Sunday/Amateurs

On this day:
1533
Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1533
Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1918
Ukraine declares independence from Bolshevik Russia.
1971
Charles Manson and three female “Family” members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.
1981
Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong, is sentenced to death.
1993
Five people are shot outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia resulting in two murders.
1995
The Norwegian Rocket Incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
2011
Egyptian Revolution of 2011 begins in Egypt, with a series of street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes, and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout other cities in Egypt.

***

Long-run political policies are almost a contradiction in terms in societies where politicians are elected in the short run.--sowell

***

Carney argues that the decline in Europe has been forced upon it by the U.S. rather than being passively accepted. But have the Americans just filled the gap, trying to help?

A quick rebuttal to Carney's assessment of the West's recent past and unknowable future by Magnus:

The parallel between Havel’s moral argument for dissent under conditions of coercion in a totalitarian communist system makes for good oratory. But it offers a poor, and deeply misguided, illustration of our lives under the old liberal rules-based order, and cannot provide a guide for how we must now adapt. Personal and moral bravery in 1970s Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe isn’t quite the same as trying to wrestle military, technocratic and economic statecraft back from an over-reliance on the United States, which we all thought was a good idea for over seven decades.

***

The non-argument over 'tax the rich' is not about the money of the wealthy; it is about the power and the corruption of the politician and bureaucrats.

***

Sunday/Amateurs

In today's gospel, Christ begins to collect his disciples. They are Galileans--local men whose district was associated with a radical political sect--and fishermen. And this latter group will lead a revolution in human social and religious thought. To develop a universal rethinking of mankind, these are very parochial messengers.

This is not meant as a diversity joke, but this is a very limited group of evangelists in an ethnic community that will carry Christ's word across languages, races, and cultures. And the subsets of people most obviously absent are the intellectuals, the civic, and the religious leaders.

The notion that they were the most needful does not answer the other side of their conversion, the evangelical side, as the intellectuals and successful would presumably be the most persuasive.

It's like having the world changed by a bunch of Cajuns.