Wednesday, August 13, 2025

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium: Scholars and seekers explore new research

 


SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium

Scholars and seekers explore new research

I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.

Friday, August 8, 2025

Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, Please Tell the Truth about Friedrich Spee

 

Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, Please Tell the Truth about Friedrich Spee

Dr. Steven Pinker

Dr. Michael Shermer

Penguin Books

Henry Holt and Company

Gentlemen:


I'm writing to request that you retract what appears to be false material published in both the 2011 Penguin Book Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Dr. Steven Pinker and the 2015 Henry Holt and Company book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Dr. Michael Shermer. I request that you remove this material from any future editions of both books, and that you insert accurate material.


Both books repeat an unsourced anecdote that misrepresents Father Friedrich Spee, one of the first and most influential opponents of the witch craze that seized Europe during the Early Modern Period. This misrepresentation of a long dead priest matters for several reasons.


Friedrich Spee was a human rights hero and pioneer. He risked his life for others.


Spee is a figure of historical importance. Understanding him is key to understanding the witch craze, a significant period in Western history.


Spee's work is highly significant today. His biographers consider Spee to be among the first influential authors to work out an argument against the use of torture to obtain confessions. Spee "ranks among the most important authors of his time." His work "was one of the first sustained, detailed attacks…against the witch trials and use of torture" (Modras 27).


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representational of atheist reason and truth, as opposed to the alleged obscurantism of persons of faith. That both gentlemen have disseminated unsourced material from a non-scholarly book undermines their self-identification.


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representing a new and improved, science-and-reason-inspired path toward better lives for all humankind. Father Friedrich Spee should be assessed as an ally, and celebrated, by those interested in human rights. He should not be denigrated and slandered with the use of spurious material and unscholarly methodology.


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat Charles Mackay's anecdote about Friedrich Spee in their books. As Mackay would have us believe, a humanitarian secular leader, the Duke of Brunswick, "shocked" by the witch craze, which, presumably, is being carried out by Catholic clerics, summons Father Friedrich Spee. The Duke demonstrates to Spee that torture does not work in the extraction of confessions. Brunswick does this by torturing an accused witch into implicating Spee in witchcraft. Spee has an Aha moment and puts an end to the witch craze. Dr. Pinker uses this anecdote to prove that the "Age of Reason" and a "scientific spirit" ended the witch craze. Dr. Pinker places the witch craze in the Middle Ages, as does Dr. Shermer. Dr. Shermer uses the same anecdote to "prove" the same point.


The anecdote is almost certainly false.


I wrote to Dr. Pinker and he was kind enough to reply. He acknowledged that he found the anecdote in a book that cited Charles MacKay's 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Charles MacKay was a Scottish journalist, not a scholar. Delusions is not a serious history of the witch craze. It was written in a popular and sensationalistic style. I found no footnote for the anecdote in my copy of Mackay's book. The reference librarians at the Cheng Library found no footnote for Mackay's anecdote in their copy of Delusions.


Dr. Ronald Modras, author of a biographical sketch of Spee that appeared in a scholarly journal, and author of several other works on Jesuits and Catholic history, wrote to tell me that he has read at least eight works on Friedrich Spee and that none of them mention Mackay's Duke of Brunswick anecdote.


I find no mention of Spee, witches, or torture in one online biography of the Duke of Brunswick (here).


At the height of the witch craze, Friedrich Spee risked his life in writing an anti-witch craze book, Cautio Criminalis. There is no evidence in Cautio Criminalis that it was inspired by any shallow trick of any Duke. Rather, as Modras writes, "The Cautio is not a calmly argued essay on jurisprudence. It is a shrill cry to stop a travesty of justice" (Modras 29).


Cautio Criminalis was inspired by Spee's experience. "I myself have accompanied several women to their deaths in various places over the preceding years whose innocence even now I am so sure of that there could never be any effort and diligence too great that I would not undertake it in order to reveal this truth…One can easily guess what feelings were in my soul when I was present at such miserable deaths."


Cautio Criminalis' argument against the witch craze is not the argument Doctors Pinker and Shermer want it to be. Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat what has since been proven false: that increasing scientific thought ended the witch craze.


In fact Spee does not use a scientific disbelief in witches to support his case against the witch craze. Modras argues that Spee is like a modern-day opponent of the death penalty. Realizing that banning the death penalty outright might be unattainable, death-penalty opponents focus on issues like the high cost of death penalty cases, and the lower cost of life in prison.


