Out of Egypt

On this day:

476
Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed when Odoacer proclaims himself King of Italy, thus ending the Western Roman Empire.
1797
Coup of 18 Fructidor in France.
1862
Civil War Maryland Campaign: General Robert E. Lee takes the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war, into the North.
1886
Indian Wars: after almost 30 years of fighting, Apache leader Geronimo, with his remaining warriors, surrenders to General Nelson Miles in Arizona.
1957
American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Crisis – Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Central High School.
1967
Vietnam War: Operation Swift begins: U.S. Marines engage the North Vietnamese in battle in the Que Son Valley.
1972
Mark Spitz becomes the first competitor to win seven medals at a single Olympic Games.
1998
Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.

***

The Sussexes return to England: A Royal Recall--Brian

***

The French Revolution reads like a sci-fi novel of religious excess.
In the Coup of 18 Fructidor, the Directory arrested political opponents and invalidated the previous election.
The Directory was instituted on 2 November 1795 under the Constitution of the Year III, drafted in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794, aiming to forge a moderate republican framework that curbed Jacobin radicalism while safeguarding bourgeois property interests through a five-member executive and bicameral legislature comprising the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. 

The Directory perceived an existential threat from resurgent royalists following the 1797 elections, fearing a coordinated effort to restore the monarchy with foreign assistance amid ongoing wars against coalitions including Britain.
This unconstitutional action, supported indirectly by Napoleon Bonaparte's provision of military reinforcements from Italy, temporarily consolidated Directory power, reinstated anti-clerical measures against nonjuring priests and émigrés, and foreshadowed further executive overreaches culminating in the Brumaire coup two years later.

Fructidor. The Directory. The Year III. Thermidor. Council of Five Hundred. The Council of Ancients. Ah, democracy.

***

Prudence has been one of the great classical virtues, along with wisdom, courage, and justice. Has prudence become more of a behavioral suggestion than its original designation as an ethical obligation?

***

According to the media watchdog Status, after Trump gave a speech in July about election interference, Fox Business officials ordered the network’s top stars to stay clear of Trump's unsubstantiated claims. Several outlets noted that Fox gave little airtime to Trump’s speech in the hours and days that followed.
Bartiromo then leaked the company directive to the White House, according to Status. It's unclear if she reached out first, or the Trump team made the request.

The Press leaks to the government.

***

European officials accuse Russia of years of hybrid warfare, from attempted arson outside the British prime minister's home, to firebombing warehouses in Latvia storing aid for Ukraine, to an assassination plot against a German weapons manufacturer, as well as drones that cross into NATO territory and have destroyed property. Recently, these attacks are increasing...
"You have the Leipzig attack. You have arson, sabotage, murder, attacks on critical infrastructure also. And Russia has more than one service likely engaged in this campaign. You have military intelligence in the GRU, and you have the FSB..."--David Cattler, Former U.S. Intelligence Official (PBS)

***

From Axios:

                "AI models are becoming unknowable."

***

Out of Egypt

Science has always walked the edge of mysticism. The original great Greek thinkers were as abstract as you could get with demiurges and the like. Newton had some astonishing beliefs well away from mass and acceleration. Science and its very unscientific stepbrothers have been a provocative topic and creep into many publications and articles, from The DaVinci Code to Benjamin Breen.

Thelema was one of the New Age foundational notions. The law of Thelema is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." The law of Thelema was developed in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, an English writer and ceremonial magician. He believed himself to be the prophet of a new age, the Æon of Horus, based upon a spiritual experience that he and his wife, Rose Edith, had in Egypt in 1904. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal or "praeterhuman" being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated a text known as The Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis, which outlined the principles of Thelema. (These things happen in the Middle East. And New York.) An adherent of Thelema is a Thelemite. (From Wiki)

Jack Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first castable, composite solid rocket propellant and pioneered the advancement of both liquid and solid-fuel rockets, important contributions to eventual rocket flight.
For a while, Parsons was a Marxist. Then he became a Thelemite. Yes, he did.

Before Parsons accidentally blew himself up in his home lab in 1952, he had welcomed into his Pasadena home a Second World War veteran who’d been expelled from the Navy for psychological instability: L Ron Hubbard. The two men shared a love for science fiction and black magic. But in 1946, Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ mistress Sara, and his yacht. Parsons invoked a Babylonian god and (he believed) stirred up the typhoon that caused their boat to capsize, but Hubbard and Sara survived.

