Sunday/A Life and a Death

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the proleptic Julian calendar, the current era in the Maya Long Count Calendar started.
1522
The Victoria, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
1620
The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.
1847
Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
1901
Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
1949
A former sharpshooter in World War II, Howard Unruh kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger to become the first U.S. single-episode mass murderer.
1966
In Cape Town, South Africa, the architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death during a parliamentary meeting.
1972
Munich Massacre: 9 Israel athletes taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games by the Palestinian “Black September” terrorist group died (as did a German policeman) at the hands of the kidnappers during a failed rescue attempt. 2 other Israeli athletes are slain in the initial attack the previous day.
1991
The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
1997
Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, takes place in London. Over a million people lined the streets, and 2.5 billion watched around the world on television.

***

"Tactical nukes are a gateway drug to Armageddon"--Andreas Kluth

***

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift

***

Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

***

Bartiromo made $70 million in her tenure at Fox News, according to court documents

***

In the gambling-ridden sports world, the Michigan game ending certainly did nothing for the game's credibility.

***

No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.
The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into orbit.

***

 
Sunday/A Life and a Death

The author, Wendell Berry, has died. His writings are part of an American rural tradition that emphasizes humanity's foundational elements: nature, the land, family, and religion. American man without car chases. What follows is a very tender eulogy from a local writer.

"We have been told that we live in a time after democracy, that liberalism has failed, the American constitutional order is lost, and all that remains is picking a side in an agonistic struggle between factions that lust after the power to govern our discordant nation. The philosopher that many, particularly on the right, turn to in order to anchor their account of our decline is the late 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche.

But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.

But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”

That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life.

Among the many words that Berry wrote, these words that close his New York Times obituary strike me as summarizing his work perfectly: “You know, if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left,” he said in 2005. These words place him in the tradition of Emerson, as well Emerson’s great friend and one of Berry’s great influences, Henry David Thoreau.

These words also put him at odds with more or less the entirety of contemporary American public life, virtually all of whom (including most Christians) have little interest in the Gospels, little memory of the Declaration, and little regard for the Constitution. If you doubt that Emerson was right to warn so frequently about the dangers of the herd, or that Thoreau was right to say that so many of our neighbors live lives of “quiet desperation,” I would suggest you are simply not paying attention.

That raises the question, of course, of how one can escape the mindless herds prowling about today. How can a person live in a way not marked by that haunting Thoreauvian phrase? Can we find genuine vitality as well as beauty and goodness within the confines of our life today? Berry showed us how, and he did so in two distinct ways.

The first was his contrariness. Among his most loved poems is “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” which you can hear the man himself read in this recording done with On Being many years ago.



Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.


The contrariness Berry endorses is not “the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” The contrariness, rather, is the acted-out recognition of the ways that conformity seduces us over time, nudging us into saying things we do not mean or do not believe and to repressing the thoughts we actually do believe. Berry’s contrary farmer cares more about saying what is true than he does appeasing the desires, prejudices, and conventions of others. This contrariness is also a form of neighborly love, offered in the hope that others who see the same but say nothing would be emboldened to speak.

Several of Berry’s greatest fictional creations exemplify this commitment—Jayber Crow, the barber and protagonist in the novel bearing his name, perhaps most of all. It is also the subject of another of his poems, perhaps my favorite of all his poems, called “Do Not Be Ashamed.” Several lines in particular are worth sharing:



Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.


If you would protect the light you have made in your life, Berry warns, then you must be contrary. You must refuse to say “I am ashamed” when the herd attempts to coerce you into doing so.

But there is a further commitment of Berry’s that is significant. Berry’s three greatest novels, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter are in one sense a trilogy considering the problem and challenge of marriage. Indeed, marriage is in many ways the dominant metaphor for all of Berry’s work, as some of his own essays suggest—most notably those found in Standing by Words as well as the title essay from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

In an interview with the filmmaker Laura Dunn, he says that



We all come from divorce now. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. … That’s the way the work has to go.


He says something similar near the end of Jayber Crow, his greatest novel in my opinion. Writing near the end of his life, Jayber reflects on what he thinks hell might be, and he says it is



where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart.


Jayber’s idea of hell, incidentally, sounds very like the agonistic world that the Nietzscheans mistake for reality. If we would be saved, we would do well to heed, instead, the examples of Emerson and Berry.

The answer to the rupture of divorce is the faithfulness of marriage, a way of life that radiates outward from the lovers into fidelity to the world—the habits and virtues taught within the form of marriage are one means by which we learn to keep faith more generally. We learn something of what it means to live for the good of our neighbor, or even the good of our home place, by the ways in which marriage forces us very directly and intimately to live for the good of another. In this, Berry and his wife of 69 years, Tanya Berry, became models which we might emulate. The point of contrariness is not mere negation; it is to accept the mantle of responsibility thrust upon each of us as a condition of our life in the world. The form of his marriage to Tanya is one of the chief ways that Mr. Berry learned this responsibility, I think—or at least that is what I am led to believe by his many poems addressed to Tanya. Consider this, for example,



... yet

You have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

That other women have been

Your shadows.


In “Do Not Be Ashamed” Berry speaks of the nameless “they,” which Emerson would think of as “the herd.” They go about shining a light in search of you so that they might find you and compel you toward their way. This external light is a light, as the poem says, that will squelch the light you have made yourself. But in “Marriage” the light offered by Tanya is a gift, not a means of control or coercion. The contrariness of the mad farmer ultimately exists to serve and enliven the marriage of the mad farmer. The demands of contrariness create the circumstances that bring about life, or at least that is how I read Berry.

