. People like critters and trees, free-flowing rivers and streams, dolphin-filled seas and clear, starlit skies. Right after we’ve taken care of feeding, clothing and housing ourselves and fending off barbarian murderers, we humans tend – all evidence points to this, just look around – to tidy up, set areas aside and otherwise keep the planet in a pleasing state. This is not speculation – Earth Day itself is a result of this basic desire for a nice place to live.

Even strip miners, lumberjacks and petroleum engineers generally want their little corner of the planet to be nice, and so can understand other’s desire for a nice place to live, too. Often – you’ll be flabbergasted to hear this – they can be reasoned with. We do ask them to balance the desires of urban-dwelling iPhone-using Prius-driving sophisticates for the raw materials and cheap energy that make their low-fat latte, light foam lifestyles possible with their desire for nothing bad to ever happen to anything in Nature.

Unless of course the Bad Thing is the Circle of Life manifesting itself as baby caribou paralyzed by terror being disemboweled alive by wolves – something like that, it’s not often clear. And policies that will condemn Africans, say, to death by malaria or permanent energy-starved poverty are OK to our current betters in the name of saving the planet.  So clarity isn’t a strong suit of Earth Day participants in general.

So let us remember the earth, this day, a tiny jewel in the firmament, as meaningless as the life of a single amoeba, as pointless as the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, as doomed as the red giant which will eventually consume it – except for the souls of the billions of people who have lived, do live, and will live upon it. Long may its beauty and utility reign!

2. The chief form celebrating Earth Day takes is having members of a hemp-vested priesthood lead the faithful in Lamentations, and to entreat their collective omphalos for progressively  more dire prophecies of the Apocalypse.  Here are the predictions made at the 1st Earth Day back in 1970, via the Oracle Wikipedia:

• Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for the first Earth Day, wrote, “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, stated, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, stated, “… by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve to death.
• Life Magazine wrote, “… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
• Ecologist Kenneth Watt stated, “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Watt also stated, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil.”

In accordance with this now-hoary tradition, we should expect sincere and possibly sweaty (1) panic mongers, knuckles white, to make any number of equally wrong and stupid predictions this year as well. Ice sheets melting, deserts spreading, sea levels rising, dogs and cats living together – that sort of thing.

The anti-Cassandra effect is in full force: these people will be believed no matter how wrong they have shown themselves to be in the past. No evidence to the contrary will ever sway those for whom the destruction of earth at human hands is their deepest religious belief, nor will any prediction of doom be judged too preposterous to promote as gospel.

3. Our youngest son is learning to play the violin. He recently got large enough to use a full-size violin. He is borrowing a violin I gave to his older sister back when she played. This violin I got from my father, who in turn got it from his father – the instrument is about 125 years old, a run of the mill fiddle made in France back when you could sell violins to lots of people.

When I had it worked on by John Jordan years ago, he told my daughter to never take it out of the country, because US Customs might not let her bring it back in. The tailpiece is made of tortoise shell – common enough a century ago, but trafficking in (possibly) protected species parts today. John had horror stories.

So now our diligent federal employees are protecting us and our French tortoise friends from the terror of little girls playing their great grandfather’s old violins. In the name of protecting the planet. Reminds me of the Gibson Guitars wood scandal of a few years back. Not that anything done to save Gaia from evil, evil humans could ever be motivated by anything other than unalloyed virtue…

4.  Just imagine how much more beautiful this scene was before a bunch of French villagers mucked it up with their quaint little farms and village:

Or not. Maritain pointed out the beauty inherent in proper human activity – that, as beautiful as nature is in itself, adding beautiful works of man improves it. He used the example of a French farm – that French farmers took some care that their farms be beautiful. A natural scene was improved by adding an attractive French farm or village to it. (2)

To call nature “Unspoiled”, when that term is applied to part of the natural world merely lacking any evidence of the presence of humanity, is blasphemy.

