I can always move back to Canada…

A version of this piece appeared in the Washington Post.

Full disclosure: I can move to Canada should the outcome of the Presidential election displease me.

That’s because Canada is from whence I came due to the outcome of another Presidential election, one that did please me.

In 2008, I was living in my hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, working often for US companies in my role as writer of books and producer of television. When Barack Obama won not just the White House, but the imagination of the civilized world with his message of hope and change, our street in Vancouver had a party. Other neighborhoods in Canada and around the world did the same, unleashing a massive cheer for the USA after the dark and bloody eight years preceding this momentous event.

And we decided, in the euphoric aftermath of Mr. Obama’s election, to become part of that hope and change by moving to the USA.  My wife is a US citizen, and our daughter was a year away from entering kindergarten, so it seemed like the perfect time to head south and east. Hope begat change already.

So, there I was, getting my green card in Montreal in March 2010. The immigration officer who approved my application talked to me about my work, and my love of hockey. She told me that she was learning French by reading a book on hockey, one entitled Hockey: La Fierté d’un Peuple.  I told her that I had written that book. Destiny was in play.

Indeed, it had been in play for a long time, ever since my father’s family immigrated to North America from Ireland. They had wanted to go to the United States, where they had family, but circumstances sent them to Canada, which was, as they say, good to them. Still, our family vacations would inevitably take us to California to see family, and to where my father dreamed of migrating to open a business. My mother would always back out at the last minute. I don’t know why, and by the time I was ready to fulfill my father’s dream, Alzheimer’s had robbed her of the capacity to tell me why.

So we came to New York City, and settled in Brooklyn. We were welcomed on Day 1 by our neighbors, the mother, African-American, the father, white, who invited us from our moving van and right into their house for wine, and my daughter met their daughter and so, a best friend. America the beautiful.

And so it went. The generosity of this country, the warmth of its spirit, its belief that the impossible dream could become possible sustained us as we made our way. To be sure, there was turbulence, but none so severe that gave us pause to say: hmm, maybe we should go back to the Old Country.

An amusing thing to us is that because we come from Canada, it’s hard to tell us from natural born American citizens. We can speak with strangers and friends alike who don’t know or have forgotten that we come from the land up north. And even though, as the great white arch demarcating the border between Canada and the United States at Blaine, Washington declaims on its wall, we are both “Children of a Common Mother,” we have found that our American sibling can sometimes confound.

However, in the spirit of our adopted country, we, too, empowered ourselves with clairvoyance, and through that lens could see some of the blemishes of our chosen homeland in a more forgiving light. And with such enlightenment, we believe the Founding Fathers didn’t understand the 2nd Amendment to triumph over all the others; that people who want to come to the USA by means legal or not generally do not want to abandon all they hold dear and uproot themselves and their families to come here to create criminal mayhem, so we need better doors, not walls;  that while life is indeed precious, perhaps we should devote more energy to enhancing the lives of our fellow citizens already with us, so that children don’t go to bed hungry, and women and men are helped, not punished, when making tough life decisions; and that the first or second or third recourse of the police in dealing with a human being, either in distress or at a traffic stop, should not be to kill them. We’re pretty sure the Founding Fathers would be with us on that one.

And we’re certain that they’d be with us in thinking that Barack Obama, the man whose election moved us to move, will be judged by history as a great president, who had vision and imagination and decency, and what he failed to do was not the result of his flaws or of an imperfect democracy, but because people opposed to him had contrary views of to whom our democracy belongs. But that’s why we have term limits. So someone else gets a chance to make their American dream into public policy.

Which brings me to the reason why people have invoked my homeland as a destination should the earth reverse on its axis and Donald Trump win the 2016 Presidential election. Indeed, we view him in the great tradition of American con artists, and history may judge him as just that, a colorful (and yes, add in whichever pejorative you choose and I will agree) character who supercharged a moment with his own brand of regime change, which, the majority rejected as not the kind of democracy in which they wished to live. When we looked at his plan, such as it is, the idea of democracy as the Founding Fathers envisioned would be a lot like the European society that they had chosen to reject: King Donald, dispatching armies to quash foreign lands, while collecting taxes and paying none.