My favorite scene in all his fiction comes near the end of A Place on Earth. It is an uneven novel, which Berry himself knew, given that he revised it after publication and released a new edition. But its high points are the highest points in all his fiction. One such point comes near the end when the town of Port William, loosely modeled after Port Royal, learns that World War II has ended and their boys will be returning home. The town converges on the lone street running through it to celebrate, and the local purveyor of the finest moonshine materializes with the fruit of his labor. Jayber Crow, Burley Coulter, and several others enjoy that fruit thoroughly. They take turns passing the bottle—Berry remarks elsewhere that the sound of moonshine poured from a jug sounds like “good good good”—and on each pass Jayber “greets” the bottle cordially. He then embarks on a half-drunk sermon, offered in response to the whiskey’s benediction, that I think contains much of Berry’s wisdom, for his own time and for ours:



For is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?—for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?—and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?


Writing as his life came to an end, Jayber remembered the sound of that whiskey being poured from the bottle when he wrote,



I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.


Berry was a man of faith. He went through enough, as we all will, to kill him. But he lived in such a way that the sound of his life is doubtless contained in the sound I heard just now as I poured out a glass of his state’s finest export to toast the man’s life and work. And the light he made in his story not only preserved him from those who would demand his shame; it offered to us what Tanya gave to him, a light that drives all else into the shadows.


Rest in Peace, Mr. Berry, a citizen of Port William and a son of the commonwealth of Kentucky."

--Jake Meador in The Dispatch

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Danger of History

 

The defense lawyers for the most recent Trump attacker are trying to remove those people at risk during the attack from testifying because, as potential victims, they will not be objective.

There was a time in America when they would be called "witnesses."

***

A Danger of History

I feared that on a recent trip to Knossos, one of the favorite places of my youth, I might be force-fed the old truth that "you can't go home again." I still believe that if you've never seen the astonishing ancient Minoan city, you should; but if you have seen it, you probably don't need to go back. 

The modern recreation of the archaeological site is now representational. It is history at arm's length. Wooden walkways guide us, restricting the remains from our contamination and us from the rugged terrain. Thus, the ruins--and we--are protected from each other. Modern cement has filled in spaces. The grass has been cut, the areas staked out, and some glassed over. Areas have been roped off. What was once a spontaneous immersion in a historical site of profound depth and meaning is now a visit to a museum or the Stations of the Cross.  

Analysis and micro-examination of the sources and evidence of one of the great human achievements has disrupted the very interstitium of life itself. Imagination can no longer fill in to enhance the gaps.

Life and Its Absence

On this day:
1820
The Missouri Compromise is signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allows Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, but makes the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
1836
Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo – After a thirteen day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured.
1857
The Supreme Court of the United States rules in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.
1869
Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
1951
The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins.
1970
Blast at Weather Underground safe house in Greenwich Village kills three.
1975
Algiers Accord: Iran and Iraq announce a settlement of their border dispute.
1975
For the first time, ever, the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown in motion to a national TV audience by Robert J. Groden and Dick Gregory.

***

The national debt is a taxation without representation upon our future children. Put another way: It’s child abuse.--letter to the editor

***

RFK wants Dunkin' to prove its coffee is safe. That's impossible, and anyone running a scientific bureau should know that.

***

A recent study by the New York Federal Reserve concluded what many other studies have shown—that nearly all the economic burden from the Trump tariffs has fallen on U.S. firms and consumers.

***

In the 1930s, some of Joseph Stalin’s censors, who were more zealous than educated, reportedly forbade radio broadcasts of music by Franz Schubert, who died in 1828, for fear he might be a supporter of Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky, who was born in 1879.

***

Will Mullin get lip fillers?

***


Life and Its Absence

Youth see life as so hot, so intense, so expanding. They always struggle with the ultimate truth, that the universe is cold, indifferent, and winding down. 

Indeed, life is the outlier in the universe, the exception that gives it value.

The universe without life is math.


The Peace of Wild Things
by
Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Bad Sociology

On this day:

1935
New Deal: The Supreme Court of the United States declares the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, (295 U.S. 495).
1940
World War II: In the Le Paradis massacre, 99 soldiers from a Royal Norfolk Regiment unit are shot after surrendering to German troops. Two survive.
1941
World War II: The German battleship Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic killing almost 2,100 men.
1980
The Gwangju Massacre: Airborne and army troops of South Korea retake the city of Gwangju from civil militias, killing at least 207 and possibly many more.

***

Juan Soto's hitting problems are profound, yet reassuring. It seems, according to knowledgeable people, to be a failure of "preparation," which means that such changes may be temporary and coachable. (See Suwinski, Davis, and many other Pirates. But not, I guess, Alvarez.)

***

Is cannabis as safe as the COVID-19 vaccine?

***



Bad Sociology

"Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.” --Lionel Shriver

                                                *

When Lionel Shriver delivered the Brisbane Writers Festival opening address, the American author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, and The Mandibles created quite a stir. The topic of the speech was the freedom of the writer, and "cultural appropriation" was the engine. It did not go well.

First, a definition: The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University (who is white), defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Shriver listed many such crimes: Tiny sombrero party-favors at a tequila-theme party at Bowdoin College, Katy Perry dressing like a geisha at the American Music Awards, Iggy Azalea committing “cultural crimes” by imitating African rap (Daily Beast), students at Oberlin College in Ohio who have protested “culturally appropriated food” like sushi in their dining hall whose inauthenticity is “insensitive” to the Japanese.

