Early Cross-Cultural Exchanges.

Roman glass in a Japanese tomb; an Indian Buddha in a Swedish grave:

Glass jewelry thought to have been made in the Roman Empire has been found in a very unlikely place -- an ancient Japanese tomb.

Researchers from Japan's Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties announced Friday that three glass beads recovered from a Fifth Century burial site near Kyoto bear signs of Roman craftsmanship. This suggests that Roman influence reached as far as East Asia.

"They are one of the oldest multilayered glass products found in Japan, and very rare accessories that were believed to be made in the Roman Empire and sent to Japan," researcher Tomomi Tamura told AFP.

The gilt artifacts, which are 5 millimeters in diameter, contained traces of the chemical natron, which Roman craftsmen used to melt glass. A natural salt, natron was also used by the Ancient Egyptians in the preparation of mummies.

Researchers are now interested in finding out how the beads traveled more than 6,000 miles from present-day Italy to Japan.

This is not the first evidence of contact between Eastern and Western civilizations in the ancient world.

In 1954, an archeological dig at Helgo, Sweden unearthed a Sixth Century Buddha statue from northern India. In 2010, 2,000-year-old bones from a Roman cemetery in Italy were found to contain East Asian DNA.

During the reign of emperor Trajan in the early Second Century, the Roman Empire's territory spanned the Mediterranean and stretched from England to Iraq. By the time the artifacts were interred at the Utsukushi burial mound, Rome was in decline, losing much of its territory before ending in 476.

Japan in the Fifth Century is noted for its Kofun burial sites. While it is commonly considered to be part of Japan's Yamato period, Yamato rule at this time was challenged by competing provincial powers.

Is everything you thought you knew about biblical history wrong?

According to this article, there was no "great temple of Solomon;" the real great temple was on Mt. Gerizim in the land of the Samaritans, where it had stood and would continue to stand until 128 BC when the Maccabees burned the Samaritan temple, and the Jews then re-wrote the bible to edit out the temple on Mt. Gerizim:

Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking possession of the promised land.

Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine "made of stones" on Mount Gerizim and coat it with "plaster." Indeed, he said, this is "the place that the Lord has chosen."

No Mention of a 'Chosen Place'

That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem's priests probably spent a good deal of time revising, everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a "chosen place."

The word "Gerizim" has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on "Ebal." "By naming the mountain of the curses," says Schorch, "they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy."

WTF? History.

According to this Cracked piece - and they are usually pretty accurate in posting humorous stories of the weird - ancient Egyptian mummies tested positive for tobacco and cocaine - which are both found only in the Americas.

Weird, if true.

Here is an academic paper on the subject, which seems to debunk efforts to debunk the finding.

The scientific consensus seems to be "what a weird finding...oh, look, squirrels!" According to Straight Dope, the finding has been dismissed out of hand as too outre but not disproven:

There the matter rests. According to Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, the Germans' work has been dismissed by mainstream archaeologists. No discussion of it is to be found in recent surveys of the field. Theories about transoceanic trade in ancient times are considered too outré to warrant serious consideration. To defenders of Balabanova, Parsche, and company, this suggests a pigheaded refusal to reexamine entrenched beliefs. I disagree. If the Germans aren't being taken seriously, it's largely their own fault.

The "what" of Himmler is laid out in horrifying detail; the "why" remains a mystery.

Heinrich Himmler: A Life by Peter Longerich 

5 Stars - My review is here.

Peter Longerich's Heinrich Himmler is an excellent book on the life of Heinrich Himmler. In 750 pages of text and 200 pages of endnotes, we learn what seems like everything there is to be known about the political career of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, with "political" meaning Himmler's indefatigable efforts to murder every Jew that he could extend his jurisdiction to. We also get an exhaustive look at Himmler's "origin story," including his parents' history and his youth, his frustrated WW I military ambitions, his friendships and his university years, and his decision to stay within the sphere of German post-war right-wing Volkisch radicalism.

I have not been - and am not now - a World War II "nut." I have had friends who can rattle off the details of the major campaigns of the Eastern Front and seem to be on a first name basis with Erwin Rommel. I've never really been interested in that level of information about the "tactical" details of National Socialism, but, recently, because of the late Christopher Hitchens' scurrilous and false claim that Nazism was "right wing Catholicism," I've been examining the Nazi years, which has raised the issue of how people subjected to the Nazi regime understood themselves in terms of that regime. I thought that looking at the life of Heinrich Himmler, born a Catholic but converted to one of the arch-anti-Catholics of the Nazi regime might shed some light on that question.

