Chateau Lloyd

Back in 2013, we still had a dish, and watched lots of the various streaming channels.  That was supposed the new Golden Age of television, thanks to programs like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Justified, and so on.  While Hollywood was busy getting woke, the streaming services and networks were able to produce long-form dramas without being bound by a 22-episode season.  What was more, it was easy to catch up on a sleeper hit, and when each season was released, one could binge-watch it in a week or so.

That time has passed, but it produced a number of shows available on DVD, and one of them we liked was The White Queen, a series based on Philippa Gregory's historical novels of the Wars of the Roses.

The concept of telling history through the eyes of women is nothing new, and goes back to the beginning of writing.  For every story of a king or warrior, there are parallel tales of the women who influenced them.  Feminists like to pretend that The Patriarchy silenced women, but most have never bothered to read the Bible or Homer or any other ancient work.

Anyhow, the story of Elizabeth Woodville lends itself to this approach and it is one of those remarkable historic events that turns everything upside down.  For those who don't know, one day King Edward IV is riding along after having won a battle  and sees a beautiful young woman waiting by the side of the road for news of her husband, who was a knight on the side opposing Edward (the Lancastrians).  She learns she is a widow, but the King offers to "comfort" her.  Remarkably she refuses his advances and insists that he marry if he wants to get it on.  So he does.

This completely upends the power structure in England, because it is bitterly divided between competing factions vying for control, and Edward was supposed to make a political marriage, not a romantic one.  Anyhow, drama ensues.

This is not a lavishly produced show, but it does a good job of conveying the period, and there's some battles and sword fights because leading characters did die in the conflict.  In fact, the Wars of the Roses were something of a sideshow for the commoners but a bloodbath for the nobility, and many royal lines were 'pruned' from the family tree.

The show has excellent performances, and follows the history reasonably well, but does veer into the all-to-familiar conventions of showing secret witchcraft influencing events and indulging in pretty graphic sex scenes, which at this point my life I find really boring.  It get it, they had sex.  Why is this is any way interesting to watch?

If one knows the history well, it will be maddening at times, but it does try to keep things reasonably close to accurate, and the various personalities are presenting in interesting ways.  The dynamics of the York brothers is well done, as is the way the various factions maneuver for control. 

I will particularly single out Amanda Hale's Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, who comes across as an absolute fanatic.  Given that her son was something like 10th in the line of succession when the story starts, I'm not sure I buy the notion that she thought he could somehow overcome Henry VI, his son Edward, the three York brothers (Edward, Richard and George), and their sons and potential sons.  It think in reality it was more of a "Well, who is left?  You're up, Henry!"

Anyway, I've watched it through a couple of times, and it still holds up well.  Folks who like Game of Thrones will particularly enjoy this, in large part because the ending makes sense.  Indeed, once you see it, you'll realize who derivative George R.R. Martin's work was.

Back in 1987, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers created a huge discussion within the strategic community.  It was a sweeping survey of international power politics using extensive data sets to map out the strengths and weaknesses of the various hegemons.

I devoured it, and was delighted to find that was on the required reading list for one of my classes when I went to college.  I was more than a little smug when I set my battered hardcover edition down on the table, where it stood out from the paperback editions everyone else had picked up at the student book store.  My was a first edition, meaning I read it as a freshman in high school.

Anyhow, in retrospect Kennedy has been spectacularly wrong in his analysis.  "Imperial Overstretch" does not exist.  Empires often rise and fall simply because of a leadership crisis.  As we are seeing in real time, the ongoing decline of many nations is simply a choice of the ruling class.  They prefer poorer, squabbling subjects rather than independent, prosperous one.  The post-war dissolution of the British Empire was not economically or strategically necessary but instead the result of a socialist political agenda.

Of particular note was Kennedy's prediction that Japan would soon displace the US at a global power.  Talk about a miss!  

Anyhow, I do like Kennedy's book as a survey of history and also the framing he used in terms of describing the power structures over the centuries.  He described the 20th Century as the crisis of the great powers and the coming of a bipolar world, which was the one he was describing in 1987.  That note that the US was about to collapse because of the Reagan buildup was widely regarded as absurd, and the facts bore it out.  The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the bipolar world became a unipolar one, with the United States standing unchallenged.

