Arnold And Francis

What do a former Republican Governor of California and the Pope have in common?

They're both intensely interested in something Trump says doesn't exist: global warming. They're both promoting alternative energy as energetically as they can.

Of course you can't sell sunshine and wind with big profits the way you can do with petrochemicals. Who cares if it's killing us all, with oil, with Trump, and Putin, there's money to be made!

But -- is there, really? Are the Dakota and Keystone pipelines going to be able to pay for themselves if demand for petrochemicals is drying up, because everybody is switching to solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and biodiesel and vegetable oil and switchgrass and corn ethanol and hydroelectric and nuclear? Not every item on that list is popular with environmentalists, but every one of them isn't petroleum. And with the possible exception of hydroelectric, nuclear and corn ethanol (the only ones on the list which aren't popular with environmentalists), each one is growing fast.

How does this leave us with expanding demand for oil such as that there is any economic reason for Trump's energy policies even if we leave "secondary" considerations such as the health and survival of the human species completely out of the equation?

The oil companies lied to us for so long about the effects of their products. I think they may be lying to us now about the long-term demand for their products. Losers. Sad.

More On My Problems With Buddhism

Either Buddhism has been erroneously called a religion by very many people for a very, very long time, or it is a religion which recently has been very successfully marketed to atheists.

Just today in an online discussion, I was saying Yu-huh it is too a religion, and this other person, possibly a Buddhist, I don't know for sure, was saying no it's a philosophy, and I indicated that I was tired of the discussion, and the other person said Okay if you don't want to discuss religion...

*sigh* I pointed out that -- *sigh*

I'm so sick of them. "Buddhism is not a religion. We don't worship deities or preach any sort of metaphysics. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go to a temple and kneel in front of a statue of the Buddha alongside some Buddhist monks, and chant and meditate in my quest to attain eternal bliss."

This little tiff started off with a quote from the Dalai Lama: "I believe that the only true religion consists in having a good heart." I replied: "I don't think you need any religion to be a nice person."

The other person tossed me an LOL and said that that was exactly what the quote meant, because Buddhism isn't a religion, and we were off.

It's one thing if you think that the Dalai Lama is a great person and a powerful force for good in the world. Maybe he is. I admit that I can't really judge his personality or his effect on the world objectively, because all of this it's-not-a-religion sticks in my craw.

I happen to like Pope Francis very much. (I didn't right at first, as you can see by reading what I wrote about him in this blog immediately after he was elected Pope. But part of that, of course, was just my own personal disappointment because I hadn't been elected Pope.) I like him more and more.

I'm not sure whether I would like him if he and/or some of his followers started to claim that Catholicism is not a religion and never has been. If, for example, Catholics suddenly started to claim that the belief in the Resurrection isn't really a belief in the Resurrection and never was such a belief, the way that some Buddhists have suddenly begun to claim that Buddhists beliefs in reincarnation -- reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example -- are not actually beliefs in reincarnation and never have been.

If you're a Catholic and also an atheist, that's fine with me. Just don't try to tell me that no Catholics believe in anything supernatural and that none ever have.

If you're a Buddhist and you don't believe in reincarnation, I have no problem with that.

If you're trying to tell me that "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated, they believe that aspects of one Dali Lama are transferred to the next, because they all share one heart," and that I'm just silly for thinking this is a religion and not a philosophy, and for thinking that what you just said has anything to do with reincarnation, then I don't want to talk to you any more.

Not about Buddhism, not right now anyway.

Why? Because I'm always struggling to make sense, and that struggle is difficult for me under the best of conditions. Maybe it's actually much harder for me personally because I'm autistic. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical I wouldn't loath theology so because it wouldn't pose such a threat to me. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical and someone were to say to me: "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated per se, they believe that the ideals of the last Dali Lama have been transferred to the new one. The one who owns the heart," I'd find it fascinating, and we'd be able to discuss it all day and all night and I'd find it all ever so delightful. I seem to remember a line from a poem by Jack Kerouac about Buddhism being delightfully empty baloney any way you slice it. I'm sorry, I can't find that line right now. And often I remember lines completely wrong. (Is that also because I'm autistic?) But assuming that Kerouac did actually write something more or less like that -- is this a matter of some people finding a perfectly good and healthy sort of nonsense in religion?

Is it possible that it's similar to the wonderful stuff I find in Gertrude Stein, which so many people have had to explain so laboriously to each other but which no one ever had to explain to me, which I loved from the first instant?

Maybe. Or maybe I simply have a very good point here and I'm right to call some Buddhists on their nonsense.

[PS, 20. March 2016: Another thing has occurred to me lately: how seldom anyone seems to wonder whether the feats of archery described by Eugen Herrigel in his famous book Zen in the Art of Archery were faked. (Herrigel tells of a Zen master shooting an arrow at a faraway target in the dark and hitting the center of the bulls-eye, and then shooting a second arrow which splits the first one right up the middle.)]