I found that the book was compelling history. To be fascinating to the non-"nut" - the person who is not obsessed with a particular historical topic - it helps if the historical subject has an inherent "gosh-wow!" factor. The life of Himmler, unfortunately, has that "gosh-wow!" factor. From an overall perspective, the arc of Himmler's life takes him from being someone who desperately wanted to be a soldier but never was, who went from being a low-level organizer of a not-terribly important part of Germany to organizing political speeches, which required that he also provide security for those speeches through a small group known as the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad) aka the "SS," a side-line which took him to being the second most important politician at the end of World War II with a virtual empire of terror throughout Europe, and a responsibility for mass murder rivaling Genghis Khan.

In short, it is as if your Rotary Club's "program director" pushed the envelope of his job assignment and became "Dr. Evil."

Longerich does a good job of following Himmler's upward career path. Himmler's chief gift seems to have been his ability to be obsequious to superiors. Himmler did his job competently and without question, and, apparently, his personality was such that he was trusted, notwithstanding his ability to engage in the ultimate act of betrayal to his former mentors. Thus, for example, Himmler was brought into the right-wing Volkisch movement by Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his career was fostered by being the protégé of "left-wing" Nazi Gregor Strasser. However, on the Night of Long Knives, Himmler had no difficulties in demonstrating his loyalty to Hitler by having his SS murder Rohm and Strasser, an act that Himmler subsequently touted as an indication of the toughness required of an "SS man."

Himmler's ascent seems almost effortless. Himmler seems to have simply accreted power and titles over time. His job as SS head seemed to logically imply that he should take over the police of various states, ultimately resulting in his being handed the Prussian secret state police, the Gestapo. The control over the police led to his control over concentration camps, which led to his control over Jewish policy, which led to his major role in the conquered territories, which led to the Waffen-SS, until eventually Himmler was the Interior Minister and, by the way, was also responsible for the department involved in farming a rubber substitute.

Longerich also demonstrates Himmler's single-minded determination to kill every last Jew in Europe, even when he was faced with opposition by Fascists. That last point struck me as surprising. It clearly doesn't fit the "narrative" that has been pressed for the last forty years that all of Christian Europe was just waiting for an opportunity to commit mass murder of the Jews, but it seems that Italy was a positive thorn in the side for Himmler, refusing to release any Jews to Himmler in Italy or in its zones of control in southern France and the Balkans. Himmler was able to seize Italian Jews only after Mussolini was removed from power, and Germany was able to take military control of Italy in 1943. The idea of Mussolini as protector of the Jews seems anomalous, but while he was no friend to the Jews, he was also no Himmler. Himmler had an easier time surmounting the opposition of Tiso in Slovakia and he was able to overcome Hungarian opposition to Jewish deportations with a coup.

For the wealth of information Longerich provides, we never do draw a real bead on Himmler's motivations. Longerich provides a lot of detail on Himmler's life before his Nazi years. We learn about his social awkwardness and his need to control the personal lives of others - something recreated by Himmler in the SS as prime mechanism of controlling his subordinates (along with the tried and true practice of giving disgraced failures from other walks of life a second chance in the SS.) But we don't see in those years the things that would make Himmler so very dedicated to the murder of Jews. Himmler's childhood exposure to anti-semitism was minimal, and there is nothing in his family upbringing that seems to have inculcated a hatred to Jews. During his university years, if anything, Himmler was exposed in Catholic circles to an anti-anti-semitic tendency; in a controversy over whether the dueling societies would permit dueling with Jews, the Catholic student organizations for matters of principle opposed the marginalization of Jews, although they remained traditionally anti-semitic on religious grounds (p. 34.)

It seems that during his early twenties - from age 23 to 25 - Himmler underwent a rejection of the values he had been raised in. It was during this period that the previously arch-Catholic Himmler rejected Catholicism and religious faith in favor of the weird interest in occultism and paganism that he would pursue throughout his life. Concomitant with this was his turn to racial anti-semitism. We don't really get a look at what caused this turn, except that Himmler seems to have "reasoned" his way into occultism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism by reading occultic, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic books. (By the way, on that last, it's fascinating how often we find Himmler lumping "Jesuits" in with Jews as his particular bête noire. Himmler's attacks on the Jesuits and the Catholic Church are of a piece with the traditional liberal anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf. See The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany).)