Spee's concession to popular belief notwithstanding, his insights about what causes witch crazes are in alignment with contemporary scholarship.


"It all begins with superstition, envy, and calumnies. Something goes amiss, and people clamor for an inquisition. All the divine punishments described in the Bible now come from witches. God and nature are no longer responsible for any mishap; witches do it all" (Modras 32, summarizing Cautio Criminalis).


That a Roman Catholic priest writing in the height of the witch craze offered insights that mirrors the most modern scholarship contradicts the notion that people needed to evolve into, or be tutored by, atheists, or scientists, or twenty-first century moderns.


Spee briefly concedes what his readers probably cannot be disabused of – that witches exist – but then Spee argues that guilt cannot be adequately ascertained, and torture is too cruel and unjust.


Spee uses the tools of his Catholic faith to make his point to his audience. Spee uses traditional Jesuit argumentation style and Biblical citations. He cites the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Just as a farmer allows weeds to grow with wheat, and separates one from the other at harvest, God allows sinners to live out their lives (Matthew 13). Just so accused witches should be allowed to live, Spee argues, in order that people might avoid the serious crime of killing innocents. In risking his life to save others and to cleanse the soul of his church and his wider society, Spee was following the example of his Lord, Jesus Christ.


Spee's traditional, Catholic, Jesuit argumentation style, his graphic descriptions of the cruelty and irrationality of torture, and his Biblical references worked.


Where and when Spee's book was translated and read by leaders, the witch craze ended.


The pattern of Spee's impact was repeated throughout Europe. It wasn't science that ended the witch craze.


I asked prominent witch craze scholar Brian P. Levack, "What ended the witch craze?"


On February 21, 2015, Levack wrote to me, "I address this question at length in the third edition of my book, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, and at great length in my essay on the decline and end of witch-hunting in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Eighteenth Century. This is a complicated issue, but my main argument is that the trials did not end because judicial authorities stopped believing in witchcraft but because they began to realize that the crime could not be proved at law."


In his other writings, Spee showed his special concern for women. He wrote a devotional book directed specifically at women's spiritual development. He used feminine metaphors for God. He was a brave and self-sacrificing man who entered primitive hospitals, malodorous, foul places he described in his writing. He died at the young age of 44 of an infection contracted while ministering to the sick.


Nowhere in the factual biography of Father Friedrich Spee does one encounter the silly anecdote deployed by both Doctors Pinker and Shermer to prove that ignorant Catholics required compassionate secular leaders to end the witch craze.


The old-fashioned, popular understanding of the witch craze runs something like this: In the Middle Ages or Dark Ages, the obscurantist, misogynist, all-male and omnipotent Catholic Church murdered millions of innocent, Goddess-worshipping wise women. Then the Enlightenment came along, people rejected religion -- especially Catholicism -- suddenly became very smart and scientific and atheistic, and stopped the witch craze.


Scholars have completely debunked everything about this narrative. The witch craze took place not, as Doctors Pinker and Shermer would have it, during the "Dark" or Middle Ages, but during the Early Modern Period.


In the real Middle Ages, the Catholic Church repeatedly rejected the concept of witchcraft. Societal stresses like the breakup of the Catholic Church during the Reformation, the Little Ice Age, and changes in the prices of basic goods and traditional patterns of almsgiving contributed to witch crazes.


The Inquisition actually sometimes suppressed local witch crazes. See, for example, Alonso de Salazar Frías, the witch's advocate, who was himself a Spanish Inquisitor, and who worked to stop the witch craze in his region. The demand for trials often came from below, from common people, rather than from church or secular leaders, and from women. Envy and petty malice was often the spark. Men as well as women were victimized.


In a metaphorical sense, witch crazes have never ended. During the Reign of Terror, devotees of the Enlightenment, dedicated to atheism and reason, managed to rack up a death toll in one year comparable to the entire number of witch craze victims over the course of three hundred years of trials.


We fool ourselves, and we squander an opportunity to learn how to be better people, when we rewrite the witch craze as something done by people wholly other who lived in a past we have overcome.


We benefit ourselves, and the cause of righteousness, if we recognize that the witch craze was carried out by people exactly like us.


We inspire ourselves to better things when we learn of lives like that of Father Friedrich Spee, what inspired him and what he accomplished.