The next year, Hubbard would begin writing Dianetics, which mingled occultism with Atomic Age scientific jargon. By this time, Hubbard was claiming to be a nuclear physicist. Scientology would emerge a few years later.

 

 

Easter/Sunday

On this day:

1242
During a battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, Russian forces, led by Alexander Nevsky, rebuff an invasion attempt by the Teutonic Knights.
1862
American Civil War: The Battle of Yorktown begins.
1900
Archaeologists in Knossos, Crete, discover a large cache of clay tablets with hieroglyphic writing in a script they call Linear B.

***

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

***

According to AI, Pilots can experience G-forces ranging from 12 to 20 Gs during ejection.

***

Obama's presidential campaign promised "fundamental change" in the country. What did he mean by that?

***

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—n’ Strait, you crazy 

b—--ds, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

This is a tweet from the President of the United States.

Is having thoughtful, intelligent, patriotic, reflective leadership in this country too much to ask for?

***

Alexander Nevsky was a prince of a Russian city-state in a period when Russia was caught between Western Catholic crusaders seeking religious and territorial expansion, and Eastern Mongol invaders (the Golden Horde) enforcing brutal domination over the region. He is famous for his defeat of the Swedes at the river Neva (giving him his name) and "the Battle on the Ice" where he defeated the Germanic Teutonic Knights. He also negotiated--to his own advantage--with the Mongols.
He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547.


***

Easter/Sunday

Easter is the essential Christian event. Every aspect of the Christian church hinges on Christ's resurrection.

The gospel is filled with little particulars (the woman hesitant to enter the tomb, Peter being outrun to the tomb, the meticulous arrangement of the burial cloths, the assumption that the body was stolen--after the assumption by the Pharisees that the apostles would steal it)--all giving misdirection and specificity to what becomes the philosophical earthquake of all time. And, of course, another biblical irony: The first to arrive, the women, could not be legal witnesses.

Yet how does this all hinge? Hearsay? The interpretation of a sacred book? Amulets and magic rites? No. Amazingly, it hinges on us.

By the time Christ rises, we know all the players. We even have some insights about them. They are not revolutionaries, not mystics and, while seemingly sincere, they are not special. They are relatively normal working folks with responsibilities and, probably, annoyed families. As seen by their behavior during the Passion, they are not fully aware of what is happening. Nor are they particularly brave. Yet, after this crisis where their leader is tortured and killed, they somehow emerge as philosophers and martyrs. They all, to a man, experience a mind-changing, life-changing event. Scattered and leaderless they raise a religious movement that challenges everything in its time and, eventually, forces mighty Rome to adapt.

Christ performed the great, unarguable miracle. It was the behavior of men, people, who confirmed and developed it. No leap of faith was necessary. They were convinced and changed. Then they convinced and changed the world.

Easter Eve

On this day:

397
Death of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan

1147
First historical record of Moscow.
1581
Francis Drake is knighted for completing a circumnavigation of the world.
1814
Napoleon abdicates for the first time
1841
William Henry Harrison dies of pneumonia becoming the first President of the United States to die in office and the one with the shortest term served.
1865
American Civil War: A day after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
1905
In India, the 1905 Kangra earthquake hits the Kangra valley, kills 20,000, and destroys most buildings in Kangra, Mcleodganj and Dharamshala
1968
Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 6.
1968
Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

1991
Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania and six others are killed when a helicopter collides with their plane over an elementary school in Merion, Pennsylvania.

***

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”--Trump, letting the truth slip.

The Easter luncheon where the president made these remarks was not open to the press, but the White House posted the video of Trump’s remarks on its YouTube page — as it usually does with open press events — and then deleted it.

***

Medicaid lost $100 billion to fraud in one year, according to Oz. Oz.

***

Links between social media use and mental wellness in youth are an artifact of other factors: implications for public policy and meta- analysis--paper by Christopher J.Ferguson

So, question answered?

***

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the opening of a new daycare center for municipal workers on Monday that will cost more than double the average price of child care, to a tune of nearly $60,000 per kid.

