Funny Words

Are Trad Catholics a Protestant Sect?

JMSmith has a post up today about Martin Luther versus Traditional Catholics. I am nominally a Lutheran, and I have certain problems with the Catholic Church, but I often enjoy what JMSmith writes. Some of his stuff is wonderful and some of it is inpenetrable. Today's post is borderline, bunch of words I didn't know.

Scala Santa to open for limited time with the original marble stairs Jesus walked
ROME REPORTS in English
Pilate’s Staircase (also known as the Scala Sancta). Video is five years old.

Funny words:

• Greater Catechism - catechism is a summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers, used for the instruction of Christians. Evidently there is a bigger one (the Greater Catechism) and a smaller one.
• Novus Ordo -  short for Novus Ordo Missae, which means the "new order of the Mass".
• propitiatory - an action intended to please someone and make them feel calm, or to reconcile or appease.
• sedeprivationist - Sedeprivationism is a doctrinal position within Traditionalist Catholicism which holds that the current occupant of the Holy See is a duly-elected pope, but lacks the authority and ability to teach or to govern unless he recants the changes brought by the Second Vatican Council.
• sedevacantist - Sedevacantism is a traditionalist Catholic movement which holds that since the death of Pius XII the occupiers of the Holy See are not valid popes due to their espousal of one or more heresies and that, for lack of a valid pope, the See of Rome is vacant.
• simony - the act of buying or selling spiritual things, church offices, or roles that are closely connected to the spiritual. The term comes from Simon Magus, who, according to the Acts of the Apostles, tried to buy the power to give the Holy Spirit to others from Jesus's disciples.
• sola fides - a Latin phrase that means "faith alone".

More funny words that I think I know the meaning of, but mostly I'm too lazy to look them up.

• apocalyptic
• consecrate
• epiphany
• epiphenomenal
• facetiously 
• liturgy
• paraphrase
• perfunctory
• piously
• prelates
• schism
• secession

Update next day - replaced video. Original wouldn't play here.

The Eagle Official Trailer #1 - (2011) HD

When we started watching The Eagle I suspected we had seen it before, but no. Centurion was the movie I was thinking about. Centurion is about the loss of Rome's 9th Legion. This movie is about the son of the commander going north of Hadrian's Wall to retrieve their standard, a gold eagle.

American Rome

The Romans in their Decadence - Thomas Couture, 1847

Washington D. C. is to the American empire as Rome was to the Roman Empire. All over these empires ordinary people are working, going about their business and getting on with their lives. In the American Rome, the politicians and their toadies are busy feathering their nests with as much golden goose down as they can get their hands on. They are doing this by siphoning off a portion of the government money they spend on every single one of their government projects. It might be in the form of sweetheart deals, bribes, kickbacks or valuable prizes like jet planes or a country estate.

Most of the money the government spends is conjured out of thin air. Oh, there is some income from taxes, but does that even cover the interest that is owed on the national debt? It doesn't matter, all that magic money is causing inflation. Inflation doesn't really bother the rich because their holdings are invested in the real world, like real estate or profit making businesses, like the oil and armaments industry. Inflation causes the value of the dollar to go down, but that just means the price tag on the rich folk's holdings goes up. But anyone who understands basic economics realizes that increase in 'value' is just an illusion. The real value has not changed, it's just that the value of the money used to assess the value of the real thing has gone down.

It's the poor who suffer, and by the poor, I mean everyone with less than a million bucks worth of real stuff. The longer inflation goes on, the more people are squeezed out of the bottom and onto the streets. But the fat cats in the American Rome don't care because the poor have been beat down so far they don't have the energy to fight back or even to vote. All their energy is spent on survival.

So what we have is the same strategy pursued by the Mafia and Latin American dictatorships - squeeze the poor and then squeeze them some more. Be careful though, squeeze them too much and you get a revolution like you got in Venezuela and Nicaragua. 

The vast majority of the population has no real understanding, nor any real curiosity about what the government is doing. The pigs in Washington D. C. have built a media empire that tells the people something like a fairytale that keeps the majority of them complacent. They tell the people that Biden, the most corrupt son-of-a-bitch of them all, is bringing down inflation and building back better and fighting that evil Russian, and the people just lap it up.

If you want change, something needs to be done about the lock the pigs have on the media. I don't know how you are going to do that. A supreme court ruling might help, or if some of the billionaires in charge of these media empires have a change of heart, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Inspired by Tucker Carlson

Aloha Wanderwell

US actress, Aloha Wanderwell, with her husband Walter Baker, in front of the Arch of Constantine in 1928 -  Roma Ieri Oggi

Aloha has appeared here before.

Via Roger Pearse

Eye of the Tiger

In Roman times, the so-called ′ Tiger Eyes′ (small white stones) were placed among the stones on the road so that they could be seen at night

Stolen complete from daily timewaster

Political Stupidity

 

Germanic-Roman general Stilicho with his wife Serena and his son Eucherius.

Today's history lesson by Joseph Moore is the story of the awesome Stilicho and the vile Olympius. Olympius single-handedly brought about the fall of the Western Roman empire. How vile was he? The only images I could find of him are of a Power Rangers villain. I think that tells you something.

Britannia

EXCLUSIVE: Britannia Winter Solstice Red Band Trailer
We watched Britannia on Amazon Prime last week. It's a bit of swords and sorcery set in Merry Olde. There's a some history (the Roman emperor Claudius did send his General Aulus Plautius to invade Britain for a second time in 43AD), but pretty much the rest of it is made of whole cloth. Never-the-less, it gave me something to think about.

First off we have a Roman encampment with rows of canvas tents staked out. Never seen it done before in a movie (nor in real life, but we're talking about show business here). That's probably because it's a lot of trouble (meaning expense) and if it isn't critical to the story you can get away with someone just casually mentioning that he has 20,000 troops at his disposal, you don't have to build an entire camp just so you can show it on the screen. The camp that we saw on screen wouldn't have been big enough to hold 20,000 troops. It looked more like a hundred tents which would have been adequate for a thousand men, more or less, but still it's more than I've seen before. They did all this just so you can get a feel for the situation.

The tents looked remarkably like the tents used by the US Army 100 years ago, which I thought was a little odd. Surely in 2,000 years we would have developed a better tent, but then I realized we were probably using the original Roman plans on how to raise, train and equip an army. I mean it worked for them and you can't argue with success.

Then we have iron bars on the prison cells and chains hanging on the wall and I'm wondering if they really had that much iron back then. Wikipedia tells me that in Europe the Iron Age ran from around 500 BC to the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC. It also tells me that the Iron Age is part of "prehistory", so the end of Iron Age coincides with the beginning of history. In the Mideast this happened around 5,000 BC. In Britain this starts around the year zero when the Romans started showing up and writing things down.

I didn't include the weapons as an indicator of metal-working ability because making small things is relatively easy compared to making big things. To melt a 10 pound bar of iron takes nearly ten times as much heat as it takes to melt 5 pounds. Still, equipping an army with metal weapons and armor is a sizable undertaking.

Then there's the sorcery. We have a crazy man out running around loose. He has visions. And fits, and manic phases and calm rational phases. Kind of like you might see with a real crazy person. This guy is special though. He has skills, like hypnotism and the ability to sell his visions as prophetic. When he is rational, he can apply these skills.

We also have drugs, psychedelics mostly. Did the Druids have drugs? Manda Scott has a few words to say about Britannia, Druids and Drugs.


Donovan - Hurdy Gurdy Man (1968)
The show opens with Hurdy-Gurdy man by Donovan. It's a song about love songs and I'm wondering why would you pick something like that for show about violence, so I did some checking. Previous to Donovan, there was:

"Der Leiermann" ("The Hurdy-Gurdy Man"): Back of the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man, cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. His begging bowl is always empty; no one listens, and the dogs growl at him. But his playing never stops. "Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?" -  Song #24 in Winterreise (Winter Journey) by Franz Schubert

and previous to that there was:

The hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument that produces sound by a hand crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. It is generally thought to have originated from fiddles in either Europe or the Middle East some time before the eleventh century A.D. - paraphrased from Wikipedia

So while hurdy-gurdy doesn't go back to the dawn of time, it does go at least halfway back. And the song was released in 1968 when LSD was all the rage, so, trippin'.

Update November 2019 replaced missing video and fixed some typographical errors.

Centurion

Olga Kurylenko as Etain

We watched Centurion this evening and I'm pretty sure this is the second time we've seen it. There can't be two movies with Olga playing the Pict mole who leads the 9th Roman legion to their doom, can there?

This is second century AD and I'm wondering about the technology. The Romans have swords and armor, as do the Picts, but I'm pretty sure the only way the Picts got ahold of anything made of iron was because they got it from the Romans. They even manage to acquire a set of iron manacles with a chain that they use to restrain the leader of the 9th after they have captured him.

Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian's Wall makes a brief but impressive appearance, if you happen to notice it (about 10 mintues from the end of the movie). The movie is set in 117AD, but Hadrian's Wall wasn't started until five years later, but that's Hollywood for you.

As movies go, it was pretty good. Lots of action with some fairly realistic primitive tactics. But there were a number of instances that just didn't jibe with what you might expect. You know, Hollywood adding drama when no extra drama is needed. Aiming for low-brow, gut reactions I suppose.