Doctors Pinker and Shermer, please retract the unsourced and unscholarly anecdote you have disseminated and please change any subsequent editions of your books to reflect the true history, motivations, and impact of Father Friedrich Spee.

***


I sent this letter years ago. It was at my previous blog, the Save Send Delete blog. Google hides that blog so people can't see this letter. 

I have received no word that either Pinker or Shermer cares enough about truth to correct their lies. 

Their falsehoods now appear in the Wikipedia page dedicated to Spee. 

It is tragic that no one cares enough about truth to correct that page. 

https://save-send-delete.blogspot.com/2015/02/steven-pinker-and-michael-shermer.html

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Mamdani, Trotsky, and Stalin

 


Bronshtein in the Bronx and Koba the Dread; Laughter and the Twenty Million

Trotsky, Stalin, and Zohran Mamdani

On June 24, 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, won the primary to be the Democratic Party's nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani's mother is Indian-born Mira Nair, a filmmaker nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA, and recipient of a Golden Lion. His father Mahmood Mamdani was also born in India. He occupies an endowed chair at Ivy League Columbia University. The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government Chair is named for the son of one of the Jewish Lehman Brothers. The New York Post reports that Columbia professors in Mamdani's class are paid "an average of $308,000 a year." Mahmood Mamdani has been accused of antisemitism. Mira Nair has attempted to get Gal Gadot, a Jewish actress, banned from the Oscars.

Zohran Mamdani is a Twelver Shia, an apocalyptic sect implicated in Iran's push for nuclear weapons. He has professed "love" for jihadi terrorists. He supports the anti-Israel BDS movement. When asked about the phrase "Globalize the intifada," he said that that phrase expresses support for "equality," "human rights," and "equal rights." Bret Stephens corrects Mamdani; "globalize the intifada" means murdering Jews. When Mamdani campaigns in mosques, he is met with cries of "Takbir" and "Allahu akbar." He tells his mosque audiences that Israelis murdered an innocent little Muslim girl named Fatima. Why bring up Fatima Abdullah in the New York City mayoral campaign? Mamdani mentions Fatima to reinforce his portrait of Muslims-as-victims of American Islamophobia and evil Israel. Mamdani self-identifies as Muslims' avenger. "We have a million Muslims in this city. This is is our chance … an opportunity to vote for one of us," he says to mosque audiences. Mamdani does not encourage mosque audiences to vote for the best mayor for New York City. He encourages mosque audiences to vote for tribal power and revenge.

Mamdani also identifies as a socialist. He wants free buses, free childcare, government-controlled rent prices, and government-run grocery stores that sell food at government-set prices, prices that would undercut privately-run stores. He wants to "win socialism," "raise class consciousness," and he also wants to raise property taxes on "whiter neighborhoods." He "firmly believes in" "seizing the means of production." He wants to devote tens of millions of dollars to transgender drugs and surgeries.

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Materialists 2025 Review

 

Materialists 2025

What does a new film tell us about relationships?

Materialists is a 2025 romantic comedy. It was written and directed by Celine Song. Chris Evans (Captain America), Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey), and Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us) are the film's A-list stars. Materialists was released on June 13, 2025. The film enjoys an 81% positive score from professional reviewers at review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Amateur reviews are less enthusiastic; they average an only 67% positive score. Materialists has made $35,848,149 against its production budget of $20 million. The film is a "surprise box office success" for its relatively new, small, and edgy distributor, A24 Films.

I loved Materialists. I loved the warm glow of the 35 mm film stock. I loved the gorgeous cast. I loved the few laugh-out-loud funny scenes – I have lived in that same apartment and had those same roommates. I loved the film's attempt to engage big ideas. But the movie isn't for everybody.

Materialists has received a great deal of attention from professional and amateur commentators. Materialists is not just a romantic comedy; it's an essay addressing real-life romance as well as the romantic comedy genre. That being the case, it's a good idea to talk a bit about the romantic comedy genre before talking about the film itself.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

David Horowitz In Memoriam

 


David Horowitz
In Memoriam

 

In the late 1980s and early 90s, I lived in the People's Republic of Berkeley. Berkeley was one of the forces that made me the person I am today. UC grad school was permission I had been hungering for my entire life, without realizing it. Yes, it is okay to spend an entire day reading, writing, asking questions, and saying things that you weren't sure anyone had ever said. I loved being around intellectually alive people 24/7. I met Annapurna summiteer Arlene Blum (I felt small), Salman Rushdie (super charming), Czeslaw Milosz (rude), Gloria Steinem (kind), Shelby Steele (aloof), Peter O'Toole (indulgent but world-weary smile), and Frank Langella (sooo hot). Berkeley, in those days, was all about healing, and I had alotta wounds to heal. Berkeley's Twelve Step meetings were among the most important religious experiences I've ever had.

