What Europeans Found on the Most Isolated Island in the World

 From Literary Hub:

Europe came late to Rapa Nui, two centuries after Magellan led a pioneering Spanish expedition across the Pacific in 1521. Many of the statues were probably carved in those eight generations. When ships finally arrived—eight in all between 1722 and 1786, from Holland, Spain, England, and France, bringing a total of around 1,400 men—the visitors saw things they found hard to believe. There was a long tradition in Europe of representing named individuals realistically in stone, whether known persons or mythical beings or gods. The statues on the island were much larger, and far more numerous, than any standing at typical installations in Europe. And they seemed identical, anonymous, stylized, and alien. From the Islanders’ point of view, the visitors were equally strange, as they appeared and vanished overnight, over sixty-four years spending a total of no more than a week ashore. We may imagine that Islanders found it hard to stop talking and thinking about what had happened. But there must have been many who never saw a European.

Such brief and intermittent encounters had profound consequences, for the Islanders and for our understanding of their story, even now. It began on the Easter day when the Africaansche Galey signaled land. The Dutch West India Company had sponsored an expedition to search for a southern continent, which was thought necessary to balance all the land north of the equator. Jacob Roggeveen, a lawyer turned explorer, had wandered about the Pacific with three ships and found nothing. His crews were beginning to lose faith till they spotted a turtle and floating vegetation, and birds overhead. There was great joy, Roggeveen wrote in his log: They were about to discover Southland. But the imagined continent soon revealed itself as no more than a low, flat island. Rising plumes of smoke showed it was inhabited. Weather marked the occasion: They waited at a distance for thunder, lightning, heavy rain, and winds to clear.

The pioneer encounter occurred 3 miles offshore. The Dutch, spotting an old man approaching in a canoe, sent out a sloop to investigate. This unceremonial meeting was the first contact between people whose ancestors had parted tens of millennia ago in Asia, and whose experiences, cultures, and beliefs separately reflected that distance. It was an innocent event played out repeatedly around the world in various forms. A marker of unity. A harbinger of change and loss.

The naked man put up a good fight, but was overpowered and brought to the Arend, Roggeveen’s flagship. Curiosity trounced the Islander’s fears, and he seemed delighted by what he saw, taking a special interest in the ship—how it was made, the masts’ great height, the sails and the thickness of the ropes, and the guns, to which he gave particular attention. The sound of the ship’s bell and the sight of himself in a mirror scared him, and he appeared to be ashamed of his nudity. Offered a glass of liquor, he poured it down his face and tried to rub it out of his eyes. He put his arms and head on the table, and repeatedly raised them toward the sky, shouting loudly as he “addressed his gods.” (Read more.)

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Hanukkah Under Fire: Global ‘Intifada’ Brings Terror to Jewish Families From Sydney to D.C.

 From Overton News:

On December 14, 2025, during a community Hanukkah event called “Chanukah by the Sea” at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, two gunmen opened fire on a gathering celebrating the first night of the holiday. At least 12 people were killed, and nearly 30 were wounded, including police officers, as families and children enjoyed the festival. Authorities quickly classified the massacre as a terrorist attack deliberately targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. Australian leaders denounced the violence as an “act of evil antisemitism.” ABC News

This was not random violence. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said the shooting was designed to target Jews on the first night of Hanukkah, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an evil act against Jewish Australians. ABC News The attack shattered the sense of security that Jews in Australia had long taken for granted, even as antisemitic incidents had been rising there in recent years amid heightened tensions tied to the Middle East. Reuters

The brutality of the Bondi Beach massacre, where even a well-loved rabbi was among the dead, should force all of us to confront a painful truth: antisemitism is surging globally, and it is spilling over from rhetoric into deadly action. The echoes of this tragedy reach far beyond Australia.

Earlier in 2025, another horrific act shook the Jewish world at its core. On May 21 in Washington, D.C., two **Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum after attending a Jewish community event. The alleged shooter, identified as Elias Rodriguez, reportedly declared “Free, free Palestine” and expressed ideological motives tied to the Gaza war. AP News Investigators and prosecutors have charged Rodriguez with hate crime and murder, stressing the antisemitic motivation behind the attack. Department of Justice

This attack in the U.S. capital where Jewish life and American political life intersect sent shockwaves through both Jewish and broader communities. Law enforcement authorities called it terror and hate-motivated violence, and leaders across the political spectrum expressed horror. The Guardian For many American Jews, it was a grim reminder that hatred long fought against abroad can find fertile ground at home.

