Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida.
Claude
Two soft shell crabs sandwich and A PLATE OF FRIED CLAM STRIPS OVER FRENCH FRIES WITH A COAT OF NE CLAM CHOWDER 😳
Set list
“Street Fighting Man”
“It's Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)”
“Tumbling Dice”
“Under My Thumb”
“19th Nervous Breakdown”
“Wild Horses”
“You Can't Always Get What You Want”
“Living in a Ghost Town”
“Start Me Up”
“Honky Tonk Women”
“Happy”
“Slipping Away”
“Miss You”
“Midnight Rambler”
“Paint It Black”
“Sympathy for the Devil”
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
Encore
“Gimme Shelter”
“(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction”
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 Thanks to ridiculous and expensive (YOU are paying for this crap) bank regulations…every week I receive these mailings to “inform me” of holdings in managed accounts. This one had about 20 pages of the same stuff. Assured Nominees…Confirmation Hearings. On and on and on.       ******************************* | |||||||
Reflection: Silence exits so that we might speak to God.
And it is in silence that God communicates His gaces to us. —St Vincent de Paul
Prayer: Heavenly Father, teach me to appreciate the value of silence in my life. Let me set aside a few silent moments each day for thinking about You and speaking to You.
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| St Vincent de Paul |
When Are We Human?
The “right to reproductive freedom,” as it is called, is an interesting “right.” One might have thought it would be a “right” that would prevent the Chinese government from sterilizing women or enforcing a “one-child” policy. But, oddly, it’s not. In practice, it’s the right to terminate the life of another human being.
Now, granted, there are those who argue that a baby, even just ten minutes before birth, is not a “human being.” The baby only becomes “human” after birth – and perhaps not even then. “Ethicists,” such as Princeton’s Peter Singer, argue that no newborn should be considered a person until thirty days after birth. So too, philosopher Michael Tooley argues that a human possesses a right to life “only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”
How we would gauge “scientifically” the presence or absence of an adequate “concept of self,” especially in, say, marijuana-smoking teens or homeless people on the streets, is hard to say. It’s a slippery slope, one would think.
These men, and other abortion supporters, often hold positions of influence at major universities. Still, history often provides valuable lessons and insights in such matters. I suggest reading accounts of the arguments high-level philosophers and scientists in the nineteenth century used to “demonstrate scientifically” that black people were a “lesser” form of human being, thus not “persons” in the sense meant by the Declaration of Independence.
Several major philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Kant, Voltaire, and Hume were proponents of race inequality and expressed negative judgments about Africans as a “primitive” race. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and the German physiologist Johann Blumenbach argued for distinct “species” of Homo sapiens. Soon, scientists were ranking them, especially evolutionary biologists who argued for polygenism, the multiple geneses of different species, rather than the monogenism advocated in the Biblical creation account. Many argued that blacks were less “evolved.”
In 1799 Charles White, a Manchester physician, published the earliest “scientific” study of human races. White had scrupulously measured the body parts of a group of blacks and whites, lending the semblance of hard science to his conclusions that the Negro, the American Indian, some Asiatic tribes, and Europeans were of different species and there was a gradation of the races.
Thomas Jefferson, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” recorded his “observation” of black people that “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” justifying their enslavement. One wonders whether he would have judged them to possess a sufficient “concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states.”
In 1851, noted physician William Cartwright, professor of “diseases of the Negro” at Tulane University, reported to his fellow doctors in the Medical Association of Louisiana that Negroes had smaller brains and blood vessels, which explained their tendency toward indolence. The true cause of their “debasement of mind,” he concluded from the results of his studies, was the “defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium. . .[that] has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.” Very scientific sounding, but pure bunk. However eminent these men were then, they are viewed with contempt now.