 

The San Francisco Mime Troupe's free outdoor plays inspired me. One performance managed to turn Liberty Leading the People, from the Delcroix painting, into a character. I get chills just thinking about it. I felt, "Wow, I have found my tribe. We are going to usher in a better world!" In the cavernous, 1,466-seat UC Theater, I watched all five hours of the Samurai Trilogy in a packed house of whooping and cheering fans. Though I'm from Jersey, where excellent pizza is as the air we breathe, I must salute Zachary's deep dish spinach and mushroom pie. I danced off the calories at Ashkenaz, a warm and welcoming nightclub constructed to resemble an eastern European synagogue.  

Tuesday, June 3, 2025


 

Don't Underestimate Importance of Recent Polish Election - Taras Berezovets






"Jews Are Afraid Right Now" New York Times Op Ed


 

Excerpt:

This is how antisemitism works. Antisemitism scapegoats Jews, depicting us as both invisible and omnipresent, casting us as powerless when convenient, and all-powerful and controlling at other times .Antisemitism isolates, allowing hatred against Jews to grow and fester. The person charged with Colorado’s attack, according to an F.B.I. affidavit, told the police that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.”

Some comments in the comments section on this blog follow the above-described antisemitic pattern. These posts depict Jews as "all powerful." Because Jews are "all powerful," Poles can't tell their story publicly about WW II or Polish suffering. This is nonsense. Poles could unite, organize, and act strategically to get their story told in curricula and media. But they don't. That is not the fault of Jewish people. Insisting that it is the fault of Jewish people is antisemitic. 

Otherwise, this article is heartbreaking. America has seen three high profile, potentially deadly, and in one case, deadly antisemitic attacks in recent months. 

I have to note that if these attacks had occurred during the presidency of a black Democrat, a Kamala Harris, say, Team Trump would be exploiting the attacks. Trump is not offering ethical or inspirational leadership in the face of these attacks, and his fans are not taking him to task for that failure.  

Monday, June 2, 2025

American Antisemitism

 Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home set on fire The arsonist was a Pennsylvania criminal. 

Two embassy personnel gunned down in a Washington, DC street by a murderer shouting "Free Palestine." 

Now an Egyptian Muslim in Colorado has used an improvised flamethrower to set on fire elderly people calling for the release of Israeli hostages. 

Pray and take action against antisemitism. 

Lech Walesa Reacts to Poland's Presidential Election


 

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Putin's Russia Celebrates Stalin

 Putin's Russia has erected numerous statues of Joseph Stalin, arrested and imprisoned those who uncover Stalinist crimes, and suppresses any dissent. 

How bad was Stalin? A good, brief article is here, "Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide?" by Cynthia Haven about the book Stalin's Genocides  by scholar Norman Naimark. 

Link to New York Times article about the new Stalin monument is here.




Saturday, May 24, 2025

Maus Author Art Spiegelman Insulted Trump; Got Censored

 Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, a racist comic book that depicts Polish people as pigs, has been censored -- because he insulted Trump. Trump has power; Poles and Polonians do not exercise power; so the anti Trump insult had to go, but the Polish-people-as-pigs garbage earns a Pulitzer. Full story here

Friday, May 23, 2025

Thunderbolts* Movie Review. Slavic Stereotyping But I Still Liked the Movie

 


Thunderbolts*

A Marvel movie even Martin Scorsese might love

 

On May 2, 2025, Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures released Thunderbolts*. Thunderbolts* is a superhero movie advertised as "Pure cinema," featuring "Not heroes. Not super. Not giving up." In Thunderbolts*, a ragtag group of flawed characters cooperate, in spite of their self-loathing and mutual antipathy. They dismantle a deadly secret program, save Manhattan from Bob, a rampaging monster, and help Bob defeat his own demons. They thus redeem themselves.

 

Internet scuttlebutt insisted that Thunderbolts* addresses important issues in today's society through real characters that develop through real changes, and that audiences were actually tearing up.