That world no longer exists, and there are three great powers, along with several rising contenders.  The final nail in the coffin to the unipolar world was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which proved decisively that all the blather about Russia having a GDP the size of the Netherlands was bad propaganda.

In fact, the very measure of GDP is now highly suspect, since it rates government spending as the same as consumption and investment, which is clearly is not.  We need a new measure to measure, which cuts out government spending that does not product tangible things like roads or warships.

The growing understanding in American circles of this strategic reality means that we can perhaps finally put away anti-Russian animus and a Cold War mentality and look at the world as it is.  Russia and China are superpowers in their own right, and will not accept dictation from Washington.  Weaponizing currency and banking only creates incentives go create alternative means of exchange that are less vulnerable to external manipulation.

India is another rising power, though less strategically ambitious.  Brazil remains the nation of the future and always will be (to recycle an old joke).

The upshot is that we are in a new strategic environment where realpolitik and strategic necessity must supersede ideology.   Gone are the days when presidential pronouncements produced immediate and positive results.  The blindness of our leadership greatly increased the risk of miscalculation that could have had catastrophic consequences.

I think the new US leadership understands this, and as a result I'm sleeping a little better at night.

Some years ago I got a copy of Bulfinch's Mythology, which I think was a gift from my father.  He has a copy, and highly recommended it.

This is one of the standard books that every respectable house had in it, along with a Bible, a dictionary, and some Mark Twain.

The original work was from the 19th Century and help bring Greek and Norse mythology alive in a world where only the elites could study them in the original languages.  It has since been edited and provided with a modern commentary, which makes some corrections, but sadly has the typical scholarly viewpoint that all religions are bunk.

What is more, it takes the point of view that similarities in mythology are proof that things were "borrowed," and one sees this particularly in the notion that the Bible was cribbed together from Egyptian and Babylonian faiths.  

The notion that everyone is trying to describe the same spiritual events from different perspectives is of course unthinkable, because no amount of proof is sufficient to convince the scholarly atheists.

I must give credit to the Lord of Spirits podcast, which opened my eyes to the reality of the spirit world.  I have since deepened that by reading further into Catholic mysticism and of course several accounts of spiritual warfare.

What really stood out to me upon digging back into Bulfinch's Mythology was how he was drawing the lines more than a century ago, and using the premise that the Bible was correct.  Of course, one can go back the St. Augustine to find assertions that the Greco-Roman deities were really fallen angels, so nothing is really new.

At any rate, it's inspiring me to write again, though I'll need to read more first before I have my thoughts fully formed.

Posting has been light because I was busy finishing off Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.  It is an absorbing story set during the period of Catholic persecution in Mexico, which led to the Cristero War.

Greene is vague on the details, giving only the most cursory references to time, geography and even characters.  Indeed, the primary character is a troubled Catholic priest with no name - he refers to himself as 'a whiskey priest,' a reference to his alcoholism.  He has also fathered a daughter, and in ordinary times, he would be a figure of ridicule and scorn, but against his will, he is seen as a heroic figure by the faithful who gratefully accept the sacraments from him.

I have to admit that I would have gotten more out of it if I simply read it as any other book, but instead, I found myself analyzing Greene's writing style, dialog, description, plot points and such.  I was therefore unsurprised by some of the plot twists, but Greene's ending was both surprising and satisfying.

Modern writing seems sterile, most juvenile genres, perhaps because people didn't have the wide experiences of travel, war, revolution and of course faith, as Greene did.  The West has been aggressively secularized, and a classic example is how The Force, which was mysterious and spiritual was redefined as a function of biology in the Star Wars prequels (another reason why I hate them).

Greene, like Evelyn Waugh, puts religion squarely in his stories, yet at the same time is not afraid to mock the hypocrisies  of its practitioners.  I picked up a handful of cheap paperbacks by Greene, and will continue to read through them.  They are only a couple of hundred pages, which is refreshing given all the door stoppers I've been reading over the past couple of years.

