Notes on Christianism

Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Vangelo di Matteo (1964), via a blog called "El Primo de Marty Feldman".

So Cardinal Cordileone ("Lion's Heart") has excommunicated Speaker Pelosi, at least when she's in San Francisco—I don't suppose he can stop priests elsewhere from ministering to her—over her support for laws permitting abortion in a society that is 78% non-Catholic. 

Excommunication seems pretty crazy to me all the way around. It's not like shunning, where the criminal is sent into complete social exile. Excommunicated Catholics remain legally part of the community, they're even expected to attend Mass like everybody else, but they're barred from the sacraments, remaining in their seats while the congregation goes up to receive communion. It occurs to me that that is exactly the opposite of what happens in the Gospel narrative, as Matthew tells it: during the Passover seder service on the evening before his death, Jesus literally hears Judas's confession (though Judas doesn't realize he's confessing)

Saint Patrick's Day

A Saint Patrick's Day Post: What Three Millennial YouTubers May Tell Us About Their Ireland, Compared to Ancient Memories of Mine (Warning: Long)

I say "may" because I may be wrong. The perceptions of a septuagenarian Irish-American regarding societal change in Ireland -- based on recollections of a six-week sojourn there in the Summer of 1968 -- may not be the best basis for social or psychological assessments of the work of these three "lads" and what they have to say about the Ireland of today. But of course, I'll press on regardless! Judge for yourself how "off" I am.  If you want to skip all the stuff about me, go straight to the subheading "Sgt. Ducky!"

Redhand

Let me speak about my starting point in 1968. I was living in Rome with my Air Force pilot family while slowly recovering from what we thought had been a near-fatal case of Hepatitis B the previous year.  My parents decided to reward me for surviving by sending me for six weeks to Ireland, where they had recently visited.  I was to spend time with my grandfather, Richard "Dick" Sweeney, my mom's dad, and also a great-uncle on my mother's side, James "Uncle Jim" Hynes. I had met both before in America.  

Twenty-one Years

Updated 5/25

Photo by Manchester Evening News, June 1996.

Just 21 years ago, on June 15 1996, the city of Manchester (which has, like most big cities in the north of England, a very large Irish Catholic population) was rocked by the explosion of an enormous bomb, 1500 kg and the largest bomb ever detonated in Great Britain in peacetime, in a truck parked on Corporation Street. The perpetrators, the Provisional IRA, had sent a warning an hour and a half in advance, allowing the police to evacuate some 75,000 people from the area, and nobody was killed, but 212 people were injured, and you can imagine the chaos and distress in the city as friends and parents and lovers tried to assure themselves of each others' safety, and emergency medical workers sought out the victims—it's a whole story that they were confused by mannequins lying in the street after the blast blew them out of their shopwindows.

In the horrible business of deciding which terrorist attacks are worse than others, you'd have to say this bombing wasn't nearly as bad as last night's attack on the Ariana Grande concert audience at the Manchester Arena, which gave no warnings, aimed specifically at an event where most of the participants were children, and has killed at least 22 people, but it was horrible all the same.

Make Ireland Great Again—Bring Back the Druids

St. Patrick (in halo) reclines on a hillock, while the beasts of the vision he is having frolic underneath. Wauchier de Denain, Lives of the Saints, Paris, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Royal MS 20 D. vi, f. 213, via University of Notre Dame.

.@realDonaldTrump Happy St. Phatrick's Day to you too! (It's Pádraig, not Phadraig)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2017

Ochone!

Mr. Trump Potato Head, by Hannah Rothstein. Via Time.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, a day or two ago, telling us how he really feels about those white working class Trump voters (rearranging slightly):

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

You seem nice, Kevin.

And now he can't believe everybody's so pissed off with him! Well, I guess he remembers it a little differently, because he doesn't wonder if he was wrong to compare people to dysfunctional, negligent, incomprehensibly malicious stray dogs who are 100% to blame for whatever suffering they may endure. What? No, he thinks it's about the advice he gave them; he's

What a swell party this is!

Mélenchon remplit sa plage! Today's rally in Marseille for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche, drew a crowd of 120,000—looks like holding it on the beach was a smart idea. What a swell party this is.

A bit of a setback in Egypt in the news that the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, presumably military-run, has barred ten candidates from the election, including some we don't like—the hard-line Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail whose mother became a US citizen before she died, and the Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. No reasons were given, according to the Guardian, but the New York Times speculates that in the cases of the likewise barred Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater and the classy old liberal Ayman Nour it was their prison records.

And how did they get prison records? Jailed by Mubarak, of course, for political activity. They can't run for president because the disgraced criminal ex-dictator didn't like their politics! Looks like premature anti-fascism is still a crime, and that can't be good news.

From The Albinophant blog.

Here's another depressing little irony: Guess who doesn't like austerity, in Italy and Ireland? Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and it's not very funny, either, because they're killing themselves: unable to pay their debts in County Cork (190 suicides from 2008 to 2011), creditors of a deadbeat government in the Veneto (more than 30 small-business suicides in the past three years). All those job creators just need to man up a little, I guess. Look at Mitt Romney! He doesn't whine.

Why is this man smiling? Photo by Sean Gardner/Reuters.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate couldn't get his taxes done on time, though!  He's filed an extension, the same day Barack Obama and Joe Biden publicly released their 2011 returns. Luckily, he'll totally get it done before the election.

"Earlier this year, Gov. Romney released his 2010 tax return and an estimate of his 2011 income and taxes.  This is an extension for filing his 2011 actual return, similar to what he has done in prior years," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return."

The Romneys estimate a total tax liability of $3,226,623 for 2011, according to Saul. They made payments of $3,434,411 in 2011. They made an estimated payment of $887,000 for 2012.

Naturally Obama has it easier—he works for the government, doesn't he? Just goes to show how out of touch Obama really is.