Pope Francis' Emphatic, Reality-Based Remarks On The Environment

"The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth."

That's from Pope Francis' encyclical "Laudato Si," released today. You can read the whole thing in English here if you like.

As I understand it, Papal encyclicals are still written in Latin, and then translated from Latin into many other languages. I've never been able to find any Catholic documents written post-Vatican-II (post-1962) in book form in Latin, and I haven't been able to find "Laudato Si" in Latin on the Internet. However, to my great surprise, today I found this page on the Vatican website which contains Latin versions of some documents written by Francis, including his 1st encyclical, which was published in 2013, so I assume -- no, I don't assume. I hope, but the Vatican website has disappointed and puzzled me so severely so many times that I no longer assume anything at all about it -- I hope that "Laudato Si," Francis' 2nd encyclical, will soon be on this page in its original Latin.

For now, back to the English version: Francis mentions that every one of his predecessors going back to John XXIII spoke out against the destruction of our environment; that many of those most badly affected by this destruction are the poorest of humanity, that many of the Earth's wealthy seem more concerned with covering up the problems of pollution and global warming than in addressing them; denounces "social exclusion" and "an inequitable distribution of energy and other services;" points out that fresh waters supplies are quickly dwindling while "access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right;” and that plant and animals species are dying out very rapidly, with disastrous results for remaining life; denounces previous political responses to the environmental crisis as weak, saying that international environmental summits "have not lived up to expectations because, due to lack of political will, they were unable to reach truly meaningful and effective global agreements;" opposes free-market capitalism with remarks such as “by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion;” assets that when it comes to how we interact with the Earth's enviroinment, "we need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity." [...]

In short: over and over again in this encyclical, Francis says things about the environment and politics which we all know are true, and which almost of the politicians in the GOP in the US say are false, and it's full of a sort of common decency which is in short supply in the GOP. (I apologize to my international readers for this conclusion to a post about an international figure and his statements on an international problem, but the contrast between Francis and the GOP is so striking that I had to mention it. I'm sure that much of the same is true of many political parties in other countries.)

"Everything's A Situation"

-- that's my favorite line from "NYPD Blue," which, more than 2 decades after it premiered, is still the gold standard for American broadcast-TV partial nudity.



Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...

Where was I?

Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.

I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."

Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:

Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.

When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.

Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.

Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.

And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.

PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.

I Can't Find A Pope Francis Effect In The Book Market Yet

Rush called Francis a Marxist. Francis makes statements about the rich and the poor which certainly sound more Leftist than Rightist. Now he's said, "I know many Marxists who are good people." In angry opposition to Francis, or so he thinks, a rightwing freemarket laissez-faire rah-rah-siss-boom-bah capitalist has written: "Capitalism and many variants called Capitalism has raised the standard of living for more people around the world than any system every created by man. Capitalism has produced more wealth and increased production greater than any other system in the world." I replied to him: "That's very close to a direct quote from the first pages of the Communist Manifesto. Which you might want to read sometime. It's only 20, 30 pages or so. Maybe some people somewhere dispute what you say about capitalism's effect on the world's wealth and productivity. Marxists certainly don't."

So that's when I wondered whether perhaps many Americans had indeed read the Communist manifesto because of Francis. What with the economy and all, and now in top of that what with Francis infuriating rightwingers on such a regular basis in such a delightful way. Marx has been read very little in the US in proportion to how much he is dissed. People don't know what they're talking about when they diss him, they're just repeating the staggeringly-successful US capitalist talking points on Marx and Communism. So I thought, maybe now, after years of spectacular worldwide abuse of financial deregulation and now with Francis, and what with the economy and all -- maybe now, finally, Americans would start reading Marx. The Communist Manifesto at least. Capital and Critique of Political Economy, that could come a little later, and then pretty soon Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brian could discuss Maoism versus New Left with their movie-star guests and everybody would get it and the Earth would be saved and we could all just really get on with it. Thanks to a Pope, sure, why not, who, if not History, doesn't love irony?

But no, I was getting a little ahead of myself. I couldn't find an edition of the Communist Manifesto higher than around #20,000 on Amazon's book bestseller list. Then I thought: maybe AD-AMAZON The Portable Karl Marx,but ouch: it's at #147,305.

Even Francis himself is not burning up the track: a book by him published in November is at #1348, and AD AMAZON Evangelii Gaudium,which caused such a fooferah in the headlines? It's at #661. Holy moly, pardon my French, Holy Father. Wouldn't something by John Paul II have been at #1 by now? And in Amazon's top 20 for books there are items by Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. It's all horribly disappointing and surprising for me, except for the success of O'Reilly and Beck, which is merely horribly disappointing for me.

Then I thought: Maybe Kindle is here and it's passed me by because I'm old, and that's where the real bestsellers are, and Francis is way up high in the Kindle bestseller list, but no. Marx, also no.