Disaster preparation is a hot topic these days (ahem), and I know quite a bit about it.  One of the core missions of the National Guard is disaster response (often put under the term Defense Support of Civil Authorities or DSCA), and one of the regular ways people respond to hurricanes, severe storms and wild fires is the rallying cry of "Call out the National Guard!"

The thing is, most of these events are foreseeable and while not necessarily preventable, one can plan ahead to mitigate the impact.

For example, in Michigan ice storms are a known threat, and people will recall severe ones.  Yet in 2012, the state's leadership was caught flat-footed and - unlike its neighbors - failed to use the Guard to the fullest extent, thereby prolonging the disaster.  Afterwards there was a thorough review at the highest levels, analyzing what equipment and personnel were available and how best to mobilize and deploy them.   I know, because I sat in on the meetings, and there was a heavy tinge of interservice rivalry in the process.

My novel Three Weeks with the Coasties - A Tale of Disaster and also an Oil Spill is based on my experiences at the Unified Area Command during the Deepwater Horizon disaster recovery operation.  It was a scene of colossal confusion, ineptitude and demoralization that was only mitigated by grim determination to see the thing through.

Thus, when looking at a bad situation, it is important to remain within the bounds of reality - nature really can overpower man without much of an effort - but people can shape events beforehand and afterwards to minimize the damage and loss of life.

One of the indicators of competence in this respect is training, particularly large scale exercises.  These are very expensive, but the only way to see if things will work when you need them.  At the most basic level, it is essentially just a phone tree where units get a simulated alert and see how fast they can reach their members and get estimates on when everyone could get to their armory or base.

These can be combined with regular training events to practice the necessary skills, which often have a secondary practical function.  For example, a road-clearing exercise might well use a blocked or deteriorated logging route.  A dilapidated county round would be a good candidate to practice rehabilitation against a time element.  I participated in an exercise were dead trees that posed a threat to a stretch of road and needed removal were dropped across it, and clearance teams were put on the clock to remove the obstruction.

People have a tendency to want a single factor, a single smoking gun that proves culpability, but the reality of the situation is that these are usually cascade failures, as was Deepwater Horizon.  Lots of small failures created bigger ones.

The response was also botched, as my novel points out.  In our current age, a lot of effort goes to appearances rather than results.  UAC was all but besieged with politicians wanting to be photographed with admirals and shaking hands with Coast Guard personnel.  At the start of the operation, the Coast Guard was the most popular and respected of the US armed services.  By the end, it had record low approval and lagged its rivals, in large part because its promises and statements did not align with reality.

While fictionalized, the Coast Guard really did claim that all civil volunteer craft were fully deployed and reports that they were idle in marines were false.  At the same time these assurances were being made, an Alabama National Guard media/recon flight passed directly over the flotillas in question, which were sitting in port.  What a stupid claim to make.

And the worst part is that maybe the headquarters believed it was true.

All things to consider before rushing to judgement.

The restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral is a marvelous thing.  How encouraging to see world leaders visiting a sacred Christian space and treating it with such respect?

This goes beyond political pleasantries or diplomatic protocols - the cathedral is itself beautiful.  I have never seen it, but I recall being moved to tears by the beauty of the Dom in Trier.

When I was younger, I partly bought into the Protestant argument that golden chalices and detailed artwork were a form of idolatry, and that money spent on architecture was better used to feed the poor.  

Then I grew up.  I realized that faith is a not a zero-sum game, and that money spent on religious art actually can increase giving the poor because it touches the heart, and moves people to acts of charity.

These thoughts returned to me some months ago, when I attended a friend's funeral at a rural Baptist church. The building was purely utilitarian, the fit and finish were right in line with any other institution.  Other than the cross on the far wall, the main space could have been confused for a hotel conference room, which even had a projection screen.  The entire laying was sterile, reminiscent of a public school auditorium.  There was nothing to elevate, or inspire.  The service itself was something of a variety show, with the pastor sitting like Johnny Carson off to one side as the acts performed.

