Pirates and Powers

from Greydanus's pen.  Excerpts:

Was Catholic novelist Tim Powers’ 1987 historical fantasy-adventure novel On Stranger Tides in some way the inspiration, or an inspiration, not only for this fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick, but for the whole Pirates franchise?

Powers’ fans noted striking connections eight years ago, when The Curse of the Black Pearl made its debut: Like the novel, there were sailors’ tales about a dreaded pirate ship crewed by the undead and glimpsed only at night and an impoverished hero forced to turn pirate in order to save a heroine — named Elizabeth — who has been kidnapped by pirates. Powers’ novel even featured a boozy hero named Captain Jack S. (not Sparrow, but a different two-syllable name, Shandy) who gets drunk on the beach — though Johnny Depp’s character is entirely his own creation. (Wikipedia articles suggest further entanglements.)

While Disney certainly wouldn’t acknowledge any influence on the series from the outset, they did option Powers’ book a number of years ago for a possible sequel — and now here is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, with the cagey credit line: “Suggested by the novel by Tim Powers.” Powers fans, take note of that modest verb. The filmmakers have borrowed the title and a few key concepts, like a voodoo-wielding Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, but On Stranger Tides is a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, no more, no less. Especially no more...

"The Answer is Community"

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

Goldman Sachs and the Financial Crisis

Interesting argument.  Excerpts:

...Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial...

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008...

WALL STREET AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse

Newsflash: Kenobi Dead, Says Vader

Wow.  So they actually got him.  Excerpts:

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday. In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock...

The comments are most...illuminating.

And the Empire has released video footage!

The Great Japanese (Catholic) Novelist

A good overview.  Excerpts:

The Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo – described by Graham Greene as one of the century's greatest writers – was always wrestling with the relation between Christianity and Japan. In an interview, he said:

"But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony. It fits, of course, man's sinless side, but unless a religion can find a place for man's sinful side in the ensemble, it is a false religion. If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan's mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly this part is – that is what I want to find out" (cited in Emi Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo's Literary Works, 72)...

What Inculturation Looks Like

These are quite lovely.

Is Hawking Right on No-Heaven?

Mark Shea, take it away!  Excerpts:

...Now here’s the deal, kidz. When the subject is physics, Hawking is your man. He has forgotten more physics than most of us will ever know. But, if the subject is, say, how to costume the cast of “The Wiz,” or which sort of pipe to use to re-plumb your house, or how to deal with that drunken, swiving man of yours, or hot air ballooning, or, dare I say it, whether or not Heaven exists, Hawking has no more competence to speak than the veriest lush at the local bar (and sometimes even less if the lush happens to have training and experience in theatre costume design, plumbing, family therapy, hot air ballooning or philosophy and theology).

Indeed, even within the scientific community, Hawking is an ignoramus outside his extremely specialized field of physics. When he starts gassing on about how the mind is nothing more than the epiphenomenon of a computer made out of meat he is giving you, not science, but his reductionist materialist faith. And it is a faith that has been running aground for years now on the simple fact that we are no closer to creating artificial intelligence with a computer than we were when the quest began. The problem is that the faith that mind is nothing more than a function of matter and energy keeps running into hard scientific reality which keep showing it is not. Some of the best brain researchers (some of them atheists) are, in fact, beginning to reluctantly turn to St. Thomas’ philosophy and to carry on conversation with Dominicans because, well, their philosophy leaves room for ideas and concepts that the crude materialist reductionism of a Hawking does not.

As to the rest of the tommyrot he spouts, I’ll let the inimitable Michael Flynn do the autopsy...

For more on the difference between the mathematical mind and the "intuitive" mind, see here.  For an answer to Hawking's metaphysical claims, see Father Spitzer.

Amd for evidence that heaven exists:

How to Treat The Poor: Addendum

Well, here's a good one.

Modern Economics

An interesting comment.  Excerpts:

CEO pay is 343 times that of employees.

What's fascinating about the time in which we live is that modern serfs are still, at present, willing to fight to the death so that their Lords can maintain this ridiculous inequity. To suggest, as Chesterton did, that the principal trouble with capitalism is that there are too few capitalists is to invite being shouted down as a socialist, Marxist or Commie not by the CEO, but by the people who are watching their savings vanish, their jobs disappear, and their buying power dwindle while presidents of failed corporations ditch the plane in a golden parachute. Ideology is the triumph of the All Explaining Theory of Everything over reality. The Commie wants the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the State. The Capitalist wants it concentrated in the hands of the rich man. Chesterton thought wealth and power shouldn't be concentrated but part of the common good and that everybody should own a little property, run a little business and take care of his family. Naturally, he is vilified as a closet communist by the people who think Ayn Rand is a genius.

