The Youngest Star, an Olden Star

 Wartime Christmas
by Joyce Kilmer 

Led by a star, a golden star,
The youngest star, an olden star,
Here the kings and the shepherds are,
Akneeling on the ground.
What did they come to the inn to see?
God in the Highest, and this is He,
A baby asleep on His mother’s knee
And with her kisses crowned. 

 Now is the earth a dreary place,
A troubled place, a weary place.
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees
Babies asleep on their mother’s knees.
While there are love and home -- and these --
There shall be Christmas Day.

The War of the Rohirrim

 I recently went to see The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in the theater. The reviews have been all over the place about it, and I think it has struggled because it is often seen as the test case for whether the 'franchise' can survive the general disaster that was The Rings of Power. This is unfortunate; it demands of the movie something that it probably could not have delivered anyway and I think that while it has a number of flaws, it mostly succeeds at what it was actually trying to do.

(1) In practice, everything Hollywood does with ideas from The Lord of the Rings is make prequels for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies. Rings of Power, for instance, is clearly at times trying to be an unofficial prequel; the Hobbit movies were more LOTR movie prequels than they were adaptations of The Hobbit. War is not an exception to this tendency. On this front, however, it does very well. It is, without any doubt whatsoever, better as a prequel to the LOTR movies than Rings of Power is. It is also better as a prequel than the Hobbit movies, with the caveat that the highs of the Hobbit movies (usually when the movies bother to adapt the book directly) are higher highs than War manages to achieve.

(2) At times the animation is excellent, but at times it seems stiff, clumsy, and choppy. This is emblematic of the movie as a whole; it does some things very, very well, and then it will suddenly have a rough patch in which the story, or the character motivations, or the ideas seem clumsily put together.

(3) Helm Hammerhand, voiced by Bryan Cox, who seems really to commit to the larger-than-life aspect of his character, is almost on his own a reason to watch the movie. Literally every time he is on the screen, the story suddenly becomes more interesting. He is also the character who gives one the most sense of well-roundedness; the movie really sells the idea that this is an extraordinary man and exceptional king who is dealing with a new situation he does not fully know how to handle. 

(4) The script sometimes has a made-by-committee feel, which is probably due to an inability to work out the complications of having had two different writing teams as well as considerable input from the director. This means that sometimes even very good ideas are not adequately developed. One good idea that I think could have been done better is the focus on Eowyn, who narrates the story. This is not made adequately clear in the story -- if you don't recognize Miranda Otto's voice, nothing would alert you to the fact until the credits.  This is an idea that could have done much to bind the story together; it explains the focus on Hera rather than Helm; and it would appeal to members of the audience who would like what is effectively an Eowyn story that does not damage Eowyn's canonical story. Eowyn telling a tale of a heroine who inspired her is something that could have worked exceptionally well, if there had been more commitment to it and more emphasis on it in both marketing and narration.

(5) The main character is Hera, Helm's daughter (mentioned in a sentence but never named by Tolkien). She sometimes gets sharply criticized in reviews, but I actually liked Hera as a character, for the most part. She actually makes a very plausible princess, for the most part, which is increasingly uncommon on the screen, The primary difficulty is that we don't get a full sense of her motivations.

(6) Character motivations, in fact, seems to be one of the things with which this movie struggles. The strongest character usually aren't given any obvious motivations for their major actions. The weakest character -- Wulf, the antagonist, is the most obvious one -- have motivations that make remarkably little sense, and it gets irritating at how much of the plot is moved forward by Wulf repeatedly doing exactly the opposite of what General Targg's consistently accurate analysis of the situation indicates he should do. There are also broader motivations that are somewhat baffling. Rohan and Gondor seemed to be assumed to be entirely separate kingdoms, when in reality Rohan is effectively a vassal state, the Rohirrim having received Rohan as a grant from Gondor when they as a tribe allied themselves with Gondor against other tribes, and having received the grant on the condition that they guard Gondor's northern border and provide military assistance in friendship. Thus it makes no sense for any Rohirrim, however interested, to protest the king's daugther marrying a Gondorian prince, as if that were itself a problem. The relation of the Rohirrim to the Dunlendings is never made sufficiently clear for the particular story being told, either. In the books, the Dunlendings are separate tribes who are effectively kept under close watch by Rohirrim, and serve as one of the examples of how the Rohirrim's tendency to mistreat other tribes nearly results in disaster in the War of the Ring. In the movie, it is much less clear how the situation is being conceived.

(7) This is movie that does not shy away from the dark and the violent; it is the most gory of the big-screen presentations of Middle Earth. It generally handles this well, but audiences should know it beforehand.