Returning to my parish, I gratefully took in the various images and icons, the Stations of the Cross carvings, chapel and various grottos for private devotions.  I should add that as far as Catholic church buildings go, my parish is actually pretty modern, having been built in 1957 in a college town, so it has many mid-century flourishes and the seating forms a semi-circle, rather than the traditional cruciform aisles.

Still, when the there are slow moments, I am comforted by those images, which help keep my mind on task.  I also think of the artisans responsible for the work, and the satisfaction they no doubt derive from glorifying God.

That's the larger point - if we view religious art as decadent and wasteful, we will have only secular art, which is far more vulgar and typically points to sin.  Is it not better to have talented painters evoke salvation history or should they go for the make their money in pornography?

One of the greatest negative outcomes of Vatican II was the destruction of so much religious art.  Our cathedral is currently undertaking a massive restoration project to undo the damage wrought on it by the reformers.  Vivid murals were simply painted over and the building was given a white, sterile appearance.  Nothing to elevate or inspire.  It looked Protestant.  I can understand why people would have left the Church upon seeing that - and I can also see how people might consider conversion when beholding the meticulous devotion and financial investment in sacred beauty.

This power was celebrated by G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh, who already seeing the destructive hand a modernism calling for new "efficiencies."

I'm sure they would loathe what passes for Protestant religious art, which is either abstract or kitchy and saccharine and self-indulgent.  I'm thinking specifically of soft-focus portraits of Christ, making him look more like a 1970s hippie musician than the Savior.  I suppose it's an outgrowth of the "personal savior" motif and as such He's more of a boyfriend or pal than the Son of Man.

Of course, a recurring Protestant criticism of religious art is that its somehow idolatry, which is patently absurd.  No one is offering sacrifice to the images, or attempting to trap a deity within a sacred statue.  Icons are what they appear to be - images that help center our thought on God.   What better way to contemplate the sacred mysteries than by gazing on an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe?

That's another element - much of the art has historic value, and when we look at it, we see how our forefathers perceived God and salvation history.  This in turn points us to seeking the wisdom of the Church Fathers and the writings and acts of the saints.  Archeology confirms that sacred art has always been used in both Judaism and Christianity.  That modern variants of the two have turned their backs on it only underlines how out of the orthodox traditions they have become.

Last week Carl Trueman, a frequent contributor to First Things, posed an online essay explaining why he is not a Catholic.

If you are a subscriber, you can read my reply on the site, which pointed out that becoming Catholic is often a strugged between one's beliefs and accepting the fact that others may actually know more about the faith.  I specifically mentioned John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh as people who possessed far more knowledge than I, and in a context of wisdom, their combined insight was more than a match for mine.

I also that a lot of objections to the Church center on vanity; whether it is good enough as opposed to being valid, and that for many Americans, faith is much like picking out a car - you try the find the one that best suits you.

However, having read other responses (and re-read Trueman), I've noticed that the vast majority of his essay isn't about the lineage of the Church, the wisdom of the Church Fathers, the validity of the sacraments, etc., it's most about a personal dislike of the pope and a disdain for the veneration accorded the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Protestant really seem to have a particular hate for Our Lady, and I'm not sure why.  I freely admit that it took me time to get used to Marian prayers, but that was simply because I wasn't very well churched.  In time, I realized just how important a figure the BVM is in salvation history.  

She's not a rebranded Venus, but a figure foretold in the Old Testament and brought into fruition in the New.  I think a lot of Protestants know what they have said about Her, and it would be tough climb down to take all that back.

But the larger issue is clearly the pope, and I think this is not because of arcane arguments about the sweep of papal authority, or his role in the Magisterium, the relative precedence among bishops and patriarchs, but instead Protestantism's unique focus on the holiness of the individual ministers.

For Protestants, ministry is a unique, individual calling, which is why you have major figures emerge like Billy Graham.  Their personal charisma is the proof of their divine sanction.  In addition to living an upright life, they have to deliver inspiring sermons and constantly preach with confidence as this shows that they have "the spirit within them."  Because there is no apostolic succession, no sacrament of ordination,  or even sacraments at all, personal charm is all that Protestants can fall back on.