A weakness of the book is that we don't really get an investigation of what this turn meant to Himmler. After his university years, the private life of Himmler closes off. We do find out about Himmler's relationship with his wife, and his apparently close relationship with his daughter. We hear about his affair with his secretary and the creation of his second family. But we don't really get any sense of what those relationships meant for him; like the mass murder of the Jews, they are just data of his life, without emotional "qualia." Surprisingly, we get very little insight into Himmler's relationship with Hitler, albeit we learn from an observer of his short, ill-fated tenure as a military general at the very end of the war that he was terrified of disappointing Hitler.

Longerich's book caused me to realize that our view of the Nazis was that portion of the National Socialist project that belonged to Himmler. If we think about what we view as the distinctive features of National Socialism, we might think of the occultism, or the cult of race, or the idea of disciplined, emotionless, loyal elite willing to subordinate their humanity for their leader, or their Nazi "super-science," or the mass-murder of the Jews. All of those features were part of Himmler's vision of what National Socialism meant. Those features don't necessarily apply to other Nazi leaders, e.g., Hitler had disdain for Himmler's occultism and Rohm's view of National Socialism was not elitist. As Longerich points out "[i]f Himmler had been replaced in the 1930s by someone else, this specific and highly dangerous network of different powers would not have come into being. If on the other hand, these responsibilities had been distributed among several Nazi politicians as separate domains, Nazi policy could not have led to its dreadful consequences in quite the same way."(p. 747 - 748.)

Nothing in Himmler's childhood and youth point to the man he became. Take out - or change - that man and perhaps, perhaps, millions don't die. That is maybe the saddest of "gosh-wow!" observations - individuals matter to history.

There's an alternate history story in obscure bit of history.

Evidence emerges which may verify the claim that a future priest saved Hitler from drowning when he was four years old.

First Time as Tragedy; Second Time as Farce.

Are we there yet?

Ed Driscoll on "A World Without America?"

Why the Neanderthal went extinct.

Bottom line - longer tendons and not enough trees.

Our ancestors evolved as cursorial hunters on the open lands of Africa, where they would simply chase animals into exhaustion.  In the European forests, chasing animals into exhaustion wasn't going to happen, so Neanderthals became ambush predators, learning to fight animals at close quarters.  As the glaciers advanced, Europe became unforested tundras, just as our ancestors were evolving.

But for that ecological change, Europe might still be in the hands of a species of humanity that would win every Olympic contest involving strength.

The History Channel....

....a never-ending source of cliche story-lines:

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.


Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

Fight the Pseudo-knowledge!

Mark Shea fears that the constant din of anti-Christian agitprop making its way through Hollywood could be setting up a cultural climate to play out the worst prescriptions of the New Atheists:

Our Manufacturers of Culture, under the influence of powers and principalities, are slowly and surely preparing our culture to undertake a pogrom. Again and again, outright lies about Christians and their history get promulgated while we are told that it is “impeccable research” as, incredibly, the Da Vinci Code was described by one reviewer. Or, we get the ill-informed tracts by New Atheists that would embarrass any real atheist. But, above all, we begin to get the toxicity making its way into popular visual media like Agora.

The reason this matters is that visual media tend to bypass the critical intellect, and we live increasingly in a post-textual age. People get less and less of what they “know” about the world from reading books and processing arguments through critical faculties. Propaganda, prettily presented by the cinematographers art, can do wonders in transforming a culture. The image bypasses the rational faculties and people somehow find themselves agreeing around the water cooler that, as “everybody” knows, Christians are the enemies of learning who destroyed the Library at Alexandria.

Shea is referring to the movie "Agora" starring the beautiful Rachel Weisz.  It's a movie I ought to love, with its obscure history and panoramic recreation of Alexandria, but it is going to be chock-full of offensive and preachy pseudo-knowledge that I won't be able to stand it, particularly since that pseudo-knowledge will all be directed, once again, at slandering the name of my ancestors.

Here is a clip from "Agora" which shows the seductive way that the visual media insinuates itself into the mind:



So, after this, we will have a lot of insta-experts telling us all about Hypatia and how the Christians burned the Library of Alexandria, all of which will be wrong.  As Father Robert Baron explains:

Well, Hypatia was indeed a philosopher and she was indeed killed by a mob in 415, but practically everything else about the story that Gibbons and Sagan and Amenabar tell is false. For the complete de-bunking of the myth, take a look at David Hart Bentley's book Atheist Delusions, but allow me to share just a few details. The library of Alexandria was burnt to the ground, not by Christian mobs in the fifth century, but by Julius Caesar's troops, some forty years before Jesus was born. A temple to the god Serapis, called the Sarapeon, was built on the site of the ancient library (and there might have been some scrolls in it in the fifth century), and it was this building that was sacked by angry Christians in Hypatia's time, in response to pagan defilements of Christian houses of worship. Now mind you, I'm not excusing any of this for a moment. Whenever Christians respond to such attacks with violence, they are opposing themselves to the one who said, "love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek." But I am indeed insisting that the charge that Christians mindlessly and gleefully destroyed the greatest center of learning in the ancient world is a calumny.