These events in Australia and the United States are not isolated. Jewish communities in Europe, Canada, and beyond have reported spikes in antisemitic graffiti, assault, and harassment, especially since the October 2023 conflict in Gaza reignited old hatreds and unleashed new ones. Antisemitic rhetoric on social media and at protests has normalized language once considered fringe. What was once coded hostility has, in some circles, transformed into explicit calls for violence against Jews.

As we light the menorah this Hanukkah, we do so in a world where Jewish existence is again under threat not only in distant war zones but in our neighborhoods, our streets, and our places of worship and celebration. The lit candles symbolize hope and endurance, but they also remind us that light alone cannot safeguard us from the darkness of hate. True protection requires vigilance, political will, and moral clarity. (Read more.)

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Extinct Bird Returns tσ New Zeɑlɑnd

 From Exgenus:

In a massive and historic conservation success story, eighteen takahē birds have been released into the wilds of a nature reserve on Lake Wakatipu. This is hoped to be followed by seven more in October, and another 10 in the early months of next year as this rediscovered wonder continues its long road to recovery into the third separate breeding population in the wild. The automobile was still a novel sight in London when the takahē was declared extinct. This iridescent flightless bird is a symbol of New Zealand’s unique prehistoric past, but it evolved on an island without mammals, and with their invasive introduction came what might have been the bird’s ultimate demise. (Read more.)

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Tales of the Jazz Age

 From Reid's Reader:

Tales of the Jazz Age is a very mixed bag. On the table of contents, Fitzgerald writes a facetious account of how each story came to be written. Its eleven stories contain three stories that are now often regarded as masterpieces, a fourth one that I would add to that list, and a fifth that comes near to greatness. The other six are mainly "fillers" - frivolous, silly and often reading like sophomoric college humour.

I'll deal with the rubbish first. "The Camel's Back" is a strained comedy about a man wearing a camel suit while gate-crashing a party. Fitzgerald himself said "I like it least of all the stories in this volume". "The Jelly Bean" is a little better - a sad anecdote of a bumpkiin bested by a canny flapper. "Porcelain and Pink", written as a play script, has a young man peeping in on a young woman in the bath, filled with banter and topical jokes that now mean nothing to us. Fitzgerald admits that "Tarquin of Cheapside", "Mr Icky" and "Jemima, the Mountain Girl" were all written when he was an undergraduate at Princeton - and they look it, even if he polished them up a little for later publication - wisecracks, puns, pratfalls etc, with (again as Fitzgerald admits) "Jemima, the Mountain Girl" leaning on the type of high-speed absurdities that the Canadian wit Stephen Leacock pioneered. 

So much for the forgettable. Now for the genuinely worth reading stories.

May Day, a long short-story, was first published in a magazine in 1920 before Fitzgerald’s first novel was published. It is interesting in many ways. It is one of the very few stories Fitzgerald wrote that included proletarian characters and made a brief glance at a radical situation, quite different from the wealthier classes or parvenus that were his usual stamping ground – although much of the story does deal with the wealthier. It takes place in 1919 when the May Day riots broke out, pitting de-mobbed soldiers against Communists… or radicals who were deemed to be Communists. But this is going on in the background. Two proletarian de-mobbed soldiers are desperate for booze, having come back from the war in Europe to find that America is on the brink of adopting Prohibition. They go to an expensive restaurant where one of them knows a waiter who might slip them some drink. Expensive restaurants are still serving alcohol. Hiding in back-rooms of the restaurant, the two boozers get their wish and proceed to get smashed… But this is only part of the tale, for more of the story is about the higher class. A man called Gordon desperately needs money, having lost most of his wealth in speculation. He asks a friend to help him out… but no help comes. A haughty belle called Edith was once Gordon’s old flame.  Edith is dining and dancing in the restaurant’s ballroom. A man called Peter is infatuated with Edith, but when he asks her for a dance she spurns him. Dejected, Peter finds his way into the backroom where the two bibulous soldiers are boozing. He joins them. The well-off gourmet and the proletarians meet in alcohol. Meanwhile chaos and the smashing of glass can be heard distantly going on in the riot some streets away. Gordon meets Edith in the restaurant. She used to think he was wonderful, but now he is a neurotic mess. She is no longer impressed by him and turns him away. Without money, Gordon goes back to his meagre lodgings and commits suicide. Presumably the dance goes on. Money, class, prestige and the unattainable woman – these are all ideas that Fitzgerald played with in most of his novels; and in some ways this long-short-story is their precursor.

Even more read than "Mayday" is The Diamond as Big as the Ritz . As I understand it, it is basically a fantastic adventure story but with a sort of moral. Way out in a desolate part of Wyoming, a prospector has discovered in a hidden valley a diamond of unbelievably huge proportions – maybe as big as the Ritz hotel. It must be worth wealth beyond belief, but the prospector leaves it in the ground. It is for him to delight in and nobody else but his immediate family. Over the years, he keeps his great discovery from prying eyes. He uses black slaves for heavy labour. He has persuaded them that the Confederates won the American Civil War and therefore slavery is still legal. [This is one element of the story which would now probably have the story banned from schools.] He has a crew with weapons such as machine guns and barbed wire to keep strangers out. Yet he raises a family there and he allows his son to go off to college… from which his son brings back a college friend to the forbidden zone. How does this story wind up? The college guy falls in love with the prospector’s daughter… but the college guy gradually understands that, to keep the huge diamond unknown, passing visitors such as he are put to death. So, with the girl, he tries to escape from the hidden valley… at which point aircraft, bombers and armed forces descend on the valley and the millionaire’s hidden valley is reduced to rubble. What, apart from entertaining us, is the point of the story? As I see it, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a kind of satire on miserliness. What is the point of huge wealth that is hidden from the world and is put to no particular use? Does wealth alone become a sort of fetish? The miser thinks that money is an end in itself. The “moral” could be expanded to be a satire on American capitalism, where money is pointlessly king… but I still see it as basically a fantastic adventure story.

The third most admired story has come to prominence only in recent years. This is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantasy about a man growing backwards. He is born a grumpy old man, grows to be a middle-aged man, becomes a young man, fights in the Spanish-American war, marries and has children of his own, is a teenager, then a toddler and finally we see him as a baby in a cradle. [Fitzgerald goes no further than that... it would be difficult to see Bejamin Button returning to the womb.] The story is set in the late 19th century and finishes in the 1920s. Its humour is built on the shocking effect that Benjamin's progress has on polite society. Why has the story come to prominence only in recent years? Because a film version was made in 2008, which up-dated the story to the present day and basically took only the general idea of somebody growing backwards.  (Read more.)

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Lone Survivor of a Lost Forest

 From Live Science:

A bizarre, giant tree with a pair of leg-like trunks looks like an Ent from "The Lord of the Rings" — and it has just been crowned New Zealand's Tree of the Year after strolling past the rest of the competition. The strange tree, which has been nicknamed the "walking tree" because it looks like it's striding across a field, is a northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) — one of New Zealand's tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years. It's roots and long, arm-like branches make the tree look like an Ent — a fictional race of tree-like creatures that guard the forests of Middle-earth. The tree stands alone in the middle of a large paddock next to a cemetery near Karamea on the west coast of South Island. It is around 105 feet (32 meters) tall — around the same height as a seven-story building, according to The New Zealand Tree Register. (Read more.)

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Napoleon and Lapérouse

 From Quadrant Online:

Lapérouse sailed to the Pacific to establish trade connections, also being tasked with the establishment of French settlements. Lapérouse, a great admirer of James Cook, also intended to expand the maps Cook had made of the area. Quadrant has published two fine books by Margaret Cameron-Ash on the rivalry and imperial intrigue driving the great powers of the day’s race to Sydney....The story of Lapérouse’s expedition to the Pacific, however, is noteworthy for another reason.

In 1785, Napoleon Bonaparte applied to serve as a crew member on one of the ships. He was a 16-year-old from Corsica, fresh out of the École Militaire in Paris, and although short-listed he was not selected to join the expedition. One could say that the world would have been a very different place had he been welcomed aboard and perished with the other crew members.

There would have been no French Empire, no ill-fated invasion of Russia, no Waterloo, no Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, and no notoriously profligate Empress Joséphine. There would also have been no reason to make a movie about him – a film recently released to mixed but mostly poor reviews prompted in no small part by its often laughably inaccurate depictions of what really happened. Napoleon did not, as the final scenes present, lead a last and doomed cavalry charge, instead slipping away from the battlefield in his green coach. Thus did one of the most influential and divisive figures of the 19^th century meet his comeuppance.