One need not even be formally educated to preach and develop a following.  Indeed, such figures are often treated far better than those with doctorates in theology because they are more "authentic."  Thus,  it may be difficult for someone like Trueman to understand that Catholic clergy can vary greatly in their personalities, knowledge and holiness, but their sacraments are all just as valid.

It also bears mentioning that Catholics have a different understanding of suffering and humiliation.  I see Francis not as the pope we wanted, but the one we needed.  He has done more to expose the corruption of the church than anyone else.  His flirtations with heresy have reinforced the importance of the Magisterium in Church doctrine, demonstrating that the pope cannot simply wake up one day and redefine dogma.

Protestants really seem to believe this, in part because in their churches, it's absolutely the case.  Time and again, we have seen televangelists and mega-churches riven asunder in personal and family disputes.  The assumption clearly is that Francis is the harbinger of some terrible liberal Catholic future.

In reality, he's likely to be the ignoble last gasp of liberal Catholicism.    As I've noted before, the seminaries are packed with very orthodox young men.  Francis imagines himself the future, but he is part of a fleeting movement that is already fading into the past.

Trueman does not understand this, and it diminishes his stature, which is unfortunate, as he does have some keen insights into the weakness of Protestantism.  As in so many other cases, his pride seems greater than his wisdom.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Nicholas, more popularly known as Santa Claus.   While reimagined as an elf living at the North Pole, the actual St. Nicholas was a bishop of the Church and some claim he punched out the arch-heretic Arius at the Council of Nicea.

The linked article says that there's no contemporaneous evidence of this, the the oldest source for the story is from the 14th Century.  This is consistent with the scholarly rule of thumb that sources closer to historical events are more accurate.

However, there is one giant caveat here, and that is that often individuals who later become significant, are ignored or diminished in their own time.  In the years afterwards, more information becomes available but this is subsequently lost, and so  all we are left with are more distant recapitulations of those stories.

This trait is akin to how scholars approach prophecy, generally assuming that they are all fake, created by snake-oil salesmen to support their made-up religion rather than honest people who are credulously recording remarkable events. 

For example, if a friend of mine writes down that I correctly predicted in August of 2013 that Michigan State would have an incredible run, there is no reason for anyone to doubt that as he has nothing to gain.  Yet bible scholars would, because (to them) such things are highly unlikely.  Clearly my friend is trying to push a cult or something.

In the bigger picture, this points to how people who ostensibly swear by facts and reason are just as emotional and biased as the religious people they disdain.  One of the reasons I entered the Church and began to take its claims seriously was that the logical contortions to explain away all these well-document events was comical.

Simply insisting that the sum of all knowledge has already been found and that miraculous events - which are meticulously documented - is completely illogical.  

So while it's impossible to prove St. Nick didn't bust Arius' chops, we can't rule it out, either.

While I don't like to follow politics, there is undeniably a link between government action, policies and the spirit realm.  Government can either side with the angels or work for the devil.  The notion that there is some neutral ground where all are free to operate is at best naive and at worst a damnable lie.

Christians across American breathed a sigh of relief that their faith would not be put to more strenuous tests in the near future.  Catholic hospital administrators went to bed free of worrying when and what form of abortion mandate would be imposed on them, and how they would fight it.

Contrast this with the situation in England, where the British Government demands control over the very souls of its subjects, demanding that silent, otherwise undiscernible prayer be banned in certain places.

This is of course nothing new for the British, who ran a martyrdom factory during the Tudor era.  As a sidebar, the other day I came across a conversation where Protestants observed all the important theological reforms made by the English Reformation, and now necessary they were for the development of Christianity.  I managed to restrain my desire to point out that if they were no necessary, why was torture and death employed to implement them, and how's the old Church of England doing these days?  The ancient cathedrals are being used for dance parties and put-put golf games.  But I digress.

Many people have remarked to me over the last few months of the gloom and dread they felt, and former agnostics returned to the faith as a result.  A better example of God letting us see the folly of our sinful ways in order to repent cannot be imagined.

And now there is an undeniable change.  A weight has been lifted.  Other in the paid performance press, the division has largely vanished.  People can get on with their lives and the faithful have the marvelous feeling of deliverance.