"... who," Shriver asks, "is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes takes notes, the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts? The fiction writer, that’s who."

And who "... regards other peoples' attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft?... Those who embrace a vast range of 'identities' – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege, and disability."

Shriver's main concern is art, and there is reason to worry. The reviewer of The Mandibles in the WashPo wrote: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.”

Sudanese-born Australian social activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who was attending the Brisbane Writers Festival event, walked out in a huff and then quickly penned a comment piece which argued that Shriver’s speech was “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.”

"Exploitation of the experiences of others?"

A NYT editorialist wrote of Shriver's speech: "Failure is less the work of political correctness and more the evidence of a morally inadequate imagination from those who already have the stage."

"Morally inadequate imagination?"

Nonetheless, Shriver has a point. Must the mystery writer kill before writing the mystery? Must Melville go to sea? (He and Conrad both did.) What experience are writers writing about anyway? Is science fiction--clearly entirely made up--valid as an art form? And what to do about Stuart Little?

While there are certainly subsets in humanity and certainly writers who exploit them, the entire idea of art is broadening and unifying. Homer was writing about Greeks but also about us; that is why it is good. Our modern view--where art is personal and consequently beyond judgment--is new and probably untenable. But this personal validity argument cuts both ways, and authenticity is an awkward tool. Is Starling Marte Black? A man? A Hispanic man? A Hispanic, Dominican man? A Hispanic, Dominican, black outfielder man--who is heterosexual--who throws right handed---who bats right handed--who has a golden glove--who is an immigrant--a legal immigrant--a Catholic--a father--a son--several siblings' sibling....Does all this just depend upon what the definition of "is," is?

It all sounds like the old question about the blind men trying to define the elephant but, in this instance, a blind elephant is trying to define itself.

And this is the broader point: How should a person define himself? Or should he just let himself be defined? We, each of us, are amalgams of genes and peoples, races and tribes, nations and families, occupations and diversions, religions and beliefs, passions and tendencies, hardware and software--and Lord knows what epigenetics means. We are a collection of incidentals. To cover ourselves in the cloak of one or two characteristics swallows us, making us soulless. 

Rather than defining us, it covers our essence in the Cloak of Invisibility. It is the weapon of the racist, the slaver, the fascist, the sniper. It trades humanity's wonder, beauty, and potential for a handle.

Narrowing us, micro-defining us, making us excluding rather than exclusive--diminishes each in the shadow of some smaller whole. It makes us subject to a tiny part, one of our many elements, an accident of our lives that we allow to limit us. It is the tool of the huckster and the politician who are looking for an edge to exploit; it demeans us when we accept. It is a world shrinker, a fence builder, a mind closer, a life limiting and isolating personal and world view where every encounter jangles with some potential conflict or reward, and where every individual demands some advantage or deference not for what they are but for what circumstance says they are.

We are confusing the spice in our lives for our lives.

Lionel Shriver is a case in point. Contrary to expectation, Lionel Shriver is a woman, too. That is, she is misnamed.

Sunday/Feeling the Difficulty of Faith

On this day:
1152
Henry II of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine.
1593
Playwright Thomas Kyd’s accusations of heresy lead to an arrest warrant for Christopher Marlowe
1860
Abraham Lincoln wins the Republican Party presidential nomination over William H. Seward, who later becomes the United States Secretary of State.
1896
The United States Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that the “separate but equal” doctrine is constitutional.
1980
1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens: Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington, United States, killing 57 people and causing $3 billion in damage.

***

“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain. How is it possible?”--Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

***

InventWood makes a carbon-based material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said. It’s also Class A fire rated, or highly resistant to flame, and resistant to rot and pests. With some polymer impregnated, it can be stabilized for outdoor use like siding, decking, or roofing. InventWood’s first products will be facade materials for commercial and high-end residential buildings.

Compressing the material also concentrates the colors. You end up with something that looks like rich, tropical hardwoods.

***

Sunday/Feeling the Difficulty of Faith

“If there is a single painter with whom the new millennium has identified, it is without a doubt Caravaggio,” begins the catalogue for Caravaggio 2025, an extraordinary exhibition of twenty-four of the artist’s works, gathered at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini from museums and private collections across the world. The crowds are big.

This hasn’t always been the case. After falling into obscurity for several centuries, Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) star began to rise again in 1951 thanks to a similar exhibition organized in Milan by the great art historian Roberto Longhi.

The painter’s life fits the post-Byronic template for a tragic artist –- salacious liaisons, murder, exile, and an untimely death on the unforgiving (but romantic) Italian coast. Romanticism put a premium on artistic self-expression, and Caravaggio’s work was undeniably original because of the inner tumult that gushes from his figures. Those figures are not always conventionally beautiful, but they are compelling.

Yet these considerations don’t quite explain Caravaggio’s magnetic draw. Perhaps above all, Caravaggio was a great religious painter; something about his style resonates with the spiritual aspirations and shortcomings of our age. His works on secular themes are clever, but don’t convey the power of his later religious works. And none of those works are quite so powerful as the Flagellation, Supper at Emmaus, and Ecce Homo with Jesus Christ at their center. One feels a yearning for redemption in the darkness of the artist’s life.

Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon locates the roots of Caravaggio’s style in the reforms of Milan’s great archbishop St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584). Borromeo was the dominant cultural and religious figure in Caravaggio’s native Lombardy at the time of the artist’s birth. Guided by the Council of Trent’s emphasis on the sacraments and the imaginative prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, Borromeo favored an intense, dramatic, devotional style Graham-Dixon describes as “populist.”

These characteristics, alongside Borromeo’s awareness of the darkness that original sin casts over our existence, are distilled in Caravaggio’s mature work. In the Flagellation or the Conversion of St. Paul or St. Francis contemplating death, one feels no scholastic abstraction, but salvation worked out achingly in wounded flesh.

Another art historian, Alessandro Zuccari, points out that all available evidence indicates that Caravaggio’s religious beliefs were conventionally Catholic. He confessed and received Communion at Easter and participated in forty-hours Eucharistic devotions. The fiery temper that caused the artist so much grief is evidence of concupiscence, not heterodoxy.

St. Francis in Ecstasy by Caravaggio, c. 1595 [in the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut]

Exiled from Rome after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio spent the rest of his life seeking papal forgiveness instead of fortune in the Protestant principalities of northern Europe. When his self-portrait appears in scriptural scenes, it has a haggard, yearning look. But feeling the difficulty of faith is not the same thing as unbelief. And that’s, I suspect, why the artist’s work so resonates today.

In Michelangelo’s muscular figures, we witness the robust marriage of faith and Renaissance humanism. The inky darkness of Caravaggio’s scenes anticipates an age when faith no longer feels so inevitable. At Caravaggio 2025, I was struck by the arrangement of St. Francis in Ecstasy – the saint, reclining in soft angelic arms, fills one side of the painting, but its center is all shadow. If you look closely, you can make out figures in the distance, but just barely.

Other works also seem sketched at the border between faith and unbelief. In Caravaggio’s two versions of the Supper at Emmaus, the disciples’ bodies reel with the shock of recognizing the risen Lord, but in both cases, a weary innkeeper looks on with faint irritation, as if hoping they’d just place their order and finish their meal. Not all have eyes to see.

The Conversion of St. Paul, across town in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, forces viewers to question their own vision. In it, the young Saul, on the ground with outstretched arms, has literally been floored by a vision of Christ, but Caravaggio doesn’t paint that vision. All the viewer sees is the rear end of Saul’s horse. Like an examination of conscience that stings, the painting asks, “Do you have eyes to see?”

An earlier version, on loan to Caravaggio 2025 from a private collection, is a less inventive (and busier) composition but poses a similarly uncomfortable challenge. The figure of Jesus, attended by a cherub, is visible in the sky and Saul is on the ground again, covering his eyes. His attendant, however, is upright and armed with shield and spear, which he aims at Christ, as if to fight him off. Not everyone welcomes the Lord’s appearance.--from Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J. in Catholic Thing

Shen Yun

On this day in 1950, Chiang Kai-shek evacuated Hainan, leaving mainland China to Mao Zedong and the communists.

***

Gunmen shot and killed at least 26 tourists on Tuesday at a resort in Indian-controlled Kashmir

***

Human judgment "imposes "an impenetrable ceiling on the AI agent's performance: the agent cannot discover better strategies underappreciated by the human rater, DeepMind scholars David Silver and Richard Sutton write in the paper, Welcome to the Era of Experience. Most studies do not allow a context for a problem, a history. That is to say, human thinking is holding the technology back.
Uh oh.

***

Who ever imagined there would be a Waste, Fraud, and Abuse lobby?

***

Shen Yun 

The Shen Yun dance is coming to Pittsburgh this month. As with all things China, it is not without controversy over its admitted religious-political content.

That criticism is state-based. China has been using its economic and diplomatic influence to pressure theaters and ministries around the world and disrupt Shen Yun performances. In 2016, the Chinese Embassy in South Korea threatened financial retribution against a hosting theater in Seoul, effectively forcing cancellation of a performance just days before it was scheduled.

The Shen Yun interpretation of traditional Chinese culture differs sharply from the official version sanctioned by the Communist Party. Its narrative episodes are inspired by Chinese history and literature, claiming a “true Chinese tradition” defined by Confucian morality as well as Buddhist and Daoist spiritual thoughts — ideas that developed over millennia, ideas denounced and suppressed after the 1949 Communist takeover and all but eradicated during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.

Against this historical background, the Chinese communists’ ongoing persecution of Falun Gong may be seen as part of a larger campaign against religious faiths and traditional cultural values. The regime’s overbearing effort to censor the dance show may imply its deep-seated insecurity about its own professed legitimacy to embody Chinese civilization. Or it may be evidence of an overwhelming force trying to finish an annoying opponent off.

Shen Yun artists have bypassed communist intervention and take seriously the Chinese intellectual and cosmological foundations in their understanding of dance. The spiritual teachings of Falun Gong, to which the show’s creators adhere, include an essential unity between the material and the spiritual, which human beings should strive to embody. For the dancer, it is important to refine one’s moral character while improving one’s physical skills, so that virtuous thought may extend from the heart to the body in performing tales of heroism, kindness, and devotion.

This spiritual interpretation of Chinese culture has had a compelling global impact, and this inspiring vision of what China was and could be without the Communist Party must be deeply unsettling to the authoritarian state. The artificially conjoined ideas of “China” and the party are decoupled, undermining the regime’s insistent claim to be the sole legitimate guardian and spokesperson of Chinese civilization and culture. Like a lover, the state must be "the only one."