After his application to serve on Lapérouse’s expedition was rejected, Napoleon instead joined an artillery regiment, gained rapid promotion, became the ruler of France and one of the most influential and divisive figures of the 19^th century.

In my opinion, one of the mistakes made by Napoleon was to crown himself Emperor of France on December 2, 1804, in Notre Dame de Paris. Although Napoleon’s imperial ambitions were approved by an 1804 constitutional referendum, his coronation did not greatly increase his political power because he was already First Consul. But vanity obviously prevailed. His arrogation of the imperial throne would undoubtedly have made the leaders of other European countries both jealous and wary. This would not have helped him create political alliances and conduct military campaigns. (Read more.)

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On George Orwell

 From Nicholas Reid at Reid's Reader:

All of Orwell’s novels are in some ways polemical (and his non-fiction is certainly polemical.). Burmese Days condemns colonialism. A Clergyman’s Daughter has a go at many things - a fading Anglican church, the nastiness of cheap private schools, exploitation of workers in the hop fields and poverty in London. Keep the Aspidistra Flying targets both pretentious literary people and the advertising industry. Coming Up For Air laments both the decay of English countryside and the growing militarism that is preceding a coming war. And of course you already know how polemic Animal Farm and 1984 are. Orwell always has a “message” clearly spelt out. I also find it interesting that every one of his novels ends with defeat for the main character. John Florey commits suicide in Burmese Days. Dorothy Hare, after all her wild journeys, goes back to doing good works in her father’s parish in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Gordon Comstock gives up the arty-literary life he took to, and returns to the advertising agency he had escaped in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. George Bowling is completely disillusioned by his journey to his childhood town and returns to his nagging wife in Coming Up For Air. And you all know that the animals in Animal Farm are stuck with their horrible regime, while at the end of 1984, Winston Smith truly loves Big Brother. 

I am bemused by the way Orwell leaves his protagonists in defeat. Does this mean that he was basically a pessimist? Or was he simply always facing the reality that most people have to get on with their lives, happy endings are rare, and there is not one great revolution coming along fix things? I have noticed that, while Hollywood cranks out happy endings in frivolous movies, it is especially in totalitarian countries that earnest films have happy endings, usually concluding with the state and its ideology neatly fixing things. (Over the years, I have been able to see some Stalinist Russian films that were made to this formula.)  While Orwell wanted to improve the world, he was not a Utopian and was fully aware that making things better was going to be a long, hard struggl 

A difficulty in all Orwell’s novels is that, from Burmese Days to 1984, his narrative always hinges on just one main person. His novels are never told in the first-person but they might as well be. In this respect, Orwell’s novels are very like most of the novels of H. G. Wells [look him up in the index at right ]. It is well-known that Orwell liked books written in the Edwardian era (it is an Edwardian society George Bowling is futilely seeking in Coming Up For Air ) and he admired much of Wells’ earlier work. What it means, though, is we are getting one [usually male] character’s perspective. There is a real single-mindedness in Orwell’s work with an inability to step inside the minds of characters other than the protagonist. Hence a degree of flatness. 

It is easier to categorise  Orwell’s non-fiction. In descriptions of places and people he is often a master, but two of his non-fictions are very poorly organised.  Down and Out in Paris and London and  The Road to Wigan Pier are both made of two incompatible halves. Down and Out in Paris and London appears to have been patched together to pad out a book that was regarded by his publisher as too short. The Road to Wigan Pier yields some of the best reportage Orwell ever wrote, but the second half is a rambling, often vague essay about socialism and types of people. It’s a mess and his publisher hated it. Only Homage to Catalonia stands up well as a unified and perfectly purposeful narrative. I regret that Orwell did not have the opportunity to write more in the same vein. 

How do I sum up Orwell? He is certainly very readable, but his work does not amount to a great classic. It is very, very interesting to read about the times and places he depicts. He enlightens us on the era in which he lived. I do not believe he was a prophet as some of his most fervent admirers suggest; but he was absolutely right to call out a totalitarian idea which gullible people in the democracies had embraced. In the end, his work is most interesting not as literature but as history. Which, for all his flat characters, means he is still important. (Read more.)

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Ancient Landmass Emerged and Disappeared 70,000 Years Ago

 The world has changed. From The Greek Reporter:

New archaeological research reveals that the sea off northwestern Australia once had islands and a massive landmass. This area was so large it could support around half a million people, as reported in a study published in Quaternary Science Review.

