Yesterday I had a long nice talk with a new friend who told me along the way that the Jesuits, the Sociedad de Jesus in Spanish since the Jesuits got started in Spain, had a lot to do with the Civil War breaking out. I hold the notion that it had more to do with 1) sectional disputes over slavery arising from different ideas about the concept that "all men are created equal" 2) sectional disputes over how much power states had to up and leave the Union 3) a reallllllllly big reaction in the South that its way of life was threatened when Lincoln was elected (which I consider grossly overblown--Lincoln opposed not slavery where it existed but any future expansion into new states), and 4) according to Mary Chestnut, Lincoln's not being wise enough to temporarily back down when South Carolina challenged Fort Sumter. Chestnut, probably the best writer in North America, or anywhere else, who wrote more than a few serious columns about the war while it was going on, bills herself as a S Carolina "seceder" from the beginning and says: We in South Carolina hurried out of the Union on our own. If you had just left us alone out there a while, along with the states that scurried to follow, we might have found our way back in peacefully. Instead Lincoln hurried to be tough and, per Chestnut who seems to make a potential plausible argument, helped stumble into the conflict he prayed to avoid.
I did some checking. My friend did show me a post from an ex-priest, I think Chincuy, who wrote in a book that he spoke to Lincoln. He recorded a long quote from the president that says the Jesuits played a big role in starting the war. At a glance the quote didn't seem to fit with what I've read of Lincoln over several years. Google didn't have any more things linking Lincoln and Jesuits that a quick search could locate. He did blast the Know Nothing party because they were against blacks and Catholics and others, and one Catholic priest blogger says they started the rumor that Jesuits made So. Carolina leave.
I do know of two simple pieces of information that help me think about this. Lincoln once said to the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, something like, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Stowe, need I say, was not a Jesuit. I also know from several sources that the first or at least loudest voice for Southern secession was that of Robert Barnwell Rhett. he was a candidate for president of the Confederacy. As a rigid Protestant, he was about as far from a Catholic order as you could be. I wonder if my friend would know either of those two names. I had to look up Rhett's first name myself. Reminds me of the scene in the movie "Jackie," where J. Kennedy asks the driver of the limosine carrying her dead husband, "Do you know the name James Garfield?" "No, ma'am." "He was also killed while holding the office of president."
I'm a rank amateur on the Civil War. I've probably read books about it totaling 2500 pages, so I have a few half-informed notions. I watched Ken Burns' series on this war twice, and don't recall any historian in that series, including Shelby Foote (who said 1000 intelligent things on the subject), or any person the series quoted who lived during the War, even mentioning the Jesuits. I looked in the index of the longest book I've read on the subject last night, by Carl Sandberg, and there's no entry for Jesuit or even Society of Jesus. In Mary Chestnut's Civil War there's no index entry for Jesuits, though Jews get four lines. It's like somebody just made this up.
Has Dan Browne got it in for the Jesuits? Anybody wanna help sort rumor mill from decent historical fact?
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
General List Made Up From World Around
Germany bare.
Germany, says Alice Gregory (presumably an American) writing in the NY Times, so it must be true, has a widespread, curious habit of baring all. Nudity is big, taking in 10 or 15% of the people, especially those over 50 and those in the east, the old Russian piece of Germany. We understand that nudity on many beaches all over Europe is normal and yawned at. The American journalist shows up in a bikini but ditches it as no one pays any attention, her relative youth being ignored. Her act makes her swimsuit seem "lifeless, damp, maybe even diseased."
Yet she fills two pages without a line about going bare as a way to become more comfortable with and accepting of your body. The notion that baring your body around others who do the same can help you be more comfortable with your body seems kind of self-evident to me, and maybe the best defense of an otherwise questionable practice of naturism. Being a female writer for the NYT, she seems likely to be friendly to feminism's urges to be less wound up with your physical form, and doesn't seem to have noticed Germany's hobby may help with this. ??
Bayonne covered.
Move from paunchy white nude Germans to a trim dust-and-debris-covered 28-year-old black legal assistant named Marcy Borders from Bayonne, NJ. Though she was told "no big deal, keep working," she hurried down 81 floors of the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001. Out on the street when one tower collapsed, she was knocked down and covered in dust. She was afraid she might die there and then, but a guy helped her up. A photographer caught her looking like a white-out--Dust Lady. Only her facial features and the darkness of her lips hint she is African-American. She went home, but perhaps the fear of it sucked half the life out of her. She never went back to work for Bank of America, like the guy who told her to keep working, though we would suspect he followed his own advice and died. Marcy wouldn't go into Manhattan, stopped talking to people. Life fell apart for her. Ten years later she started getting it back together, working for a politician. Two years ago she had stomach pain, delayed seeing a doc due to no insurance, ended up with stomach cancer. She wondered whether to blame it on the attack, since, the NY Times tells us, 4000 people who were there later got cancer. Borders left from this physical realm in 2016 at age 42. She escaped the building, but not the terror.
Alzheimer's treated?