***

St. Ambrose was a theologian of the transition period between the decline of Rome and a rise of Christianity, mediating the struggle between the secular and religious powers.. He was an intellectual bridge between the Platonist philosophy of the old world and the spiritual new world. He integrated Eastern arts with the West. He converted and baptised Augustine.

***

Easter Eve

For all its importance, Easter in the New Testament is treated more as a challenge to Christ's followers than the challenge to nature and the intellect that it is. Several descriptions vary considerably; in one, the confused followers find a empty tomb with some linen fallen underfoot, some strangely, neatly folded. But in most the empty tomb is mediated by some extraordinary event or individual, earthquake or angel. Then the story seems to go into suspended animation. There is no cataclysmic epiphany. The realization is gradual--in typical biblical cosmic humor, the first witnesses are not even legal witnesses, as they are women. Christ's astonishing miracle is made clear and defined slowly to various individuals, one at a time.
As befits a collision of the physical and the spiritual which results in a new supernatural order.

 

.Good Friday

On this day:
33
Generally agreed-upon date for the historical crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth,
865
American Civil War: Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America.
1882
American Old West: Jesse James is killed by Robert Ford.
1885
Gottlieb Daimler is granted a German patent for his engine design.
1888
The first of 11 unsolved brutal murders of women committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London, occurs.
1948
President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.
1996
Suspected “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski is arrested at his cabin in Montana, United States.

***

History is a novel whose author is the people. -Alfred de Vigny, poet, playwright, and novelist

***

A professional comedian has a routine ridiculing a young woman who was made a widow by a gruesome public murder. 

Indecency and cruelty are apparently not covered by the Constitution.

Does society have no option?

***

The most intense tornado outbreak on record hit 13 states and southern Ontario in the opening days of April 1974, solidifying its spot in history as the 'Super Outbreak' against which all future outbreaks would be measured.

Experts confirmed nearly 150 twisters over the course of 24 hours

***

Don't know this military site but the story is provocative. If true, it raises some questions about how the West should position itself here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-eKb0Mm4zs

***

For most of the West, the story is about the individual, their actions, their decisions. However, for many in the non-Western world, the story is about things outside of their agency. 

Is there movement present? Which way?

***

Good Friday


How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers are now the norm.


Christina Rossetti's Good Friday


Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?


Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;


Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.


Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann's Easter Sunday, taking the human-centric position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.


But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

The Watchmaker

Government allocation, that is, allocation by politicians and bureaucrats, at least partly replaces market signals and incentives.

***

Wild enthusiasm for a government project usually occurs only when we are putting costs on other people.

***

The Watchmaker

Penrose and Hawking did calculations based on their research on black holes. Two of their conclusions:

“The odds against an ordered universe happening by random chance are 10^10^30th to 1, against."

And,

"The odds against life are 10^10^123rd to 1, against.”

"If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."--Hawkings

The Enlightenment, the reliance on reason, created tremendous problems for religion. Regardless of the various times and philosophies, religion relies on faith. The unreasonable, the miraculous, the very essence of the unknowable inherent to religion was anathema to the Enlightenment. Eventually, this strictness created a reaction with a new reliance on the individual and the value of his feelings, Romanticism. A quasi-enlightenment bridge for religion at this time was Deism. Deism was the belief in a God who created existence but did not interfere in life. The classic image was the Watchmaker, used by William Paley. Paley asks himself what he would think if, while walking in a field, he came upon a stone? Not too much. But if he came upon a watch! What would that complexity imply?

God, as the Watchmaker, made this complex and precise world but did not interfere with it. Once created, the watch ran on its own.

Not only could a reasonable man look at the complexity of life and see the logic behind this complex Creator, he could rationalize why he need not hold God responsible when things went wrong. This analogy continues to this day in various guises, most recently in the Intelligent Design movement, which argues that the cellular information-based genetic system is a modern example of the computer-oriented Watchmaker. So each age builds its own spiritual mirror.

Our current mirror is now clouded. Our new understanding of the universe has become arcane, mathematical and recondite, creating a new, upper strata of knowledge-priests reminiscent of older times..

"It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it," Dirac wrote in 1963. "One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe."  

Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who has worked at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has recently claimed that a mathematical formula could be the ultimate proof of God's existence. (Warning. The good Dr. Soon is hated by many because he is a global warming skeptic.)

At the core of Soon's thesis is the fine-tuning argument, which posits that the precise nature of the universe’s physical laws is too perfect to have occurred by chance. The theory, initially proposed by Cambridge mathematician Paul Dirac, implies that the universe’s conditions are so precisely balanced that they suggest intentional design. A small variation in constants like gravity or the cosmological constant could have prevented the formation of galaxies, stars, and even life itself.

In an interview on the Tucker Carlson Network last year, he referenced  Dirac, who predicted the existence of “antimatter” in 1928, specifically a counterpart to the electron. Four years later, in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the positron, a particle with the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge. Soon described this as miraculous, highlighting Dirac’s ability to predict its existence before any experimental confirmation.

Dr. Soon also referred to geometry in mathematics, specifically the concept of closed curvature in spacetime without gravity, which has long challenged the understanding of how mathematics relates to the real world. He noted that studies have explored this topic extensively. Hermann Weyl, a German mathematician, introduced the Weyl tensor to measure spacetime curvature without relying on mass-energy. This tensor helps describe tidal forces in a gravitational field without referencing the energy-momentum tensor.
John Archibald Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, gave “Geometrodynamics”, proposing all physical phenomena could be understood in terms of spacetime geometry, and suggesting that curvature can exist due to the vacuum structure rather than mass-energy. He also introduced geons—self-contained gravitational or electromagnetic waves held together by their own energy, demonstrating curved spacetime without traditional gravitational sources.
Willem de Sitter’s solutions to Einstein’s field equations describe “de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spacetimes,” where a universe with positive curvature is driven by a cosmological constant, independent of any matter content.

How many people can understand this? But, as difficult--and harmonious--as the obscure might be, it is not necessarily spiritual. A Rubik's Cube is difficult and harmonious.

Dr. Soon concluded by saying, “There are many incidents and examples like this. So sometimes we have to bow down and occasionally take a deep breath, and maybe some ever-present forces will illuminate our lives. God has given us light. All we have to do is just follow the light.”

Easter Eve

 

Easter Eve

For all its importance, Easter in the New Testament is treated more as a challenge to Christ's followers than the challenge to nature and the intellect that it is. The descriptions vary considerably; in one, the confused followers find an empty tomb with some linen fallen underfoot, some strangely, neatly folded. But in most instances, the empty tomb is mediated by some extraordinary event or individual, an earthquake or an angel. Then the story seems to slow down. The gravity of the situation is too much for time.

There is no cataclysmic epiphany. The realization is gradual--in typical biblical cosmic humor, the first witnesses, women, are not even legal witnesses. Christ's astonishing miracle is made clear and defined slowly to various individuals, one at a time. This is not a movement; this is elemental and personal.
As befits a collision of the physical and the spiritual, which results in a new supernatural order.

Good Friday

Bill Clinton earned nearly $18 million as an adviser and honorary chancellor for the international for-profit college network between 2010 and 2015.

***

Shipping goods with a value less than $800 in the US (150 EUR in Europe) is import duty-free – something Chinese firms like Temu and Shein have been taking advantage of, accounting for an estimated 30% of such “de minimis” shipments last year.

***

Response rates of major economic surveys are falling, making economic data hard to trust.

***

Good Friday


How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers are now the norm.


Christina Rossetti's Good Friday


Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?


Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;


Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.


Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann's Easter Sunday, taking the human-centric position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.


But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Betting on the Pope

“When money is free, crazy ideas get funded. When money has a price, funders and investors want to see a direct link to value. That means ideological pet projects are the first to go.”--Greene

***

The Pirates have optioned catcher Henry Davis, infielder Nick Yorke, and outfielder Billy Cook to Triple-A.

***

A fascinating review of Snow White centers on the famous question before the talking mirror, "Who is the fairest," which has always been about beauty. But in the remake, fair is fairness; the queen isn't fair because queens benefit from unequal and unfair economic distribution. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen's economic policies. She's not fair because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people!

***

Betting on the Pope

The Sixteenth Century was a golden era of gambling in Italy, especially in Church affairs and choosing a new Pope.