 

This time fandom did not over hype. Not only did the characters in Thunderbolts* change. I changed. I am now willing to give Marvel movies another chance.

Friday, May 16, 2025

At Home with the Holocaust by Lucas F. W. Wilson. Book Review.


 

At Home with the Holocaust
A scholarly exploration of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors

 

On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book's goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents' and grandparents' experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

 

In an online biography, author Wilson says, "I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary." On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with "Pronouns: he/him/his." In an interview, Wilson says, "My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred." Christians have "genocidal intentions" toward GLBT people, Jews, and "Indigenous folks in North America."

 

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. "I have received several fellowships and awards for my work." An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi's Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

 

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book "makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants and the complex ways in which traumatic memory is passed along intergenerationally." Alan L. Berger, the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, says that At Home "breaks new ground."

 

I can see how At Home with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

 

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I'm a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn't give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

 

On August 14, 1945, Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured "V-J Day in Times Square." A sailor is kissing a young woman wearing a medical uniform – white dress, white stockings, white shoes. The photo expertly captures the ecstatic jubilation of the end of worldwide horror and atrocity.

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Everything Is Illuminated Not by Ivan Katchanovski

 I just stumbled across this article. I have not fact checked it. I found it on the "Wayback Machine" so apparently it is otherwise unavailable. I'm no expert in WW II in Ukraine so I can't comment on the article's accuracy. 

THE PRAGUE POST

NOT Everything is Illuminated

 

October 07, 2004

 

Everything Is Illuminated distorts history by omitting crucial facts, including an important link to the Czech Republic

 

By Ivan Katchanovski

 

As the recent controversy about The Passion of the Christ and the election of a movie star as governor of California show, movies are not only entertainment but also sources of negative and positive stereotypes. An upcoming Hollywood film, much of which was filmed in Prague this summer, promotes such negative stereotypes. Furthermore, the book on which it was based, Everything Is Illuminated, distorts history by omitting crucial facts.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Jewish Men Attack Lone Woman in NYC.

 


My only comments: this happened. It needs to be addressed. People are people and people from any ethnic group can do good or bad things. Mob behavior -- and that mob can be people of any ethnicity -- often gets very dark. 

Thursday, April 17, 2025

The Shroud of Turin. Is Seeing Believing?

 


The Shroud of Turin
 Is seeing believing?

 

A storm had been brewing for days. You could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black, muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque River.

 

It came from the west, right over the river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.

 

That was a swallow-tailed kite!

 

This Florida bird did not belong in New Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound alligators and colorful flowers.

 

Birders keep something called a "life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier between perceiving and accepting. 

 

The part of my brain that instantaneously assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.

 

And it's more than that. Now that I'm an adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent sky over the humble Wanaque River.  

 

In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."

 

He replies, "You get it. You just can't handle it."

 

A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.

 

Over seventy years earlier, a world-class French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a "disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the "impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.

 

Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.

Saturday, April 12, 2025

Snow White 2025 Review

 


Snow White 2025
 
Is it Woke or Disneyfication that hobbles the movie?

 

Ever have one of those days when no matter how hard you try to be rational, pleasant, and productive, the universe seems to hate you? You walk out the door and a pigeon poops on  your head? You cross the street and a cab splashes you? You show up for work and everyone blames you for every snafu? Relax. At least you are not the 2025 film Snow White.

 

Snow White is a musical fantasy produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Marc Webb directs. Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the screenplay. Her best-known work is Secretary, an explicit exploration of a sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant boss. The songs "Heigh ho," and "Whistle While You Work," from the 1937 Snow White, but with new lyrics, re-appear. The song "Someday My Prince Will Come" is cut. Lyrics to new songs in the film are by EGOT-winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Snow White is 109 minutes long. It opened in the U.S. on March 21, 2025.

 

Some scenes in Snow White put a smile on my face and made me laugh out loud. I'd rate the film three out of five stars. What handicaps Snow White is not so much Woke, as it is the Disneyfication of the source material. More on that, below, after a bit of background.

I'll be posting non-Polish-Jewish related material for a while

 As I've mentioned before, I'll be posting non-Polish-Jewish related material here for a while, and maybe forever. 

