Sugar For Dope Fiends
After the post-Nativity indulgence, I realized that it was time to get serious about losing weight. It probably came on the morning I was eating a fistful of rum cake for breakfast, but if it wasn’t then, it ought to have been. I weigh more now than I ever have, and exercise less. I had started working out again late last fall, but my early December car accident has put that initiative on hold until my back improves. The only diet I’ve ever used that did a bit of good was going on a low-sugar/low carb regimen. In fact, the only time in my life that I weighed almost as much as I do now was the fall of 2001. I lost thirty pounds in three months on that diet, and felt better than I ever had before or since.
Back then, I was living in New York, and walking everywhere. Plus, I was about to turn 35. Now I’m living in Baton Rouge, and walking nowhere. And I’m about to turn 50. It’s never going to get any easier to lose this weight, and my woebegone lower back is not helped by my walking around with all this weight on my belly.
So, I’m off of sugar now, and carbs too. When I went for our splurgey anniversary dinner on December 30, I ate steak and salad and mushrooms like a boss, but I didn’t mess with potatoes. I did eat a few spoonfuls of cheesecake, but I wouldn’t do that now. I’ve managed to make it through the messy detox period in which you crave carbs and sugar like mad (and for me, it’s more about carbs than sugar; I’m not a big fan of sweets, but I love me some bread, rice, and pasta). Last night we went out for my wife’s birthday dinner. Mexican food is her favorite (it’s an ancestral Texas thing), and it just about killed me not to order enchiladas or to eat the chips and salsa. But I made it through, and indulged by eating three spoonfuls of whipped cream from the dessert she and the kids shared.
By the time I made it home, it felt like I had been drugged. Just from three bites of whipped cream! But you know, this is what it was like before for me, on this diet. Once you’ve gotten your body more or less past the massive craving for carbs and/or sugar, when you eat a serving of rice, potatoes, or something sweet, it feels like you’ve drunk a shot of something. Let me correct that: it feels like you’re as logy as you would be had you had a shot, but you get none of the pleasant feeling.
It turns out that I’m doing the right thing, and not just for vanity aesthetic reasons. Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal‘s rave review of Gary Taubes’s new book The Case Against Sugar:
One wonders whether the debate might have been different if everyone involved had been able to read Gary Taubes’s blitz of a book, “The Case Against Sugar.” In his 2010 best seller, “Why We Get Fat,” Mr. Taubes argued that carbohydrates like grains and starchy vegetables were behind the obesity epidemic. “In a world without cigarettes, lung cancer would be a rare disease, as it once was,” he wrote. “In a world without carbohydrate-rich diets, obesity would be a rare condition as well.” This time around, he focuses on the “unique physiological, metabolic, and endocrinological effects” that sugars have on the human body, how they trigger obesity and diabetes, and the role that the food industry has played in covering up sugar’s contributions to our national health crisis.
Mr. Taubes’s argument is so persuasive that, after reading “The Case Against Sugar,” this functioning chocoholic cut out the Snacking Bark and stopped eating cakes and white bread. It was easier than I expected: Within a week, I was so sensitive to sugar that I could taste it in the weirdest places; in a restaurant salad, for instance, and in my organic yogurt. When I ate a piece of Thanksgiving squash pie, it made my head buzz. I felt like I’d just taken a hit off a tank of nitrous oxide.
That’s so true! Honestly, there is nothing like experiencing this to understand how powerfully our moods and sense of well being is controlled by sugar (including refined carbohydrates, which turn into sugar inside the body). The review says that Taubes, a well known science writer, meticulously explains why it’s simply not true that all calories are the same. A calorie consumed in the form of sugar affects the body differently, metabolically speaking, than a calorie consumed in the form of, say, spinach. And the fact that people assume that all calories are created equal is no accident, according to Taubes. from the review:
“The Case Against Sugar” is a history of the food industry and the medical science that has both supported and denied the role of sugar in disease. It explores the addictive aspect of sugar (which anyone with a toddler is familiar with); the “peculiar evil” of marketing sweets and sweetened cereals to children; and the industry’s 60-year effort to shift the blame for obesity and diabetes to saturated fats and behavior. In the 1960s, for example, the Sugar Association, a trade group, became concerned about the emerging evidence linking sugar to diabetes and heart disease. It worked hard, Mr. Taubes claims, to “combat the accumulating evidence from researchers,” by financing industry-friendly research and besmirching the credibility of scientists whose research suggested that sugar was unhealthy. These efforts were successful enough to influence the language of FDA reports on sugar in 1977 and 1986, as well as the first government-compiled Dietary Guidelines, released in 1980, which unsurprisingly declared that fat caused disease.
Opinions began to change in 2007 when the “Sugar Papers,” a trove of internal documents detailing the relationship between the sugar industry and medical researchers in the 1960s and 1970s, was discovered by Cristin Kearns, the general manager of a large group of dental practices. The trove—which she found by (wait for it . . . ) googling—revealed that the sugar industry had worked with the National Institutes of Health to create a federal program to combat tooth decay in kids that did not recommend limiting sugar consumption. Mr. Taubes convinced me that these food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research on American health to their favor and to the detriment of the American public.
