Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:

Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests

Eh?

This found:

In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.

Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.

Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.

For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.

Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.

For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.

I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.

Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.

Related threads:

The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.

Secular suffering for nothing

Pancake Day.

Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

Lex Anteinternet: Super Dangerous Activities and Vast Resources

Lex Anteinternet: Super Dangerous Activities and Vast Resources: ...

Super Dangerous Activities and Vast Resources

A lot of Twitter is junk, but this comment hit me a bit:

The death of any man diminishes me but, beyond a quick yet sincere Requiescat for them, my main question now is how many public tax dollars were spent trying to rescue the super-rich from their super-dangerous escapades.

Not that they asked for it.

And not that there isn't an effort to rescue any who are, in the words of the hymn, "in peril on the sea".

But there's just something existentially different about this.

Many will say that nobody has a right to tell other people what to do with their money, but that is in fact wrong, and we do it all the time. There are plenty of things that are illegal that people spend their money on, and we aren't inclined to make them legal on this basis.

To have cash to such a surplus level that $250,000 can be spent for a single instance of amusement, no matter how profound the experience, raises moral questions of all sorts, and not just for those who are that well funded, but also for the societies allowing this to occur.

And the Titanic is the site of a mass loss of human life. To spend that amount of money to dive on what is essentially a grave is problematic.

There's a public duty to try to rescue those imperiled, irrespective of their wealth or lack of it. An interesting thing here is that the effort was undertaken when those in the know, already knew these individuals were dead. The U.S. Navy knew at the instant it occurred. Those on location did as well. It sounds as if those on location distributed the news within thirty minutes of it occurring.

I'm not saying that "expend any effort" shouldn't be attempted. That was done, and no doubt that cost at least the United States and Canada millions.

I'm saying that this shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, and that in this era of vast wealth, something should be reassessed.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. Vulgar

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. Vulgar:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. Vulgar

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Hageman Says She Would Vote To Impeach Biden

So Harriet Hageman has stated that she'd join Insurrection Barbie in a move that brings the nation's perilous attachment to democracy four or five steps closer to the brink.

The sad thing is that Hageman, whom I'm sure when she was younger probably would have found this abhorrent, probably means it now.

What on earth happened?

Make no mistake. Save for the last time it was attempted, every act to actually impeach a US President has been, frankly, stupid and ill-advised. This would be the stupidest.

People advancing such causes will regret it. The lucky ones will regret it in this World. The unlucky ones in the next, when they cannot atone for it here. But account for this we all will, including those who are in the stands watching the circus consume itself with horror.

Vulgar.

Missing Titanic sub crew killed after 'catastrophic implosion'

This is a tragedy. May God rest their souls and may the perpetual light shine upon them.

There's something really wrong with diving on what is, after all, a massive grave. Now the wreckage of this submarine befouls the grave.

I've been to plenty of locations where the dead lay, including battlefields. But there's something about this that is simply intrusive beyond all measure.

It really ought to stop.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLIV. We pay these people. . . why?

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of ...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of ...:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo...

From Opal Harkin's Instagram. The sentiments on the mortaboard are quite correct. FWIW, it's a little unusual to see mortorboard for a law school graduation, more typical is a certain sort of old style beret.

Earlier this week, I ran this post:

Lex Anteinternet: Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo...:
Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo and law live side by side in the life of CNFR competitor

The best of both worlds: Rodeo and law live side by side in the life of CNFR competitor

When I did so, I did it without commentary.

Didn't have the time to comment.

Opal Harkins (what a delightful old school name), has had an impressive rodeo career, and a pretty impressive academic one as well. Included in that academic career, she's just completed attending law school. That's what made me curious, as it's really unusual.

It would not, quite frankly, be easy to go to law school and be on a rodeo team, although one of the members of my law school class was a place kicker (or whatever the kicker on a football team is called) for one year on the UW football team, and one of the members of my father's dental school class was also a rodeo team member for his university, and a very accomplished one at that. The latter, I'd note, would be even more difficult than going to law school and being on a rodeo team.

So, it's possible.

Opal Harkins had a long association with rodeo, and did throughout her academic career. She was, for example, the National High School Rodeo Queen for 2016-17, which I only know due to this story. Oddly enough, she was sort of homeschooled, although through what I'd call remote schooling for high school students, which means she studied from home, but through an online program run through a Montana university, but had home school aspects. Indeed, when I read it I thought it was probably because she came from a remote ranch, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The five Harkins siblings are memorable for their talents alone – but their unique names contribute to their trademark as well. The three oldest siblings are boys: Odis, Othniel and Ogden, followed by two girls: Ouana and Opal.
“The story is that in my mom’s family, their names all start with “Sh” and my dad’s brothers and sister all start with “J,” says Harkins. “Odis was named after my great-grandpa, and after that, they had to keep the tradition up and find
“O” names for all the rest of us.”
Like the rest of her siblings, Harkins was homeschooled until 7th grade, when she had the choice to attend public school, which she did for a year. “My parents decided to homeschool all of us so they could be in control of what we were being taught,” says Harkins. “They wanted to be the main influence in our life and didn’t want it to be teachers or other students.” They learned through a Christian curriculum, including taking Bible classes since they were young.
The homeschool flexibility worked perfectly for a family that loved to rodeo together.
“We had schedules when we were all homeschooled together, we would work ahead on cold days and then ride all day on warm ones,” she says.
Now, technically a junior in high school, Harkins is again homeschooling and also taking college courses through the Montana State University – Billings High School Connections program. When she graduates high school, she will also have an associate’s degree in English.
“Being homeschooled is the reason why I am where I am in college right now,” she says. “It taught me to be self-motivated, and being able to take high school classes when I was in 8th grade is the reason why I was able to start college my freshman year of high school.”

Following graduating from that, she went on to university and then on to law school, staying in rodeo the the entire time. She obtained a big following in her high school years, with one print commentary calling her "a natural doe-eyed beauty", something I wouldn't have expected to see in print following the 1940s.

There's a number of Harkins who are lawyers in Billings, and she's likely (well. . .is) the daughter of one of them. So she's basically following in her father's footsteps. I wonder, in fact, if she'll hang her shingle there.

There are a lot of negative things posted here about the practice of law, without a doubt, including some comments about how lawyers themselves, surrendering their professionalism to their wallets, and law schools, having churned out vast numbers of lawyers in the 60s and 70s, have caused the profession not to be that.

And those comments are deserved.

A former president of the Wyoming State Bar had a "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" campaign at one time. Well, that was before the UBE meant that a lot of those lawyers never darkened Wyoming's border. Plenty of "Wyoming lawyers" today are Colorado lawyers, or Utah lawyers, or Texas lawyers, and that's for the money.

What else would it be for?

But in fairness, law has and still does provide a means for a lot of rural people to make an in town living. And a lot depends on the type of law a person does. Litigation is one thing, estate planning quite another. Domestic relations, something else. As a child of a lawyer, perhaps she knows which direction she's headed. A lot of new law school grads really don't.

One of the things noted in the article was this:

One day, she’ll have a career that will allow her to continue rodeoing, she’ll be able to afford her own nice trailer and nice horses.

I'm inclined to say, don't bet on it. And don't bet on having the time to be able to enjoy, well, pretty much anything of that type. But maybe I'll be wrong, and indeed lots of lawyers I know manage to do just that. And that says something about matching a career to a personality, something there is very little effort to do, at least by my observation, for law students.

Well, anyhow, remarkable story.