Art, from the vision of eternal punishment in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment to the Von Trapp family’s perilous escape from Nazi persecution in The Sound of Music, has never existed in a social vacuum; it has always aspired to greater universality than the politics of the moment. However, politics is increasingly claiming this universality. To view politics and religion as the sole ends of Shen Yun’s art rather than its context is to deny the vital human experience of hope and kindness, which many of its audiences, regardless of their political and religious orientations, already derive from it.

Even More Bowdler

Local politics report: Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole in California, but Newsome overturned it.

***

Ukrainian forces have captured two Chinese prisoners fighting alongside Russian forces

***

On this day, General Robert E. Lee surrenders his rebel forces to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Va.

***



Even More Bowdler

In the months after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published (1885), a Concord, Massachusetts, library banned the book, calling its subject matter “tawdry” and its narrative voice “coarse” and “ignorant.” In the 1950s, the book came under fire from African-American groups for being racist in its portrayal of black characters, although it was seen by many as a strong criticism of racism and slavery. As recently as 1998, an Arizona parent sued her school district, claiming that making Twain’s novel required high school reading made already existing racial tensions even worse.
So it was banned by two groups, white and black.

But in censorship, there are no ties. Everyone loses. We have loads of examples of efforts throughout the history of uncomfortable and simply hateful art and beliefs inflicted upon society. The problem is that such art does not scratch at a scab on the body politic, it is the scab. Sometimes, the problem is significant; sometimes, like a crucifix in urine, it is gratuitous. But outlawing it is not the answer. Outlawing hate speech is like trying to outlaw hate itself.

Imagine the Athenians reacting to Lysistrata.” (It is a dirty anti-war comedy by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, first staged in 411 BC.) It is the comic story of Lysistrata and her one-woman mission to end the Peloponnesian War, as she convinces the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands to force the men to negotiate a peace. The Athenians were at war at the time--guys were dying--and the playwright was laughing at them.
We clearly are better people now. We have become much more refined. Now, we do not struggle over plays, we struggle over words. We are actually banning words.

There is a legitimate objection when facing something like Finn: The problem of the quality of the public's understanding. They simply might not get it. The first response to Taming of the Shrew might easily be anger if you are of a parochial mind. And it is more difficult now as everyone is so tender; the outrage is quick and internet-broad. But that was Bowdler's original concern; he did not think the audience up to it. They--in his case, women and children--were so fragile as to be easily corrupted.
The Church thought that too. That's why they developed The Index. They were protecting those poor people, as we are trying to do now.

The problem is simply bigger than that. If education is necessary, then let's do it. But the only thing censorship does is expose our unwillingness to confront and solve problems. Or, worse, it exposes our fear that those offended cannot be taught, that the work cannot be explained because the deficit is in the audience. Sometimes the work does not deserve our efforts, as when people put crucifixes in urine and call it art, but still the solution is to confront it--or rise above it, not lynch the artist and burn his works.

These works require a response. The question is which response. And our choice is usually less a judgment of the work than of its audience. Or, if we have a culture that has little respect for truth, ourselves.

More on Bowdler

The dire wolf has been brought back from extinction after more than 10,000 years, a U.S. biotech start-up has announced.
The company achieved this using cloning and gene-editing techniques based on two ancient dire wolf DNA samples.

***

On this day, British General Horatio Kitchener defeats the Khalifa, leader of the dervishes in Sudan, at the Battle of Atbara, 1898. And General Robert E. Lee‘s retreat is cut off near Appomattox Court House, 1865.

***

Markets staged a brief $2 trillion bounce yesterday on a false tariff headline.

***

More on Bowdler

“There are certain plays in the canon that teeter on the edge of acceptability. Titus is one of those for me. I don’t understand the violence. I don’t understand why as an audience we feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it; it’s so relentless.”--The actor Russell Beale on Titus Andronicus. (His new version has a drain around the stage for blood.)

"Bowdlerized" ("ISE" in England --"ISE" for any non-Greek-based words-- or "IZE" in North America) is a fierce academic epithet because it is an accusation of something untrue, untrue on several levels. First, it is a change from the original, from the art from which it comes, so it is a counterfeit. It intentionally removes a piece from the artistic whole. Second, it denies the art's truth, its essence. The motive is meaningless. Bowdler had a good motive for what he did; but the process is a lie, a sacrifice of artistic truth for some reason, trivial or not, for a reason less than truth. Synonyms in the Thesaurus include: emasculate, alter, neuter, shorten, reduce, cut, abridge, castrate, spay, contract, foreshorten, demasculinise, expurgate, demasculinize, and abbreviate. Anti-intellectual and declasse are not included, but none are flattering.

Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler were English siblings who, in the early 1800's, prepared and published editions of Shakespeare’s works meant for women and children and for families to read together. They wanted more people exposed to these great works but were eager to eliminate any controversial or offensive material they felt inappropriate for women and children. (It may well be that this approach exposed many more to the genius of Shakespeare had not the material been scrubbed.) In 1818, Bowdler published his edition of 'Shakespeare,' the work by which he is best known. Its title ran: 'The Family Shakespeare in ten volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.' In the preface, Thomas Bowdler wrote: 'Many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased.' He also, interestingly,  complained of the unnecessary and frivolous allusions to Scripture, which 'call imperiously for their erasement.' Four editions were published before 1824, and others appeared in 1831, 1853, and 1861. During the last years of his life Bowdler was engaged in rewriting Gibbon's 'History.' The work was completed just before he died in 1825 and published in six volumes by his nephew, Thomas.