We’re not “destroying the planet” when we turn it to our uses. Farms and cities and indeed all works that man makes in the course of being human are, in themselves, improvements and fulfillments of nature. Of course, we can do it badly, making ugly or ill-conceived things. But our very human drive as makers is part of our Nature, and part of our being the image of God, and thus exercising it glorifies and completes the natural world. This is what the natural world is for: to be the home to Man and our works. That is its purpose and glory .

 

1. Or is that sweaty and possibly sincere?
2. He was contrasting French farms with American farms, where the farmers often left huge piles of junk and trash right out in the open. He said he’d never seen such a thing growing up in France. (Wish I could remember where I read this – must be close to 30 years ago.)

Today’s Questionable Sartorial Choice

This morning, just prior to 6:00 A.M., fumbling around in the closet for a shirt. Came across an old company shirt, with an old logo for our flagship product on it. What the heck, I thought – it’s the classic ‘Raiders’ look – silver and black – much prized among my coworkers back in the day, maybe 15 years ago, when this shirt was new. Here’s a picture:

A bit out of focus – it looks cooler in person. 

Was taking my lunch hour walk before it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to be a tiny walking billboard. Think I may retire this shirt until after the elections, maybe until after the next 4-8 years, depending. Maybe forever.

Science! Um…

Here we have an article about the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Seems we – you know, that we – now know that dinosaurs were petering out for 40 million years before the asteroid/comet wiped them out.

There are a couple of problems with this article and the study it is based on. The first is just silly:

Around 66 million years ago, the sky fell on the dinosaurs’ heads. An asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, causing cataclysmic climate changes that marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and killed off some three-quarters of animal species.

Climate change? The way the sentence is structured, one can read it as saying that climate change killed off the dinosaurs. Really? This reminds me of a quip a friend once made, when a report came out saying the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11 was due to substandard steel used in the buildings. He opined that a couple fully-fueled airliners crashing into them also had something to do with it.

Let’s recap that fateful day 66 million years ago: A significant percentage of dinosaurs were pulverized on impact (1); many were crushed or otherwise killed by the debris and shock waves; another chunk were asphyxiated as dust filled the air; another bunch buried in ash; more crushed and drowned by tsunamis; the earthquakes that result from having a large mass smash into the earth’s crust took out some more. THEN many starved as the dust high in the atmosphere killed off what was left of their food supplies. Some tiny percentage that made it through all this then had to deal with a world in which the sun was blotted out for nobody knows how long, trying to find food in a dark and growing cold.

Some creatures, like Coelacanths, who happen to live in caves deep in the ocean, survived. Others were able to travel around easily – birds, say – and could expand the range in which they could look for food. But larger creatures would need to be very, very lucky to avoid all the things that would kill them and still find enough food to not starve. Goodbye all the classic dinosaurs we loved as kids (those that had not died off before the asteroid, that is).

After all this, the post asteroid impact climate was different than the pre-impact climate, because few things can change your climate like a giant chunk of rock hitting your planet at high speeds. Saying the climate killed them is a little like saying blood loss killed somebody who was shot by a murderer – kind of missing the point, even if not entirely untrue.

The second problem is more subtle and ubiquitous if not any less damaging to modern science properly understood. Here’s the abstract from the paper that occasioned the article in the Atlantic linked above:

Whether dinosaurs were in a long-term decline or whether they were reigning strong right up to their final disappearance at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 Mya has been debated for decades with no clear resolution. The dispute has continued unresolved because of a lack of statistical rigor and appropriate evolutionary framework. Here, for the first time to our knowledge, we apply a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to model the evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction through time in Mesozoic dinosaurs, properly taking account of previously ignored statistical violations. We find overwhelming support for a long-term decline across all dinosaurs and within all three dinosaurian subclades (Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda), where speciation rate slowed down through time and was ultimately exceeded by extinction rate tens of millions of years before the K-Pg boundary. The only exceptions to this general pattern are the morphologically specialized herbivores, the Hadrosauriformes and Ceratopsidae, which show rapid species proliferations throughout the Late Cretaceous instead. Our results highlight that, despite some heterogeneity in speciation dynamics, dinosaurs showed a marked reduction in their ability to replace extinct species with new ones, making them vulnerable to extinction and unable to respond quickly to and recover from the final catastrophic event.

