A Catholic Question

Dad29 is asking about whether exorcists should be featured prominently; he thinks so. In addition to his argument, there's another angle on the question that this survey brings forward:

This 'all religions are mostly after the same basic truth' idea is one that G.K. Chesterton wrote about extensively. For example:

There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach." It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.... They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.

Even if one were not a believer, I think that one could usefully divide religions agnostically into 'ones that might be true' and 'ones that are definitely false.'  Even once you do that, though, eliminating the obvious falsehoods like (say) Mormonism, you're still left with a great deal of difference in what the teaching is. Christianity and Buddhism are two of the more defensible religions, and as Chesterton explored at length they have very different basic claims about reality and what a good soul should desire and strive to obtain -- so different, indeed, as to be 'eternal life united with God' versus 'an end to suffering through extinction'! 

There is no way that both of those claims can be true. Both could be false, but they simply cannot both be true. Likewise Christianity versus Hinduism: is life fundamentally meaningful or meaningless? Is the soul real and loved, or is it just a passing dream that will be forgotten when the Great God awakens? 

Exorcise that, if you can. 

Honky Tonk Sunday

I guess my memory is better than that. 

"Assault Knives"

Nobody seems to know if this is real or parody; I've seen it cited on both kinds of pages lately. 

As a longtime student of the Riddle of Steel, I have to admit that I don't know what an 'assault knife' might be. It's apparently twice as dangerous as a Rambo knife, though! 

I do recall that the UK went through a thing about "Zombie-style knives" a while ago, which apparently is defined in law as 'the kind of knives you see in Zombie movies.' I assume some equally precise definition is at work here. 

Half-Ton Van

I just did a video/music post, but what the hell, let's have two of them.

This reminds me of an older song.

Unrelenting Policy

Since I was doing a Paint Your Wagon clip recently, here are a couple more. Sadly, the frontier is closed for the moment.

Certain motorcycle rallies still resemble this, however. We have more women, which is one of the advantages of not being on the wild frontier. 

UPDATE: In the first video, Lee Marvin responds to an assertion of disagreement with, “I don’t want to hear about it.” That’s a novel concept today! A fair one though: I’ve considered my position adequately for my satisfaction, and I’m not interested in new ideas on the topic. For those of us with steel in our beard, or other hair, a fair assessment. 

The Wrong Dose of Medicine is Poison

Even if you are inclined to take psychological therapy seriously -- especially if you are, I suppose -- you should be mindful of the dangers of excessive intake. 

Imagine losing five years of contact with one of your parents and not getting contact back to make amends or work things out. A cancer diagnosis sometimes offers a runway, but a heart attack often does not. 

Sorting Out (by) Faith

Via Hot Air, a plea from a defender of Palestinian Christian communities. 

[A] number of... Palestinian Christian leaders assured me that they need our love and prayers—but they also badly need practical support if Christianity is not to die in our lifetime in the land that gave birth to our common religion....

The same holds true in Bethlehem (the City of Bread), where not only the French and Polish orphanages but the wider Christian community are literally depending on the Salesian Bakery for their daily bread. Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, jointly administered and run by a coalition of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, stands empty. The Franciscan hostel beside it is shuttered, as are the nearby rows of souvenir shops, while Manger Square is so empty it might as well be in a ghost town.

The all-Christian town of Taybeh, a little over an hour’s drive past Ramallah to the north, is likewise on its last legs. The Khoury family have shuttered their hotel, their beer factory is running at a loss, and, like for the rest of the village, settler roadblocks and vandalism stop them from accessing their crops. Faced with all this, Christians continue to flee via Jordan to claim refugee status in Portugal.

There is probably nothing that can be done to save them, speaking pragmatically. This strikes me as being partly a consequence of the war begun by Hamas with its October 7th blood magic, which designed to use mass human sacrifice as a prayer to Allah for a final reckoning with Israel. They seem to be getting their prayer answered, by whomever it is that answers such prayers; it is likely that this conflict extends beyond human hands, and that its final outcome will not be subject to our opinions but to higher judgments. Everything associated with Hamas, including "Palestine" and anything that chooses that name for itself, is likely to be brought under that judgment. So I guess; but it is not for me to say, or even to know for certain, in matters such as this. 

