Civilization

The Stone Guest. Don Juan and Doña Ana by Ilya Repin 1885
Presumably the statue standing in the background is the 'Stone Guest'.

Civilization goes hand in hand with culture and society. I was going to say one was based on the other, but I couldn't decide which came first.
    All these Islamic Jihadist terrorist attacks are spurring some people to try and figure out what the difference is between us and them, because there is obviously a difference, but facile explanations for their actions do not seem to explain anything at all.
    Marcel points us to a post by Joseph Moore that does some good work in this vein. As a bonus, I picked up a couple of new terms:

• Stone Guest - Statue of man killed by Don Juan that takes him to hell.
• Mary Shelley - I recognized the name but didn't recall that she wrote Frankenstein until I looked her up. She hung out with a number of other famous people back in the early 19th Century. I'm not sure that blaming her for widespread misery and death is exactly fair.
• Kulak - a peasant in Russia wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labor. Emerging after the emancipation of serfs in the 19th century, the kulaks resisted Stalin's forced collectivization, but millions were arrested, exiled, or killed.

And then we have this from the comments:

Gregory of Tours (539-594): History of the Franks  PREFACE HERE BEGINS GREGORY'S FIRST PREFACE

With liberal culture on the wane, or rather perishing in the Gallic cities there were many deeds being done both good and evil: the heathen were raging fiercely; kings were growing more cruel; the church. attacked by heretics, was defended by Catholics; while the Christian faith was in general devoutly cherished, among some it was growing cold; the churches also were enriched by the faithful or plundered by traitors-and no grammarian skilled in the dialectic art could be found to describe these matters either in prose or verse; and many were lamenting and saying: "Woe to our day, since the pursuit of letters has perished from among us and no one can be found among the people who can set forth the deeds of the present on the written page." Hearing continually these complaints and others like them I [have undertaken] to commemorate the past, order that it may come to the knowledge of the future; and although my speech is rude, I have been unable to be silent as to the struggles between the wicked and the upright; and I have been especially ­ encouraged because, to my surprise, it has often been said by men of our day, that few understand the learned words of the rhetorician but many the rude language of the common people.

The comment used the term 'bookish' in place of 'liberal', which I thought a little odd. 'Bookish' seems more appropriate, but that may be because 'liberal' has become such a loaded term in these contentious times.

P.S. Technical note: The Chrome browser's find function cannot find enumerated footnotes in Wordpress web pages.

Catch-22

Catch-22 (1970) - B-25 Mitchell take-offs - HD
Iaman is looking for a cabana on the beach in San Carlos, Mexico.

San Carlos, Mexico, is about equidistant from San Diego, El Paso, Cabo San Lucas and Mazatlan
Follow the link to see the airstrip location.

In the course of his musings, he discovers that the aircraft scenes for the movie Catch-22 were filmed there. "Paramount planned to film the Catch-22 aerial sequences for six weeks, but the production required three months to shoot and the bombers flew a total of about 1,500 hours. They would appear on screen for 12 minutes." The film cost $20 million to produce and this was back in 1970 when a dollar was actually worth something. "The Catch 22 airport was constructed from scratch for the movie."

What's Wrong with the Left

To give you some idea of the size of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, here’s a picture of its replacement during the 1984 renovation. It can only be accessed via a very narrow stairway.

One of my main gripes about political writers is the way they blame the Left (or the Right) for our current eff-ed up mess, but they never specify exactly what is wrong with 'those people'.  Col. B. Bunny spells it out for me:

Having been as slow on the uptake as anyone, I can't claim too many independent penetrating insights early on. The Cold War years seemed straightforward enough with the main irritant being the left's

1. failure to recognize the hideous nature of communist regimes,
2. failure to recognize the superiority of economic freedom,
3. failure to recognize the innate decency of American law and traditional society,
4. pathetic belief in their ability to craft solutions to life's problems superior to those developed over the centuries, and 
5. their dishonesty about their revolutionary objective.

You can argue over the validity of these points, but at least we have a list to work from. From Liberty's Torch via Dustbury

Saving Paris From Islam

Beyond Radical Secularism by Pierre Manent

Barton Swain has a review of Pierre Manent's book Beyond Radical Secularism in The Wall Street Journal today (if you can't read it there, you can read a stolen copy here). Here's an excerpt:

The only humane, enlightened way to deal with the Muslim presence in France, then, is to acknowledge France’s Catholic Christian character. France’s Catholic Church, he thinks, will need to assert itself as a “mediator” between Muslims and non-Muslims, with a view to admitting Muslims into a civic life defined by some common practices and a common good. Evidently some, at least, of the most radical Islamists already think of the Catholic Church as somehow representative of French society—the young militants Nabil Petitjean and Adel Kermiche, remember, did not choose a university professor or a journalist or even a politician to murder but an 85-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel.

It's pretty great. I recommend it to your attention.

Background Check

Donal Logue as Captain Kevin Tidwell holding the perp's damaged shotgun

We've been watching Life on Netflix and it is pretty entertaining. The other night we see Detectives Crews and Reese attempting to buy ice cream from a vendor's truck, but there's a criminal hiding in the truck pointing a shotgun at Charlie. Well, he's pointing it at the wall of the truck, but Charlie is on the outside and the criminal is on the inside. It's one of those ubiquitous delivery trucks with thin aluminum walls that are no barrier to bullets. This comes to Charlie's attention via one of those wide angle mirrors that people are always sticking up all over the place so you can see around corners, so Charlie takes out his gun and points it the criminal. Words are spoken, Charlie counts to two and then a gunshot is heard. Next thing we see is the blood besmirched criminal being wheeled away on a gurney loudly complaining that Charlie never got to three. In the aftermath, the Captain shows up to congratulate his detectives and we see him holding a shotgun (photo above). The end of the barrel has been splayed wide open. Nothing is said about the gun, no one (in the show) takes any notice of it, but it's right there in the middle of the screen.

Chippy

Stores have lots of interesting ways of telling you a chip isn't accepted. credit. PHOTO: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

I have started using a credit card for most purchases these days. I try to carry as few cards as possible, which means just one credit card, which happens to be my Costco card. Costco changed from American Express to VISA this year, which is what triggered the change in my buying habits. American Express is great if you are spending thousands of dollars on hotels, airline tickets and car rentals. Not so good for buying cheeseburgers (mmmm, cheeseburgers). So when I was carrying an American Express card, I was using cash for all the small stuff, and that worked pretty well. I'd go to the bank once a month and get a wad of cash and disperse it into the community five or ten dollars at a time. The big benefit was not having to keep track of all these chickenshit transactions. I bought, I paid for it, the money is gone, we're done.
     The downside was hauling out the wallet to get the cash, stuffing the change and receipt back in and then stuffing it back in my pocket. Part of the problem might have been that at least one of my pairs of shorts has Velcro closures on the the hip pockets, which might be great for mountaineering, but around town they are just kind of a nuisance. (No, I don't go mountaineering. I get out of breath climbing a couple of flights of stairs. While I have no doubt that I could climb Mt. Everest if I wanted to, having to take a nap after every couple of steps might make it a practical impossibility.) So now I keep my card in my front pocket and I just carry my wallet around for ballast.
     Ran into all kinds of credit card terminals on our recent road trip to Iowa. Swipe readers were more prevalent, many of the chip readers were disabled (photo above).
   Joanna Stern has a fine story in the Wall Street Journal about the pros and cons of the various methods of paying for things. Looks like I picked exactly the wrong time to change to using a card for everything: the chip makes every transaction take twice as long. Her solution is to use a smart phone. That would be fine if they didn't cost $50 a month. I may have to go back to paying with cash.

Authoritarians R Us

Braveheart

Vox has a story that purports to explain why Trump has has such a large following. It's pretty good, though a little long.
What we've got here is the age old battle between, no, not good and evil, but order and freedom. Order is what gives us civilization, which makes life pleasant, but freedom is what makes life worth living. It can sometimes be a hard choice. See Braveheart.