Read the entire review, written by Eugenia Bone. Here’s a link to an essay in Aeon by Taubes himself, adapted from the Case Against Sugar book. In this excerpt, Taubes summarizes the alternative hypothesis to the “a calorie is just a calorie” view (the energy-balance hypothesis):
So here’s another way to frame what is now the imperative question: is the energy-balance hypothesis of obesity correct? Is it the right paradigm to understand the disorder? The competing hypothesis has existed for over a century: in this paradigm, obesity is not an energy-balance disorder but a disorder of excess fat accumulation and so, clearly, a hormonal and metabolic disorder – the result of an ‘endocrine disturbance’, as it was phrased in the 1930s by Eugene Du Bois, then the leading American authority on metabolism. By this logic, the foods we eat influence fat accumulation not because of their caloric content but because of their macronutrient content, the proteins, fats and carbohydrates they contain. This paradigm attends to how organisms (humans, of course, in particular) orchestrate the careful ‘partitioning’ of the macronutrient fuels they consume, determining whether they will be burned for energy or stored or used to rebuild tissues and organs. It proposes that dysregulation of this exquisitely-evolved, finely-tuned homeostatic system (a system that is biologically balanced) is the necessary component to explain both the excessive storage of calories of fat – obesity – and the diabetes that accompanies it.
This alternate hypothesis implies that sugar has unique effects in the human body leading directly to both diabetes and obesity, independent of the calories consumed. By this way of thinking, refined sugars are indeed toxic, albeit over the course of years or decades. We get fat and diabetic not because we eat too much of them – although that is implied tautologically merely by the terms ‘overconsumption’ and ‘overeating’ – but because they have unique physiological, metabolic and hormonal effects that directly trigger these disorders. If all this is right, then thinking of obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem (caused, of course, by earning too little or spending too much, or both). By conceiving of obesity as a problem caused by the behaviours of excessive consumption and physical inactivity, researchers not only took a physiological defect – the excess accumulation of fat, often to a massive extent – and turned it into a behavioural problem. But they made a critical error, one that has grown over the course of decades into an idea that seems too big to fail.
The history of this scientific debate is fascinating. Conclusion:
If we accept von Bergmann and Bauer’s thinking that obesity is a hormonal/regulatory disorder and combine it with the revelations of the 1960s about the hormonal regulation of fat accumulation and the insulin resistance that is associated with obesity and diabetes, then the result is a very simple hypothesis that explains not just obesity but also the current epidemics and our failures to curb them. The sugars and refined grains that make up such a high proportion of the foods we consume in modern Westernised diets trigger the dysregulation of a homeostatic system that has evolved to depend on insulin to regulate both fat accumulation and blood sugar. Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.
If you like, buy the book.
I would love to read of you readers’ experiences with low carbohydrate/no sugar dieting. In my past experience, once you make it through the detox period (about a week to 10 days), it’s not a difficult diet to follow in terms of controlling cravings. The hard thing is that sugar and carbohydrates are everywhere, and they taste so very, very delicious. Inevitably I have fallen off the wagon, usually with bread. You slide back into it very easily. So, what has worked for you, and what has not?
Weimar Americana
When my partner Charlie got pregnant, we were awash in excitement, but there was one thing we weren’t looking forward to: shopping for maternity clothes. As a genderqueer butch, Charlie is not excited about struggling to hunt down the closest approximation of menswear on racks of belly-paneled leggings and empire-waist dresses.
Around the time Charlie gets pregnant, we hear about a Kickstarter for this awesome new company called Butchbaby & Co, which is going to make clothing for pregnant butch and masculine-presenting people. There is a moment of elation before we get to the part about how you can’t actually buy their clothes yet. It’s kind of worse than if they didn’t exist at all.
I know a lot of people still aren’t hip to the concept that genitals don’t determine gender, and men and non-binary people can get pregnant, but even if only women ever had babies, do we really have to assume that every one of them is so freaking femme? There’s only one maternity store at the mall near us, and it is a festival of pastels, florals, and unnecessary ruffles. I wouldn’t even wear some of this stuff, and I wear pink cowboy boots.
So they go shopping for Charlie — a woman who presents as a man — can find some duds. The mall is a vale of tears:
The next step is maternity jeans. We spend an afternoon at the mall trying them on, but Charlie hates every single pair. “Why are the pockets so small?” he fumes.
“All women’s pants pockets are unreasonably small,” I explain.
“But why?”
“Because the patriarchy wants us to depend on men to carry our keys for us so we’ll never be truly independent. Or everyone just assumes women will have purses.”
The patriarchy isn’t quite finished inflicting its satanic sartorialism on this couple:
Then there’s the formal wear problem. We have three weddings to attend while Charlie is pregnant, each about six weeks apart, so they’ll occur when Charlie is three totally different sizes. If anyone is considering a contemporary rewrite of Dante’s Inferno, I really recommend “shopping for butch maternity formalwear” as a new circle of hell.
You laugh at this stuff, but it’s getting mainstreamed bigtime. I talked the other day with a friend who teaches at a Catholic high school, and who said that the parents of his students have no idea how normal all of this is to their kids. When you get to the point at which as staid an establishment institution as National Geographic is promoting an ideology that declares male and female to be obsolete categories, you know the culture is deeply disordered. Nat Geo writes in its current cover story:
But people today—especially young people—are questioning not just the gender they were assigned at birth but also the gender binary itself. “I don’t relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy,” Miley Cyrus told Out magazine in 2015, when she was 22, “and I think that’s what I had to understand: Being a girl isn’t what I hate; it’s the box that I get put into.”