I really don't have many answers of any sort when it comes to economics, but the left and the right both hold positions which ring hollow after you test them for long enough. Is this the best we can do?

A Concentration Camp Martyr

Never forget.  Excerpts:

Sixty-eight years after he died of starvation and disease at Dachau, early on this "Good Shepherd Sunday" brought the beatification of the German priest Georg Haefner, whose death at the hands of the Nazis was judged to be "in odium fidei" -- out of "hatred for the faith" -- and, thus, has seen his designation as a martyr.

One of nearly 500 German and Austrian clerics to be jailed, Hafner's reported offense was to preach against the rise of the Third Reich.

With this morning's rites, the new Blessed (1900-42) becomes the fourth member of the fold who perished in the concentration camps to be raised to the honors of the altar, following Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), and Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian farmer who was executed for refusing to be conscripted into Hitler's army. (Another lasting light of the era was now-Blessed Cardinal Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), the "Lion of Munster" whose preaching against the Nazis during the war exposed the regime's manifest evils.)...

Islamic Internal Reform?

An interesting article.  Excerpts:

...in announcing bin Laden's demise, the president fudged a vital fact. Echoing George W. Bush, he insisted that al Qaeda's icon "was not a Muslim leader."

But this is untrue. Bin Laden and his followers represent a real interpretation of Islam that begs to be challenged relentlessly and visibly. Why does this happen so rarely?

"Moderate" Muslims are part of the problem. As Martin Luther King Jr. taught many white Americans, in times of moral crisis, moderation cements the status quo. Today, what Islam needs is not more "moderates" but more self-conscious "reformists." It is reformists who will bring to my faith the debate, dissent and reinterpretation that have carried Judaism and Christianity into the modern world...

...what takes place among Muslims affects countless lives outside the fold, so our business is everyone's business. When it is "moderates," not extremists, who treat you as a traitor for advocating liberal democratic values, something has corrupted the moderates themselves.

That something is identity politics. Even in the seemingly tolerant Muslim communities of America, the politics of identity stands in the way of reinterpretation and reform...

...you do not have to be murderous to be an obstacle to reform. I will never forget the Muslim man in New Jersey who flaunted his moderate credentials by leading an interfaith dialogue group, yet who, behind closed doors, revealed a purist's insularity. On the letterhead of his interfaith initiative, he presented me with a list of phrases and paragraphs to be banned from my 2004 book, "The Trouble with Islam Today."

"You want my publishers to edit out these thoughts?" I asked, incredulously.

"Oh, yes," he confirmed. "Otherwise, you're like a fascist..."

Coolness

Albert Einstein proven right again.  Whodathunkit?

What's Good for the Goose

An interesting comment.  Thoughts?  Excerpt:

...It’s also easier to conduct assassinations abroad if the Commander-in-Chief is liberal. This neutralizes criticism from the media, universities, the legal community, and Hollywood. Obama the law professor can assassinate bin Laden in Pakistan, dump his body in the ocean, and with first-person emphasis boast of our brilliant mission in a way Bush the Texan could not get away with—in the same manner that killing the son of Qaddafi, and the effort to kill Qaddafi himself, are not really forbidden targeted assassinations under Obama, and in the manner that Guantánamo, tribunals, renditions, preventive detentions, Predators, wiretaps, and intercepts that so bothered Senator Obama and others are now deemed essential.

This paradox is just the way it is; the media will report a liberal president’s Predator drone attack or commando hit as done with reluctance and without other viable choices. Were a conservative leader to take the same actions, he would be portrayed as a trigger-happy war-monger reveling in the violence. Thus, the street celebrations that ensued when news of bin Laden’s death broke are seen by the media as a new unity inspired by Obama. Three years ago, they would have been seen as macabre triumphalism...

The US Military and Good Old Fashioned Police Work

We really have become the world's police.  Good grief.  And yet, good for the military for taking a leaf out of the police playbook.  Excerpt:

The recent raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan yielded, as expected, a massive amount of data. Anyone with any connection to al Qaeda, and particularly bin Laden, knew what that meant. In short, you had better run, and stay away from anyone else so connected, until the aftereffects of all this damaging data have run its course. This is all because of what happened in Iraq. Most Americans are not aware of this intelligence angle, but the word has gotten around in terrorist circles. It works like this.

In the last five years, counter-terror operations in Iraq were increasingly concentrating on chasing down specific terrorists and their organizations. The amount of intelligence residing in databases, plus the daily flow of new information made it possible to track terrorist cells and chase after them with high confidence that they would be caught. There were a lot of Islamic terrorists out there in Iraq, but by 2007 they had to spend most of their time on OpSec (operational security, making sure that they, or their bomb making workshops, are not discovered.)...

The army and marines have been doing the same thing police forces and corporations have been doing for over a decade; taking data from many different sources and quickly sorting out what all the pieces mean. It's called fusion and data mining, and it's a weapon that is having a dramatic impact on what many thought was an unwinnable war...