Sensali — essentially bookies — took bets on everything from the outcome of pregnancies to the identities of new cardinals. Like a Renaissance version of the Polymarket comments section, newsletters sprang up promising insider information on the Vatican’s current thinking. These bets straddled the line between savvy financial hedging and complete degeneracy:

“Throughout the entire first half of 1584, Rome remained stirred by the possibility that Gregory XIII would make an important trip to his hometown of Bologna. Brokers took bets on whether he would go or not, when he would go, and for how long he would go. The wagering centered on part of a larger discussion. Gregory XIII was very sick throughout that year, and many clergy and papal officials — even Philip II of Spain — worried he might die in Bologna and what repercussions that event could have for the city of Rome.”

— J. Hunt, Betting on the Papal Election in Sixteenth-Century Rome

In theory, the cardinals were locked in; in reality, brokers were constantly informed on the results of voting, and newsletters circulated with the latest updates from the conclave. Attempts to stop this, including reinforcing the walls of the conclave and arresting brokers, only slowed the process.

Unsurprisingly, these practices undermined the spiritual authority of the process — and the Church wanted it stopped. In response to poor Cardinal Carafa (the guy falsely accused of being dead), the cardinals ordered the rumor-spreaders to the gallows, and their possessions seized. Meanwhile, popes started issuing bulls trying to shut down the betting markets as early as 1562.

In 1591, the hammer came down. Pope Gregory XIV issued Cogit Nos, a bull punishing a bet on papal duration or conclave outcomes with excommunication.--from No Dumb Ideas

Happy Birthday Earth One Day Late

In Harris’s home state of California, Democrats raised the minimum wage to $16 an hour from $12 in 2020. Over the past two years, unemployment among those ages 16 to 19 has soared to 19.2% from 10.8%, versus 11.9% from 10.5% nationwide. California’s new $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers has compounded the problem.

***

"Trump may be the source of the contaminated McDonald's hamburgers!"--NYT (Just kidding)

***




Happy Birthday Earth One Day Late

This is one of my favorite days of the year. Today is the birthday of the earth.

James Ussher was born in Ireland in 1581. His mother was Catholic but he grew up a Calvinist. He became a priest, was a well regarded academic and scholar. He became Bishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland in 1625 and continued so until his death in 1656.

But, while a powerful and influential political and religious figure, he is known best for his historical research into the age of the earth. He started with Adam. The bible records an unbroken line from Adam to Solomon. There were some estimates necessary because not all of the information correlates perfectly, and there is some guesswork from begat to begat.

After Solomon, more historical resources were necessary but good historic points existed up to the Destruction of the Temple. After this--the so-called Late Age of Kings from Ezra to Jesus--the Bible offered little help and most of the dates had to be taken from independent history. For example, the death of the Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar II, who conquered Jerusalem in 586 B.C., could be correlated with the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin (2 Kings 25:27).

He finally published his most famous work, the Annales veteris testimenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650, and its continuation, Annalium pars posterior, published in 1654. In this work, he calculated the date of the Creation to have been nightfall on October 22, 4004 B.C.. Probably at 6 p.m..

Before you roll your eyes, be aware that his estimates do not differ much from other such bible-based estimates of the time, estimates from significant thinkers, notably Johannes Kepler who estimated the birth of the earth as 3992 B.C. and Isaac Newton as 4000 B.C.. And Ussher was a very accomplished man; his collected works make up eighteen volumes.

The annoying and disappointing Stephan Jay Gould would write in "Fall in the House of Ussher" in Eight Little Piggies:

I shall be defending Ussher's chronology as an honorable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past
Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology…

So times change. Methodologies change. And brilliant minds work within their contexts. And some, despite their greatest efforts, will be remembered only for their errors.

Happy Birthday, Earth!

Divine Error

Shohei Ohtani hit his 49th, 50th and 51st homers and stole his 50th and 51st bases all in a single game against the Miami Marlins on Thursday, bursting into history with a 6-for-6 game with three homers, two doubles, two steals, four runs scored, and 10 RBIs. It might have been the best offensive game by a position player ever. (He wasn't pitching.)

***

How is the Blinken mission of peace in the Middle East going?

***


Divine Error

We are a species that seeks basics and truth. It has brought us to a lot of strange places.