Members of Cyrus’s generation are more likely than their parents to think of gender as nonbinary. A recent survey of a thousand millennials ages 18 to 34 found that half of them think “gender is a spectrum, and some people fall outside conventional categories.” And a healthy subset of that half would consider themselves to be nonbinary, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2012 the advocacy group polled 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens ages 13 to 17 and found that 6 percent categorized themselves as “genderfluid,” “androgynous,” or some other term outside the binary box.
There’s a photo in the long piece of a 17 year old female who identifies as male, and who sports chest scars from where her breasts were surgically removed. We are permanently mutilating our children before they are even old enough to have the right to vote.
Canadian gay rights activist Fred Litwin is not on board with all of it. Excerpt:
The federal government, many provinces, and some municipalities and school boards in Canada are introducing or strengthening regulations and legal protections for gender identities. The Ontario Human Rights Code, for one, protects “people from discrimination and harassment because of gender identity and gender expression.” It further decrees that “trans people should be recognized and treated as the gender they live,” and that “organizations should design or change their rules, practices and facilities to avoid negative effects on trans people.”
This includes the trans demand for everyone to use their invented pronouns. A Q&A on the OHRC site says that “refusing to refer to trans people by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity, or purposely misgendering, will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social arena covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education.”
And, just what are these pronouns? Well, to start: There is ne (nominative) /nem (objective) /nir (possessive determinant) /nirs (possessive pronoun) /nemself (reflexive). For instance, you could say that Ne laughed and that I called nem. Other sets include Ve/ver/vis/vis/verself; ey/em/eir/eirs/eirself; ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself; Xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself; tey/ter/tem/ters/terself.
If you are unsure of usage, there are many websites to guide the uninitiated through this minefield. And, if you won’t or can’t learn all the pronominal permutations, your may be accused of using oppressive language, which in turn could lead to an appearance in front of a human rights tribunal or a criminal charge under the hate crime law.
If you doubt it could go that far, consider this:
– Trans activists at the University of Massachusetts organized a ‘Sh*t In’ last month to protest lack of gender neutral bathrooms. They occupied bathrooms around the campus and vowed to stay until their demands were met. UMass already has over 200 single-stall gender neutral bathrooms and is currently building an additional 50. It’s not enough for activists who also want the hiring of a professor “who is an expert in the study of critical transmisogyny from an intersectional perspective.”
– Dawson College in Montreal opened their first two gender-neutral bathrooms in 2015 and the Dawson Student Union gave out #IllGoWithYou buttons. “The wearer of a I’ll Go With You button is a public volunteer, a buddy who can be counted upon to give peaceful support, act as a buffer, or speak up to any harassers in defense of the trans person’s right to use the restroom in peace,” the DSU explained, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “bathroom buddies”.
– Continuing and Professional Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto put on a webinar on “an introduction to gender-neutral pronouns for educators.” The seminar, taught by Lee Airton, a lecturer in the Masters of Teaching Program and the founder of They Is My Pronoun or TIMP, a blog about gender-neutral pronoun use. In an article for the Globe & Mail, Airton said that “I’ll be the first to admit that my pronoun can be silly sometimes, that it can cause confusion, prompting the need for clarification.”
– In November 2016, Jillian Bearden, a 36-year-old biological male (who now identifies as a transgender woman) won the women’s division of the El Tour de Tucson bike race in Arizona. In June 2016, a teenage male won a girls’ track meet in Alaska. And the International Olympic Committee ruled this year that transgender athletes can compete in their preferred gender category without having undergone sex reassignment surgery. (Men will have to be on female hormones though.)
– The Teacher Education for All! (TEFA) initiative at the University of British Columbia (UBC) will incorporate LGB/T2/Q inclusion into teacher education in the province. This will include workshops on Trans Literacies for faculty, staff and teacher candidates. Here is the bio of one of the workshop facilitators: “K, who uses the pronouns they/them, is a queer, non-binary second-generation Chinese settler raised in unceded Coast Salish territories, they put energies into QTBIPOC communities, writings, and activisms. They most recently facilitated a student directed seminar titled “Voices from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Race, Sexuality, and Settler Colonialism” (GRSJ 425A), focusing on WOC and Indigenous feminisms, queer of colour and Two-Spirit critiques, and art-based activisms. Outside of school, K is a photographer whose work is framed in community representation, accessibility, and social justice.”
More Litwin:
Here are some other questions we should be asking. Will a small group of post-modern activists force us all to change our language? Will doctors be forced to treat gender dysphoric kids with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Will the public go along with people using the change room of their choice? Will women accept more and more boys and men in their athletic competitions? Are we really going to give trans activists full control over all issues related to sex identity? Is ‘misgendering’ really a crime?
And what’s next on the activist agenda? In this world of identity politics on steroids, more and more victim groups are popping up – and all of them “intersect” together. There are people who classify themselves as “transabled”. Alexander Baril of Dalhousie University told the National Post that “we define transability as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain physical impairment. The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic.” Seriously? Self-mutilation to obtain a new identity? Will this be the next group added to the protected human rights list? Don’t bet against it.
Here’s the website for the author, Fred Litwin, an openly gay Canadian conservative.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is the Canadian clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor under siege for refusing to use these made-up, fake pronouns that the SJWs demand. From a must-read interview with him:
My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is “we must never forget.” I’ve learned that you cannot remember what you don’t understand. People don’t understand the Holocaust, and they don’t understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called “Maps of Meaning,” which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.