(8) One of the weaknesses of the movie as a prequel to the LOTR movies is that it sometimes tries to shoehorn in allusions, either visual or narrative; only a few of these allusions work well at all, and a couple of them end up being cheesy. Others that mostly work well -- like the brief introduction of Saruman -- could have been set up better, and thus despite being nice additions end up feeling tacked on.

My overall recommendation is that it is worth seeing; it is mostly better than anything since the LOTR movies. It has definite flaws, and sometimes feels like it needed one more serious revision or editing run-through, but it mostly does well what it is actually trying to do, and I think it holds up well in comparison with a lot of what is on the screen these days.

PNC Christmas Price Index

 The PNC Christmas Price Index for 2024:

Total Christmas Price Index (CPI) 

Even with its small basket of goods and services, the PNC Christmas Price Index is not immune to the rising costs in the broader U.S. economy, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. 

$49,263.47 (+5.4%)

... 

True Cost of Christmas in Song
$209,272.00 (+3.6%) 

 This represents the total cost of all the gifts bestowed by True Love when you count each repetition of the song, totaling 364 presents. Spreading cheer throughout the year in 2024 costs 3.6% more than in 2023.

The Ten Lords-a-Leaping surpassed the Seven Swans-a-Swimming as the most expensive Day of Christmas last year and continued to rise this year, now standing at $15,579.65. The Partridge in a Pear Tree saw the sharpest percentage rise, entirely due to the increase of costs in pear trees.

When All the Stars Become a Memory

 When all the Stars become a Memory
by Joseph Mary Plunkett 

When all the stars become a memory
Hid in the heart of heaven: when the sun
At last is resting from his weary run
Sinking to glorious silence in the sea
Of God’s own glory: when the immensity
Of Nature’s universe its fate has won
And its reward: when death to death is done
And deathless Being’s all that is to be --

 Your praise shall ’scape the grinding of the mills:
My songs shall live to drive their blinding cars
Through fiery apocalypse to Heaven’s bars!
When God’s loosed might the prophet’s word fulfils,
My songs shall see the ruin of the hills,
My songs shall sing the dirges of the stars.

Dashed Off XXVIII

 Scientific evidence depending on the likeness of the universe to design (i.e., the experiment) and on the likeness of the universe to abstract intelligibles (i.e., theory), no scientific evidence could ever be such as to rule out an intelligent cause of the universe.

covenant as exemplate of Trinitarian procession

Everything truly personal is to some extent timeless.

A theory of modality can only be fully unified through positing necessary being, ie.., a case in which necessity, actuality, and possibility are mutually implying.

symbolic delomic legisign as communicable imitation of incommunicable person

Human beings use symbolic delomic legisigns to construct other signs.

"Son of God and of a human being, incapable of being violated by reason of the one state, capable of suffering by reason of the other, he renewed our mortal essence through his immortal one." Leo I (Sermon 65)
"We possess the sign of circumcision, the sanctification of anointing, the consecration of priests. We possess the purity of sacrifice, the truth of Baptism, the honor of the temple. Rightly should the messengers have ceased after the message had come to pass. Yet our reverence for these promises should not be diminished just because the fullness of grace has been shown."
"Rational souls should cling especially to those thoughts from which they gain an increase of faith."
"A double remedy has been prepared for us miserable people by the Almighty Physician, one of which is in the mystery, the other in his example. Through the one, divine grace is conferred, by virtue of the other, human response is required. As God is the author of justification so human beings are debtors of devotion."

"Christ, the primordial mystery, the primordial sacrament and the source of all sacramentality, gives to the Church the quality of being a sacrament." Dumitrus Staniloae
"The Church is constituted through sacraments, is nourished by and extends itself through them."

"El Derecho es una especial normatividad que descansa sobre dos nociones: La titularidad, y la de capacitación o potestad." (Leonardo Polo)
"La mentira destruye la organizazión, porque la organizació se basa en la communicación y la mentira la anula. Si el conectivo social es el lenguaje, corromper el lenguaje es disolvenete."
"Lo malo de la mentira es la incommunicación que introduce."

The human race has always lived in an age of wonders.

One thing that must be understood about progress is that an undeniable improvement may create an insoluble problem.

The saintly intrigues us but is also just out of reach; we find it only in reflections and flashes.

It is easy to assume that our task is to attain mature adulthood, and in the long run it is, but our primary task here and now is to be born.

Salt brings out the flavor of everything, and we are the salt of the world. Light brings out the color of everything, and we are the light of the world.

"Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will." John Michael Greer
"A symbol held in one mind, charged with will and desire, can affect another even when there's no obvious way for the effect to take place; that's the central thesis of magic."
"You win a magical struggle by formulating an ideal, as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible, while completely ignoring the other guy."

Listening goes beyond letting people speak; one cannot listen without communicating.

