1. I think I crushed one of my students’ spirit a little bit when I told the class that Braveheart was mostly made up.

2. Prayers for the Holy Father, who sounds like he’s on his way out. Whether immediately or in another year, all accounts are that he won’t be here much longer.

Now, obviously I have a lot of problems with how the Pope has reigned and the things he’s done. Though I try to avoid making public statements about him, since it’s not my place to do so (I’m sure you can find some on my blog, but I hope they’ll mostly be from when I was still working out what I thought the right response was). But that doesn’t really matter now; any time we know a man is about to meet God, we owe prayers on his behalf, especially a Pope. And the more critical we are of his actions, the more we should pray for him. If we think he’s done a poor job in perhaps the most important job a man can have – the Vicar of Christ – then, by extension, we must think he stands in need of God’s mercy.

We’ll all find ourselves in a similar position some day.

3. I’m starting to have to rush through my History classes, since I haven’t yet worked out the art of timing the course for a whole year, so I find myself with ten weeks to go and not even out of the 19th century.

4. This week I taught them about the great tycoons of the post-civil war era: John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and so on. These guys were interestingly contradictory characters: you have Rockefeller who was a devout Baptist who went to the same small church for most of his adult life and gave away over half-a-billion dollars…and who also used every legal and extra-legal trick in the book to ruthlessly crush his competitors and at his peak controlled more than 90% of the oil in America. It’s a fascinating portrait.

5. The dark side of these tycoons, with their obsession on economic efficiency, is that they approached employees as if they were vendors: “I want the most possible for the least money.” Except that when we’re talking about desperate men bargaining for a livelihood, that leads to an appallingly inhumane system of men working for twelve, fourteen hour days in brutal conditions for pennies and no job security.

The problem is that it is treated as an exchange between equals when it is nothing of the kind. The business owner and the job seeker are not men of equal standing coming to a mutually beneficial agreement: if the deal falls through, one side stands to lose almost nothing, the other stands to lose his ability to survive.

Remember, the pretense of equality always favors the stronger side. Employees are not equals, they are dependents.

6. I saw a recent poll showing that most of the population of most European countries said they would not fight for their nation in the event of a war.

I suspect the reason is that one part of the population has been taught to regard their nation as a racist, genocidal abomination, another part doesn’t care to risk their neck for the nation that keeps calling them racist, genocidal monsters, and the remainder are essentially foreigners with no loyalty to the country anyway.

As so often happens, I have to ask, “What the Hell did you think was going to happen?!”

7. Speaking of Popes: