MB&F L’Epée 1839 Grant

This is Grant.

Grant can be moved into 3 different positions, and is about 7 inches wide and 8 inches long.

And, as you can see by this photo --

-- Grant is a clock, a joint venture between the companies MB&F, who make mostly somewhat out-there watches, and L’Epée 1839, who make mostly weird and playful clocks. Grant is named after a WWII tank which was named after Ulysses S Grant, was made in a limited edition of 150 pieces, and retails for a little over $20,000, which is a real bargain when you look at all of the high-quality craftsmanship and fine materials which have gone into this piece.

Can we talk about socialism? There are some socialists who hate wealth and money and want to do away with it. Then there are socialists such as myself and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw wrote, in the Preface to Major Barbara,

"To teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money."

(My emphasis, lest some careless reader think that I or Shaw were telling the lazy poor to complain less and work harder.)

The other sort of socialist -- the Puritan sort, even though they often are atheists -- will point to things like Grant and say that they represent all that is wrong with the world. They may bite their tongues, if they were raised as Christians, to keep from saying "all that is wicked," but that's what they mean. Shaw and I favor universal basic incomes, that is: giving money to everyone, because everyone should have it. We see nothing wicked about Grant. What is wicked to us is that the world is arranged so that so very few people can afford to buy themselves something like a Grant, if they so choose. (Not everyone could buy a Grant even if everyone were rich, because there are only 150 of him, but there are many extravagant things like Grant.) And that other sort of socialist, the Puritan kind, ought to brush up on their Marx, especially Marx on the subject of leisure, if they think Marx is on their side, and not not mine and Shaw's.

It strikes me how many of these socialists who say they're against wealth are a lot wealthier than I've ever been. They have varying definitions about how wealthy is too wealthy, but, conveniently, it tends to be much wealthier than they are. Bernie Sanders may well be a millionaire, but billionaires really grind his gears. For them not to be much more focused on poverty requires, I think, both a lack of experience of it, and a lack of empathy. It happens now and then that a rich Puritan socialist will actually give away everything they have, to the point where they actually become poor on purpose, but it doesn't happen often. Shaw, as far as I know, was never close to being poor, but he was gifted with enormous empathy. He was able to spot suffering without having experienced something similar to it himself. And he was clever enough to see that one doesn't reduce the amount of misery in the world by becoming miserable.

Anyway, I just came here to say: lookit Grant, he's wicked cool!

Worship God Or This Homeless Person Will Starve!

1. An article by a theologian lecturing atheists in HP? How refreshing! It's been literally days since I've seen such a thing!

2. In some countries, there are enough shelters and kitchens to house and feed all the homeless, courtesy of the government, as is universal health care, and it's been that way for decades. I'm just saying, some Amurrkins should look around more.

3. Not all atheists are New Atheists. I'd never heard of the capitalized variety before I started hanging around HP Religion, and by sometime last year I realized I'm not one. (I don't say "bronze age" or give anachronistic and inaccurate depictions of ancient and Medieval history often enough.)

4. Much as I would like to believe that religion is sharply declining, I think many people, both atheists and non-, are making much too much of certain polls alleging a sharp decline in religion, because these polls are not distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and the allegedly "spiritual but not religious," who of course are religious, but currently somewhat disorganized.

5. Schwartz claims that most of the world's religions are based on the "fight for the oppressed and the impoverished." Actually, they're based on theistic beliefs. That fight has always been optional. Articles like yours are manipulative appeals of the send-money-or-this-puppy-will-die variety: "Worship God or this homeless person will starve!" If the priorities of the billions of the world's Christians and Muslims were as Schwartz claims they are, human homelessness would've been thoroughly eradicated long, long ago.

"Do you need mansions and gold hats to worship god?" -- An Open Letter To Someone I Don't Know

Yes. Yes I do. I need mansions and gold hats in order to worship God. (And Maseratis too! And luxurious chaise lounges and finely-made intricate mechanical pocket watches -- bushels of 'em!) Which is kind of ironic because I don't even believe in God, and I'm not even convinced Jeebus ever existed. And if he did I don't much care what he would do.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm having a hard time taking you seriously. The other day I saw an episode of "Family Guy" in which Peter led a radical libertarian-anarchist movement which succeeded in eliminating all government in Quahog. "And now that we're FREE," Peter said in triumph once the hated shackles of government were gone -- he said: why don't we get organized here in order to optimize out living experience and protect one another and maintain our infrastructure and discourage crime, codifying what we do and do not deem to be acceptable behavior, confining criminals in enclosed places if need be, and collect refuse and so forth, and we can elect representatives to oversee all of these important duties, and we can repeat these elections at regular intervals, so that if the people we elected the first time aren't pleasing us with their job performance, they can be replaced. And we could chip in some money to pay for time and effort of those representatives and that of all of the other people needed to keep it all humming -- little or no money from the poorer folks and more from those who are well-off. And we'll do all of this without government, yaaay!! And all of his anarchist friends cheered wildly at these brilliant suggestions.

Sort of reminds me of all you people insisting that a charitable institution be broken up and sold and the proceeds given to charity. The constant calls for a Vatican art sale are absurd. (I know, you yourself didn't call for a Vatican art sale, you called for some of the Church's "trillions of dollars' worth" of real estate to be sold off. I don't think mentioning you in the same breath is horribly farfetched.) A few wealthy art collectors would get some bargains, the public would have less art, and what would the Vatican do next week? Sell all those manuscripts from the Vatican Library, maybe? Why give any thought to any of us Classicists who benefits from those manuscripts being accessible to the public? History, schmistory! It's a brave new world, what with the RCC being downsized at last! And as far as the art is concerned, the most valuable Vatican artworks are frescos, painted onto the walls -- so they'd literally have to sell the buildings themselves, or bust them up. "Next up for auction we have the chunk of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel containing Michelangelo's beautiful painting of the Delphic Sibyl. What am I bid?"

Gold hats? Silk slippers? Small potatoes! Some of you guys are fixated on teeny-tiny stuff. And unfortunately, Francis is one of you, paying his hotel bills and dressing simply. Well, maybe there's symbolic value to that. Still, I'd rather he outdid Benedict XVI with the bling and always traveled by limousine and private jet and excommunicated a few of the most egregious credit-default-swapping, Malaysian-sweatshop-owning, air-and-water-and-soil-polluting Catholic CEO's. And/or advocated birth control or stem-cell research, or said that being LGBT is as good as being anything else, or that religion is silly ooga-booga from thousands of years ago. Oh well, nobody's perfect. I do like that he's speaking up against corporate greed and sweatshops and mass starvation.

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.

When You're Poor For a Long Time --

-- you learn to really stretch a buck. Which is good, it's a good skill to have, buck-stretching. But then recently I became less poor, and sometimes I've been stretching the dollar unnecessarily. Without thinking about it, by instinct. For example, for several years, my home had a completely unnecessary lack of flyswatters, because I had attained the level of wealth where buying a flyswatter would not break my budget, but it continued not to occur to me to buy one.

But those several years too had a big and unexpected upside. After several years of swatting flies with rolled-up newspapers, and with towels, and with books, and whatever other less-than-ideally-suited object was at hand, after I finally smacked myself on the forehead and went out and bought that flyswatter, I found that my skills had been honed to a very fine edge. With the proper instrument, now I am deadly. An anti-fly ninja. Fugettaboutit. I see a fly, it's dead, like in the time it takes me to walk over there. Doesn't matter how old and wily the sucker is. It's history, and it's easy.

The glass is half-full. Always. Whether you can see it or not. It just is.