More to it, Hypatia, sadly enough, found herself caught in the middle of a struggle between two powerful figures in Alexandria, namely, Orestes the civil authority and Cyril the bishop. She was most likely killed in retaliation for the murder of some of Cyril's supporters by agents of Orestes. Again, all of this is nasty stuff, and I'm not trying to exculpate anyone, but to pitch this largely political story as a battle between sweet reason and vicious religious superstition is misleading to say the very least. Finally, though the film portrays her largely as an astronomer (probably to compel comparisons with Galileo), Hypatia was best known as a neo-Platonist philosopher, a devotee of Plato and Plotinus. Not only were there Christians in Hypatia's classes, not only were Christian bishops among her circle of friends, but Christian theologians – Augustine, Ambrose, and Origen, just to name the most prominent – were enthusiastic advocates of neo-Platonism. Therefore, to portray her as the noble champion of reason over and against mouth-breathing Christian primitives is just ridiculous.

But none of this gets to the heart of why I object to Agora. In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz. The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated. I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenabar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians, and that precisely his manner of critique was used by some of the most vicious persecutors of Christianity in the last century. My very real fear is that the meanness, half-truths, and outright slanders in such books as Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion have begun to work their way into the popular culture.

We Christians have to resist – and keep setting the record straight.

Of course, when we do, we will be told that "it is only a story," and, besides, it has the feel of "truthiness."

A.D. 381 - A well-written but fundamentally biased look at the formation of Christendom.

An Amazon book review.

Charles Freeman’s “A.D.381” is an interesting and engaging historical examination of the relatively over-looked period during which Christianity consolidated its hold over the Roman Empire. It is unfortunately marked by an ideological debt to Gibbons’ thesis that the Fall of Rome was the triumph of barbarism and Christianity.


“A.D. 381” is quite excellent in looking at the players and events that often remain obscure in most histories of the late Roman Empire, namely, how Christianity went from a tolerated religion under Constantine to the only lawful religion within a century. Most people with a basic familiarity of the subject can identify Constantine, the Council of Nicea and 325, but probably don’t know that Council of Nicea under Constantine was only the beginning of Christian influence over the Roman Empire. But it was not until the last decades of the Fourth Century that both paganism and heretical – i.e., non-Nicene Christianity – were outlawed and one form of Christianity, which defined the persons of the Trinity as being “consubstantial,” emerged as the only legal religion in the Empire. Hence, the date 381 marks the date of the Council of Constantinople which was called by the Emperor Theodosius to confirm the Nicene Creed and put an end to the dispute between followers of the Nicene Creed and those Christians who viewed Jesus Christ as a lesser, created, divinity, including the Arians and other “adoptionists.”

Freeman’s valid thesis – which he proves in detail – is that theological developments can not be removed from the brute social facts in which the theology developed. So, as he remarks in the close of “381,” while some theologians want to treat the development of Christian doctrine as the bloodless, intellectual development of conclusions from core Christian premises, the historical fact is that the development of Christian doctrine involved politicking, trickery, bullying and just plain chance.

A key example of chance is found in the life of Theodosius himself. Prior to Theodosius, Roman Emperors had been generally content not to take a too pious view of their jobs as Christian emperors and to hold off on baptism, which might require that they become pious carrying out their duties as Christian emperors, until they were facing death itself, the “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” clause being the ultimate “get out of jail” card. Theodosius seemed to be following this script until 38 AD, when after being baptized in the face of a life-threatening illness, something messed up the script – he lived. At that point, he had a problem; he was a baptized Roman emperor who could not turn a pragmatically blind eye to the problem of heresy.

Because of this historical accident, Nicene Christianity became hegemonic as Theodosius outlawed paganism and called the Council of Constantinople in 381 to ratify the Nicene Creed. Once the Nicene Creed was ratified by the Council, Theodosius then put an end to the long Nicene-Arian controversy that had divided Christianity in the Roman Empire by removing Arian bishops from the seats of power.