However, I am also reminded that this process has been ongoing for quite some time. Wars intensify and speed it -- the Iraq War, for example, led to the destruction of several Christian and Jewish communities in Iraq as well as the subjugation of other religious minorities. At the Aristotle University in Thessalonica, a recent conference pointed out that the shrinking of Christian communities is part of a trend more than a century long -- or longer yet, if you want to go back before the establishment of Islam, which provoked a great shrinkage through conquest and forced/coerced conversions.  

Likewise, Jewish communities across the region have shrunk by approximately 99% in the last century in the Arab countries plus Iran. The 1978 Iranian revolution is part of that story, but mostly it's a reaction by Muslims to a century of relative weakness -- they are attempting to purge the land clean of those who deny the truth of their religion, and they tend to hit the Jewish communities because they are weak and vulnerable to the kind of force that Islamic militants can bring to bear. That's true of Christians and other minority groups as well; it is less true of the Kurds, but even they have been subject to intense violence from ISIS and other Islamic militants as well as from nation states like Iraq (under Saddam), Iran (periodically), Turkey (very much still today), and Syria (under Assad -- the new government at least for now is trying to play nice with the Kurds). 

In that sense the current war is just another war, another accelerant thrown onto a long-burning fire. The real question is to what degree that fire will spread to Europe -- or Detroit -- rather than how it will eventually burn itself out in the Middle East. 

No Communities In Any Community Rooms

The vote was last night; on consideration, they decided not to allow community meetings in the Cashiers community room either. Only official agents of the state/local government may now use the spaces.

It's odd to me to see the Republicans on the side of restricting the access in this way, because in the 2nd Amendment debate this is the position they reject: 'only agents of the state may be trusted to deploy this liberty responsibly.' The idea that only agents of the state can be trusted to keep and bear arms is in obvious and outright defiance of our tradition of self-governance and human dignity. 

Somehow when it's the 1st Amendment, though.... 'you can't allow the community to rent the space from the county because then those weirdos will do something we don't like in a government building, which might give the impression that the community as a whole approves of it' turns out to be the logic, and locking it down to government agents only the accepted response. 

Admittedly the Democrats have the inverse contradiction going on, so it's not like they're better -- it may be that they're worse, because 2A liberties are even more fundamental than 1A ones since they get at your ability to enforce your dignity rather than merely express it. However, it remains a striking contradiction. 

Ah, Another Prince

Troy Jackson, a powerful Maine legislator now running for Senate, once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn’t persuade a lawmaker to vote his way. He yelled at another lawmaker, prompting her to post on social media that straight men were “too emotional” to be in politics. And he cursed and shouted in a meeting with the speaker of Maine’s state House, until she kicked him out of her office.

During the six years Jackson presided over Maine’s Senate, until he left office in 2024, his temper was a feature of his leadership, and one that Democratic lawmakers discussed among themselves as a problem and even raised with the governor....

His temperament is coming up as he is on the verge of replacing Democratic candidate Graham Platner[.]

Washington Post, so there's probably a paywall -- thus the longer quote. 

Probably he doesn't have Nazi tattoos though, so I guess he meets at least one objective standard for being an improvement. Still, don't they have any guys over there who don't act like this?  

"Five Cups"

When you say "up to five cups of coffee," do you mean a measuring cup, or my cup?

Wooster-Chester

The Mexicans have figured this one out. 

Offside

From xkcd.

"Workers Deserve More"

I generally agree that working men ought to receive fair, even generous pay -- that is orthodox, though less common in practice than it ought to be. 

Still, I'm a little mystified about how this plan has anything to do with improving outcomes for workers. "Workers deserve more! Step one, abolish the Senate." 

What?

All the Gold in California

Don't know how much gold is still in California. But, once, it was the promise of individual liberty.

Ignorance is Part of the Product

We all recall President Obama's speech guy explaining to a noted journalist that, unlike when they got started, journalists now are all 27 year olds who "know nothing." Apparently, at the Washington Post that now qualifies you to write a review of The Odyssey. [Long quotes because it is paywalled, and you shouldn't pay for what follows.]

We can discuss later whether my education was merely eclectic or an utter catastrophe, but somehow, having successfully avoided the spoilers for nearly 3,000 years, I went into an early screening of “The Odyssey” with no idea of what it was about.

I mean, ok, everybody's upbringing is different... but wasn't there someone at the Post who could have taken this assignment who wasn't completely ignorant of the subject? 