Munger believes we now mistake government for God. His take:

"At the heart of the crisis of representation, we will discover an impossible longing for meaning and transcendence.

…..

The pathology has spilled over into politics. Hungry for a loftier state of being, many somehow imagine they have found it in bashing the dull machinery of representational government. These seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation. Only politics, they believe, can save the earth. Only politics can establish social justice. Only politics can preserve the “normies” from the pedophiles who run the country.

As it happens, they are demanding personal validation from an institution explicitly designed not to provide it.

Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” Young Thunberg was one of Haidt’s sufferers, healed by the miracle of environmental activism.

“Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat at home, with an eating disorder,” she tweeted. “All that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”

Thunberg is a fairly typical specimen of those who confuse politics with redemption. With an almost gnostic fervor, she hates the society in which she lives quite comfortably, and keeps breathlessly anticipating its doom. She’s wholly focused on personal theater—not surprisingly, her father is an actor, her mother an opera singer—with few, if any, perceptible consequences. She’s sustained by the absolute certainty that she embodies Truth in the eternal war against Falsehood. Above all, she needs the fuel of rage to lift her spirit above this meaningless world—the angrier she gets, the happier she is."

So maybe politics has become a matter of faith. No wonder Kamala doesn't feel it necessary to explain her policies. 

The politics of joy. Halleluja!

Akhenaton

“...though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”--Lippmann

***

Only 1% of The #Forbes 400 is under 40, the lowest percentage in at least two decades.

***

Overriding all the problems of the current Biden crisis is the obvious unwillingness of the administration to do what is best for the nation.

***

Akhenaton

I have always thought that Obama looked like Amenhotep IV aka Akhenaton. Of course, his statues changed with his reign --and, I think, his religious vision --but the long, long face is pretty consistent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GD-EG-Caire-Mus%C3%A9e061.JPG

Amenhotep has always been fascinating. He was unknown to history until his temples were uncovered in el-Amarna in the 19th century and gradually quite a story emerged. He was the son of Amenhotep III and assumed the throne--either singly or as co regent for a short time--in about 1350. He seemed to be an interactive, concerned leader as he dealt with the problems of empire, particularly the growth and incursion of the Hittite Empire. But his main contribution to Egypt was his startling attempt to reverse, indeed revolutionize, Egyptian culture. He was Egypt's--perhaps the world's--first monotheist. (This observation was expanded into a whole thesis by Freud who argued in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian and had learned monotheism from the Aten cult). The current god was Amen. He gradually began to dismantle the pantheon of myriad gods and goddesses ruled over by Amen and substituted the single god Aten--really a re-emphasis of the old sun god Ra-- in their place. He also established himself as the intermediary between Aten and the world, thus bypassing the priest caste. This may have been a difficult process against the priests and tradition but perhaps it was a cult of the upper class with the lower classes clinging to the old gods and ways; nonetheless, the images and charms of the older gods seem to have continued unchanged. Amenhotep IV eventually changed his name to Akhenaten, moved the capital to a new site, Amarna, dedicated to the new god, and destroyed and desecrated the old Amen statues and religious sites.

There are so many interesting and unique aspects of this man. He changed art; representations of the pharaoh became softer and more personal. His family became prominent (his first wife was the elegant Nefertiti) and for the first time, statues became less rigid, more life-like . Temples were bright, airy, and filled with representations of family and community scenes.

Things ended badly. He died--or was overthrown--and his family began rule. But soon Horemheb took the throne and all evidence of Akhenaten, his family, and his new god was erased from monuments and records. Indeed Horemheb is recorded as directly following Amenhotep III. Amarna was abandoned; Akhenaten was anathema. Amen and his priests were back.

Good Friday

“Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately. As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. As a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways, which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”--Postol

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The Netherlands, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology, and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions…

The country has nearly 24,000 acres — almost twice the size of Manhattan — of crops growing in greenhouses. These greenhouses, with less fertilizer and water, can grow in a single acre what would take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to achieve. Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow about a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons.

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Good Friday



How the norms slide and slip, how the bell-shaped curve moves. Two poems about Good Friday that were outliers, now the norm.


Christina Rossetti's Good Friday


Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?


Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;


Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.


Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.


And the atheist Housmann's Easter Sunday, taking the position of the thief:


If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.