(Full study behind a paywall, darn it!)

The problem in its most general form: you don’t get more certain results by applying statistical analysis to uncertain, speculative data (2). The most well know and egregious example would be the Drake Equation, which purports to tell us something about how common intelligent life is in the Universe, when we have no data to support any of the values used in the equation itself. In other words, *if* we know how often life arises under the right conditions (we don’t) and what those conditions are (we don’t) and how common those conditions are (we don’t) and on and on, *then* we can apply a little math and – voila! – we commit a Sagan and start talking about a universe just crawling with inevitable, mathematically demonstrated intelligent aliens.

So, before we head down this bunny trail, let’s recap what we know about dinosaurs. Not what we speculate, however reasonably, but what we know in any demonstrable sense.

One’s Personal Sample Population & Stuff

1. Long liked the assertion – can’t recall who asserted it – that the only generalizations you can make about mankind should be those that hold for you and your friends, for the obvious logical reason that you and your friends are just a particular sample of People In General: My friends and I are bloodthirsty killers; my friends and I are destroying the planet; my friends and I are gullible rubes. Then, if you don’t like how that sounds, you must come up with what it is about you and your friends that makes you all so special. Which, if you’re the least bit self-aware, ought to make you really, really uncomfortable. Not that it can’t be done, but the exercise would expose, one fervently hopes, naked tribalism for what it is.

This is often rare. People are pretty dense and clueless, after all.

2. My own direct, personal sample of Humanity consists of a few hundred people, a huge chunk of whom are blue collar workers and their spouses and kids (almost everybody I knew before I went to college) or low to mid-level professionals of some sort (almost everybody I’ve met since). Sprinkled here and there are some top-level professionals (I’m related by marriage to a hedge fund manager, for example, and do know a couple CEOs of non-trivial corporations). All of these folks live or lived in the 2nd half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st.

Then there are the memorable outliers. I’ve know a few college professors, a mixed group for sure; a number of semi-elite (as in: college-level) athletes; several crazy artists and a few sane ones; people with various disabilities physical and mental; all flavors of orientations (at least of which I am aware – and I frankly don’t need to be aware of any more  at this point at this time); some people with chemical dependencies of one kind or another sufficient to destroy them and those they love. Races and ethnicities, yep, got those pretty well covered. No Inuit that I can think of, but that’s the level of detail we’re talking about.

Yet this is an insanely narrow, hardly representative sample of Humanity, considering that billions of us have lived for half a million years over millions of square miles of the planet, under a bewildering variety of conditions both social and physical. I’d have to be reckless, crazy reckless, I tell you! to make any generalizations at all about People from such a laughably limited collection as my own sample.

Unless… Unless there’s something common to humans across time and space and social conditions, something perceptible and understandable by a lowly individual trapped in his own personal data set, as it were.

One reason to suspect that this is so (1) is all the people one meets through reading. Including them, my sample now spans millennia and continents, cultures long dead and still going, people unimaginably poor and unimaginably rich, incomprehensibly violent and stunningly passive, and a dozen other extremes as well.

While there’s often things that are shocking about true strangers – strangers to our time and culture – when we first meet them, the underlying impression is always one of recognition and familiarity. People are people, as the philosophers in Depeche Mode so astutely put it. An eskimo, bushman or Mongolian is first and foremost clearly a human being, even if he’s chewing whale blubber or poison-darting an elephant or throwing down the boodog when we first encounter him in person or in print, or, now days, in pictures and video.

3. No real point here. I am happy to report that I generally really like people. That I mostly like the people I meet leads me to imagine, however unjustifiable on technical grounds, that I’d mostly like the people I haven’t met, too. One thing that’s helped a lot in this regard is that I’ve now raised a batch of children, which makes it easy to see that adults are just children who have grown up through no fault of their own. Their interests and emotions are largely the same as any 2-year olds, however much wrapped in and disguised by grown-up trappings.