Alzheimer's has so far been untreatable, with lots of drugs (200 in 15 years) tested that failed. Amyloid protein formation is one problem, though lots of us over 60 have amyloid and don't have dementia. Another protein called "tau" plays some role in the nerve damage, too. Dr Longo of Stanford is testing a drug called C31. C31 is said to interfere with "10 of 14" triggers that lead to disease. Meanwhile prevention? In recent years the word "exercise" has become part, perhaps the first part, of the answer to "what do I do to prevent dementia?" Wanna go for a bike ride? I did six miles yesterday. The biking held fun and neighborhood discovery and work and pain all together.
A New Age not relying on astrology.
One type of "New Age" that seems obvious and may have nothing to do with taro card reading. In 1932 Alice Bailey described a "new age" that makes sense to me (her book: From Intellect to Intuition, p. 4). "We are now one people. The heritage of any race lies open to another; the best thought of the centuries is available for all; and ancient techniques and modern methods must meet and interchange." I conclude we live in a "new age" in which virtually all the scattered pieces of humankind are in lots of contact with the other pieces. It's a New Age because it's a global era of interconnection. In theory we should be able to take from East and West, from new and old, from Jew and Gentile, land and sea, from outer space and a computer's innards (on which I'm writing this), from Mahatma Gandhi, Steven Hawking, and Sandra Day O'Connor. With all this we may well be able to brainstorm, write out, create, find inspiration to make better lives for more humans on Earth than ever before.
Bailey, says Wikipedia, was one of the first to use the term "new age" to describe our era. The above lines show, to me, that she articulates a way we are in a new age, better than others.
Germany, says Alice Gregory (presumably an American) writing in the NY Times, so it must be true, has a widespread, curious habit of baring all. Nudity is big, taking in 10 or 15% of the people, especially those over 50 and those in the east, the old Russian piece of Germany. We understand that nudity on many beaches all over Europe is normal and yawned at. The American journalist shows up in a bikini but ditches it as no one pays any attention, her relative youth being ignored. Her act makes her swimsuit seem "lifeless, damp, maybe even diseased."
Yet she fills two pages without a line about going bare as a way to become more comfortable with and accepting of your body. The notion that baring your body around others who do the same can help you be more comfortable with your body seems kind of self-evident to me, and maybe the best defense of an otherwise questionable practice of naturism. Being a female writer for the NYT, she seems likely to be friendly to feminism's urges to be less wound up with your physical form, and doesn't seem to have noticed Germany's hobby may help with this. ??
Bayonne covered.
Move from paunchy white nude Germans to a trim dust-and-debris-covered 28-year-old black legal assistant named Marcy Borders from Bayonne, NJ. Though she was told "no big deal, keep working," she hurried down 81 floors of the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001. Out on the street when one tower collapsed, she was knocked down and covered in dust. She was afraid she might die there and then, but a guy helped her up. A photographer caught her looking like a white-out--Dust Lady. Only her facial features and the darkness of her lips hint she is African-American. She went home, but perhaps the fear of it sucked half the life out of her. She never went back to work for Bank of America, like the guy who told her to keep working, though we would suspect he followed his own advice and died. Marcy wouldn't go into Manhattan, stopped talking to people. Life fell apart for her. Ten years later she started getting it back together, working for a politician. Two years ago she had stomach pain, delayed seeing a doc due to no insurance, ended up with stomach cancer. She wondered whether to blame it on the attack, since, the NY Times tells us, 4000 people who were there later got cancer. Borders left from this physical realm in 2016 at age 42. She escaped the building, but not the terror.
Alzheimer's treated?
Alzheimer's has so far been untreatable, with lots of drugs (200 in 15 years) tested that failed. Amyloid protein formation is one problem, though lots of us over 60 have amyloid and don't have dementia. Another protein called "tau" plays some role in the nerve damage, too. Dr Longo of Stanford is testing a drug called C31. C31 is said to interfere with "10 of 14" triggers that lead to disease. Meanwhile prevention? In recent years the word "exercise" has become part, perhaps the first part, of the answer to "what do I do to prevent dementia?" Wanna go for a bike ride? I did six miles yesterday. The biking held fun and neighborhood discovery and work and pain all together.
A New Age not relying on astrology.
One type of "New Age" that seems obvious and may have nothing to do with taro card reading. In 1932 Alice Bailey described a "new age" that makes sense to me (her book: From Intellect to Intuition, p. 4). "We are now one people. The heritage of any race lies open to another; the best thought of the centuries is available for all; and ancient techniques and modern methods must meet and interchange." I conclude we live in a "new age" in which virtually all the scattered pieces of humankind are in lots of contact with the other pieces. It's a New Age because it's a global era of interconnection. In theory we should be able to take from East and West, from new and old, from Jew and Gentile, land and sea, from outer space and a computer's innards (on which I'm writing this), from Mahatma Gandhi, Steven Hawking, and Sandra Day O'Connor. With all this we may well be able to brainstorm, write out, create, find inspiration to make better lives for more humans on Earth than ever before.
Bailey, says Wikipedia, was one of the first to use the term "new age" to describe our era. The above lines show, to me, that she articulates a way we are in a new age, better than others.
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