He has always been reviled for his prudery, his destructive approach which can only be characterized as non-artistic, and his willingness to sacrifice the art and truth of genius to a lesser god. He was, however, not alone. Samuel Johnson said that Cordelia's death in Lear was too painful to be endured. Mr. Nahum Tate agreed so much he rewrote it. In his version, Cordelia lives, marries Edger, and everyone lives happily ever after. His play was quite successful. It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838. While many critics sneered and dismissed it, Samuel Johnson quite approved. The memorable Lear of David Garrick was Tate's!

Nor is this a behavior of older and rigid times. When Taming of the Shrew was staged in New York at their Shakespeare Festival in1990, it was bowdlerized to dilute the play's misogynist sentiments, an essence of the play.

The sacrifice of truth for sensibilities never ends, perhaps because the targets are endless. We must make Julia's confessor a lay adviser, the Merchant a pedantic Calvinist, substitute a jousting contest for Agincourt, a swede for the Moor, but maybe a Moor for Henry the Fifth. And no dwarfs. Or madmen. Or hunchbacks.

So it seems, for all its faults, to Bowdlerize is to be kind.

The New Bowdlerism

“To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community.” --Disney

***

Trigger Alert! "Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming."—Coach John Wooden, UCLA Head Basketball Coach of 10 national championships

***

“Today’s CEOs are the last generation to lead exclusively human workforces.” --Benioff

***

“It is easier to start a war than to end it.”--Gabriel García Márquez

***

The New Bowdlerism

The author who invented Western man in drama is under attack for being too Western. Prim investigators at Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust have been hard at work. Already, several tortured words have confessed.

The process of "decolonizing" Shakespeare’s work reportedly includes researching "the continued impact of colonialism" on world history and how "Shakespeare's work has played a part in this." The effort, which roughly means distancing work from Western perspectives, reportedly began after concerns were raised that the celebration of Shakespeare enables "White supremacy."

The trust has also warned that some items in its collections and archives relating to the iconic 16th century playwright may contain "language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful."

Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust reportedly worked on a research project with the University of Birmingham's Dr. Helen Hopkins. It concluded that praise of Shakespeare as a "universal" genius "benefits the ideology of White European supremacy." Their research concluded further that "colonial inculcation" spread European ideas about art and used Shakespeare as a symbol of "British cultural superiority" and "Anglo-cultural supremacy."

Celebrating Shakespeare’s work, the research argued, was part of a "White Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today."

One of the solutions proposed by the project is for the trust to "present Shakespeare not as the ‘greatest,’ but as ‘part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world.’"

The Telegraph also reported that the trust has worked to make Shakespeare’s legacy more international by organizing events like "celebrating Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, and a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop."

Censorship always has a presumed beneficiary--children and mothers, young girls, uneducated pagans--generally some subset felt by the Chief Arbitrators as incapable of making their own judgments and coming to their own conclusions. But the modern bluenose is breaking new ground. He is not trying to sanitize the world, he wants to attack what he feels is the threat to world stability: Quality.

Quality as a destabilizing force in the world is a chilling vision of man. 

 

Call Me Ishmael

It seems that the Trump administration needed to learn the Russians are aggressive, expansionist, and casually homicidal. This, apparently, is a new realization. So, in fairness, the Americans allowed Putin to default to the better angels of his nature. And Putin has defined himself. Now...?

***

And what will the holier-than-thou Europeans say other than "Uh oh?"

***

So now the Americans must manage several problems for the diffident world: the bellicose Russians, the potential life-extinguishing threat in the psychotic Middle East, the dangerous China hermit and its quest for cultural affirmation--all with a debt of $36 trillion. The good news is our deficit is only two trillion dollars in this year's budget.

***

Call Me Ishmael

Bad news; one million monkeys can write Hamlet. In fact, one can.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on X (formerly Twitter) that a new AI model has been trained to write fiction. This was the 'prompt' used to generate an example:

"Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief."

Please.

The result was a shocking 1,200-word encounter between a character, Mila, and the AI, over Mila's loss of another character, Kia. In the story, the AI is both a narrator and itself.

"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts."

Democracy of ghosts. The voices the AI refers to are its training, which becomes a dramatic element in the story.

"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."

This is a tricky, debatable paragraph as the AI refers to something it was programmed to forget, but the AI is experiencing "loss," like Mila, and defining itself. Now this:

"She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…".

"Liminal." On both sides. In between a transition. AI.
This is good stuff.

Years ago a TV sci-fi story developed a world where boxing matches were fought by very human-looking robot fighters. A human 'manager,' financially desperate, personally enters a fight against another robot, replacing his own defective robot, so as not to lose the purse. The story emphasized the disparity between the two fighters and, indeed, the human, Lee Marvin as I remember, took a terrible beating.

But there was another important, unasked question: could people empathize with machine fighters who appeared in all superficial ways, human? Was the appearance of life--falsified--rewarding, and identifiable? Carthetic? After all, fiction is...fiction.

This was never explored because the robot fighters were played by humans. But the question is significant, especially now with the increased quality of gaming and computer image-generation. And the written word generates more empathy than the more superficial--if more intense--visual arts.

The quality of this AI story is remarkably high, especially in what would be assumed to be early in a steep timeline. And writing, unlike the visual arts, can be anonymous. 

True connection between the AI fiction generator and the reader does not look far away.

Quality vs Censorship

The Democrats spent 300 million dollars against Scott in Florida.