The study maps a world that appeared and then disappeared as sea levels changed over the past seventy thousand years. People are believed to have migrated to this part of the world between forty-five thousand to sixty-five thousand years ago.

The area was part of a paleocontinent called Sahul, connecting Australia to New Guinea. The submersion of this land might have led to significant cultural and population changes in northern Australia. (Read more.)

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This Australian Behemoth

 From Popular Science:

Not only did the researchers find that Cooper was not a member of any previously described species, they also officially deemed the Australotitan dinosaur, or the “southern titan,” to be the largest known dinosaur to ever roam the outback. It likely weighed somewhere between 25 and 81 tons. At about 80 to 100 feet long and 16 to 21 feet tall at its hip, Australotitan is also within the top 10 to 15 largest dinosaurs in the world. For comparison, the Tyrannosaurus rex was only about 40 feet long and 12 feet tall. 

With those stats, Cooper joins the ranks of the titanosaurs, a group of mega-beasts previously only discovered in South America. It lived between 92 million to 96 million years ago. The findings were published in the journal PeerJ.  Mackenzie told ABC News that Australotitan was just “the tip of the iceberg” and that there are plenty of Australian sites brimming with potential for more fossil excavations. Australotitan was a plant eater, Hocknull noted, “so what was marauding around trying to eat these guys? We don’t have any evidence of that just yet.” Each discovery will help complete the story of Australia’s ancient past. (Read more.)

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Earth's Hidden Eighth Continent

 From Popular Mechanics:

Zealandia’s history is quite closely tied to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which broke up hundreds of millions of years ago. Zealandia followed suit—roughly 80 million years ago, according to the latest theory. But unlike neighboring Australia or much of Antarctica, Zealandia largely sunk, leaving only a small portion of what many geologists believe should still be dubbed the eighth continent. New Zealand makes up the most recognizable above-water portion of Zealandia, although a few other islands in the vicinity are also part of the maybe-continent in question.

The latest research, led by Nick Mortimer, dredged the northern two-thirds of the submerged area, pulling up pebbly and cobbley sandstone, fine-grain sandstone, mudstone, bioclastic limestone, and basaltic lava from a variety of time periods. By dating the rocks and interpreting magnetic anomalies, the researchers wrote, they were able to map the major geological units across North Zealandia. “This work completes offshore reconnaissance geological mapping of the entire Zealandia continent,” they said. (Read more.)

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Only a Priest

I recently had the privilege of reading a marvelous novel sent to me by my friend John Porteous in New Zealand. While Only a Priest by M.O. Chamberlain is an often light-hearted tale, it fearlessly plumbs the depths of both the gloom and glory of being an ordained and celibate Catholic minister of God. Penned in an easy, descriptive prose, this particular book stands out because of the Down Under setting. We in America tend to forget that on the other side of the world there are those who share our Faith as well as the vicissitudes of living the Christian life in the modern world. I am reminded of my own pilgrimage to New Zealand in 2009 and how blessed I felt to be so warmly welcomed by my brethren in the Faith so far away.

According to Only a Priest's Amazon page:

A young parish priest calls for help in dealing with a problem beyond his experience and capability. A veteran priest comes out of unwanted retirement to answer the call. Father Gilbert, a former missionary, has served in one of the world’s toughest missions, before a breakdown and fall from grace saw him hand over his stole. Overcoming a profound sense of unworthiness, he has returned to the priesthood. Not wearing the disgrace of his former life lightly, he is driven to make amends. He forms an unlikely alliance with the young Father Ward, and together they fight an ancient Enemy, wearied not by time.

Only a Priest is poignant, funny and thought-provoking, as it looks at today’s Catholicism and reflects back on both the weaknesses and strengths. The book gives an understanding inside-look at a church trying to navigate through our rapidly changing times, without compromising the core of its own faith, with the sympathetic characters of both the old and the young priest giving this story warmth, even as it asks the hard questions.
Dr. Lyn Wytenbroeck.

A very compelling story within a contemporary setting. I had difficulty putting the book down and that hasn’t happened in a long time. This story, while fictional, is grounded in reality. The writer’s literary experience, plus his rich life history, has enabled him to deliver a persuasive tale. This is done via the medium of conversation pieces, mainly between the two colourful characters who dominate the book. This rich technique gives it fluency and makes the book easy to follow. Well worth a read.
Sir Patrick J. Lynch. KNZM, QSO.

