God's Bankers

"Popes come and go, but the Curia goes on forever."

-- Vatican motto

A new book on the old corruption of the Catholic Church: "God's Bankers" by Gerald Posner. The Curia is the Church bureaucracy. Posner exercises the old injunction to follow the money. I am especially fond of the quote from one of the Vatican's more notorious bankers, Paul Marcinkus, “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys.”

1860s The South

We have an excerpt from a new book on racism and crime in the deep south. Turning America into a white country took a lot of effort.

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The first Klan was launched right after the Civil War in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a social club, but the next year it became a “regulative and protective organization” and began terrorizing former slaves, trying to put them back in their places, trying to make sure they realized that they might be free but they were not equal. This first Klan was disbanded in 1872 by its grand wizard, the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. By then, it had accomplished its goal of making sure that the freed slaves understood: The white man was still running the show in the South, emancipation or no emancipation, Thirteenth Amendment or no Thirteenth Amendment, and the Klan would enforce this with the sword if necessary.

-- David Beasley, "Without Mercy"

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Celebrities and Stuff

"WGBH Music: The Lone Bellow - Button (Live)" (Watch on YouTube)

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