This is comforting. What appears to be evil intent is, more often than not, just a kid who wants a cookie or needs a nap. Heck, I could use a cookie and a nap right about now myself.

4. This break from reading education history has, lately, rekindled(2) my reading jones.  Stayed up past midnight finishing off John C. Wright’s Somewhither. It was good. I may need to reread it in order to give it a worthy review. I’ve got 3-4 more fun books to read in the queue, which will also require reviews.

Maybe I’ll get back to the schooling stuff once summer rolls around.

1. in addition to the basic Aristotelian reason that there’s something that allows us to correctly identify them all as ‘people’ in the first place.
2. Not to mention reKindled. Ha.

Circle of Life – in the Kitchen

1. On the bright side: turns out our 10 month old cat is a tremendous mouser. I would not like to be a small animal anywhere near him.

The late mouse looked a lot like this, only deader. And not perched on a nice piece of wood in the Great Outdoors, where he would have a meet and just life expectancy measured in weeks, but IN MY KITCHEN!!!

On the dark side: he’s a house cat. Meaning, we have (or had, one fervently hopes against all experience and wisdom) mice. In our kitchen. In the pantry.

Back on the bright side, I was able to give a still slightly twitching mouse to the cornsnake last night – win win! Back on the dark side, that meant that I couldn’t give the snake this morning’s even more alive mouse that Razor (that’s the cat’s name – prescient, it seems) was playing with when I got up.

And on the darkest side: I’ve now got to employ the full anti-mouse protocol, which will involve a lot of crawling around, dragging out and inspecting stuff, throwing stuff away, cleaning up droppings, etc.

Which is no fun.

This is a happy occasion!

2. Our house was built 70 or so years ago in what was then walnut groves. After the fashion of home builders, the walnut trees that were not in the way were left as is. When we looked at the house 20 years ago, there were 4 trees – one in the front, 3 in the back. One of the back trees was worrisomely close to the house and had damage at the base, so we took it out before we moved in.

Two days ago, we had the tree in the front removed. It had begun to look less and less healthy in recent years. It had a huge cavity in its base – used to have a beehive in there,  until a skunk ate it a few years ago – and leaned toward the house. Toward the room where my wife and I sleep. Soooo, we had it taken out.

I was able to find a local urban wood guy, who collects wood from trees taken down in cities and towns and mills them into something useful. I’m to get back a few boards. I’m thinking maybe I’ll make a predieu, unless he gives me enough to make something larger.

The circle of life for a big tree – and this sucker would have crushed the house had it fallen on it – is also a circle of life moment for the critters that live in it. This includes what might have been some voles living among the gaps and roots – good riddance, they were tearing up the yard. The squirrels, I trust, just moved to the other trees. But, sadly, this morning I noticed a piece of a branch, neatly sawn, sitting on a pile of bricks near the house. It was largely hollow. In it I saw a nest with a number of tiny dead birds in it, just reaching the point where their real feathers were coming in.

Did the workers notice the nest, carefully cut the limb and place it there hoping the parent birds would return? I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s comforting, on some level, to think that men who cut trees could be soft-hearted enough to do that.

But mom and dad bird did not return. I will be thinking of the little birds as I plant stuff in the yard. Circle of life.

 

Book Review: Lord of the World

Short n sweet: Read this book. It’s a quick read. If you’re Catholic, it will stir you in some ways (and if you’re familiar with the old liturgy, even more so) and dismay you in others. If you’re not Catholic, it will give you a glimpse into how the Church thinks even if, as is most likely and is the attitude of most of the people in the book, you end up thinking it crazy.

It is not for nothing that both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis admire this book. It is hard not to think of Benedict when reading about the Pope John of the first half – ancient, calm, clear, saintly and unbending on those things that cannot bend. Probably Francis wants that too, it’s just clearer with Benedict, who happens to look the part.