This book really resonates with many aspects of what it is to be priest. It would make good reading for seminarians and a copy should be in the seminary library. Father Larry Rustia. 

 Only a Priest is one of the best novels on the sacred power of the priesthood that I have read since I read The Exorcist. The older priest Father Gilbert is the diocesan exorcist which is why he is called to assist at Father Ward's parish. Amid all the usual ups and downs of parish life in a country village, there is a bizarre case of a possessed young man. I read Only a Priest at night and I have to say that it often had me scared and reaching for the holy water. The possessed man comes from a devout family but finds his way into the occult through porn, drugs and sex, all of which he eagerly seeks out to spite his parents. Both priests have had their own trails and failings through which they have come to humility, and it is then that God works through them to cast out the demon. It is when we acknowledge our weakness and powerlessness before God that we are able to become His instruments.

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A Caste System Threatens the West

 From The Brownstone Institute:

If you test positive or refuse to be tested at all in New Zealand, prepare to be shipped out to a quarantine camp recently established by the government. Shocking, yes, but we have an analogous system in the US. If you test positive (which is not the same as actually being sick), you will be removed from school or forbidden from coming into the office. You could lose your job – or refused the opportunity to earn money.

In many places in the country and the world where you travel today, you are subject to quarantine unless you can present a clean Covid test. The same is happening with vaccines, with new edicts from governments that their cities will be disease free and no one unvaccinated will be allowed to enter buildings or eat in restaurants.

All these policies that stigmatize those perceived to be sick, excluding them from society, follow directly from a strange twist in Covid policies. We started presuming that many or even most people will get the disease but seeking only to slow the pace at which it spread. Over time, we began to attempt the impossible, namely to stop the spread altogether. In the course of it, we’ve set up systems that punish and exclude the sick, or at least relegate them to a second-class status (a Scarlet Letter C on their chest, as it were) while the rest of us wait for the virus to go away either through a vaccine or some mysterious process by which the bug goes into retirement. 

What really is going on here? It is resurrecting what amounts to a pre-modern ethos of how society deals with the presence of infectious disease. It’s not clear whether this is by accident or not. That it is in fact happening is indisputable. We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation. 

Every pre-modern society assigned to some group the task of bearing the burden of new pathogens. Usually, the designation of the unclean was assigned based on race, language, religion, or class. There was no mobility out of this caste. They were the dirty, the diseased, the untouchables. Depending on the time and place, they were segregated geographically, and the designation followed from generation to generation. This system was sometimes codified in religion or law; more commonly this caste system was baked into social convention. 

In the ancient world, the burden of disease was assigned to people not born as “free;” that is, as part of the class permitted to participate in public affairs. The burden was borne by the workers, merchants, and slaves who mostly lived away from the city – unless the rich fled the cities during a pandemic. Then the poor suffered while the feudal lords went to their manors in the country for the duration, forcing the burden of burning out the virus on others. From a biological perspective, they served the purpose of operating like sandbags to keep those in city free of disease. Pathogens were something to be carried and absorbed by them and not us. The elites were invited to look down on them, even though it was these people – the lower castes – who were operating as the biological benefactors of everyone else. 

In religious teaching, the classes designated as sick and unclean were also considered unholy and impure, and everyone was invited to believe that their sickness was due to sin, and thus it is correct that we should exclude them from holy places and offices. We read in Leviticus 21:16 that God ordained that “Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous, or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookback, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken.”

When Jesus came to heal the sick and the lepers in particular, it was not only an impressive miracle in itself; it was also something of a social and political revolution. His powers to heal freely moved people from one caste to another merely by removing the stigma of disease. It was an act imparting social mobility in a society that was very happy to do without. St. Mark 1:40 records not only a medical act but a social one: “And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed.” And for doing that, Jesus was expelled: he “could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places.”

(This is also why Mother Teresa’s work in the slums of Calcutta was so politically controversial. She was seeking to care for and heal the unclean as if they are just as deserving of health as everyone else.) 

