Ben Carson is 100% correct here.

A bit of forgotten history: the 1943 Detroit Race Riot. Here, 

whites are pulling black passengers off buses to beat them.

 
I can't see him as President, but he's a smart man with a history of fearlessly jumping on one of America's third rails:

“White people think of racial violence in a modern context — such as the black riots that erupted in the wake of the Rodney King verdict,” he wrote. “They have no grasp on the history of racial violence in this country — as illustrated by their total unawareness of what Newsweek (Dec. 8, 1997) admitted were ‘two [facts] that every American should know. Between 1885 and 1900, at least 2,500 blacks were lynched or murdered as the KKK consolidated its hold on the post-Reconstruction South. In 1741, 14 slaves were burned at the stake and 18 others were hanged because of fears of a slave revolt— in New York City.’”

Carson cited an example of his own personal history with racial injustice, an arrest of his mother for frivolous charges.

“Too many other incidents of injustice are not merely ancient history, but personal history, even current events, for the majority of black people. I remember in Boston when I was a child, my older cousins, sons of the aunt and uncle who took our family in, were arrested and thrown into jail for some minor infraction of the law. When one of my cousins protested that abuse, he was beaten so severely by the police that he almost died. I vividly remember seeing the results of that beating. A few years ago, when my own mother questioned a policeman who stopped her for a routine traffic violation in a Detroit suburb, the officer angrily told her she met the description of a woman wanted for abducting an elderly couple. He promptly arrested her, had her car impounded, and threw her into jail. I had to call a lawyer friend of mine, a fellow Yale alumnus, who used his contacts as a senior partner in a major Detroit law firm to get her released and to see that the bogus charges were dismissed.”

If his campaign accomplished nothing else, getting more conservative whites to think about racial disparities would be an excellent thing.

Coming soon...

I'll be resuming book reviews for the Changeverse series. Going to be skipping around a bit and starting with this one.

One of the many advantages of taking the bus is that I get quality reading time.

Slam-dunk prediction.

Just "initiating a process."

"Discernment" and "accompaniment" will be the new ecclesial buzzwords, joining such revered warhorses as "dialogue" and "pastoral."

As with the older saws, both will be synonyms for "negligence," "enabling" and/or "tacit approval."

Meanwhile, Ches helps you understand why the "famous victory" is no such thing, and why changing the language always results in changing the meaning.

All translation is a mediation, not only between two languages but between the two cultures that produce those languages. And both linguistic and cultural mediation open up the eventuality that the source text will not be faithfully translated. That is because fidelity to the source battles against adequacy for the target at every turn. Some "archaic or simply incomprehensible" language (to quote Pope Francis) just cannot be translated - like 'Trinity' or 'Transubstantiation'. But what would I know, being nothing other than a phylacteried lackey?

The Conscience of Blase Cupich.

The Ordinary of Chicago and Pope Francis appointee Blase Cupich made some waves this week when he suggested that anyone who felt they had a good conscience could receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

That prompted many questions and discussions, and was certainly intriguing considering his track record as a spiritual guide and shepherd of souls.

To whit:

He locked 220 parishioners out of their church during Holy Week and suggested it was their fault.

He forbade priests to participate in 40 Days for Life, leaving his layfolk on the front lines bereft of clerical support.

He filed a lawsuit against the Diocese of Spokane's bankruptcy law firm "to throw mud and see if anything sticks." The lack of merit of the lawsuit can be seen in the fact it was settled with a filed stipulation from the Diocese stating that the law firm had done nothing wrong.

And he said that live organ harvesting from babies was morally equivalent to unemployment.

Well, then.

I will agree with the archbishop to this extent: he's certainly not in a position to judge anyone else's conscience.

Just a little chip.

The Pope is a fan of starting processes--religious and political:

God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes. 

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.

Read paragraphs 84-86 of the final synod document with that hermeneutic in mind.

Also, remember what the progs did with the built-in ambiguity of the Vatican II documents. 

Celebrate the glorious triumph accordingly.

Not trying to hide it much.

In 2008, Michigan voters passed a referendum legalizing the medical use of marijuana.

In 2012, Detroit voters decriminalized the personal possession of less than an ounce of marijuana on their own property.

Thus, the number of "medical" marijuana dispensaries in Motown has ballooned recently.

Why the scare quotes?

Consider the names of some of the emporia your host passes on a regular basis.

Some are unobjectionable in that they attempt to convey some genuine medical connection: "The THC Healing Center," "The Healing Tree," "Herbal Remedies." OK--you can still be dubious about the law, and even the dispensary in question, but at least there's an effort to connect it to the 2008 law.

But the most recent ones seem to be tilting toward Law No. 2: "The Reef," "Puff Detroit," "King of Budz," "420 Dank" and, most recently "Dank Godz." 

I'm missing the "medical" angle, gents. Unless your treating physician is Tommy Chong and you're suffering from the dread Lackaganja virus.

Fortunately, the City of Detroit seems to be a wee bit skeptical, too, and is doing something to rein in these joints: 

About 150 medical marijuana shops are operating in Detroit. Until now, city officials had no way to track the shops or control who operated them, stoking concerns among many residents about the potential for violence and other nefarious activity near the shops.

“We’re dealing with squatting, people buying other drugs standing on the corner,” said Norma Foster, who lives near East 8 Mile Road and Kelly Road. "This medical marijuana is just putting more strain on us.”

Under the rules City Council approved by a vote of 6-1, the shops will have to get a city license or be shut down. Operators of the shops would be subject to a police background check, and drive-through service would be prohibited. The ordinance also sets an inspection process and prohibits shops from staying open 24 hours a day.

Councilman James Tate said it's the city's responsibility to address residents' concerns about the marijuana dispensaries. He said the licensing rules allow people to receive their medicine.

“Right now, there’s no ordinance to allow for these places to exist,” Tate said. "That compassion is there ... because it allows these facilities to exist.”

 

Long odds.

There is a scene in Alan Moore's uneven-but-sometimes-brilliant Watchmen that has always stuck with me.

Long story short: Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 where superheroes exist. The most powerful of them is Doctor Manhattan, a godlike superbeing accidentally created during a nuclear experiment gone wrong. His powers give the United States an advantage in the Cold War, and we take it, keeping the Soviet Union cowed. His powers have also left him detached from humanity, almost amoral.

The American advantage ends. Manhattan flees the Earth after being told that his powers have given those around him cancer. It turns out that this is part of a sweeping conspiracy involving the murder of superheroes which also has some unexplained connection to the resurgent Cold War. Manhattan also decides humanity is beneath his concern and he cares nothing for the fact that the world is tottering towards nuclear war.

Manhattan brings Laurie Juspeczyk (his former girlfriend) to Mars (it's not like he needs to breathe) to try to persuade him to help address the plot and save the Earth. He declines. Then he learns that Laurie's biological father was an important superhero murdered early in the film and...one who had unsuccessfully tried to assault her mother a few years before she was born. Laurie is horrified, but the Doctor takes a different view:

If you are unfamiliar with the book, the smiley face at the end is an ironic logo worn by Laurie's superhero father.

All of this brings me in a very, very roundabout and desperately geeky way to announce that today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary.

It is, quite truly, a miracle. As are our children. Any number of decisions--or indecisions--would have deflected us away from each other. And yet here we are. The same holds for you, dear reader, whether you are in a relationship or not. Your very existence is so unlikely that you should marvel at it from time to time.

I love you, Sweetheart. Here's to us, and our miracle.

I'd have a dram or two.

Hat tip to Ace.

My new fave.

I am rather fond of unexpected covers of songs. Some manage to elevate the source material (Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt comes to mind). Trent Reznor admitted that after he heard Cash's cover, it felt like seeing his girlfriend walk off with another guy: it was now a Johnny Cash song.

  

But some artists work in an entirely different way, sending it up and exposing just how awful the original was. Alanis Morisette's cover of "My Humps" is a brilliant example of this:

And then there's Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. This band is the brainchild of Mark Jonathan Davis, and dares to ask the question: what would current rock and R&B songs sound like after being filtered through the stylings of a highly-mannered 70s lounge singer and his ensemble? Here is their cover of "Baby Got Back."

Good luck getting that one out of your skull. You'll never hear the original the same way again.

Offer Void in Wisconsin.

So...I'm reliably informed that everything is just okey-fine with the Synod. The clock's ticking down, and we got this.

Yeah, well...let's just say I've seen that recently.

As America's Confucius famously said: "It ain't over till it's over." And the guy who just collegially dumped a 45 day annulment procedure drafted in secret on his brother bishops is the one in charge of the clock. 

