"Heh," he says, noting the gruesome reality.

 Memes as dead-on commentary.

 

I feel seen.

 

The worst residential real estate development ever?

This location in Turkey has to be in the conversation.

Y. I. K. E. S.

 

The proof is in the plumbing?

An interesting hypothesis regarding the social problems in the Roman Empire is that the widespread use of lead for pipes, storage, cooking and utensils caused lead poisoning.

Interestingly enough, contemporary Romans and Greeks warned that the use of lead was unhealthy, though it should be noted that lead pipes for water were likely not a source of dangerous poisoning. Calcium carbonate in the water itself coated the pipes and, along with regular water flow, kept lead contamination down.

And it is certainly safe to say that lead alone did not cause the fall of the Western Empire.

But there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that Romans, especially upper class ones, accumulated toxic levels of lead over time--especially from cooking with lead and using it to store wine. Furthermore, it is known that lead poisoning can cause neurological damage, aberrant behavior and infertility, problems which plagued Rome across a wide period of time:

In a 2019 study, archaeologists examined several skeletons from London during the Roman era for signs of exposure to toxic levels of lead. The team sampled 30 thigh bones, as well as 70  bones from the Iron Age as a control. They found that the Iron Age skeletons contained just 0.3 to 2.9 micrograms of lead per gram, whereas the ones from the Roman empire had between 8 to 123 micrograms per gram. Those are sufficiently high levels to cause widespread health effects, including hypertension, fertility issues (and subsequent population decline), kidney disease, neural damage, gout, and so forth.

While not conclusive, it does strongly suggest that lead was a culprit in Rome's many social problems.

It's a start.

Yet that's the thing: it has to be a *start.*

Clerics at the Vatican, rather like American congresscritters, have the tendency to get rich at the center of power, and the sloshing of cash has stained the institution from time out of mind. 

The problem now is that there's so much more of it, and greed is like drinking salt water--it just makes you crave more. Bertone's apartment, the Papal Foundation loan, McCarrick, Maciel and Bransfield flinging cash all over the place...

And the last three are good reminders that creeps who steal from the collection plate probably have other issues they'd rather you overlook. Making it rain zips mouths shut and makes people studiously incurious. See Sodano, Angelo Cardinal.

Bottom line: nice to see an indictment. Better to see convictions with real sentences. But it's only good if more follow, and it becomes the standard.

Absolute shock.

I knew Matt. Lost touch with him at least 15 years ago, but he was a member of our former parish. His son was an altar boy at our wedding. I heard vaguely that Matt had hit a rough patch--but not this rough.

And he just took his life in horrific fashion. Fortunately, no one else was hurt.

I can't believe the guy I knew would knowingly decide to take people with him.

I refuse to believe that. 

But I could be wrong. Depression is a mental prison that teaches its inmates all the wrong lessons.

May God have mercy and grant his troubled soul peace.

 

[Update: his son is pushing back hard against the claims of depression and suicide. I fervently hope he is correct on all counts. Here is hoping that the investigation is thorough.] 

"The Brazilianization of the World."

A loooong essay, but extremely worthwhile. 

The essential argument is the world's future is that of Brazil: a superficially-modern society, but one which rests on pylons of political, social and economic inequality, patronage, functional castes and the social immobility which comes with all of those formidable problems.

For the better-off societies in the South, now called “emerging markets,” neoliberal development aped the tacit assumptions of mod­ernization theory in assuming these countries were just “late,” but that they would get there eventually—they would become “like us.” Just look at the shopping malls springing up in São Paulo or Bangkok or Cairo! We just need to wait for that wealth to spread and soon these countries will join the rich-world club. In the pages of the Economist, for example, it was said that countries like Brazil just needed some liberal reforms before growth would once again take off. After all, Mexico, South Korea, and a handful of countries in Eastern Europe joined the OECD in the 1990s, with Chile following in 2010. It was only a matter of time.

What this story ignores is that the policy tools wielded by modernization theory (such as import-substitution industrialization) were now gone, as was the international scenario and technological relations that had made catch-up development possible. The technologies and associated industries of the Second Industrial Revolution were no longer in the vanguard. An economy based around the technologies of petroleum, rubber, and steel—say, the manufacture of automobiles—was no longer the stuff of “high value-add.” The important stuff—the really valuable ideas—were now protected by intellectual property rights, inaccessible to a country such as Brazil. Global South and North are therefore no longer avatars of past and present, with the former slowly catching up to the latter, but now seem to exist in the same temporality.

Brazil consequently finds itself stuck—caught in the perennial fluctuation between hope and frustration. And the fate of being modern but not modern enough now seems to be shared by large parts of the world: WhatsApp and favelas, e-commerce and open sewers. In fact, leaving aside the exception of China’s remarkable ascent, the global story of the past forty years is one of retrogression, whatever bluster there may be about the “new middle class”—or, really, a working class that has entered consumer society precariously, now able to buy a fridge and a TV, and maybe even go to university for the first time in family history, but which has not achieved real security.

Indeed, this story of regression is now perhaps most conspicuous in the Global North, which today is demonstrating many of the features that have plagued the Global South: not just inequality and informalization of work, but increasingly venal elites, political vola­tility, and social ungluing. Is the rich world not also becoming “modern but not modern enough,” but in reverse?

 And later:

All around we’re confronted with deaptation, an idea the philosopher Adrian Johnston has taken from memetic theory to describe the way that an initially adaptive memetic strategy later becomes useless or even counterproductive.⁵ If liberalism was a set of ideas appropriate to the bourgeoisie’s rise and then consolidation—all in the name of freedom—it is today in a state of deaptation, wielded in defense of hierarchy and domination.

Brazilian intellectuals have been tangling with deaptation for decades, and thus offer an important perspective from which to understand our moment and the misalignment between ideas and contemporary reality. Moreover, as scholars Luiz Philipe de Caux and Felipe Catalani remark, “in historical situations in which trans­planted ideas are forced to readjust themselves to material conditions that do not sustain them in the same way as their conditions of origin, this maladjustment does not need to be discovered through reflection, as it is always already a daily feeling of the common man.”⁶ 

The average Brazilian has always sensed the hypocrisy of out-of-place ideas. Globalization—or Americanization, via the internet—means that ideas become unmoored from their conditions of origin and the determinate material realities to which they bear witness. Ideas are out of place everywhere, as seen in Europe when young people, in the midst of a pandemic with looming economic devastation, took to the streets to attack “white privilege” in overwhelmingly white-majority countries, thereby imagining themselves American.

As for Brazil, people once thought that its promised future would materialize when it erased the core-periphery division within itself—curing the problem of islands of wealth surrounded by oceans of poverty. Instead, it seems like it is the Global North catching up with the Global South in replicating this pattern. Brazil is once more in the global vanguard.

The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes advanced the Brazilianization thesis in a remarkable 2004 essay, “The Brazilian Fracture of the World.”⁷ Arantes began by surveying various thinkers in the Global North who had registered disquiet about the course of devel­opment of global capitalism. As early as 1995, the conservative strategist Edward Luttwak wrote about the “Third-Worldization of America.” In the same year, Michael Lind referred directly to Brazil in his prognosis of an American society divided through a rigid, though informal, caste system. White elites governed a racially mixed society but the masses, internally divided, would allow for the strengthening of oligarchy.

A year later, Christopher Lasch would attest to the ruling class’s self-enclosure and separation from the rest of society in The Revolt of the Elites. Meanwhile, the former Thatcherite John Gray would write of an emerging “Latin American–style rentier regime” in which elites made a killing in the new globalized world, while the middle class lost its status and workers were proletarianized anew, putting an end to the great expectations provoked by postwar growth.

Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells saw that many would be excluded entirely even from this divided society. A new reality was emerging in which only the bourgeoisie would remain as a social class, albeit a transnational, cosmopolitan one.

It will take a while, but read the whole thing. The diagnosis seems to be dead on.

Excitement on the Lakes!

Sight-seeing boaters viewing Michigan's Pictured Rocks get a sight to remember.

Pure Michigan, that.

 

Space aliens are more likely to wonder why Neil deGrasse Tyson assumes they would think like him.

Dude needs far more time in the lab and far less on Twitter.

I heartily recommend the latter: after a three month experiment, I deleted my own Twitter account. 