What followed, according to Freeman, was the “closing of the Western Mind,” which is the title of Freeman’s better-known, earlier book. This was the result, according to Freeman, of the repudiation of the ancient Greek ideal of free speech, something which Freeman drops in periodically as a chorale note throughout the book, at which point, presumably, the reader is supposed to nod his head in agreement, knowing that Christianity was a victory for the forces of “faith” against that of “reason.”

Unfortunately, those Gibbons-like notes are where Freeman’s book went off track for me. I had to wonder where the discussion of the ascendancy of the Arian emperors during the period between 325 and 381 was to be found. I wondered what Freeman’s explanation was for Theodosius’ ability to so thoroughly win the day for the Nicene Creeds, when earlier emperors were not able to put their Arian Creed into a hegemonic position in Christianity. I also wondered what Freeman’s explanation would be for the inability of Imperial power to deal with the Monophysite schism in the same way that it had dealt with the Arian schism.

In short, I formed the impression that Freeman was cherry-picking his facts and arguments to favor his thesis that Christian theology was dictated and enforced from the top down. It seems to me that this other perspective on history suggests that the “grass roots” did have a lot of influence over how history played out. For example, in his discussion of Augustine, Freeman reveals the thesis of his book as the proposition that the Nicene doctrine became orthodox only because it was enforced by the state. But in order to prove that thesis, then a discussion of why the Arian emperors were unable to impose Arianism, or the Chalcedonian emperors were unable to Chalcedonianism on the Monophysite areas of the Empire seems required. Freeman doesn’t discuss these counter-examples, which seem to allow the conclusion that the Nicene doctrine may have been successfully enforced by the state because it was orthodox.

In short, it seemed that Freeman was adopting a strategy I see in a good number of books where someone has an antipathy for history as it turned out – they don’t deal with inconvenient counter-facts. When an author fails to deal with such counter-examples, it leaves the impression that he is engaged in polemics and propaganda aimed at taking advantage of readers who don’t already know all the facts.

Likewise, although I’m sure that Freeman has developed the theme of how the “Western Mind” became “closed” in his prior book, I have to wonder what he meant by that term in the context of this book. He quotes pagan panegyrics to emperors which had spoken out in favor of free speech as an example of how there was a tradition of free speech and free debate in the ancient world. However, does he really expect us to believe that there were not some issues that were off limits in the ancient world, such as whether emperors were really divine, or whether emperors were really the font of all grace and wisdom? One rather doubts it.

Also, are we supposed to believe that free speech and debate came to a complete close after the Council of Constantinople decided in re-affirmed the Nicene position? If so, why were there all those controversies in the following centuries over Monophystism, Nestorianism, Monergism, etc., etc.? Did those controversies not involve a high order of logic and reason?

But Freeman doesn’t discuss those issues from that perspective, choosing instead to leave the reader to believe a caricature of the intellectual life of late antiquity that could have been picked out of a book on the war of religion against science. Again, that approach does the reader a disservice.

My sense was that by emphasizing the facts of politics and personalities, Freeman was able to play up the discontinuity and contingency of history. However, while Freeman was very good with the details of the politics and personalities – albeit with a generally hostile interpretation of historical characters such as Ambrose and Augustine – he ignored his own prescription that the actual facts of history be examined in their historical context. Among those facts are certainly the principles and logic that the historical characters believed that they were applying to the theological disputes that they were involved with. Freeman rarely discussed why the historical figures that he analyzed believed what they believed. By ignoring the elements of the theological principles and logic, Freeman seems to have inappropriately underemphasized the element of theological continuity and the deep roots of the theological doctrines at issue in the theological disputes of late antiquity.

I do recommend “381.” It is an engaging read and does provide the reader with an excellent overview of, and insight into, a bit of history that we often overlook and may not understand as well as we should. For example, I knew about the story of Ambrose's confrontation with Theodosius over the slaughter of citizens of Thessalonica, but Freeman's book is the first time I ever learned about the details surrounding that historical event, even if Freeman manages to "tee up" this historic moment when a Roman Emperor was forced to acknowledge a power greater than himself as an example of Ambrose's megalomania.

I would, however, recommend Robert Louis Wilken’s “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God” to see the elements of continuity and reason that informed early Christian theology.

Richard Nixon: Savior of the World.

The Telegraph is running an article on how, in 1969, Richard Nixon "blocked" a Soviet strike on Communist China by indicating that America would strike at Soviet targets if Russia nuked China.