More:
I was also quite profoundly influenced by [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. People say that real Marxism has never been tried – not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasn’t real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
You’ve painted a pretty bleak picture for the future.
There are bleak things going on. To start with, Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. It’s also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next.
How do you see the future of public discourse in this country if we don’t reverse course on things like C-16?
I have no idea. I think that we’re in a time of chaos and anything can happen in a time of chaos….
Read the whole thing. I am going to quote more of it in a separate post. It’s a stunning document.
If you think you are going to avoid this ideologically-driven chaos in your kids’ school, you are dreaming. It is widely disseminated in the popular culture. We laugh at the idiocy of the fringes, like the travails of a pregnant woman angry that she can’t find men’s clothes to accommodate her swelling belly, but as Dr. Peterson can attest, this is no laughing matter. He knows where that leads.
UPDATE: Reader “matthew” just posted this:
As a teacher in a public school system I have already witnessed the first gestational growths of this radical biological thinking. But the reality is that most of my administrators are simply too ignorant of the ideology behind these movements to even be able to clearly articulate why they would be in opposition of any mandates being forced on the district. And so they either will capitulate, or already have caved to the pressure to accept that this is the new normal. And their ignorance or lack of will for fear of losing their career makes it all that much easier for the outspoken activist(s) in the district to continue pushing their own agenda.
But what concerns me even more is how blasé about all of this most of my christian friends are in regards to having their own children in the public school system. I have talked to one friend recently who assured me that he knows many good christian teachers in his kids nice affluent suburban school system, as if this will somehow shield his kids from the effects of all the other teachers he doesn’t know and students who his kids will be surrounded by for 7 hours a day, not to mention whatever ideologies those kids parents are either pushing or succumbing to out of a fear of being labeled as bigots. I know that he thinks his kids will somehow miraculously emerge unscathed because they go to church and whatever other fanciful ideas he has that somehow his kids being raised in a christian home will shield them from all of this.
Christian parents outside of some pretty small circles are blindly walking their children into a firing line that they will have almost zero chance of emerging from unscathed. And the church from what I can gather seems to be just as ignorant. The one institution that should be doing everything in its power to wake these parents from their comas is just as naively trusting in some sort of “godly cultural protection bubble” to shield what will most likely become a lost generation of christians.
The Benedict Option is nine weeks away from publication, and I’m already wishing I could add to it.
Pope Francis & Child Abusers
Michael Brendan Dougherty has published a blockbuster column today. Excerpts:
The Catholic Church has long been plagued by sickening scandals involving priests abusing children. And there is reportedly another scandal coming — this one of the pope’s own making.
Two people with direct ties to the Vatican tell me that Pope Francis, following the advice of his clubby group of allies in the curia, is pressing to undo the reforms that were instituted by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI in handling the cases of abuser priests. Francis is pushing ahead with this plan even though the curial officials and cardinals who favor it have already brought more scandal to his papacy by urging him toward lenient treatment of abusers.
It has to do with something as seemingly dry as curial reform. But Dougherty contends that what’s really going on is Francis is protecting friends and punishing enemies — and using something as critically important as cleaning up the Church’s handling of abuser priests to do it. More:
Rumors of this reform have been circulating in Rome for months. And not happily. Pope Francis and his cardinal allies have been known to interfere with CDF’s judgments on abuse cases. This intervention has become so endemic to the system that cases of priestly abuse in Rome are now known to have two sets of distinctions. The first is guilty or innocent. The second is “with cardinal friends” or “without cardinal friends.”
And indeed, Pope Francis is apparently pressing ahead with his reversion of abuse practices even though the cardinals who are favorable to this reform of reform have already brought him trouble because of their friends.
Consider the case of Fr. Mauro Inzoli. Inzoli lived in a flamboyant fashion and had such a taste for flashy cars that he earned the nickname “Don Mercedes.” He was also accused of molesting children. He allegedly abused minors in the confessional. He even went so far as to teach children that sexual contact with him was legitimated by scripture and their faith. When his case reached CDF, he was found guilty. And in 2012, under the papacy of Pope Benedict, Inzoli was defrocked.
But Don Mercedes was “with cardinal friends,” we have learned. Cardinal Coccopalmerio and Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, now dean of the Roman Rota, both intervened on behalf of Inzoli, and Pope Francis returned him to the priestly state in 2014, inviting him to a “a life of humility and prayer.” These strictures seem not to have troubled Inzoli too much. In January 2015, Don Mercedes participated in a conference on the family in Lombardy.
This summer, civil authorities finished their own trial of Inzoli, convicting him of eight offenses. Another 15 lay beyond the statute of limitations. The Italian press hammered the Vatican, specifically the CDF, for not sharing the information they had found in their canonical trial with civil authorities. Of course, the pope himself could have allowed the CDF to share this information with civil authorities if he so desired.
Read the whole thing. It brings to mind Francis’s repugnant handling of a case in Chile, relayed in this National Catholic Reporter story in October 2015. Excerpt:
On Oct. 2, a Chilean news channel brought to light a May 6 recording of Pope Francis defending Bishop Juan Barros, who was recently assigned to Osorno, Chile, despite allegations that the new bishop covered up clergy sex abuse by a priest in the 1980s and 1990s.