Lord of the World was written by Robert Hugh Benson in 1907 as a response (or so Wikipedia says) to the utopias of H.G. Wells.  Seems Benson, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury who ordained him an Anglican priest and who nonetheless converted to Catholicism and became a Catholic priest, didn’t think that Roddenberry’s – oops, Wells’ – world of eugenics, euthanasia, atheism, communism and marriage as an easily voided contract would ultimately make people happy. Go figure.

The main speculative point upon which the story hangs and derives much of its power is the assumption that it all works – that, by eschewing God, family, individual rights and life itself in favor of a great brotherhood of Man in which individuals are subsumed as cells in a body, that the world obtains prosperity, peace and a happiness that, while not exceeding understanding, is pretty darn good. Benson’s point is that it is not in the failures of a materialist Communist utopia that the real evil lies, but in its successes. He was free to imagine this, as it had not been tried and found murderous and miserable – yet, in 1907.

It is always so nice to read English authors from the turn of the last century. Their command of English and elegance of expression is so often a pleasure, even when, as is the case with Wells, it’s snake oil they are selling. Benson doesn’t disappoint – it is often a beautiful book to read. One other impressive thing he does is write about the interior, spiritual lives of his characters, often at some length, describing the strictly indescribable without derailing the story.

Fr. Percy Franklin is a young priest in London in something like the 1990’s – 80+ years after the date the book was written. Fr. Franklin is intelligent, reverent and striking looking – his hair is completely white even though he’s ‘not more than 35’ years old. His duties are to write a daily report to his superior, the Cardinal-Protector of England in Rome. Things have gotten bad enough, and Church shrunken small enough, that the Pope has appointed Cardinal-Protectors to all the major areas of the globe. Their field agents are sharp-eyed and intelligent priests such as Fr. Franklin.

Oliver Brand is a member of the British government representing Croydon. As a charming, attractive and articulate man, he serves by giving speeches that promote the government’s positions while mocking his opponents into silence. He’s very good at it, and enjoys and is proud of his work. He lives with Mabel, his young and beautiful wife, and his mother in a house just outside London.

The story is told largely through the adventures, after a brief encounter, of Fr. Percy, Oliver  and Mabel as the world unwinds around them. The world has fallen to communism, materialism, atheism and a general contempt for all things Christian. The Americas form one sphere or empire, Europe and Africa another, and the East a third. Peace and prosperity reign, with marvels such as high-speed trains and highways to everywhere and volors, which sound like Zeppelin/LMH-1 airships, by which easy and convenient world travel is possible.  Prisons have been reformed to be more humane, the death penalty forbidden, and euthanasia stations established so no one need suffer either physically or psychologically.

In a desperate move, Rome negotiated the surrender of almost all local church property in exchange for the Pope’s sovereignty over Rome itself. Pope John then rejects most of the new technology in favor of a renewed search for holiness. Catholics from around the world move to Rome and its suburbs in order to be near the last bastion of Catholicism in the world and share in its life. The descendents of the royal families of Europe, laid low by the new governments, regain their Catholicism as they lose their temporal powers – they know themselves to be kings by the grace of God, and having lost their temporal kingdoms does not change that. Powerless earthly royalty surrounds Rome.

In defiance of the world, the Pope reestablishes capital punishment, on the grounds that, while life is sacred, it is not the most important thing, and those more important things can be defended unto death. Rome is a smelly anarchy – except it isn’t. It is a nursery of holiness.

When the story opens, England and all of Europe are anxiously awaiting news from the East. No wars have broken out in many decades, but perceptive observers know that, once the East has measured its own strength, that Europe could not hope to stand against it. Their only hope is that, somehow, the East might restrain itself or be restrained.

As tensions in the West mount over the threat of the East, an amazing figure appears from out of America – the mysterious Julian Felsenburgh. (1) Felsenburgh stops war and the rumors of war by sheer strength of personality, it seems. He goes East, gives speeches and holds meetings to each in his own language, and the impossible is achieved: peace not only among the three Great Powers, but among the ancient rivals of the East.

Spoilers after the break. Stop here if you have not read the book, and go read it!