This is actually an old story. It has resurfaced periodically since the '80s.  What gives this iteration a certain "newsworthiness" is that the story emerges from a Chinese publication "officially sanctioned" by by "China's ruling Communist Party"

This is Odd.

April 30, 1975 - The Fall of Saigon.

Apparently, the Communist planned their entrance into Saigon to coincide with May Day.

Notice the terror of the people, who certainly knew that re-education camps were in their future.



Here's a primer on Kennedy's involvement with Vietnam.

[Via What's Wrong with the World.]

What if......

....the Japanese in World War II had an aircraft carrier/submarine that could have been used to threaten the Panama Canal and the west coast of America?

Apparently, Japan did:

Spring, 1946. Ten months after the end of World War II, an explosion rocks the Pacific off the coast of Hawaii. America has just destroyed one of Japan’s most advanced weapons systems – the I-401 aircraft carrier submarine. The supersub combined the stealth and tactical advantages of sea and sky and was invented to execute air strikes on land from the sea. But why did America sink one of its most prized military captures? Bound by an agreement to share any intelligence with the Soviets but feeling the pressure of the looming Cold War, it was a calculated decision to keep the technology out of Soviet hands. Six decades later, a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii located the submarine’s remains. The discovery of the sunken sub sparks a new examination of its forgotten place in military history.


THIRTEEN’s Secrets of the Dead: Japanese SuperSub recounts Japan’s superior submarine technology and reveals how close the Japanese came to using the subs to blow up the Panama Canal, terrorize the U.S. and possibly enact a deadly biological attack. The film premieres nationally Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Actor Liev Schreiber (Taking Woodstock and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) narrates.

No Noah's Ark.

Paleobabble reports that the purported discovery of Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat is a fraud.

The Discovery Channel - the National Enquirer of Cable - will probably still have a three hour special on this non-event, like it did for the "Gospel of Judas."

Great Moments in the Carter Administration.

April 25, 1980 - The failed rescue of the Iranian-held hostages.

This was the cap on the long slide of Jimmy Carter into the anchor position of American presidents.  Before this there had been years of Carter - or his administration - playing the shrewish, elite, self-righteous liberal and lecturing Americans on their sins, including racism, wastefulness and malaise.  Americans were also being told that there were "limits to growth" and that we should resign ourselves to a limited future.  Carter's emphasis on human rights as the centerpiece of his foreign policy had resulted in the destabilization of American allies, like Iran and Nicaragua, which, as a result of Carter's belief that his essential "niceness" would result in everyone loving him, had been taken over by virulent anti-Americans.

It was a lot like the Obama administration.

In April of 1980, I was going into Finals of my last semester at U.C. Davis.  I recall the news, and it just seemed typical of American impotence, which was what Carter and his political allies had been preaching for years.  It was, after all, not that long after America's loss in Vietnam and the fall of South Vietnam to the Communist.  I don't recall any particular hostility being levelled at Carter - in fact, the feeling was the it was about time - but it seemed to capture the feeling that incompetence was the best we could expect.

We reached for Ronald Reagan like a drowning man grabbing for a lifeline.

The Perennial Heresy.

Hre is an interesting essay on Jansenism.

In general, Jansenism was a Catholic splinter in the direction of Calvinism that developed about the same time that Arminianism splintered away from Calvinism in the direction of Catholic theology.

The author writes:

Some of Jansenism’s theological and spiritual roots are to be found in Calvin and Puritanism in general. The essential issue is the relationship between divine grace and human freedom in the process of salvation. The Jansenists found the precedent of St Augustine against the Pelagians a great inspiration for their polemics against the Jesuits. Pelagius supported the idea according to which man had the strength to want good and practice virtue, a position that would relativise the role of grace. St Augustine maintained that God alone chose to whom he would grant grace. Man’s freedom is destroyed and made perverse by Original Sin. By an act of God’s sovereign will, God acts on man by efficiacious grace, but human freedom is not destroyed.


Medieval theology was dominated by Augustinian thought, and little place was left to human freedom. St Thomas Aquinas worked hard to conciliate grace and human freedom. Man cooperates in the work of his salvation, which is the work of God. Luther and especially Calvin worked in the same direction, annihilating any idea of human freedom, and going much further than St Augustine would have remotely imagined. It is from this exaggeration of some streams of medieval theology that the famous solas would orginate (Bible alone, faith alone, etc.). The Reformers emphasised predestination. Man is saved by grace, but man cannot resist this grace that God freely chooses to confer, and the divine will is above all things. To combat the Reformers, the Council of Trent (6th Session, 1547) emphasised human freedom and left its relationship with grace open.

