Earlier today the editor of the Financial Times' Alphaville property published a very thoughtful mini-essay on centuries of storytelling, using the fire at Notre Dame as her jumping off point and the cult of belief that grew around the Marian apparitions in Fatima, Portugal as her subject.
She covers quite a bit of ground relating to the prophecies and how the revelations relate to Russia and current events. As I said, thoughtful, and in contradistinction to the rather lighter tone taken in a 2013 FT Alphaville post on pricing of tangibles which we've linked to a couple times including last December's anniversary of the introduction of bitcoin futures in "Izabella Kaminska On The Intangibles that go into Valuation With a Look at Contango in the Market for Water from the Grotto of Massabielle in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, France".
Lourdes being another case of the veneration of an apparition of Mary, this one in France in 1858.
In today's Fatima/Notre Dame post Izabella touches on the role of Saint Pope John Paul II in the overthrow of the Soviet communist system and exhibits great restraint in comparing JP-the-deuce with the current Pope Francis.
Here's her "Of Notre Dame burning and signs of the times".
And why do I hate Izabella?
For some reason I recalled that John Paul II was reputed to have a great sense of humor and I wondered if he would have liked the early internet joke:
Q: "Who's the Patron Saint of emails?"And now I can't get it out of my head.
A: St. Francis of a cc.
Can't...get...it...out...of...my...head
Here's her 2013 piece "The art of myth-making".
And the Paul Murphy draft?
Earlier this month I was sent a story on harvesting frankincense trees and, although it's the wrong end of the liturgical calendar I was going to do a post, for fear of forgetting by the time Christmas rolled around.
And since it was early April, I was going to drop a ref. to the Swiss spaghetti harvest of '57 and then Mr. Murphy posted a response to a commenter who had told him:
"...Alphaville seems very good at analysing economics and businesses, please, don't step too far out of your comfort zone and go into astrophysics."
Paul Murphy FT
"Maybe. But I’m genuinely worried there’s spaghetti-grows-on-trees side to this."