I had another blog for such material, but Google hid it because I criticized a religion one must never criticize, and also a fad one must never criticize. So now that blog is still on the web, you just can't see it. 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Just saying Hi

I haven't been posting much lately. That's not because a lot has not been going on. A lot has been going on. An American governmental figure insulted Poland and Poland's leadership. A new American president is betraying American values and alliances. Lech Walesa and other prominent Polish heroes spoke out in opposition. And world class scholars of fascism are relating what's happening in Washington and in the country to grim historical events, like the rise of fascism in early twentieth century Europe. 

Praying. 

PS: Not interested in debating with Trump supporters in the comments section, so if you feel tempted to mount a defense of any of this, please do that in a different venue. Thank you in advance. 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. Book review


 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive
 
A book asks, can Nazis love? And why did the powerful aid their escape?

 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive was published by Knopf on February 2, 2021. It is 417 pages long, inclusive of endnotes and a bibliography. Black-and-white photos illustrate the text.

 

Ratline recounts the encounter between author Philippe Sands, a Jewish-British lawyer and law professor and descendant of Holocaust victims, and Horst von Wachter, the son of a Nazi war criminal. Baron Otto Gustav von Wachter (1901 – 1949) was Austrian born. He was an early and enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, joining the Nazi Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers in 1923. He eventually rose to SS-Gruppenfuhrer, or major general rank. He served under Governor General Hans Frank, the notorious "Butcher of Poland," in Krakow and Galicia in Nazi-occupied Polish and Ukrainian territory. Wachter sent Jews, non-Jewish Poles, and other victims of Nazism to their deaths. After the war, Wachter hid out in the Austrian Alps. He eventually made his way to Italy, hoping to travel, via ratlines, that is, escape routes for Nazis, to safety in South America. Instead, he sickened and died in Italy.

 

Otto von Wachter married Charlotte Bleckmann in 1932. They had six children. Charlotte was an active diarist and letter-writer. Horst, their son, shared his extensive trove of documents with author Sands.

 

The Ratline has received rave reviews from both readers and professional reviewers. The book did not work for me, for reasons I'll outline, below, after a discussion of the book's reception and a summary of its contents. 

Friday, February 21, 2025

Presence 2024 Movie Review. A Small Film Succeeds Where Bigger Films Failed.

 


Presence 2024
A small film succeeds where bigger films failed

 

"For English, press one."

 

"Please listen carefully. Our menu options have changed."

 

"Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received."

 

"All our representatives are helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably."

 

Some of us have lost some genetic lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and when we request our prognosis.

 

Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn't gift cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn't say anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets to you.

 

In November, 2024, I coped with my latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I wasn't taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.

 

Friends? "Cancer ghosting" is a thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I'd soon be reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were, simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss was willing to hang out with me.

 

In January, 2025, I was going for a walk and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality programming that sneaks in.

 

A man was speaking. He was a white guy, older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and with himself.  Ghost stories, the man was saying, are "essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there's an afterlife. Something comes beyond" death, he said. I am intimidated by scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.

 

The man continued in a voice, that, unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the wash.

 

"In my own life," he said, "during periods that I would describe as traumatic, I felt more open to people around me, and maybe had a little easier time perceiving their own difficulties or their own pain. I wondered, if a person goes through trauma, does that open you up to sense other things that you couldn't sense before?" He mentioned a girl named Chloe. Chloe, he said, is "an open wound. She's been through this horrific experience, and so she is open to the universe." It is kind, this man was saying, to make eye contact with someone in pain and to say, "I'm sorry that you suffer."

 

This man didn't have an ax to grind. He was speaking in the most universal terms about trauma and death. He wasn't talking about how hard it is to be black and to have a ghost in your house, or to be trans and to go through trauma, or to be gay and to get a scary diagnosis. He was talking about universal stuff: life, death, the space between. His speech was not excluding, dividing, singling out for blame, or for settling scores. His speech was inviting and truly inclusive. Such speech is rare on NPR. He sounded the way you'd imagine a small town doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting would sound. His words were the most soothing words I had heard in my latest dance with death.

 

That man is screenwriter David Koepp. Let's see if you've heard of the films for which he wrote the script: Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Carlito's Way, Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town, Panic Room, and other films. His output has earned billions of dollars worldwide. Koepp has written the script for the 2024 film Presence, a ghost story. Well, I'll be darned. I had sought comfort from friends, who "ghosted" me, and from a Catholic priest, who did not have time for me. Once again, Hollywood was coming to the rescue.