The Jesuit theologians reacted strongly, fearful that excessive Augustinianism would weaken the role of the Church in the salvation of Christians. Under Renaissance and humanist influence, they sought to convey a more optimist vision of man, and based their work of St Thomas Aquinas. This is how this Dominican theologian was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567.

Theological conflicts grew from about that year. Baïus was condemned by St Pius V for denying the reality of free will. The work of the Jesuit Molina was a response to Baïus and claimed the existence of “sufficient” grace, which brings man the means of salvation, but requires a free act from the subject. In the seventeenth century, the controversy finds its centre in Louvain, Flanders (what is now Belgium). The Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen, also known as Jansenius, was a student and then a professor at Louvain. He began writing his magnum opus – Augustinus in 1628, and it was left unfinished when he died in 1638. For Jansen, since Original Sin, man’s will without divine help is capable only of evil. Only efficacious grace can enable man to prefer the things of heaven to the things of this world. This grace is irresistible and is not granted to all. Parallel with Calvin’s theory of predestination, most people are born to be damned, and God does not will their salvation.

San Francisco - 4 Days before the 1906 Earthquake.



Car Lust has some observations:

Apart from the undeniable time-machine coolness of watching a 104-year old movie, there are a few things that strike me about this film.


First is the sheer anarchy of traffic. There are no lane stripes, no stoplights or stop signs, no crosswalks. Other than a tacit agreement that everyone keeps to the right side of the road, there don't seem to be any rules at all. In just the first minute, we see a horse-drawn bus and an electric streetcar plowing through cross-traffic on Market (0:20 and 0:26, respectively) and autos making aggressive U-turns right in front of the cable car (0:24 and 0:33). So many pedestrians are ambling across the street between vehicles that I lost count. There's a police officer who crosses the tracks just in front of us at 0:39, and he doesn't seem to be too concerned with writing any traffic tickets.

Even the convention of what side of the road to drive on is less than strictly observed. We have a freight wagon on the "wrong" side of the street at 0:16, and an automobile at 3:30.

Notice, too, that some automobiles have the steering wheel on the right, and others on the left. That particular design issue wasn't fully sorted out for a couple more decades. The last right-hand drive autos built in the U.S. were made by Stutz in 1921.

Notice how much horse-drawn traffic there is, especially horse-drawn freight traffic. There's even a man on a white horse (on the "wrong" side of the street) at 4:10. Those who would curse the modern automobile as a source of pollution should perhaps consider how much pollution the gasoline engine got rid of--all of the "exhaust" those horses must have generated, and how much effort it took to clean it off the streets . . . and your shoes . . . and the carpet in the lobby or the front hallway where you tracked it in.

What's the story with the two guys chasing the automobile starting at 4:52 or so? They grab on and sort of run with it, dodging along in and out of traffic until the car makes a left turn from the right lane; you see them let go about 5:31. Did they know the driver, or was it just a random prank by a couple of teenagers with nothing better to do? Do they have any connection to the snappily dressed newsboy who gets on the tracks at about 5:05 and seems to dare the cable car to catch him? You could get a dozen short stories out of that forty seconds or so of film.

At 5:51, you'll notice an electric streetcar track which crosses the cable-car route from the left and then runs parallel in the "lane" to our right. Starting at this point on Market Street, there are two transit companies operating competing services on two different sets of tracks. By 1918, there were four tracks down the full length of Market Street, and during rush hour trolleys ran nose-to-tail on all four. The "roar of the four," as they called it, lasted until 1947.

Also, does it seem that Market Street was a lot wider in 1906 than it is now.

Also, check out this before and after analysis of the film.  This analysis, for example, suggests that a lot of the traffic was staged in order to make Market Street appear to be more active than it was.

Strategies: How the New York Times recent reporting against the Pope resembles the Nazi strategy for destroying Christianity.


In researching Hitler's religious views, I ran across the 1945 report - "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches" - prepared by the OSS as part of the preparation for the Nazi War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg. Part of the charges against the Nazi leadership included defamation of the clergy. At page 51 of the report there is this:

3. Defamation of the Clergy. In order to reduce the influence of the clergy, systematic propaganda campaigns were carried out to depict them in an unfavorable light. The most vigorous of these campaigns were the press campaigns in connection with the "Currency trials" and the "Clerical immorality trials" of 1935 and 1936, which tried to discredit the Catholic clergy as financial manipulators and moral degenerates. The Catholic Church was the principal victim of these tactics.

