Halo Halo / Tiny tips
Halo, halo
Bash the bishop
Not going to do a ‘told you so’ but how often have we said, don’t put your faith in leaders? The Church of England was founded by Henry VIII, the serial wife abuser and uxoricide. Mad at the Pope who wouldn’t allow him to divorce his first wife, Henry formed the Church of England, put himself in charge of it and disbanded Catholic monasteries, convents and religious institutions. As is the case up to the present day, a lot of wealth was held by these establishments. So Henry snaffled the lot.
In November 2024 the CEO of the C of E – known as the Archbishop of Canterbury – resigned after it was found that he had failed dramatically to safeguard the victims, young males, of a serial abuser. ‘The Bishop of Birkenhead said she couldn’t guarantee that abuse is not still going on in the Church. “We still have this institutional problem where we are not putting victims and survivors at the centre. In some ways, we are not a safe institution”’. The British monarch is always supreme head of the Church of England. Twenty six bishops including the Archbishop of Canterbury have a seat in the House of Lords and are entitled to vote.
Anime
Anime is animation, hand drawn or computer generated. It originated in Japan.
The Web says that in 2023 the global Anime industry was worth over thirty-one billion dollars. So what does anime have to do with religion?
The Catholic Church is holding a jubilee this year. Designated Pilgrims of Hope, it’s being held apparently as ‘a year of hope for a world suffering the impacts of war, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a climate crisis.’ Sure, that’s going to make a big difference to a world that continues to be beset by all the ills inherent in the capitalism system.
So, the church has, like football teams and various big business and military organisations, got itself a mascot. The mascot is of a young blue-haired, wide-eyed, cross-wearing female named Luce, Italian for light. The word ‘mascot’ comes from the French meaning ‘lucky charm.’ Sounds a bit secular to us. The resemblance to anime characters is unmistakable.
The Vatican said that the mascot was ‘part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with the pop culture so beloved by our young people’. She, Luce, (pronouns not specified), debuted at an Italian comics and games convention in October 2024. One assumes the ad agencies responsible for this are laughing all the way to the bank. Public reaction, as to any form of capitalist or religious propaganda, should be that of The Who – won’t get fooled again.
A more appropriate mascot would have been the Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The equivalent of a snake-oil salesman, the Pardoner travelled around swindling folk, persuading them that if they bought his relics they would be absolved from their sins.
DC
Tiny tips
We may be much more entertained by charity now. But on account of the Band Aid format, we are now arguably less knowledgeable about why some people suffer terribly around the world – and in no better a position to put an end to it (The Conversation).
Today, political scientists and pollsters use ‘the working class’ to describe members of the work force who do not have a college degree. By that definition, the number of working-class Americans has been declining as the country has grown wealthier and more educated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 38 percent of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2022, up from just 17 percent in 1980. There’s a major exception to that common definition, however. Marxist scholars use “working class” quite differently—typically encompassing anyone who depends on wages to survive, regardless of their educational experience (Reason).
In fact, the Democratic Party, the party of the slavocracy, of Jim Crow and of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, has never been a party of the working class. It has, and will always be, a capitalist party. Sanders’ political role…is to use his nominally ‘independent’ designation to provide the Democratic Party with a veneer of credibility in order to contain opposition to the whole capitalist system (WSWS).
What happened during the pandemic especially, was a good tutorial about how to do things. First of all, what pandemic showed us was the Hollywood utopian, you know, imagination of the future of humanity is absolutely bullshit, because when crises happen, people tend to help each other and be in solidarity, and they become even more, even loving, you know, towards each other. So we have to imagine politics as a, you know, natural disaster or like a disaster, like a pandemic, and we have to act like that (New Internationalist).
Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. ‘We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place’, he says. ‘Our best days are in the future’ (Prospect).
A ‘very rare’ 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie. The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947 (CNN).
Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to ‘true democracy’, aimed at realising ‘social justice’ after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers (WSWS).
‘The Turkish police catch 100 to 150 migrants every night. They have no mercy on them. They break their arms and legs (BBC).
I’m all for supporting a new and viable political group but let’s look at what we already have before trying to reinvent the wheel (Guardian).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)