Such theories still persist. I read recently an article bemoaning the persistence of white racism, “despite the advent of modern DNA science, which has shown race to be fundamentally a social construct. Humans, as it turns out, share about 99.9 percent of their DNA with each other, and outward physical characteristics. . .occupy just a tiny portion of the human genome.” Absolutely. So let’s stipulate once and for all that any being with human DNA is fully human, not a second-class “human” whose rights can be denied.
But back in 1857, all the very sophisticated philosophy and science of the day resulted in the Supreme Court deciding for the entire nation in the Dred Scott case that black slaves were not and could not be citizens of the United States. It was widely thought, even among some who opposed slavery, that trying to reverse this “slavery right” would simply be too disruptive. Best to leave things as they were.
At a Southern Rights Association meeting in 1851 (and by “rights” here, they meant the right to own slaves, not the rights of slaves), Josiah C. Nott, a South Carolina physician, anthropologist, and a future medical director in the Confederate army, told the assembled defenders of “rights” that the institution of slavery must be protected because it “has grown up with us from our infancy, it has become part of our very being; our national prosperity and domestic happiness are inseparable from it.”
Why it’s almost as though he was arguing that the institution “could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have. . .made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on” the institution of slavery. But no, that was Justice Kennedy writing in 1992 about abortion in Planned Parenthood v Casey.
Not only has denying the full humanity of all biological human beings always been a mistake, it has shown itself repeatedly to be one of the worst mistakes we ever make. And yet it is one we continue to make and are loathe to abandon once we make it.
*Image: Portrait of a Young Woman by Jean-Etienne Liotard, late 18th century [St. Louis Museum of Arts, St. Louis, MO]
YET… President Joe Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on abortion referrals by taxpayer-funded federal family planning clinics Monday, returning some $60 million in annual funding to Planned Parenthood. Former President Donald Trump’s policy amounted to a prohibition against giving taxpayer funding to healthcare providers who actively promoted or partnered with the abortion industry. Planned Parenthood tweeted: “Thanks, [President Biden], and everyone who organized to make this happen!”
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BEAUTY MATTERS, AESTHETIC EDUCATION MATTERS
by Robert MixaSeptember 28, 2021
Aesthetic education matters. Noble art cultivates noble souls. Until recently, most civilizations have understood this, encouraging educators to introduce the youth to art, beauty, and good taste. This is what is known as an “aesthetic education.” But how many educators do this today? When taste has been reduced to mere preference—wherein the distinction between superior or inferior taste is meaningless and even offensive—criticism of taste is considered off-limits. This view has gained hold not only in popular culture but even in the schools, threatening the very purpose of education. And while it’s important to be reticent about being too critical and a snob, education—and the soul—depends on the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can identify what constitutes “good” art.
At the heart of education is the development of an aesthetic sense—that is, a receptiveness to the goodness and beauty that ultimately opens the soul to transcendent beauty itself. Beauty is not just a formalism devoid of all content but a form embodied with meaning and intelligibility, as the expression of the mind of God. Without this transcendent horizon, the human spirit does not blossom, and art, the spirit’s expression, becomes bland and uninspired. Thankfully, there’s a long tradition of aesthetic education we can draw from to recover the cultivation of taste that desires only the finest that flows from the fount of wisdom—wisdom in Latin is sapientia, which has its root in sapor, taste. Such water helps the wings of the spirit grow.
The cultivation of the aesthetic sense matters for without it civilization and its refinements would never be passed on and developed in new expressions. As cultivation, aesthetics plays a role in cult or divine praise. It refines the capacity to recognize the holy and the divine glory even when it appears in the apparently ugly, such as the crucifixion and death of the Lord. Having an aesthetic sensibility makes us better disciples. I took this very seriously as a theology teacher, and that’s why I showed the late Sir Roger Scruton’s BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters” each year to my students. And while Scruton’s documentary scandalized many of my students who thought all taste was subjective and relative, it at least got them to think about aesthetic sensibility and why it matters. Much of the faith rests on the objective value of beauty that subjects are meant to perceive.