And the refs. 

And the playbook. 

And the rulebook. 

And the players.

Amy Welborn helps to spell it out for you here.

Let me digress to notice one of the big stinkbombs of the Synod--the decentralization thing.

Damian Thompson sorta gets it, but gets lost in the weeds a bit--as in, playing defense counsel for the Curia. They don't need a defense counsel--they are, after all, part of the problem, too.

However, the decentralization thing is fascinating in exactly the same way that above-ground nuclear weapons testing, Yoko Ono concerts, durian tasting and Showgirls mesmerize:

Each is so staggeringly bad that you wonder what people were thinking.

The Kasper proposal, too, is a staggeringly bad idea, but it has one merit (of sorts) from the Catholic perspective: it would have universal--catholic--applicability. One standard.

Whereas entrusting national episcopal conferences with "genuine doctrinal authority" is...

I certainly hope you get the idea.

Bluntly, letting national episcopal conference set doctrinal decisions re: the family (or anything else) activates the Schismotron and cranks it up to

I respect Tom McDonald's opinion and judgment, but I have to disagree with him here. If the Catholic Church were to follow through on the Edict of Decentralisation, Catholicism would be more than changed--it (pronoun chosen deliberately) would be laughable.

If something is sinful based upon whether you are east or west of the Oder-Neisse Line, the Church is done. It is no longer catholic--universal. But it would be really, really funny. Then again, I have a decidedly bleak sense of humor, so your mileage may vary. For example:

And, really why stop at the border? We all know there is no magic in a national gaggle/club of bishops. What does Cardinal Dolan know about the unique conditions of Catholicism in Michigan, and why should a majority vote of a bunch of non-Michiganders govern us? Or, really--what does our Archbishop truly understand about life on the ground in southern Macomb County? He's a Mount Clemens guy, and everyone knows things get weird north of the Clinton River. 

And so on, and so forth. 

At the end of the day, the Creed will be bit different near the end:

"I believe in One...well, no, not as such...

Holy...yeah, kinda-ish so long as you aren't pious and overly-devotional or unpastoral. Kinda...

Catholic...er, well, we don't believe the same stuff as those stuffy Africans, so, maybe universal in some spiritual-but-not-religious sense...

Apostolic...eh, maybe, I guess, if you squint and avoid solemn nonsense...

Church. Es. Yep, definitely plural. Except when we gather at the bi-annual conventio--I mean Synod thingy."


And there you go. Interesting times, eh?

This, too, is Detroit.

The last diner in a crumbling neighborhood, John's Grill keeps the orders coming and the loyal customers happy.

Out of nowhere, five police cars with black-tinted windows swarmed a passing driver. The cops boxed him in, drew their guns, yanked him from his car and started searching every crevice of the vehicle. A few onlookers gathered on nearby sidewalks and stared at the commotion.

The lunchtime diners inside John’s Grill on West Chicago near Wyoming watched the drama through the windows. The owner, however, didn’t bother to look. He’d seen this kind of thing enough times before. He kept on cooking.

“There’s always some kind of action going on out there,” said Jovica Trpcevski, the diner’s 58-year-old owner and sole cook, as he flipped burgers on the grill.

After all, this Detroit ZIP  code — 48204 — made news a few years ago when it was named by something called NeighborhoodScout.com as the single most dangerous neighborhood in the entire country. The group collects crime and census data about every city in the country, and its 2013 report, based on FBI statistics, said one in seven people in this neighborhood will be either murdered, raped, robbed or assaulted.

Trpcevski didn’t need stats to tell him things had gotten bad around here.

“Man, I’m telling you if I could put a life-size face on the wall out there of everybody that had been coming in here who I seen get killed over the years that I’ve been here, there wouldn’t be enough room on my wall,” said Trpcevski, known as John around here. “And a lot of these kids were good kids. A lot of them got killed over nothing.”

Since he opened, this west-side neighborhood has undergone a four-decade collapse into crime and abandonment. But he never reacted to the changes.

There’s no bulletproof glass in his restaurant. Customers can reach out and touch him as he cooks. They eat in an open dining room in booths or at the long counter.

In an area like this, where the only places left to eat at are coney islands that are built like fortresses designed to barricade their workers from those they serve, and where several small-business owners have been shot and killed in their shops over the years, this is unheard of.