Though evidence of the priest’s abuse was verified by Chile’s judicial court, statute of limitations allowed Fr. Fernando Karadima to dodge prosecution. When a separate Vatican investigation found the priest guilty of abuse, he was condemned in 2011 to a life of prayer and penance in a convent outside of Santiago.
“[The diocese] lost its independence once it let its head be filled with what politicians say, who are judging a bishop without any evidence, even after 20 years as bishop,” Francis said in the May 6 recording, before a group of Chilean Catholics in Rome who asked the pope to send a message to those in Osorno disappointed by the arrival of Barros. “Think with your heads and do not be led by the noses by the lefties who orchestrated this whole thing,” he said in Spanish, as translated by NCR.
Though Barros was never tried for covering up Karadima’s abuse, testimonial evidence has suggested Barros destroyed incriminating correspondence, while other victim testimonies claimed Barros was present during the sexual acts. Though Chilean courts uphold the testimonial evidence, Barros has denied the allegations and has never faced a canonical or civil case.
Francis appointed Barros bishop of Osorno in March, meeting stiff resistance by its people, most notably demonstrated by the hundreds of protestors at Barros’ installation Mass March 21. Francis made the appointment despite the objections, which haven’t abated.
In the video from May, Francis said, “The only charges brought against Barros were discredited by the judicial court, so please do not lose serenity,” he continued. “Osorno suffers, yes, but for being foolish, because they do not open their hearts to what God says, and instead get carried away by all this silliness that everyone speaks of.”
“To what God says.” Hey, God has forgiven, you ungrateful people of Osorno, so why can’t you? Besides, I’m the Pope. Who are you to question?
As ever with church leaders who talk about reform, don’t listen to what they say, but rather watch what they do.
A: ‘Juan LaFonta, Juan LaFonta, JUAN LAFONTA!’
I cannot stop watching this spot for a New Orleans barrister, and featuring transgender bounce superstart Big Freedia, who ran into a spot of legal trouble herself over Section 8 housing fraud.
Juan LaFonta, baby! Watch that spot and you will never, ever extract that earworm from deep inside your skull. If Trump doesn’t name him to Scalia’s seat, I’d say he’s got an inside track on being 2018’s Rex.
Neoliberalism Vs. Medievalism
Via @edwest, the most neoliberal thing you’ll read all week. Excerpts:
Until fairly recently, it was rare to find Americans who were passionate about both medieval history and contemporary politics. Barring the odd Christian conservative, medievalists tended to lean left: a Marxist grad student, say, mucking around in land ownership patterns to show how past inequalities gave birth to present ones, or an environmentalist activist, perhaps, fascinated with vegetable-dyed handspun clothing. But when Americans invoked historical events in politics, they tended to be more recent—the founding of the republic; the struggle against slavery and segregation; victory over Nazi Germany.
This has changed. Since the September 11th attacks, the American far right has developed a fascination with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—in particular, with the idea of the West as a united civilisation that was fending off a challenge from the East. The trend has been prodded along by the movement’s discovery of its European counterparts, which have used medieval and crusader imagery since the 19th century. This is troubling to many of those who study the Middle Ages for a living.
Oh, bother. More:
In a recent essay in the popular academic blog “In the Middle” Sierra Lomuto argued that medievalists had “an ethical responsibility to ensure that the knowledge we create and disseminate about the medieval past is not weaponised against people of colour and marginalised communities in our own contemporary world.”
In other words, the Middle Ages are worth studying only if contemporary people draw left-liberal lessons from them about the contemporary world. Read the whole thing. Ed West, probably a closet Plantagenet, remarks:
as @DouthatNYT says, telling people that an interest and attachment to European history makes you Alt-Right is not the cleverest strategy
— Ed West (@edwest) January 3, 2017
Well, as an odd Christian conservative who is ten weeks away from publishing a book holding up a very early medieval institution — Benedictine monasticism — as a model for us in the 21st century, I have a few things to say.
It’s extremely annoying when contemporary people dismiss the medieval period as little more than castles, crusades and poor hygiene. Doing so says more about modern prejudices than it does about the Middle Ages. If there is a growing interest in the European Middle Ages, shouldn’t we be asking why? The last time this happened in modern times at any popular level was in the 19th century, in the Romantic era’s reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the cold, logical classicism of the Enlightenment. Some of it was silly, some of it was dangerous, much of it was valuable — but all of it came from a widespread sense of profound disruption and dislocation, spiritually and otherwise. There was a general sense that life had become too abstracted, positivistic, and mechanical.
We in the West are in such an era today. For example, globalization has done to the populations of the West what the Industrial Revolution did to rural folks. Post-Christianity has largely finished the job that the Enlightenment started, and the Cult of Reason has proven no more satisfying to the masses today than it was back then. Europe really is once again under serious assault from Islam, though not by Ottoman armies this time (and alas for the Catholic Church, it is led by a Pope who is more into felt banners than tapestries, if you take my meaning).