Answer: The shrine of St. Michael in Monte Sant’ Angelo, on the slopes of Mount Gargano overlooking the Adriatic, located on the “spur” of the boot which is Italy. The shrine itself is located in a cave, an ancient site of pagan worship, where according to hagiographical tradition the Archangel Michael appeared in 490. He instructed that a shrine be built to his honor, and that those who invoked him would be defended in battle against pagan military incursions. Pope Gelasius I approved the shrine in 493. LINK to the full article, which is worth your time
There is always the temptation to domesticate the Gospel — to smooth out the rough edges, sanitize the language, and naturalize the supernatural. In a word, to make it comfortable. In this way, the Beatitudes become simply gentle sayings about the poor, meek, and sorrowful. The twofold command of love becomes a mere exhortation to kindness. Even the death of Christ becomes just a good example.
Saint Mark tells us that those who followed Christ were amazed and afraid. (Mk 10:32). Well, we want to be comfortable, not afraid. Not comfortable as God desires to make us (with the peace beyond all understanding), but comfortable on our own terms, according to our earthbound understanding. We want the Gospel to make our life better, not to upend it. So, we try to tame His words and make them fit for polite company.
Then comes along a Scripture passage such as today’s Gospel. (Mk 9:38-47) Our Lord’s discussion of fastening millstones around necks, cutting off limbs, and plucking out eyes shocks us back to the reality of the supernatural and the demands of the Gospel. There is no smoothing out these words or giving them a worldly interpretation. Either our Lord means that sin is punished, sometimes eternally, or He is speaking complete nonsense. Either our choices here have eternal significance, or they mean nothing. There is no in-between.
Our Lord draws us into this truth by using the example of a universally agreed upon villain — the man who ensnares children, the one who “causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin.” In recent years the Church has had many painful reasons to reflect (perhaps not enough) on these words. The abuse of children draws universal condemnation, even from those (ironically) who have failed to protect them.
People object to many of our Lord’s words. But I’ve never heard anyone complain about the condemnation of the abuser: “It would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” Of course, the only reason that fate would be better for such a man is because a worse punishment awaits him in eternity. Temporal decisions have eternal consequences.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
TOO MANY DIVORCES…
Learning from the best liars, looking at you JB
George Orwell, the writer, and Josef Pieper, the Catholic philosopher, came from very different backgrounds. They had very different views. But both shared a keen interest in the use, and abuse, of language. The reason was simple. Words have power. Words matter. Consider:
The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” For Americans, equality is a sacred word. We revere it despite the fact that, in reality, we’re not equal because none of us is identical to anyone else. We have different skills, intellects, deficiencies, and characters. Nor do our lives produce equal happiness or success; no society can guarantee otherwise and remain free. We are each unique, unrepeatable, and uniquely loved by God. We are thus inescapably unequal. Nonetheless, the ideal of political equality properly understood – equality of natural rights and dignity endowed by a Creator, and equality before the law – grounds the American experience. And it has had immense practical value, producing the greatest democratic republic in history.
But words and their meanings can be slippery creatures. In recent years, “equality” as a word in our political vocabulary has undergone its own curious “trans” surgery. The result is that delicious new word, equity. The two words sound similar. And they do share family DNA. Both derive from the Latin root aequus, meaning flat or level. But equity and equality are not the same thing, any more than “freedom of religion” and “freedom of worship” are the same thing. The differences may seem small, but they widen as the two concepts diverge.
Equality suggests sameness, as in the same access to voting, services, and opportunity. It’s typically measurable by material standards like income, poverty rates, crime stats, and education. Equity is more ambiguous. It more clearly implies a should, a heightened sense of right and wrong and the urgency to do something about it. Equity insists that resources should be directed, or redirected, to heal inequities caused by past inequalities. What those inequities and inequalities might be, why they exist, and how to fix them are matters open to dispute and adjudication. So equity is, in effect, a clergy word freighted with moral tension, and there’s nothing wrong with such words. . .in the hands of the right clergy. The trouble is that the “clergy” in today’s post-Christian, secularist culture is our smugly progressive leadership class and its supporting cast of social science shamans and media homilists.