The fun parts (following Spanish language accounts to help my reading comprehension) were outweighed by the insanity. Some well-grounded folks can handle it.

I myself cannot.

Anyway, the sad part of Tyson's tweetstorm (there are more in the same dull vein) is how it illustrates how wonder and imagination are dying among so many. 

And when those go, empathy is not too far behind.

The failure of "conservative Catholicism."

I am not the biggest fan of Damian Thompson as a commentator, but his basic observation about the state of conservative Catholicism is fundamentally correct.

Conservative Catholics are in a ghastly situation. Confronted by a malicious pope and pro-abortion Biden loyalists, they’re being offered Integralist sectarian fantasies or Vigano Mark of the Beast paranoia. I despair.

 I am bracketing "integralism" for another day because Thompson is not a reliable political guide to anything other than British Toryism. But I am in complete agreement with him on Vigano, who has allowed a ghostwriting dipstick to turn his name into a byword for crankery.

But my sympathy largely ends there. The fact is, "the ghastly situation" is almost entirely one of conservative Catholicism's making.

The conservative wing has a minimal sense of the wider history of the Faith, replete as it is with failed councils, corrupt leadership and theological windbags in love with the sounds of their voices. Like the leftists they claim to oppose, their historical sense of the Church begins with Vatican II. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that conservative Catholicism was birthed by the failed 21st ecumenical council and cannot live without reference to it. 

In response to the chaos of "renewal" after 1965, the "conservatives" chained themselves to the papacy and the often-dubious "hero bishops" (coughBruskewitzcough) appointed by them. But by conceding the essential goodness of the reforms, they simply made themselves unpaid interns for whichever direction said reforms were taken by the holder of the papal office. 

A reflex developed: 

The documents just don't say what the leftists say they do. Read them, and understand that all is well. It's just not being implemented properly. The papal office we stand beside agrees with us. Reform is needed, just not the kind of false reforms the loonies are trying. We will triumph--it is inevitable.

And so the problem for conservatives began: their entire project rested on the invocation of authority, and nothing else. The unexamined circular assumption conservativism operated under was this: 

Authority agrees with our interpretation. And authority will always be sympathetic to us because our argument is self-evidently reasonable and correct. Why? Because authority says so, and we agree with authority. And authority agrees with us.

So, when the inevitable occurred (contrary to their predictions of inevitable triumph) and a pope was elected who was unfriendly to the conservative Catholic project (such as it was), the game was up. 

Oh, sure: they tried to persist with copes about how the current pontiff was really on board with them. How could they not? Authority had agreed with them for decades! Reading Francis through Benedict and all that. But, over time, that stopped working for most of them. Of course, there are still glassy-eyed papal maximalists out there who flack for every syllable coming from Casa Santa Marta in a way that would make average Latter Day Saints flinch, but the less said about digital cargo cults, the better.

The failure of conservative Catholicism is, at its heart, the failure of the 21st ecumenical council.

"Reform was needed," the chant went. But neither conservatives nor leftists ever questioned whether a damaged and smug church in need of reform was capable of generating fruitful, genuine reforms--as opposed to "valid-but-wrongheaded-if-not-technically-damnable" ones. See, e.g., Lateran V.

Indeed, the unreflectively self-assured and repetitive-beyond-parody declarations of the sole path to righteousness still issued from on high suggest that inflexible triumphalism is alive and well. How could it be otherwise? He was formed by the same damaged and smug church--indeed, by the order most central to it and the imagined reforms.

So, in the midst of chaos and wreckage, conservatives still have their old misbegotten authority reflex, but no one to imprint on. Sure, some have gone to substitute pope figures like the tragicomic Vigano, or a supposedly-heroic truth-telling bishop or priest who comes to notice of the the internet. 

Thus inevitably repeating the cycle of disappointment and ultimate failure. 

There is no way to save conservative Catholicism. But conservatives can extricate themselves from the failed paradigm. Recognize it is broken beyond repair and move on.

But not to a new paradigm or a new leader. Rather, to prayer, scripture, the saints and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Those never change, no matter who is in charge. 

In time, God will find your cause for you.

 

 

I hoped these would have appreciated in value.

 Eh...not by much. But I am still glad to own them.