1. From today’s sermon: St. Augustine said that, “Peace is the tranquility of Order.” That’s a line to build a frame of life on! And, as you can tell by the fact that this is going up two days late (again), I lack order in my life. Something I need to work on.

2. Back to school this week. Things went about as well as could be expected; the kids were fairly cooperative, classes went pretty smoothly, and no one whined too much about the changes I’m implementing.

3. A funny thing happened in history the other day. I tend to reserve Fridays for geography lessons, and we fell onto covering world capitals. One girl had a moment of confusion when asked the capital of the UK and said “It’s not London…” whereupon the entire class absorbed the idea, and we went through about five minutes or so of “well, I thought it was London, but….” At the end I told the kids that they had had an object lesson in peer pressure and false information.

4. In US history this week we covered the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War. It is not one of the more admirable periods of our history, to put it mildly (as, to their credit, many of the men alive at the time thought, including Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant). Among our lessons was the fact that, if you capture the head of state of a nation and force him to sign a treaty at gunpoint, the treaty isn’t actually going to be considered valid by that nation’s government.

Another lesson, which I didn’t highlight, is that whether something is legally valid or not ultimately matters less than whether the enforcing power can actually do anything about it. We can say Texas was stolen all we like; point is, there was nothing Mexico could do about it.

5. Incidentally, while looking up details on the ‘All Mexico Movement’ (the position that America should annex all of Mexico), I found this on Wikipedia:

The historian Frederick Merk, in Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (1963), argued that the failure of the All of Oregon and All of Mexico movements indicates that expansion was not as popular as historians have traditionally portrayed it to have been.

Note the core assumption: that the success or failure of a foreign policy goal is determined by how popular it is among the people, so that if it didn’t come off, it must not have enjoyed wide popular support. Rather than, say, the practical concerns of “did America actually have the manpower and political will to occupy and control the more established and heavily-populated regions of Mexico?” or “was the United States really going to risk another war with the British Empire to gain an extra five degrees latitude of unpopulated wilderness?”

How popular those movements actually were, I don’t know. But the point is that their success or failure doesn’t show their popularity one way or another, because popularity doesn’t determine the outcome of foreign policy.

6. It occurred to me that, if the Hollywood sign were to burn down, I actually wouldn’t feel any regret over it. That sign is the hollow relic of something – the old film industry – that is long dead and is not coming back. It’s destruction would only be a matter of the symbol finally matching the reality.

7. The fires in Los Angeles, from what I can see, are very much a case of retribution. In the most literal sense, they’re the consequences of decades of absolutely asinine decisions by the rulers of California, abetted by the voters, who are now reaping what they have sown. Of course, as Dr. Johnson pointed out, the tragic thing is that communal punishments inevitably harm the innocent as well as the guilty, and there is no way to prevent that. Which, the good doctor reminds us, compounds the guilt of those who cause the problem in the first place.

In any case, pray for the good people caught in the crossfire of corruption.