The OSS report discussed the "Problem of Proof."

THE PROBLEM OF PROOF. Evidence here consists in the files of all German newspapers for the period. The extent and sensational coloring of the reports of these trials, quite apart from any case of the guilt or innocence of the particular defendants, is proof of the anti-Church purpose of the campaign which was underlined in violent outbursts of Hitler and Goebbels themselves made in official speeches. See especially the speech made by Goebbels in a mass meeting in the Deutschlandhalle (Berlin) on 28 May 1937.

The extent of coloring and the sensationalism of the reporting, as well as the timing and the coordination of coverage was viewed by the OSS Report as prima facie evidence of a conspiracy among the Nazi leadership to persecute Christianity. Other information that comes out of the OSS report is the motivation of the Nazi leadership to distance the churches from the people - so that there would not be a possible opposition source of authority - and the anti-Nazi message of Catholicism, which included the anti-racist message in Pope Pius XII's encyclical Summi Ponitificatus, which encyclical was suppressed by the Nazis (See p. 63), and the suspect notion that "God alone has the ultimate right over our bodies and our health," as was contained in a Catholic publication suppressed by the Nazis. (P. 65.)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the contemporary context, we can see the sensationalism of the charges against Pope Benedict. We can also see a coordination among the various liberal columnists and the supposed journalists. The element of timing the disclosures to reach a peak before Holy Week might be coincidental, but we have seen with respect to the timing of hit pieces against McCain and Bush that the media does consider the timing of its stories. Finally, the ideological element is clear. Maureen Dowd’s screeds show that her problem with Benedict is over his condemnation of abortion and his refusal to accept the zeitgeist position on women in the clergy and homosexuality.

According to the OSS report, what more do we need as prima facie evidence of the Times’ intent to persecute?

On which point, read this essay by Elizabeth Lev, which contains these observations:

The salacious reporting on clerical sex abuse ( as if it were limited to only Roman Catholic clergy) has been given a prominence greater than the massacres of Christians happening right now in India and Iraq. Moreover, the term "clerical sex abuse" is often misleadingly equated with "pedophilia" to whip up even more public outrage. It doesn't take the political acumen of an Edmund Burke to wonder why the Catholic Church has been singled out for this treatment.


While no one denies the wrongdoing and the harm caused by a small minority of priests, their misconduct has been used to undermine the reputations of the overwhelming majority of clergy who live holy quiet lives in their parishes, tending to their flocks. These good men have been smeared with the same poisonous ink.

The brutal reality is that there are an estimated 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse in the United States today. Of these, between 40 and 60 percent were abused by a family member (for the most part uncles, cousins, stepfathers and live-in boyfriends). Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan have produced a study showing that 5 percent were molested by school teachers, while the New York Times published a survey showing that fewer than 2% of the offenders were Catholic priests. But to read the papers, it would seem that Catholic clergy hold a monopoly in child molestation.

Burke's explanation for the furious anti-clericalism of yore could have been written today: The denigration of the clergy was "to teach them [the people] to persecute their own pastors....by raising a disgust and horror of the clergy."

If Burke were alive today, he would perhaps discern another motive behind the selective assaults on Catholic clergy, besides designs on Church property: namely to destroy the credibility of a powerful moral voice in public debate. The most recent example concerns the heated battle over the health care reform bill. The vocal opposition of the United States Bishops' conference (particularly in regard to tax-payer -funded abortion) has proved especially annoying to the proponents of the legislation. As the final vote approaches, the clerical sex abuse drumbeat has risen to a frenzy.

The record number of participants in January's Pro-Life March; Bishop Tobin's rebuke to Rep. Patrick Kennedy for his pro-abortion positions; and the success of the marriage movement in the United States, indicate that the voice of the bishops is indeed resonating with people. To silence the moral voice of the Church, the preferred option has been to discredit its ministers.

Well, it worked for the Nazis.  In fact, in General Donovan's October 25, 1945 Report distinguished between the Nazi strategy against Catholicism and its strategy against Protestantism:

The Protestant Church in Germany does not have hierarchic but a democratic constitution.  Apart from that, it is constituted by 28 provincial churches.  Therefore it did not have the congeniality and strictness of the Catholic Church. That is why the struggle of the Protestant Church against Hitler became much more difficult.  If it was the clerics that bore the brunt of the struggle within the Catholic Church it was the congregation which beame the nest of resistance withing the Protestant Church.

Interesting how the media attack on Catholicism mirrors the strategy employed by the Nazis.