But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Religious Politics

 

Religious Politics

Have you noticed the rise of packaged religious-political podcasts and programming with paywalls? Many conservative programs are adding direct religious messaging. Even ads contain religious wording. The Israel problem may be recruiting religious adherents. The administration's weird legal hierarchy--like raising suspicions about outspoken citizens at school board meetings and Latin mass Catholics--could be provoking reaction.

These stats from a recent survey are interesting.

55% of Hispanic Protestants, most of whom identify as evangelical, hold Christian nationalist beliefs. About 66% of white evangelicals hold such views — the biggest share of any group surveyed.
Among Latino Catholics, 72% said they rejected or were skeptical of Christian nationalism.
Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times more likely than Democrats (16%) to say they hold Christian nationalist views, the survey found.

Intensity may be hard to measure. Analog vs. digital. But something's up.

Nicodemus

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 completed the agency’s seventh commercial crew rotation mission to the International Space Station on Tuesday after splashing down safely in a Dragon spacecraft off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. The international crew of four spent 199 days in orbit.

The Crew-7 mission lifted off at 3:27 a.m. Aug. 26, 2023, on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About 30 hours later, Dragon docked to the Harmony module’s space-facing port. Crew-7 undocked at 11:20 a.m. Monday, March 11, to begin the trip home.

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Nicodemus

There has always been an interesting slant on Christ and Christianity, particularly in academic circles, that Christ was a profound thinker, a great humanist, not divine in any way but a great man. They probably haven't read as far as the recent gospel where Christ actually has a dialogue with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin. This is the first of three times Nicodemus is mentioned in the Gospel of John. (The second time he appears is when he reminds the other members of the Sanhedrin that a man must be first heard before he is condemned. The third time was when Jesus was killed and Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes to prepare Jesus’ body for burial.)

Christ is direct. He is the Son of God and the Redeemer, "so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

Is there some context you can imagine where such a claim could fit comfortably in the thesis that Christ was only "a great man?" Either He was a lot more or a lot less.

Atheism

It's weird watching Trump in court under the eye of the Secret Service.

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The Biden administration has determined that it has the authority to seize the patents of certain high-priced medicines, a move that could open the door to a more aggressive federal campaign to slash drug prices.

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On this day John Lennon was shot to death outside his Manhattan apartment building.

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The pilot who tried to cut the engines on a flight has been released from jail. All better?

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Atheism

John Gray answering the question "Hasn’t atheism become more theological than theology itself?"

No, not the kind of atheism I hold. But what you say is, of course, very true of many traditions of atheist thinking, perhaps even the dominant ones, because the dominant traditions of atheist thinking in Europe and America and elsewhere — remember, atheism in this sense is something that comes from within theism, from within monotheism — reproduce the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs. A lot of atheism is categories taken from theism but then turned upside down.

So, what you say is true of that, but my atheists I’m influenced by would include writers like Schopenhauer, who was an atheist and a pessimist, of course. And the key kind of atheism I attack in my new book — but I’ve been attacking for 20 or 30 years — is the one which attributes to the human species some of the characteristics that used to be attributed to the deity, to God. That’s to say they think that the human history is a narrative with some kind of built-in structure. Doesn’t necessarily produce inevitable results, but there is a providential move from ignorance to knowledge which has consistently greater benefits over time.

That seems to be a secularization of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history. For me, there’s no providence of any kind in history. There’s no logic in history, although particular situations may have a logic of their own. But the logic, of course, may not be benign. It may be, to use your word, absurd. That’s to say, we may find human beings recurrently trapped in situations in which what they do is bound to produce results different from, or even opposite from, the ones they want. I think that is a recurring human situation.

There’s no logic like Hegel thought or Marx thought or even Mill thought, taking that idea from Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism. There’s no logic in which history develops through a series of successive stages to some higher and higher levels. There’s nothing like that. My atheism and the atheism of Schopenhauer or Samuel Beckett, or a number of other writers I could cite, isn’t the same as the theological atheism to which you refer, which, as I say, that’s been around for an awful long time. It’s not just recent.