At the same time, we have won a battle but the war goes on.  Now is the time to further devote ourselves to God and lock in these gains.  The only way to avoid a recurrence is to so shape society that it becomes impossible.  That means the hard task of conversion and also pursuing individual holiness.  The two go hand in hand as people who are saintly draw sinner to them.  

By saintly I mean truly saintly - modest and humble, not bragging or self-righteous.  Yet at the same time, we must avoid the trap of "Nice Christianity" and speak with unwavering firmness about the evils in our midst.  A great many people still do not understand the full evil of abortion, how its supporters have twisted statistics and lied about medical necessity to kill viable children on a whim.

There is also the issue of the sudden rise of transgenderism.  It is impossible to find a parallel example of such a wicked, cruel belief system being imposed so quickly and so thoroughly.  The damage to souls and institutions will take years to heal, and a full reckoning must be made for those responsible.

Indeed, I think one of the biggest changes in the spirit world is that the faithful now find themselves confident and reassured and the wicked are suddenly troubled and afraid.  The dark powers that sustained them seemed invincible, powered by the "arc of history," but that arc has collapsed.  The secular future is no longer inevitable and the tide of events has unexpectedly turned.

We must not let this moment simply fade away.

With Halloween looming, I thought now would be a good time to look at some modern guides for spiritual warfare.  Over the past few years, Catholic media has gotten a lot more strident about All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, which is a good thing.  Yes, Halloween is generally a secular excuse to eat candy and dress up, but it also presents a unique opportunity for people who are already in the mood for tales of the supernatural to look at the reality of faith.

Halloween can therefore be a gateway for good, but also evil, since modern "goth" takes and overtly satanic themes and practices are becoming more common.  Witchcraft has never been more popular and naive young people are particularly vulnerable to being caught up in 'naughty' rituals or 'games' that purport to use magic (such as the vile Ouija board).

Two fairly recent books provide good advice on how to avoid these snares and a larger look at the reality of spiritual warfare.

Diary of an American Exorcist by Stephen Rossetti is a fascinating book that explains the modern practice of exorcisms, the difference between spiritual possession and oppression, and provides specific references from the Bible that help explain what is going on.  It's a quick, engaging read and not particularly scary because - as Rossetti points out - God wins in the end.

A Family Guide to Spiritual Warfare by Kathleen Beckman is a bit more detailed and includes some case studies.  I enjoyed it, but she does tend to repeat herself and I found myself skimming ahead a bit because yes, I get the value of prayer, etc.  I can't help but wonder if it was a series of essays that were brought together without sufficient editing, which would certainly explain the repetition.

What's interesting about both books is how mundane evil is. No need for head-spinning and pea soup eruptions - a lot of oppression and possession is just terrible life choices or cruelty that we write off as a personality quirk.

The books also highlight how people can be drawn into evil simply by assuming the spirit world doesn't exist, so cool goth tattoos or Santa Muerte decorations are just fashion statements.

Even after reading the books, I find myself still reflexively defaulting to the secular materialist explanation for things.  Intellectually, I'm well aware of the limitations of the view, but it pervades society and is arguably the greatest victory the devil has ever achieved.  The notion that an abstract principle of individual freedom supersedes God's written commandments is a monumental surrender to the forces of darkness.

The laws of men are supposed to reflect those of God, not the other way around.  It is no accident that having gained the commanding heights of government, nominally secular people now demand that people of faith violate their believes in the name of some abstract right that didn't exist until 20 minutes ago.  The drama regarding silent prayer in England is perhaps the perfect distillation of the wickedness dressed up as bureaucratic bungling.

I remember many years ago thinking that my true political home was "classical liberalism," which had somehow been perverted into socialism.  Thanks in part to reading G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, I now know that it was baked into the cake from the start.  Placing an abstraction like liberty as the highest good must inevitably force constraints on alternative sources of morality, which is why Catholic hospitals are constantly being sued to compel them to perform abortions and public prayer is being criminalized.

Both books provide insight into why these particular issues are being litigated, something unimaginable just a few years ago.

To put it another way, you may not be interested in the spirit world, but it's very interested in you!