Title to rights is always membership in a class (sometimes a class with no or one member).

reasons for the eminence of Shakespearean plays
-- development in an era of fruitful interchange between 'high brow' and 'low brow' culture
-- competent reworking of material already proven popular
-- balance in guiding and in giving freedom to the actors
-- richness of tehcnique used, suitable for teaching various aspects of dramatic art
-- balance in actability and in readability on the page
-- flood of memorable metaphors and expressions

Spatial and temporal coincidence should derive from constitution, not vice versa.

Visiblity plays a larger role in successful law enforcement than is usually recognized.

All bodies are located in various places at once; it's just that these places are usually overlapping. However, since place depends on boundary, and boundary can be relative, it does not seem absolutely imposssible for one body to be in two places that are from a particular perspective not overlapping.

The modern world has increased the extent to which people become entangled in prisons of words.

The degree to which one uses profanity is in general the degree to which one uses language primarily as an expressive medium rather than an instrument of reason.

Language rules us unless we domesticate it for ourselves.

To treat material objects as constituted in terms of space and time is to treat them as being relative to measurement.

proper semi-parts: like proper parts, but imperfectly distinguishable from other proper parts; thus supplementation does not strictly apply, because a whole may consist of one proper part and at least one proper semi-part. --> borders/boundaries may be an example

procrastination as a sign of boredom

'Whatever is moved is moved by another' as required for linking dreaming and waking

Moralizing is often not the moral course of action.

The Eucharist exhibits the maximum unity of sign, i.e., the maximal unity of representamen, object, and interpretant, that a sign can have and still be a genuine sign having all three.

Dreaming is arguably several distinct phenomena that are loosely grouped together.

-- the question of how much of what we call 'the dream' is actually the interpretation of a chaos, like an internal pareidolia, or story-association over a gibberish process

dreams as having only relative coherence

Some things are changed in a regular way; what is changed in a regular way has a separate cause of its being changed in a regular way; an infinite regress of such causes is not psosible; therefore we reach a first cause of regular change.

Empathy does not easily generalize.

The abstract specification of an experiment, being the relating of boundary values by experimental means, is in itself temporally and spatially indifferent. (This is important for replicability.)

the making of an artifact as selection of contingent possibilities of natural things

A legal system requires not merely laws but institutions (which may or may not have their origin in laws). 

The immediate object of a sign is that to which it refers in use. This use is always part of a broader process, whether inquisitive or practical, within which the sign reaches toward the object as it is at the end of the progress; this is the dynamic object. Every such process is part of an intellectual life whose end is the Beatific Vision, and the sign has in this context the relevant divine ideas as its final object.

dividing the representamen
Diamond: immediate representamen : what we primarily think of as the sign-vehicle 'itself'
Null: dynamic representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in its relevant context
Box: final representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in context of all creation

"Signum est quod se ipsum sensui et praeter se aliquid animo ostendit." Augustine (De dial.)
"Loqui est articulata voce signum dare."
"Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa disuntur." (De doct.)

"Figures came first so that their fulfillment could follow." Leo I

Human societies have a tendency to fracture along lines of stress, but some such societies have compensating elements.

People often underestimate the extent to which interpretation of our sensory epxeriences is affected and refined by testimony.

Vices shut us into the prison of our own character; virtues, on the other hand, open toward the fullness of human potential.

Maxims of Taste

 The following maxims of common human understanding do not properly come in here, as parts of the Critique of Taste, but yet they may serve to elucidate its fundamental propositions. They are: (1) to think for oneself; (2) to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought; the second of enlarged thought; the third of consecutive thought. The first is the maxim of a never passive reason. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of the reason, is called prejudice.... As regards the second maxim of the mind, we are otherwise wont to call him limited (borné, the opposite of enlarged) whose talents attain to no great use (especially as regards intensity). But here we are not speaking of the faculty of cognition, but of the mode of thought which makes a purposive use thereof. However small may be the area or the degree to which a man's natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others). The third maxim, viz. that of consecutive thought, is the most difficult to attain, and can only be attained by the combination of both the former and after the constant observance of them has grown into a habit. We may say that the first of these maxims is the maxim of understanding, the second of judgment, and the third of reason. 

[Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, J. H. Bernard, tr. Hafner Publishing Co. (New York: 1964), pp. 136-137.]

Admin Note

 The last few weeks have been fairly grueling, and the end of term even more grueling, and frankly my brain is a bit fried at this point. Things will continue to be light, for the most part.

The Fortnightly Book (Diu Crone, or The Crown) is mostly done, but the circumstances under which it had to be done were less than ideal, and I actually want to refresh my memory about parts. Given holiday scheduling, it therefore makes sense just to make it the first Fortnightly Book of 2025, so I should have it up January 4. That's the longest delay ever for a Fortnightly Book, but it was not practically avoidable.