Pope Benedict's "Civilizational Agenda"

As should have been clear from any of a number of books put out by Ignatius Press, Pope Benedict XVI is, as the Church has almost always done, working on the grandest scales imaginable.  Why?  Because it's the Body of Christ, he's the Vicar of Christ and the Heir of the Key Keeper, and the Faith is true.  An interesting article.  Excerpts:

...the real difficulty with so much commentary on this papacy is the sheer narrowness of the perspective brought to the subject. If observers were willing to broaden their horizons, they might notice just how big are the stakes being pursued by Benedict.

This pope’s program, they may discover, goes beyond mere institutional politics. He’s pursuing a civilizational agenda.

And that program begins with the Catholic Church itself. Even its harshest critics find it difficult to deny Catholicism’s decisive influence on Western civilization’s development. It follows that a faltering in the Church’s confidence about its purpose has implications for the wider culture.

That’s one reason Benedict has been so proactive in rescuing Catholic liturgy from the banality into which it collapsed throughout much of the world (especially the English-speaking world) after Vatican II. Benedict’s objective here is not a reactionary “return to the past.” Rather, it’s about underscoring the need for liturgy to accurately reflect what the Church has always believed — lex orandi, lex credendi — rather than the predilections of an aging progressivist generation that reduced prayer to endless self-affirmation.

This attention to liturgy is, I suspect, one reason why another aspect of Benedict’s pontificate — his outreach to the Orthodox Christian churches — has been remarkably successful...

...above all, Benedict has — from his pontificate’s very beginning — gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and reason.

In this regard, Benedict’s famous 2006 Regensburg address may go down as one of the 21st century’s most important speeches, comparable to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Address in terms of its accuracy in identifying some of the West’s inner demons.

Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of some Muslims’ reaction to Benedict’s citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg’s essence. It was really about the West...

An Almighty Shock: The Toowoomba Case

Interesting points.  Excerpts:

...Bishops are in some respects akin to sovereigns in their dioceses and, while it has the authority to remove them, the Holy See is usually very slow to do so, preferring discreet solutions such as early retirement.

The three forced departures in seven months have no precedent in recent years and suggest an increasing preparedness to intervene on the part of the Pope and his new prefect for the Congregation of Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet. The previous prefect, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, was an uber-liberal.

The Catholic archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, who will be retiring in 11 weeks, professed himself at a loss to understand the decision. He told the ABC: " I just wish it hadn't happened and I don't know why it happened and I would very much like to know."

Perhaps I can enlighten him.

Morris issued an Advent pastoral letter in 2006 that canvassed various options to make up for the lack of priestly vocations in his diocese.

Some were uncontroversial. Others, including the ordination of married or single women and recognising the validity of Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church clergy, were heretical.

He has since then maintained what he likes to call a dialogue on these non-options.

As anyone with the rudiments of a theological education would know, the Catholic Church resolved the question of women priests in 1994, with the Pope ruling that it had no power to ordain women in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 1995 described that decision as unchangeably settled and "to be held definitively as belonging to the deposit of faith".

On the issue of recognising the orders of Protestant clergy, Pope Leo XIII declared Anglican orders "absolutely null and utterly void" back in 1896 in Apostolicae Curae. That decision was reaffirmed by the CDF in 1998 as an infallible pronouncement to which Catholics must give "firm and definitive assent". The Lutherans in Australia and the Uniting Church don't have bishops or anything remotely like ordination in the Apostolic Succession, so recognising their orders is, theologically speaking, inconceivable.

As a bishop, Morris was obliged to teach what the church teaches, rather than using his position to sow error and confusion among his flock. His removal must have come as an almighty shock to him and his brother bishops in Queensland because they've been getting away with flouting some of Rome's rulings with impunity since the 1970s.

Given that Morris has had five years of what he again likes to call dialogue with no less than three Vatican congregations and the Pope, with plenty of opportunities to change his tune, why has he persisted in error when he was so clearly in the wrong? There are several schools of thought.

The first argues the bishop just isn't very bright...

Further options follow. A fascinating piece for a secular paper to run, since I think it captures things quite nicely. What exactly motivates men who've sworn obedience and adherence to a certain creed expect to happen when they attempt to consistently undermine, water down, or nullify that creed? The Catholic hierarchy has professional standards in much the same way as the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, or college accrediting organizations. If you do not adhere to certain standards for yourself, your organization, and your public presentation, they do not recognize you as a member, or as a competent member of that profession.

It has been ever thus. Citizens can renounce citizenship. Members can renounce membership. Bishops can renounce the faith. In each case, there are consequences. In what version of the world can one call oneself Catholic while refusing to hold and teach all that the Catholic Church holds and teaches?