Can it go wrong? Absolutely, in a thousand ways. For example, the völkisch mysticism that emerged out of German Romanticism gave us the Nazis. But it can also go very right. The Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (d. 1948) called for a “new middle age,” as I wrote in this blog post. Excerpt (from Berdyaev):
In reality the medieval civilization was a renaissance in opposition to the barbarism and darkness which had followed the fall of the civilization of antiquity, a chaos in which Christianity alone had been the light and the principle of order. For long it was believed that this complex and rich period had been a great void in the intellectual history of mankind and of its philosophical thought, when as a matter of fact these centuries had so many excellent thinkers and such diversity in the realm of their thought that noting like it can be found at any other epoch; the things which were substantial and living for them are counted as superfluous luxuries in modern times. A return to the middle ages is then a return to a better religious type, for we are far below their culture in the spiritual order; and we should hurry back to them the more speedily because the movements of negation in our decadence have overcome the positive creative and strengthening movements. The middle ages was not a time of darkness, but a period of night; the medieval soul was a “night-soul” wherein were displayed elements and energies which afterwards shut themselves up within themselves at the appearing of this weary day of modern history.
As I say in that post, Berdyaev was not a proponent of sentimental nostalgia. Rather, he said we today must read the signs of the times, and see ourselves not only as “the last Romans,” observing the passing of an old order, but must also be “watchers for the dawn,”
looking towards the yet unseen day when the sun of the new Christian renaissance shall rise. Perhaps it will show itself in the catacombs and be welcomed by only a few. Perhaps it will happen only at the end of time. It is not for us to know. But we do know beyond any possibility of error that eternal light and eternal beuaty cannot be annihilated by any tempest or in any disorder. The victory of number over goodness, of this contingent world over that which is to come, is never more than seeming. And so, without fear or discouragement, we must leave this day of modern history and enter a medieval night. May God dispel all false and deceptive light.
That’s Berdyaev. As I put it then:
The Benedict Option is the term I use to describe this rising movement for a new Middle Age, a spiritual revolution in a time of spiritual and cultural darkness. The monk was the ideal personality type of the Middle Ages. Few of us will be called to the monastery, but all of us who profess orthodox Christianity are called to rediscover a monastic temperament, putting the service of God before all things, and ordering our lives — our prayer and our work, and our communal existence — to that end. We are going to have to recover a sense of monastic asceticism, and do so in hope and joy, together.
I certainly hope that the longing for a society with characteristics of the medieval era does not give strength to race nationalists, but we should not be surprised if it does. The idea that this is the only really interesting question about neo-medievalism in our current moment is absurdly parochial. One doesn’t expect neoliberals to be excited about a rediscovery of medievalism in all its various expressions, but they would do well to understand the social conditions that are turning people’s minds and hearts back to that earlier period, and to understand why the shortcomings of neoliberalism have called these impulses forward. We have to find a way to make use of the good things about the Middle Ages while resisting the bad things about the period.
The Middle Ages will not recur as they were in the West from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 until Petrarch scaled Mount Ventoux in 1336 and came down with the Renaissance. Time is not circular, but rather is a spiral. The first thing we have to be done with if we are to understand the time we’re entering is the myth of linear progress. This is very hard for neoliberals to do.
House GOP Floods The Swamp
This, from the NYT, is an outrage:
House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.
The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.
The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.
Politico‘s report says in part:
In one of their first moves of the new Congress, House Republicans have voted to gut their own independent ethics watchdog — a huge blow to cheerleaders of congressional oversight and one that dismantles major reforms adopted after the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Monday’s effort was led, in part, by lawmakers who have come under investigation in recent years.
Despite a warning from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Republicans adopted a proposal by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) to put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee.
The office currently has free rein, enabling investigators to pursue allegations and then recommend further action to the House Ethics Committee as they see fit.
Now, the office would be under the thumb of lawmakers themselves. The proposal also appears to limit the scope of the office’s work by barring them from considering anonymous tips against lawmakers. And it would stop the office from disclosing the findings of some of their investigations, as they currently do after the recommendations go to House Ethics.
And:
The new Office of Congressional Ethics can’t release information to public. Or have a spokesperson. No communication. In any way. Got it? pic.twitter.com/BCVDjn3SmY
— Matt Viser (@mviser) January 3, 2017
Look, I have no problem believing that the OCE ought to have been better run. (Not that I do believe it, only that the claim is plausible.) But to abolish it, and to replace it with this People’s Republic-style puppet office? Are they crazy? This is the lesson a majority of House Republicans learned from the 2016 election: that the voters want members of Congress to be less accountable for their actions, and to make it easier for themselves to milk the system and get away with it?
Every single Republican member who voted in favor of this proposal ought to face a primary challenge in 2018. Again, I am willing to consider the argument that the OCE overstepped its bounds and needed to be reigned in. But to have the first headline-making act of the House Republicans in the Trump era be gutting the House ethics watchdog sends a signal that as far at the GOP on that side of the Hill is concerned, it’s pigs-at-the-trough time? It’s politically idiotic. Do they not grasp how despised and distrusted the governing class is?
You want to return the Democrats to power by showing that Republicans cannot be trusted with it? This is a good first move.
UPDATE: After Trump blasted the GOP Congressional move in a tweet this morning, House Republicans decided to retreat. Good for Trump! You don’t have to believe that good government is near and dear to Trump’s heart to recognize his skill at reading the political moment, and acting accordingly. He’s just put Congress on notice that he will go to the people against them if he sees it in his interest. Impressive.
Oriel

The Archangel Oriel (Uriel)
A friend brought back the above icon of the Archangel Oriel (also known as Uriel) from Greece, and gave it to me for Christmas. I immediately loved it, not least because I have never seen an icon of that archangel. Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael I had heard of, but not Oriel. There’s a reason for this: in 745, the Council of Rome struck Oriel’s name from the list of Archangels commemorated by the Western church. He remained recognized in the Eastern church.