Of course, you are right in another sense, which is that the highest, I would say the highest point of recent science, recent physics, might be a recognition that the world is finally unintelligible or absurd. But that, of course, is a view that an atheist like Samuel Beckett or Schopenhauer and I would endorse, too. There is a convergence in that sense, but it’s an anti-theological convergence, not a theological convergence.

‘Synodality’ and ‘Clericalism.’

Who are these "unaccompanied minors" crossing the border and where are they going?

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Jarry got married.

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Tristan Jarry

A WOD recently was 'Vulcan,' the Roman fire and blacksmith god. Injured and deformed, he marries the spectacular Venus and is betrayed. The Greek equivalent is Hephaestus, similarly injured and betrayed. He marries Aphrodite.
I thought about the name Festus, a name I first learned on "Gunsmoke," a Western TV weekly starring James Arness, a big guy who played the monster in the original "The Thing." An important minor character was a deputy named "Festus," a kind of uneducated Everyman with his typical naivete and wisdom. The name is Latin, meaning "Festive" from "Festival," an irony on Gunsmoke, perhaps, but also of biblical origin; Festus was the Roman governor of Judea who succeeded Pilate. There is also a Greek god Festus who was some minor fertility god.

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‘Synodality’ and ‘Clericalism.’

Hélène de Lauzun has an article on a change in Vatican policy, seemingly aimed at Opus Dei. It is especially interesting in the context of the Church movement away from the structured hierarchy encouraging more "synodality."

"In a new motu proprio (“of one’s own initiative”) dated Tuesday, August 8th, Pope Francis amended the canons relating to personal prelatures, a status previously enjoyed by the organisation of Opus Dei, which had already been undermined a year ago by a previous papal reform.

The principle of the personal prelature dates back to the Second Vatican Council and was instituted by the decree Presbyterorum ordinis. Opus Dei, unaffiliated with a territory and therefore a diocese, needs the personal prelature to enable the organisation to carry out special pastoral tasks by virtue of a recognised ‘charism.’ The personal prelature has been used very little, since in the Catholic Church only Opus Dei, the organisation founded by Saint José Maria Escriva de Balaguer, has enjoyed this status since 1982.

At the end of July 2022, Opus Dei had already come under attack from Pope Francis. The motu proprio Ad charisma tuendum—conceived as a continuation of Praedicate Evangelium (“Preach the Gospel”), the apostolic constitution from 19 March 2022—intended to reform the structure of the Roman curia “in order to better promote its service in favour of evangelization.” It moved the supervision of personal prelatures, and therefore of Opus Dei, from the Conference of Bishops to the Conference of Clergy, which had the effect of weakening the authority of the Work and strengthening Vatican control over it. Ad charisma tuendum had also changed the status of the leader of the Work, who no longer had the rank of bishop: he could no longer bear the attributes of a bishop and or exercise the authority of a bishop.

Following from these earlier provisions, the “Apostolic Letter in the form of a Motu Proprio amending canons 295-296 on personal prelatures,” published on August 8th, now assimilates personal prelatures into “public clerical associations of pontifical right.” The edict, in simple terms, will further strengthen the Holy See’s control over the operation and development of universal or international associations, as is the case with Opus Dei, by virtue of canon 312 §1.

The pontiff “emphasises the associative character of the personal prelature,” according to the French canonist Msgr. Patrick Valdrini. The prelate of a personal prelature is now considered to be a “moderator”—a title reserved for leaders of associations of the faithful, like other existing communities, such as the Emmanuel Community—who retains the authority of an ordinary. In other words, prelates will remain leaders with executive power, which allows them in particular to open seminaries and incardinate deacons and priests.

The text also recalls that the faithful belonging to a personal prelature remains under the jurisdiction of their local diocese, which remains the region’s natural authority.

Finally, the new motu proprio insists that the statutes of a personal prelature must henceforth be “approved or issued by the Apostolic See.” Last April, Opus Dei voted on new statutes to incorporate the recent changes. These statutes must now be reconfirmed by Pope Francis, who may want to change them once more.

The reform is consistent with other measures already taken by Pope Francis, aimed at accelerating the centralisation of power despite the stated intentions of ‘synodality’ and the fight against ‘clericalism.’"

"Centralization" despite "stated intentions of of ‘synodality’ and the fight against ‘clericalism.’" A collision between the ideal and the practical, the spiritual and the mundane?