On this day:
1099
The First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem begins.
1494
Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divides the New World between the two countries.
1892
Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he would lose the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
1893
Mohandas Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience.
1899
American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas
1944
World War II: Battle of Normandy – At Abbey Ardennes members of the SS Division Hitlerjugend massacre 23 Canadian prisoners of war.
1944
World War II: The steamer Danae carrying 350 Cretan Jews and 250 Cretan partisans is sunk without survivors off the shore of Santorini.
1971
The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment.
***
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has three terms, not one, and only the last has to do with income – though no Founding Father, and certainly not the Virginians, nor for that matter any political economist at the time, predicted the enormous fruit in economic growth from primary liberalism. Life and liberty reject supervising human masters.--mccloskey
***
The impact of the Iran War on gas prices in the U.S. is said to threaten to move elections. How is that different from years of policies designed to substitute unconventional energy for fossil fuels, which have led to a sharp increase in costs as well? Both are attacks on national wealth and the well-being of ordinary people.
***
A new report showing that real hourly wages have risen by 3% since 2019 while profits have risen by 50% has some worried “about the political stability of an economy in which ever more output flows toward shareholders instead of employees.”
Old rhetoric. Nothing prevents employees from being shareowners. More than half of American workers already own corporate shares through their retirement plans. Nor could it be easier.
***
In 'Under the Skin', a sci-fi movie starring Scarlett Johansson, an alien creature, "the Female," takes on human form and hunts the streets of Scotland, looking for men.
Many scenes were unscripted, filmed with hidden cameras, including those at the nightclub, the shopping center, and those in which the Female picks up men in her van. The crew purpose-built their own cameras to pull this off, hiding eight cameras in the Female's van that could accurately capture the reactions and responses of both her and her prey. The unsuspecting men were informed later that they had been filmed and gave permission for their scenes to be included in the movie's final cut.
'Under the Skin' is truly an exploration of the human condition, brought to the fore by the fact that Johansson was interacting with real people, unaware they were being filmed. --from CBR
Sunday/Manna
In today's gospel, Christ hammers away at His Bread of Life metaphor; He just will not give it up.
Today is the continuation of the manna/"bread of heaven" writings, starting with the very difficult:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;..."
This is very upsetting and must have caused a crisis among those listening. It is, in retrospect, pointed to as support for communion and the organization of the Church. But the audience did not know that at the time. What could they have thought? "The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'”
And Christ gets more specific, more graphic:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day."
This is grisly stuff. Isolated, it sounds very much like a reference to the ancient human sacrifice period among the early Jews.
It is.
In juxtaposing the manna from heaven and the Bread of Life, Christ is distinguishing the material from the immaterial, the physical from the spiritual, in the debate that has repeated itself since recorded time. He is saying that the materialists have a firm grasp of one appendage of the elephant of life.
The fatal one.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has three terms, not one, and only the last has to do with income – though no Founding Father, and certainly not the Virginians, nor for that matter any political economist at the time, predicted the enormous fruit in economic growth from primary liberalism. Life and liberty reject supervising human masters.--mccloskey
***
The impact of the Iran War on gas prices in the U.S. is said to threaten to move elections. How is that different from years of policies designed to substitute unconventional energy for fossil fuels, which have led to a sharp increase in costs as well? Both are attacks on national wealth and the well-being of ordinary people.
***
A new report showing that real hourly wages have risen by 3% since 2019 while profits have risen by 50% has some worried “about the political stability of an economy in which ever more output flows toward shareholders instead of employees.”
Old rhetoric. Nothing prevents employees from being shareowners. More than half of American workers already own corporate shares through their retirement plans. Nor could it be easier.
***
In 'Under the Skin', a sci-fi movie starring Scarlett Johansson, an alien creature, "the Female," takes on human form and hunts the streets of Scotland, looking for men.
Many scenes were unscripted, filmed with hidden cameras, including those at the nightclub, the shopping center, and those in which the Female picks up men in her van. The crew purpose-built their own cameras to pull this off, hiding eight cameras in the Female's van that could accurately capture the reactions and responses of both her and her prey. The unsuspecting men were informed later that they had been filmed and gave permission for their scenes to be included in the movie's final cut.
'Under the Skin' is truly an exploration of the human condition, brought to the fore by the fact that Johansson was interacting with real people, unaware they were being filmed. --from CBR
***
Sunday/Manna
In today's gospel, Christ hammers away at His Bread of Life metaphor; He just will not give it up.
Today is the continuation of the manna/"bread of heaven" writings, starting with the very difficult:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;..."
This is very upsetting and must have caused a crisis among those listening. It is, in retrospect, pointed to as support for communion and the organization of the Church. But the audience did not know that at the time. What could they have thought? "The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'”
And Christ gets more specific, more graphic:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day."
This is grisly stuff. Isolated, it sounds very much like a reference to the ancient human sacrifice period among the early Jews.
It is.
In juxtaposing the manna from heaven and the Bread of Life, Christ is distinguishing the material from the immaterial, the physical from the spiritual, in the debate that has repeated itself since recorded time. He is saying that the materialists have a firm grasp of one appendage of the elephant of life.
The fatal one.