1. Had to run that through an anagram generator, as Julian Felsenburgh is hardly a name, let alone an American name, one would readily come up with. Best so far: SHEEN FULL ABJURING. Yep, I bet Archbishop Fulton would be throwing down quite some full abjuring at the Antichrist!

 

Back From Atlanta

1. Business trip, to Buckhead, north side of town. Did get a few hours to wander around, walked to the Christ the King Cathedral:

Very lovely. Built in 1939. The 1930’s Art Deco influence on French Gothic is a bit curious in places, but not unlovely. Contrast the very traditional and beautiful stained glass:

The Cathedral has an adoration chapel right off the sacristy – a very small room. There were 6 or 8 people there at 7:00 on a weeknight, almost packing the place. I could barely find a place to kneel on the floor and not completely block the door. But that is lovely, too! That the diocese would provide a chapel and that people would fill it is a very good thing.

2. Reading Lord of the World, a 1907 Sci Fi dystopia reportedly loved by both Benedict and Francis. 80% through, and had to go to work this morning right as it reached a terrible cliff-hanger! Will finish tonight and, time permitting, review tomorrow.

The two best things about business trips: sometimes you get to walk around in interesting places, and you get reading time.

 

 

 

Venn-ever You’re Ready to Get Started & Other Ephemera

Saw someplace a Venn diagram showing the overlap between people who hold that A: businesses are insatiably greedy and will do whatever makes them the most money, and B: businesses promote less qualified men and oppress qualified women as a result of institutional misogyny. I have generalized the point being made below:

So, here’s the game: list any two positions which are logically incompatible but are held simultaneously by the same people. Then weep as you contemplate the above diagram.

I’ll start:

A: Business control the government – it’s bought and paid for;

B: Businesses move out of America to evade paying taxes.

Comments: So, if business owns the government, wouldn’t it make more sense for Richy McRichperson to simply tell his minions to change the tax laws? This disconnect also leads to the spectacle of Presidents and candidates accusing businesses of the sin of doing what the laws incent them to do as if the government was somehow not responsible for writing those laws in the first place.

Next:

A: I am Woman, hear me roar!

B: Asking women to testify in campus rape hearings would be too retraumatizing! They have suffered enough!

Maybe one more, in case I’m not offending enough people:

A: Gender is a social construct.

B. If my little boy likes dolls, I’m duty bound to get him a sex change operation and only an unenlightened meanie would object.

You?

On a related topic, here in California, politicians and activists are going to dislocate their shoulders if they don’t ease up on patting themselves on the back for two ‘achievements’: the statewide $15/hr minimum wage, and the San Francisco mandatory 6 weeks of paid parental leave for both men and women. Only a really mean Neanderthal (hot off conking his future mate on the head and dragging her to his cave, no doubt) would be so insensitive to point out what this logically motivates businesses to do:

1. Stop hiring people for jobs that aren’t worth more than $15/hour to me, the business owner. Since there’s also a ton of overhead involved in hiring anybody, getting those jobs done has got to be worth considerably more than $15/hour to me, the business owner, before I’ll risk hiring.
2. If I’m doing business in San Francisco, I’ve got to not only factor in all of the above, bit add the very real possibility that, if I hire a young person of reproductive age, I might also have to figure he or she is going to cost me 12% more (that’s 6 weeks out of a typical 50 week work year) than someone I’m sure won’t be taking that leave, even if I can miraculously get by for 6 weeks without having to hire a temp or replacement.

What San Francisco will end up with is nothing but big businesses – you know, those evil, selfish dudes who make those obscene profits from which they can pay for these political whims. Smaller, less profitable (less greedy, right?) companies will be forced to leave.

All in all, the message to businesses is clear: Stay out of California. If you must be there, keep as much of your operations out of the state as possible. If you must be in San Francisco, keep your operations to a minimum, and only hire potentially fertile people if you’re one of those evil companies Sanders wants to take over.

That all this is perfectly clear, predictable and logical only means that more people will jump into the orange area of the above graph, where they will not have to think about it. And then, they’ll blame mean businesses when it doesn’t work.