So, I made my choice on October 26 in Federal Plaza in New York City, when I had my application for US citizenship approved during an interview process that was marked from the security guard at the door to the immigration officer who dealt with my case by courtesy, respect and great civility. Everyone knew what I was doing, and they made me feel welcome, and valued.  I will be sworn in an American too late to vote on November 8, but I don’t mind. I have voted already by not going back to Canada.

The Irish Problem

There is much truth in the Irish political joke that goes: “The problem with political jokes is that they get elected.”

I had never really thought about that before until 2016, when catastrophe hit the land and somehow a TV reality “star” got elected president of the USA. And started stocking his so-called administration with my tribe, Irish-Catholics.

My father was an Irish immigrant, and I grew up in a progressive Irish Catholic home where the Kennedys, problems and all, served as the model for what the Irish could do to make America a more perfect union.

Today, another Irish-Catholic, President Joe Biden, labors on that same enterprise of perfection, assisted by an impressive team of progressive Irish-Catholics such as Secretary of Labor, Mary Walsh, and Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, among others.

It was the Trump team of my tribe, however, that sounded the alarm bells and made me wonder what had gone so horribly wrong in the Irish-Catholic brain to make them think that serving Trump’s grifting, lying, corrupt, incompetent, and downright cruel agenda somehow connected with their Hibernian DNA?

Like so many things with Trump, though, that joke about political jokes getting elected is barely true when it is applied to his former administration, as only Irish-Catholic Mike Pence was voted in with Trump, and he is—shall we say –a touch lapsed, having diverted his spiritual path from Rome to that of evangelical Christianity. The rest of them, from Steve Bannon to Kellyanne Conway,  from Sean Spicer to John Kelly to Mick Mulvaney to Mike Flynn, are all Irish-Catholics by their DNA.  So, too, is Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House.

Which is a remarkable thing. It’s not as if the aforementioned held down obscure posts in the State Department (which, under Trump, no one did). They all held positions of key importance to the dysfunctional Trump White House, with many a pundit at the time calling Bannon the real president, and Trump the (formerly) twittering apprentice.

“A blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” is how Bannon described his origin story. And that hits the essence of the problem on the head. What the hell happened to make him the human battle standard for all that is rebarbative about Trump, aside from Trump himself?

And so, too, the rest of them. It’s as if they collectively forgot the hate and hardship directed at their Irish-Catholic ancestors who fled famine for America’s welcoming shores only to run smack into the nativist “Know-Nothings.”  These Protestant Americans feared that hordes of Irish-Catholic immigrants would take jobs from real Americans and that their so-called religion of popery would pollute the purity of the American Protestant ideal.  Indeed, posters around Boston in the mid-19th century proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.”

The Know-Nothings did everything from banning the Irish-Catholics from civilized society to burning down their churches to show true Christian virtue to these starving, desperate people. As history has a great sense of irony, many of these Irish-Catholics and their descendants went on to shape America’s greatest institutions and events, from the courts to the academy, to the media, to the battlefield, to the arena, to the Oval Office. And then some of them wound up as Know-Nothings, then and today still, accomplices of Trump.

This collision with our history got me thinking about whether there was something in the Irish-Catholic character—one which Freud famously did not say was impervious to psychotherapy – that was driving some of us into the kingdom of Trump? I mean, if Trump had filled key posts with German-American Mennonites, one would wonder if he was looking for free construction help (apparently his favorite kind) and for food in the Trump restaurants that finally really schmecks. So what’s was up with his apparent attraction to Irish-Catholics and theirs to him?

Well, loyalty for one (a one-way street in Trump’s case) to the point that they’ll say anything to defend Trump’s latest lie. So it’s Conway, née Fitzpatrick, who trotted out to lecture us on “alternative facts.” We saw Sean Spicer doing such a parody of the Irish blowhard bully-- ignorant of history and bereft of shame --in his press conferences that it was truly a testament to Melissa McCarthy’s talent that she could make us laugh even harder at him via her satire. Same with Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump (and not incidentally, both satirists are Irish-Catholics).