It was not until the early 20th century that we understood the brutal scientific intuition behind these cruel systems. It comes down to the need for the human immune system to adapt to new pathogens (there has been and always will be new pathogens). Some people or most people have to take the risk of getting sick and acquiring immunity in order to move a virus from the status of epidemic or pandemic to become endemic; that is, predictably manageable. By the time the pathogen reaches the ruling class, it becomes less life-threatening. The lower classes in this system operate as the tonsils or kidneys in the human body: taking on the disease to protect the rest of the body and finally to expel it. (Read more.)

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‘Barely Cogent’

 From The Daily Wire:

While the U.S. media frequently look the other way at President Joe Biden’s verbal and intellectual foibles, foreign media have questioned the president’s mental acuity. Australian reporters have lamented that “the leader of the free world” is “struggling,” “barely cogent,” and a “human corpse” who has sunken deep into “cognitive decline.”

Those quotations come from Sky News Australia, the center-right cable news network launched in 1996 by NewsCorp Australia. Its collection of hosts and journalists have told their growing audience what many in the U.S. media have refused to say: Joe Biden’s declining intellectual capabilities threaten all Western democracies. (Read more.)

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First Human Inhabitants of Australia

 From SciTechDaily:

The best path across the desert is rarely the straightest. For the first human inhabitants of Sahul — the super-continent that underlies modern Australia and New Guinea — camping at the next spring, stream, or rock shelter allowed them to thrive for hundreds of generations. Those who successfully traversed the landmarks made their way across the continent, spreading from their landfall in the Northwest across the continent, making their way to all corners of Australia and New Guinea.

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team* of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago. Their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is the largest reconstruction of a network of human migration paths into a new landscape. It is also the first to apply rigorous computational analysis at the continental scale, testing 125 billion possible pathways. (Read more.)

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A-Frame

I have a weak spot for A-frames since there was one at the lake where we went for vacation in Canada. From Contemporist:

Crump Architects has designed a small A-framed cabin for two boys and their neighborhood friends. The ‘hideout’ is surrounded by Australian bushland and is positioned between a gum tree on one side and a hill on the other. The architects explain that the cabin was largely built from recycled materials, including a recently demolished carport, and was an exercise in getting the most – from as little as possible.(Read more.)

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Why Religion Is Not Going Away and Science Will Not Destroy It

 From Pocket:

Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.

To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. Census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief. The percentage of atheists in the US in 2017 was at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.

Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’

The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.

Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic. As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.

The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science. (Read more.)

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How Do I Surrender the Pain in My Heart?

 From Worth the Chase:

Maybe you are suffering from a broken heart, maybe your boyfriend or girlfriend cheated on you. Or maybe a trusted friend or relative has stabbed you in the back so to speak. The pain is raw and deep and you don’t want any pain or bitterness to consume you.

Another scenario is that you could be anxious about exam results, your situation at work or you are afflicted healthwise. How can you really surrender these situations to the Lord?

Sometimes we do not want to surrender because we feel unworthy of God’s love or feel we are doing too many mistakes in life. Maybe we feel that surrendering is too hard, and takes too much time and effort. Or maybe we are afraid of suffering.

Is there a magic formula one can use? How can one be sure that they have surrendered the problem, situation and pain to the Lord?

Sacred Scripture speaks of the importance of self- surrender. “Surrender yourself to the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. Do not be preoccupied with an evildoer who succeeds in his way when he carries out his schemes.” Psalm 37:7-9 No, there is no magic formula. God is merely looking for the attitude of one’s heart. While it’s easy to say to Jesus, “Help me to trust in you” it’s so important and even harder to be more thorough.

It’s important to be real with the Lord. Pour out your heart to Him and so share what you are feeling to Him. Then say, “God, I have tried to deal with this, but I can’t do so anymore. I need your help. I need your strength. I need your grace. I place it at the foot of your cross. Please take this situation and use it for your glory.” (Read more.)

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The Real Lord of the Flies

From The Guardian:

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”

In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand. (Read more.)

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Benefits Of Walking In The Rain

 

 From Gardening Soul:

Numerous people enjoy the sound of the pouring rain, many find it romantic and soothing, and others find its smell pleasant for the nerves. Walking in the rain can be a healing experience, as it calms the mind, and releases the suppressed thoughts and emotions. The scent of the rain has a special name, Petrichor, so named by two Australian scientists in the 1960s. The fragrance is a combination of chemicals released by soil-dwelling bacteria, oils released from plants during dry spells and ozone created when lightning splits oxygen and nitrogen molecules that then turn into nitric oxide. The rainy days are ideal if you are a bit stressed, feel blue, or just need some time to relax and enjoy the present moment. (Read more.)