"WATCH: Pope Francis Stops To Bless And Kiss Disabled Man"

That's a headline linking to an online video. I'm not going to click it and watch. I can picture what it looks like. The thing is, I can't stop wondering how many people who thought condoms are evil died of AIDS during the few seconds when the Pope blessed and kissed that man, how many contracted HIV, or gave birth to a child they will be able to feed and clothe only with great difficulty (and how many of those babies were born with AIDS), or how many sweatshop laborers died inside sweatshops, and how many of them were children, and how many of those children had never seen the inside of a school, and how many labor organizers had been beaten or arrested or killed.

I understand the excitement over the Oh Look How Humble Pope Francis Is! Show, but I'm already tired of it. I can't remember any humility which was as gratuitous and vain as this.

Pope Francis

I'm starting to sour on him a little, I must say. I think the word he has repeated most frequently in his Papacy so far has been "poor." He says he wants the church to serve the poor. As we know, different people mean different things when they say they want to help the poor. When I say it I mean I want to eliminate poverty. I have a feeling that's not what Francis has in mind. And in fact eliminating poverty would directly contradict Holy Scripture: remember, Jesus said that the poor would be with him always.

And of course, as many people have pointed out, the Catholic Church is now strongest in the poorest parts of the world. Is Francis a real revolutionary, as some optimists have speculated, or, quite to the contrary, does he want to keep the Church strong by keeping the number of people in poverty huge?

Refusing to wear some of the Papal bling which had become usual before his pontificate, riding in a bus with the other Cardinals instead of in a Papal limousine, personally paying a hotel bill -- these things don't impress me. They're peanuts. The Catholic Church has billions if not trillions of Euros at its disposal -- and a Euro is more than a dollar -- and Francis apparently expects people to ooh and ahh at gestures which amount to dozens or hundreds. And anyway, conspicuous consumption doesn't spread poverty. If wealth is accumulated through sweatshops and union-busting, then yes, it does spread poverty. But ornate robes and high-end jewelry are made by skilled craftsman at high wages, a large part of which wages go into the general economy -- whatever, just study some basic economics, and no, Ayn Rand was not an economist, she was merely a creep.

Birth control in the Third World would help the poor. Francis is no help there. Education would help the poor. Francis is not a Franciscan, he is a Jesuit, and when the Jesuits began they were among the best educators in Europe and the European colonies. Many Jesuits and their fans will insist that they still are, but of course that isn't true. Many students who received the benefits of an education by the Jesuits in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries grew up to be quite secular and eventually to create secular institutions of learning. And I'm not even going to add "--paradoxically" to the end of the previous sentence. It was no paradox. In the earlier centuries of the Jesuits' existence there were no non-Christian universities in Christendom, and non-Christian schools at lower levels were relatively scarce, and private tutors and private scholars also were clergypeople more often than not. In short, Christianity still had a monopoly, pretty much a stranglehold, on Western education. Therefore it makes absolutely no sense to assume that a clergyperson had chosen his or her vocation for the sake of religion and not for the sake of education, and no sense to assume that a Jesuit teacher was Christian in more than name only. And in fact many of the leading, most blatant anti-clerics of previous centuries were Jesuit clerics. It wasn't a paradox at all, it was a function of circumstance. Now that there are abundant opportunities for education completely apart from Christendom, it does make sense to assume that a Jesuit is saddled with quite a bit of superstition of the exact kind from which earlier generations of Jesuits sought to free their charges.

If by helping the poor Francis means raising them up out of poverty, and if he actually succeeds in doing so in significant numbers, then he will succeed in significantly shrinking the Catholic Church. (As well as deservedly winning the love and gratitude of many people, Catholic and non-.) If he means to keep their loyalty with an occasional kind word and pat on the head and bowl of soup and crust of bread or bowl of rice and pair of second-hand shoes, then he's not really their friend. Many misguided Leftists seem to find poverty picturesque, and despise wealth and luxury. (I'm a Leftist, but not that kind.) Maybe Francis is one of those. If so, many Leftists will love him, and the poorest human populations will not do nearly as well as they would have with a Pope who loved the bling and the limousines and ate haute cuisine and stayed in penthouses whenever he traveled, and used his power to CHANGE things, to expose exploitative right-wing regimes, to combat multinationals which sell products from sweatshops and industrial farms, to support unions, and education, and access to the best medical care for the broadest possible populations, and birth control and other women's rights.

I was actually fairly optimistic for a few hours of Francis' papacy. Now I feel I was taken in. Which is not to say that I think Francis is insincere. I have no idea how sincere he might be. And I also don't much care. His actions are going to be what they will be, whatever motivates them. But I hope that I'm now wrong to feel taken in, and that Francis actually will change some of the big things, and not merely the Papal wardrobe.