***

The Gaetz nomination was a revealing error.

***

I assess the climate impact of granting federal approval to all proposed U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects, which would double U.S. export capacity by 2030. Results indicate a net decrease in global emissions through 2070, primarily due to higher local gas prices in the U.S., leading to lower domestic gas generation and accelerated renewable adoption.--That is from the job market paper of Constanza Abuin

Not what most LNG proponents would expect. Or believe. Certainly, the supply side in the improved distribution atmosphere would have a significant, if uncertain, impact. It does say a lot about world demand, though.

***


Quality vs Censorship

The premiere of a 19th-century play directed by John Malkovich was performed in an almost empty Sofia National Theatre after angry protesters irritated with how Bulgarians are portrayed prevented visitors from entering the building.

Reuters reports that one hour before the opening of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and The Man on Thursday evening, protesters started gathering in front of the theatre, Nova TV reported on its website.

They held a big banner reading: "Without anti-Bulgarian plays at the National Theatre." Protesters threw garbage bags, spat and physically attacked Oscar-nominated animator Theodore Ushev as he tried to enter the theatre, Nova TV reported.

To avoid further clashes, the theatre management allowed only a few journalists inside to watch the performance.

The play is a comedy featuring a love story during a conflict between Bulgaria and Serbia.

Critics in Bulgaria say Shaw presents the Bulgarian soldiers as cowardly and unworthy, and Bulgarians as people who bathe once in their lives and don't read, Nova TV reported.

Criticism of art is become intolerance of it. And that can become suffocating.

Torturing Classics

Government EV-charging efforts have been targeted at “disadvantaged communities,” but those are the least in need of EV-charging stations. College graduates who make over $100,000 a year are the likeliest group of people to own an EV or be considering buying one, according to 2023 Gallup research, which makes perfect sense given their price. These people do not live in “disadvantaged communities.”

***

China has already exported cargo cranes, loaded with hidden listening devices, which are installed in US ports. "A great concern is that they could remotely operate these cranes, and therefore disrupt these port operations at critical times," says China expert Gordon Chang. The Chinese Communist Party could, in a crisis, use them to shut down all maritime commerce or drop shipping containers onto US vessels to destroy them.

***

Torturing Classics

Some peculiar themes have arisen in the English canon.

Drew Lichtenberg, "Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare?" NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2024.

"Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Over the past 10 years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of “Julius Caesar” depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of 50 percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room.

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as, “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home."

There's more. When I studied Melville years ago I never once encountered "imperialism" as a major theme. But here are segments of two academic papers on the theme:

"Moby Dick offers considerable textual evidence showing that the novel has strong ideological orientation and is extensively concerned with several major dimensions of the American imperialistic vision. A close study based on the theories of post-colonialism can best explain how Moby Dick has made efforts to establish Europe and America as the metropolis of power, and as the result comes into conspiracy with the American's national imagination of imperialism. Therefore, the reading of Moby Dick in the imperialistic context will explicitly represent the close connection between this canonized narrative and the imperialist ideology.
                                                  *
This study tries to show decolonization in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Melville applies some narrative techniques which closely match those of the decolonization process. The narrative has a potentially representative content which opens one’s horizons toward new sources of meaning and conceptual interpretation. The focal point, in this study, is to examine the decolonization level and its strategies as agency, abrogation, undermining and appropriation to see how tangibly these terms agree with the very context of the above-mentioned novel and to find out whether the purely abstract terms extracted from decolonization theory can be concretized in a practical form. Furthermore, this study aims at scrutinizing in detail the frequency and the possibility of the decolonization in the very fabric and texture of fictional narrative of the colonized nations in general."
                                                  *
"Moby-Dick, or The Whale is a novel famed for its multifaceted nature, due to the myriad of both literary themes and political views that critics can explicate from it. In this thesis, I will show how the novel Moby Dick, or the Whale can be interpreted in a manner that engenders nation and myth-building for the United States, in which the contemporary greatness of the nation makes up for the lack of an aggrandized past. Furthermore, I will attempt to show how the text uses critique of ideologies such as slavery, colonization, and imperialism (through the Pequod and its crew) to both criticize American ideologies and political agendas, whilst simultaneously (and perhaps a bit hypocritically) making use of the very same patriotic and nationalistic ideology and language it itself criticizes. In the thesis, concepts, and theories such as nationalism, community, nationhood, nation as narration, and imperialism are defined through the theories established by critics such as Anderson, Bhabha, and Said, as a means to engender a better understanding of what is meant by them when used in the analysis of the novel, as well as why these concepts are relevant for the thesis. As such, this thesis is another piece of evidence for the limitlessness of Moby-Dick, as it recognizes the vast openness of the text, that enables the myriad of interpretations, explications, and understandings of the novel. All of which adds further evidence in favor of the continued canonization and importance of Melville’s Work."

The zombie is always restless. And he never sleeps.

NaNoWriMo

A major sign of Chinese economic malaise: In 2018, 51,302 new startups were founded in China. Last year, that number dropped to 1,202.

***

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes creative writing around the world. Its flagship program is an annual, international creative writing event in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. The emphasis is on creating a first draft that can be worked on later and improved.

The project started in July 1999 with 21 participants. In 2022, 413,295 people participated in the organization's programs.

AI has been a sticking point with the program. NaNoWriMo has tolerated AI programs, both generative AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, etc.) and non-generative AI tools (Grammarly, email spam filters, etc.). This year they have taken a stronger stand.