In practice, “equity” is part of a posse of magic nouns. The rest of the posse – words like diversity, inclusion, and tolerance – share a similar moralizing ambiguity, though tolerance was last seen hobbling into the sunset. It’s essentially dead now from exhaustion. Ironically, each of the magic words, taken individually and understood properly, makes excellent sense. We’re a nation of immigrants. Tolerance, diversity, and inclusion are simply statements of American fact. They’re often pursued imperfectly, but they’ve always been part of our nation’s life.
But tolerance no longer serves a purpose in the culture war against enemies of progress, notably those retro Christian beliefs about sex. After all, why tolerate bigots? And in the hands of today’s missionaries of enlightenment, diversity actually means a celebration of separateness and fracture, aggravating divisions along racial, sexual-preference, and ethnic lines, and resulting in more, not less, social conflict. Inclusionmeans forcing families and religious communities to accept behaviors they find morally destructive. All of which creates turmoil; all of which naturally meets resistance; all of which then requires more extensive and coercive centralized authority to get the job done.
Plenty of sane people sense this. They grasp, at a gut level, Josef Pieper’s warnings that “if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted,” and that “language, disconnected from the roots of truth. . .invariably turns into an instrument of power.” In effect, as Pieper notes even more brutally, words become “an instrument of rape.” But too many sane people hesitate to speak because they fear being branded as callous or stupid or reactionary. They feel powerless to push back.
And for good reason. When preached by today’s apostles of urgent change, and then chanted endlessly in everything from fashion blogs to mainstream news reporting to athletic shoe commercials, these magic words infect our language with a kind of hypnotic voodoo. The somnambulated masses can then glide forward to a sunny future, above the vulgar trenchwork of logic and debate – unencumbered by either, and washed clean of skepticism.
And that’s exactly the purpose of the words.
Language shapes thought. Thought shapes choices and actions. Choices and actions shape and reshape the world. In this sense, today’s magic nouns are the distant kin of Orwell’s dystopian language “Newspeak.” Its purpose, per Orwell, “was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world view and mental habits proper to the devotees” of a particular ideology, “but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Does this sound a little too bleak for a nation with so many good people, and such deep resources for renewal? Maybe. Would that it were so. In any event, we’ll find out soon enough. Liars are doing very well in our nation’s public life at the moment – all those “devout” Catholic members of Congress who sacralize permissive abortion surely head the list – and lies have the habit of growing and spreading like tumors until people name and resist them. So it’s useful to remember that “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.” (Prov 12:22)
The virtue we need at the moment is courage. As Paul said, we’re called to speak the truth with love. (Eph 4:15) With love. But we do need to speak the truth. . .and demand the same from others.
From WSJ article…love the excerpt quote 😊 |
| From Readers Digest |
"I don’t want to be in that category. Celebrities are crazy, they really are. Don’t call me that anymore. These people are out of their freaking mind with how they treat people, what they do, what they say. That’s never been me. I never want to be looked at like that."
O’Neal added he didn’t want to be stereotyped as someone who is "out of their mind" and would rather be known for his kindness away from the basketball court and television cameras.
-Matt Walsh
Francis X. Maier: Language shapes thought. Thought shapes choices and actions. Choices and actions shape and reshape the world.
George Orwell, the writer, and Josef Pieper, the Catholic philosopher, came from very different backgrounds. They had very different views. But both shared a keen interest in the use, and abuse, of language. The reason was simple. Words have power. Words matter. Consider:
The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” For Americans, equality is a sacred word. We revere it despite the fact that, in reality, we’re not equal because none of us is identical to anyone else. LINK for the remainder of his thoughts
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