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Stop Scaring the Children

I am furious at how so many children are hysterical with fear because they think the world is going to end in ten years. From The Guardian:

Scott Morrison has responded to an impassioned speech by the Swedish teenage climate activistGreta Thunberg at the United Nations by declaring the climate change debate is subjecting Australian children to “needless anxiety”. The Australian prime minister, who will address environmental themes in his address to the UN general assembly on Wednesday, including ocean management, plastics, waste management and illegal fishing, was asked for his response to Thunberg’s excoriation of world leaders at this week’s climate action summit, when she accused the political class of failing the younger generations. 

Morrison told reporters he acknowledged “how deeply people feel about this issue” but said the public debate was replete with disinformation about Australia’s climate change policies. “It often comes as news to people when I share with them Australia has the highest per capita investment in renewable energy of any country in the world,” 

Morrison said – in the process neglecting to mention that his predecessor Tony Abbott had tried to wind back the renewable energy target, which triggered an investment strike. Morrison said he would use his looming address to the UN – his final public commitment before leaving New York for Australia on Wednesday – to address the lack of awareness about “the action Australia has been taking”. 

“I do understand that people feel strongly about this, but I think we also have to take stock, we have to ensure we get a proper context and perspective,” Morrison said. “I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. (Read more.)

From Dennis Prager at Townhall:

The entire American left -- the mainstream media, the environmentalist movement and Democratic politicians in particular -- are celebrating the involvement of teenagers and even younger children in protesting the world's "inaction" with regard to global warming. And not just the American left, of course. The left throughout the world is celebrating. A 16-year-old Swedish girl whose contempt for adults is breathtaking is an international hero. Congressional Democrats invited her to testify in Congress, and the United Nations has likewise invited her. 

The mayor and city council of New York City further politicized their city's public schools by allowing students to skip school to actively participate in a global warming protest. 

The message of young climate change activists is: "You adults aren't doing your job. As a result, we have no future." As a sympathetic reporter -- are there any non-sympathetic reporters? -- for the Los Angeles Times put it, "(T)eens are still waiting for a sign that their elders get it." 

The Times' coverage is typical. It reported: "Underneath the activism lies a simple truth: Young people are incredibly scared about climate change. They see it as a profound injustice and an existential threat to their generation and those that will follow. ... 

"'They do worry, and they worry kind of a lot,' said Maria Ojala, an environmental psychologist at Orebro University in Sweden. ... 

"Arielle Martinez Cohen" -- an 18-year-old Los Angeles activist with the youth climate group Zero Hour -- "remembers reading a report from an Australian think tank that warned the human species could face extinction by 2050 if society doesn't get its act together. 

"'I almost imagine, like, an apocalypse-type thing happening,' Arielle said. "Many young people say they can't fathom bringing kids of their own into the world. ... 

"'It's not ethical. It's literally a burning house,' Lana said. (Read more.) 

From David Harsanyi at The Federalist:

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived. In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg lectured the world. And maybe she’s right. We’ve failed her by raising a generation of pagans who’ve filled the vacuum left by the absence of faith, not with rationality, but with a cultish worship of Mother Earth and the state. Although, to be fair, the Bible-thumping evangelical’s moral certitude is nothing but a rickety edifice compared to the moral conviction of a Greta Thunberg. 

It’s not, of course, her fault. Adults have spent a year creating a 16-year-old because her soundbites comport with their belief system. It was “something about her raw honesty around a message of blunt-force fear [that] turned this girl from invisible to global,” says CNN in a news report about a child with a narrow, age-appropriate, grasp of the world. 

It should be noted that “blunt-force fear” is indeed the correct way to describe the concerted misinformation that Thunberg has likely been subjected to since nursery school. There probably isn’t a public school in America that hasn’t plied the panic-stricken talk of environmental disaster in their auditoriums over and over again. New York City and other school systems offer millions of kids an excused absence so they could participate in political climate marches this week, as if it were a religious or patriotic holiday. 

We’ve finally convinced a generation of Americans to be Malthusians. According to Scott Rasmussen’s polling, nearly 30 percent of voters now claim to believe that it’s “at least somewhat likely” that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out over the next 10-15 years. Half of voters under 35 believe it is likely we are on the edge of extinction. Is there any wonder why our youngest generation has a foreboding sense of doom. (Read more.) 

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