On Saturday, NaNoWriMo published its position on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing, but did so with a flair. “We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants.

"Classist and ableist." "Privilege."

This was not taken well by many. There have been resignations from the Board, and outrage on the social media platforms. While plagiarism is a legitimate primary concern, the general tone has been anxiety over the devaluation of the human creative spirit.

“Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry,” Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig said in response to NaNoWriMo’s stance. “It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story.”

Fascinatingly, the very openness of NaNoWriMo to intervention by AI so as to blunt the "classist,' the ableist,' and the "privilege" that generates them reveals the subtle and much more dangerous element that has not been mentioned but must disturb protesters: quality.

Equity, as a historical economic concept, values all work equally--not the work's product or the product's value to a consumer. And that undermines the very objective of art.

Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

Morally speaking, it is reactionary rather than progressive whenever the state expands its authority at the expense of society. Government handouts, subsidies, and interventions of every kind, no matter how dressed up with a specious humanitarianism, are essentially coercive measures by the state, encroaching more on more on the voluntary action of society.--Morley

***

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning, and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups, according to the WSJ.

***

Funds marketed with a sustainable label were hit with $12.4bn in net outflows in the US in the past 12 months even as green funds in Europe added $126.3bn, according to the data provider Morningstar.

The rift between the jurisdictions is a sign that the political backlash against asset managers who take a position on environmental, social, and governance issues in the US has started to dampen the appetite for ESG strategies, analysts say.

***

The strong nuclear force is estimated to be about 1038 times stronger than electromagnetism. This means that the forces that hold atomic nuclei together are billions of times stronger than the forces that hold atoms together through their electrons and electric charges.

The reason for this vast difference in strength is due to the properties of the particles that are involved. Electromagnetism is carried by photons, which have no mass and only interact with charged particles. In contrast, the strong nuclear force is carried by gluons, which are themselves charged and interact with other charged particles, as well as with quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

***

Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

The painting often identified as commemorating Cinco de Mayo in Mexico actually depicts the Spanish war with Napoleon's France two generations before the French war in Mexico. Nor is the event of Cinco de Mayo of much political significance--other than ironic--although it was a shocking military one.

Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War, a savage affair fought by Spanish partisans against hard, regular French troops. This famous painting was The Third of May (along with its companion piece, The Second of May 1808 or The Charge of the Mamelukes.)

Third of May:



A half-century later in 1862, Spain's creditors ran out of patience with her debts. France, eager to expand her territory and following long-accepted custom of seizing a reluctant debtor's ports and collecting the tax receipts in lieu of their loan, invaded the Mexican port of Veracruz with the intent of collecting customs receipts until the debt was repaid. They also had another aim: They hoped to make their stay permanent with the placement of Maximilian on a Mexican throne. The French marched inland. This was an experienced, tough group and they proceeded virtually unopposed until they were confronted by a good-sized Mexican force in the small town of Puebla. There, against all expectation and logic, on 5 May 1862, Mexican troops, led by Ignacio Zaragoza, defeated a larger force of the elite French Foreign Legion. Mexican President Benito Juarez declared 5 May a national holiday -- Cinco de Mayo--although he certainly knew the truth. The French replaced their commander and sent thirty thousand reinforcements. In no time they controlled the cities and created the election that elected Maximilian Emperor of México.

Art Auction

California’s highest income tax rate is 13.3%. That is in addition to a top federal tax rate of 37%. California also has a state sales tax rate of 7.25%, and many localities impose a smaller sales tax. So if a wealthy person earns and spends labor income in the state of California, the tax rate at the margin could approach 60%. Then there is the corporate state income tax rate of 8.84%, some of which is passed along to consumers through higher prices. That increases the tax burden further.

***

Governments around the world are intensifying scrutiny on the building of data centers over fears that their huge energy usage is putting excessive pressure on national climate targets and electricity grids.

Ireland, Germany, Singapore, and China as well as a US Loudoun County in Va. and Amsterdam in the Netherlands have introduced restrictions on new data centres in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental requirements.

***

Art Auction

An auction of the tattooed skin of an Austrian performance artist has been canceled after all 12 pieces were bought by a collector for "a seven-figure Art Auction sum" ahead of the event. The sale of Wolfgang Flatz's skin was due to take place at Munich’s modern and contemporary art museum, the Pinakothek der Moderne, on 8 February.

The lots have been purchased by a Swiss collector, who will receive black-and-white photographs of the lots until they are transferred to them posthumously. One remaining piece of tattooed skin will be given to the artist’s son. The tattoos include the artist’s name in Cyrillic and a quote by the Roman philosopher Cicero: "Dum spiro spero" (while I breathe I hope).

The auction, titled "To Risk One’s Own Skin", was to be led by Christie’s auctioneer and chairman, Dirk Boll. A now-removed page on Christie’s website described how "the auction thus offers a unique opportunity to acquire a significant piece of art history’s future, as this is the first time an artist has sold his real body as a work of art during his lifetime."

The event was organized as a prelude to the Munich Museum’s retrospective of Flatz’s work, Something Wrong with Physical Sculpture, which runs until May 2024 and includes a work that offers visitors the chance to throw darts at his body. An undisclosed portion of the proceeds from the sale will go towards the museum’s Bavarian State Painting Collections and the Flatz Foundation, which was set up by the artist to foster "artistic expression."

An article in The Art Newspaper then discusses the legal implications of the sale, presumably because the ideas of good taste and common sense are too subjective to allow definitive debate.