Oriel/Uriel means “light of God” or “fire of God,” hence the image above, of the Archangel bearing fire in his hand. In the Orthodox Church, the blessing of icons typically involves a short formal prayer said by a priest, and the use of holy water, but also can involve the icon being placed upon the altar during a Divine Liturgy. A couple of weeks ago, I took this icon to church, and gave it to our priest with the request that he place it on the altar and bless it. He did place it on the altar at that liturgy, but said afterward that he would need to do the formal blessing. I figured I would pick it up on the next Sunday or so.
As it happened, this past Sunday I was ill and couldn’t make it to liturgy. My wife brought it home to me. Last night I was preparing to say my prayers, and admiring the icon, when I thought, “That face of the Archangel looks familiar. Where have I seen it before?”
Then I remembered the Macedonian film I saw on Sunday afternoon, Before The Rain, which I wrote about here. This is the young Orthodox monk in the first part of the film, Kiril, played by the French actor Grégoire Colin:

Not a perfect likeness, but still, it made me smile.


In Crazy Cat Lady News…

From Cosmopolitan.com
Holy Tori Amos! Great Elizabeth Wurtzel! Here’s how this Cosmopolitan story starts:
On the rooftop of her Brooklyn apartment building this past spring, Erika Anderson put on a vintage-style white wedding dress, stood before a circle of her closest friends, and committed herself — to herself.
“I choose you today,” she said. Later she tossed the bouquet to friends and downed two shots of whiskey, one for herself and one for herself. She had planned the event for weeks, sending invitations, finding the perfect dress, writing her vows, buying rosé and fresh baguettes and fruit tarts from a French bakery. For the decor: an array of shot glasses emblazoned with the words “You and Me.” In each one, a red rose.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” she’d noted on the wedding invitations. “I had cold feet for 35 years. But then I decided it was time to settle down. To get myself a whole damn apartment. To celebrate birthday #36 by wearing an engagement ring and saying: YES TO ME. I even made a registry, because this is America.”
Self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world. In Canada, a service called Marry Yourself Vancouver launched this past summer, offering consulting services and wedding photography. In Japan, a travel agency called Cerca Travel offers a two-day self-wedding package in Kyoto: You can choose a wedding gown, bouquet, and hairstyle, and pose for formal wedding portraits. On the website I Married Me, you can buy a DIY marriage kit: For $50, you get a sterling silver ring, ceremony instructions, vows, and 24 “affirmation cards” to remind you of your vows over time. For $230, you can get the kit with a 14-karat gold ring.
Meanwhile, the crazy manifests on the other coast too:
When she graduated in 2011, Dominique went to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, where the theme was “rites of passage.” She decided to help women at Burning Man marry themselves, saying their vows into a mirror. Word got around and some 100 women showed up to tie the knot. Some came wearing wedding gowns; others carried flowers. The scene was emotional, Dominique says. “Imagine hearing 100 women stand in front of a mirror and speak the words that they have always longed to hear.”
“I will never leave myself.”
“I promise to ask for help when I’m suffering.”
“I promise to look in the mirror every day and be grateful.”
“I promise to give you the incredible life that you long for.”Now 27, Dominique is a self-marriage counselor and minister, offering services including consulting sessions and private ceremonies through her website, Self Marriage Ceremonies, which she runs from her home in northern California.
Read the whole thing — and cue the Woody Allen joke.
Honestly, the barbarians should just roll right in now. We have too much money and too little sense to live.
Bourdain Vs. The Left
Anthony Bourdain is an acquired taste. He happens to be a taste I’ve acquired. Watching the one-hour Bourdain “Parts Unknown” episode about Lyon is the only time a television show has ever made me travel to a place. I’ve seen that episode six or seven times, and probably will watch it that many more times in my life. I actually ate (with James C. and another friend) at one of the restaurants in the show. All of which is to say that I love Anthony Bourdain, even though he’s something of a bastard; in fact, I love Anthony Bourdain in part because he’s something of a bastard. A magnificent bastard who would take that as the compliment I mean it to be. Anthony Bourdain opened up the glories of Lyon to me, and I will always, always owe him for that.
I loved his interview with Reason magazine’s Alexander Bisley. Excerpt:
Bisley: You’re a liberal. What should liberals be critiquing their own side for?
Bourdain: There’s just so much. I hate the term political correctness, the way in which speech that is found to be unpleasant or offensive is often banned from universities. Which is exactly where speech that is potentially hurtful and offensive should be heard.
The way we demonize comedians for use of language or terminology is unspeakable. Because that’s exactly what comedians should be doing, offending and upsetting people, and being offensive. Comedy is there, like art, to make people uncomfortable, and challenge their views, and hopefully have a spirited yet civil argument. If you’re a comedian whose bread and butter seems to be language, situations, and jokes that I find racist and offensive, I won’t buy tickets to your show or watch you on TV. I will not support you. If people ask me what I think, I will say you suck, and that I think you are racist and offensive. But I’m not going to try to put you out of work. I’m not going to start a boycott, or a hashtag, looking to get you driven out of the business.
The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.
I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we’ve done.
Read the whole thing. He is unkind to Bill Maher, who has it coming.