But hey, sure. Let's have a review by the girl who literally does know nothing. It'll be objective, or something. 

But first: what even is “The Odyssey”?

“The Odyssey” is a massively long poem.

Look, probably the rest of the audience actually does know a little bit about the Odyssey. You might be able to skip some of the preamble. She did skip part of it; she says she wrote and deleted 'several paragraphs' about disputed concepts of authorship among scholars, which I assume she found out about middle-school style five minutes before her deadline but thought she was qualified to discuss at length.

“The Odyssey” is a thing you can buy tickets to, and we’re going to talk about the movie, I promise; this is the journey part of the story.

You know, this does read like a middle school book report. The research is similarly exacting throughout. 

Some of Nolan’s casting choices immediately became controversial. He cast Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong’o, one of the most beautiful women alive, as Helen of Troy, one of the most beautiful women alive... He cast Elliot Page, a transgender man, as one of about a hundred Greek soldiers, and this also ticked off a horde of commentators because, I don’t know, they are weird cashews.

I didn't think much of their complaints either. They probably knew who Odysseus was, though.

“The Odyssey” is a meditation on aging, Amy Poehler suggested to Matt Damon in a recent episode of her podcast, “Good Hang.” “The Odyssey” is a meditation on PTSD, Matt Damon suggested back, while also informing her that “The Odyssey” made him go gluten-free. “The Odyssey” is about “the urgent desire to get home and to belong somewhere,” according to scholar and translator Daniel Mendelsohn; it is about “what it means to survive violence, and what it means to come home,” according to scholar and translator Emily Wilson; it is, said Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, “a journey of the soul.”

So now we are gathering celebrity opinions about the meaning of the poem because they were available on podcasts? Somehow a couple of actual scholars made their way into her field of attention, and thus the book report. 

“The Odyssey” is — and let’s be serious movie people for a moment — absolutely astonishing.

Yes, by all means. If this is what 'serious movie people' look like, we can surely all be one if we choose. Maybe I'll be one tomorrow. Why not? "To hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

After sitting in the theater, gobsmacked as the credits rolled, I felt strongly that I had come into the story in exactly the right way: completely ignorant.

Can I tell you whether the screenplay diverted from the original text in matters of importance? I cannot. If it did, it wouldn’t have bothered me. A colleague revealed that her 12-year-old was irritated by the absence of a scene involving the God of Wind which is, apparently, quite important in the original text, and that girl definitely went to a better middle school than I did.

You should have had her write the review. We'd have all been better informed if you had. Child labor laws, I guess. 

Justices say 'Whee!'

The Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii secedes from the Supreme Court of the United States, or so I gather from this rant in which they declare they will 'take no guidance' from Federal cases because they think the US is becoming a worse place.

Next up, the Hawaii Supreme Court explains that federal due process rights "keep sinking" so they'll take "no guidance" from federal cases. And here is where the attacks go from odd to deranged. Accusing the Supreme Court of "imperious ideology", it goes to other areas of law...

"The Roberts Court sees only white." The Hawaii Supreme Court follows with more Callais and Allen v. Milligan to accuse the Supreme Court of racism. It accused the Supremes of misinterpreting the Equal Protection Clause.... Now election finance and redistricting. Citizens United, Rucho v Common cause, Presidential immunity, and a recent (minor) election spending case. It's like they put their least favorite cases into Claude....

Now for the page revealing the cause is the tantrum. Wolford v. Lopez and Hawaii's attempt to evade the Second Amendment. It was stymied. These justices are not happy. In a spoke -word-poem style list of grievances, they attack the Supreme Court's recent jurisprudence. Wild!

As with all the rest of this stuff, it's not the first time it's come up. In fact, sometimes it works.

Unlike more notorious attempts by states to reject or nullify federal court decisions, these state laws and decisions remain in effect. How can this be?

The reason is simple enough: the Supremacy Clause is not a binary switch. Without complete preemption, our system of federalism leaves room for state law to supplement or stand alongside federal law. States often use that freedom to depart from federal law by passing laws or issuing judicial opinions that explicitly reject specific opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hawaii is going to find it very hard to get away with that on these 2A issues, where the state's insistence would amount to pre-empting Federally defended rights in order to assert powers explicitly ruled unconstitutional. There's probably quite a lot of ground, however, where they can simply refuse to listen to the Federal courts at all.