That’s a good introduction to this great Megan McArdle column, in which she analyzes the mutual intolerance of liberals and conservatives in the US. Excerpt:
While traveling a few months back, I ended up chatting with a divorce attorney, who observed that what we’re seeing in America right now bears a startling resemblance to what he sees happen with many of his clients. They’ve lost sight of what they ever liked about each other; in fact, they’ve even lost sight of their own self-interest. All they can see is their grievances, from annoying habits to serious wrongs. The other party, of course, generally has their own set of grievances. There is a sort of geometric progression of outrage, where whatever you do to the other side is justified by whatever they did last. They, of course, offer similar justifications for their own behavior.
By the time the parties get to this state, the object is not even necessarily to come out of the divorce with the most money and stuff; it’s to ensure that your former spouse comes out with as little as possible. People will fight viciously to get a knickknack neither of them particularly likes, force asset sales at a bad loss, and otherwise behave as if the victor is not the person who goes on to live a productive and happy life, but the one who makes it impossible for the ex to do so.
Read the whole thing. Also, Megan McArdle loves to cook.
The Dark Side Of Tibetan Buddhism
Over the weekend, I ran across this 2010 essay on Reason by Brendan O’Neill, who wrote about his frustration with the way Tibetan Buddhism is whitewashed in Western culture. O’Neill, by the way, is an atheist and a libertarian. Excerpts:
Many Westerners before me have visited Tibet, popped into some monastery on a mountainside, and decided to stay there forever, won over by the brutally frugal existence eked out by Tibetan Buddhists.
I have exactly the opposite reaction. I couldn’t wait to leave the temples and monasteries I visited during my recent sojourn to Shangri-La, with their garish statues of dancing demons, fat golden Buddhas surrounded by wads of cash, walls and ceilings painted in super-lavish colours, and such a stench of incense that it’s like being in a hippy student’s dorm room.
I know I’m not supposed to say this, but Tibetan Buddhism really freaked me out.
The most striking thing is how different real Tibetan Buddhism is from the re-branded, part-time version imported over here by the Dalai Lama’s army of celebrities.
Listening to Richard Gere, the first incarnation of the Hollywood Lama, you could be forgiven for thinking that Tibetan Buddhism involves sitting in the lotus position for 20 hours a day and thinking Bambi-style thoughts. Tibetan Buddhism has a “resonance and a sense of mystery,” says Gere, through which you can find “beingness” (whatever that means).
Watching Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel read a collection of the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Central Perk on Friends a few years ago, you might also think that Tibetan Buddhism is something you can ingest while sipping on a skinny-milk, no-cream, hazelnut latte.
Or consider the answer given by one of Frank J. Korom’s students at Boston University when he asked her why she was wearing a Tibetan Buddhist necklace. “It keeps me healthy and happy,” she said, reducing Tibetan Buddhism, as so many Dalai Lama-loving undergrads do, to the religious equivalent of knocking back a vitamin pill.
The reality couldn’t be more different.
O’Neill talks about aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that he finds repulsive, but that never get talked about in the West. Then:
Of course, this only means that Tibetan Buddhism is the same as loads of other religions. Yet it is striking how much the backward elements of Tibetan Buddhism are forgiven or glossed over by its hippyish, celebrity, and middle-class followers over here. So if you’re a Catholic in Hollywood it is immediately assumed you’re a grumpy old git with demented views, but if you’re a “Tibetan” Buddhist you are looked upon as a super-cool, enlightened creature of good manners and taste. (Admittedly, Mel Gibson doesn’t help in this regard.)
I am well aware of the fact that I am not the first Westerner to be thrown by Tibet’s religious quirkiness. A snobby British visitor in 1895 denounced Tibetan Buddhism as “deep-rooted devil-worship and sorcery.” It’s no such thing. But what is striking, and what caused me to be so startled by the weirdness, is the way in which this religion has come to be viewed in Western New Age circles as a peaceful, pure, happy-clappy cult of softly-smiling, Buddha-like beings. Again, it’s no such thing. The modern view of Tibetan Buddhism as wondrous is at least as patronizingly reductive as the older view of Tibetan Buddhism as devil-worship.
Read the whole thing. Again, O’Neill’s real beef here is not with Tibetan Buddhism but with the way it is constructed by Western media. I know nothing about Tibetan Buddhism, but regarding religions (Christian and non-Christian) that I do know something about, I find that most mainstream media reporting on it tells us as much about the preferences and biases of the reporter than it does about the religion and its believers.
UPDATE: Judging from the comments, some people think I cited this essay as a way of criticizing Tibetan Buddhism. Not true. I’m quite sure that if I knew more about Tibetan Buddhism, I would criticize plenty of it, while admiring plenty of it. And I’m quite sure that as a cosmopolitan Western atheist libertarian, O’Neill finds much to dislike about Christianity, and would find even more to dislike about more folkish versions of Christian practice. All of that is beside the point. O’Neill is correct to question why Western celebrity and media culture treats Tibetan Buddhism the way it does. This is not the fault of the Dalai Lama.


The Benedict Option is the term I use to describe this rising movement for a new Middle Age, a spiritual revolution in a time of spiritual and cultural darkness. The monk was the ideal personality type of the Middle Ages. Few of us will be called to the monastery, but all of us who profess orthodox Christianity are called to rediscover a monastic temperament, putting the service of God before all things, and ordering our lives — our prayer and our work, and our communal existence — to that end. We are going to have to recover a sense of monastic asceticism, and do so in hope and joy, together.