We can write off Conway and Spicer as having given the Blarney Stone the kiss it never forgot, and so, apparently, did Mike Flynn, but then again, we can’t. What, beyond loyalty, would make people who had, until this election, respected reputations, present themselves in such publicly humiliating positions, to defend the indefensible and to do so in high dudgeon?

Why would former altar boy Pence, and Homeland Security Secretary General John Kelly, who was a voice of reason until he wasn’t, line up to promote an agenda at such stark odds with their origins, and their faith—even if residually Catholic? Why would Paul Ryan, who still looks like he might sneak in an inning or two serving at Mass, and Georgetown grad and thus Jesuit-educated Mick Mulvaney want to rip apart all that Catholic social justice teaches in the name of slicing and dicing the budget? Didn’t their faith tell them that it isn’t going to get balanced ever, until we also remember what Jesus said about the logic of spending insane amounts of money on the machinery of war instead of education and health and caring for our weakest ("Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" Matthew 26:52).

The answer lies in fear, obedience, and rebellion, one that came to the Irish in a typically Irish way-- just when they thought they had it made. The Irish are the only people who embraced Christianity without the attendant bloody martyrdom, and so, in the 6th century, they invented the Green Martyrdom, whereby those seeking holiness would wander off into splendid isolation to commune with the divine. It was a perfect Irish solution.  Just you and God up there on verdant hills.

Then along came the English invader, and the blood of the Irish Catholics would stain the Emerald Isle for centuries, turning the green martyrs red, and marrying their impulse for holy isolation into a political one, absolutely convinced of its righteousness. For in that long conflict with England, the Irish developed a keen sense of politics, of justice, and ss well as our gift for storytelling-- written in a language imposed upon us that dominates still the English literary canon. We also developed a mighty army of ideas backed up by the willingness to both kill and die for, and cloaked it all in fierce loyalty to the tribe, for betrayal of that tribe meant death.

As Anglo-Protestants cracked the cruel whip of rule, the Catholic Church became the distinctly disloyal opposition. The people took their direction, both spiritual and political, from the parish priest, who took his from the bishop, who took his from the cardinal, who took his from the Pope, for the model of the Catholic Church is nothing if not militaristic. As a result of that local clerical power, the people hated the official government and rebelled against it. They believed divine deliverance would come, while deeply fearing the wrath of the Church, which could literally consign them to hell if they disobeyed.

The result was a culture of rebellious obedience based on collective fear, a counter-intuitive idea to everyone who isn’t Irish, but which makes total sense to Steve Bannon, who even today, while facing criminal contempt of Congress charges connected to his role in the January 6 putsch attempt, wants to “deconstruct the administrative state”.

At the same time he obeys a white, Catholic intellectual conservatism that aligns him with the likes of Irish-American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a Catholic purist seen by many as leading the opposition to Pope Francis. Bannon’s vision is at once both pristinely intellectual, and violently bloody, as he has promised that his agenda will bring on the clash of civilizations, which certainly transcends the usual jokes about the bellicose Irish that one hears on the 17th of March.

As for the rest of the Irish-Catholics who marched with Bannon in the Trump administration, their conviction came from this Irish duality which has devolved from the famine Irish desperation to become American, into a suburban Irish resentment at having their America stolen from them by a rigged system favoring the “foreigner” (who is anyone not white, for starters). It’s the same impulse which makes a generation of Irish-Catholics prefer to believe the dangerous blarney of their fellow tribesman and Trump-whisperer Sean Hannity on Fox, than, say, their parish priest, who might be a Jesuit from Nigeria. Hannity has a more appealing pulpit.

And so we have rebellion against whatever they now hate or fear—immigrants, Muslims, Black and Latinx people, a federal government that serves justice and equality for all and so on –while being obedient to Cardinal Bannon’s theocracy and ex-Pope Trump’s enforcement.

Indeed, the continued wrath of Trump in exile at Mar-a-Lago will speed them to the burning lakes of damnation should they not shout down an observable fact or shout out a democracy-threatening Trump Big lie with volume and velocity. It’s the same kind of mind-set that saw generations of men and women in Catholic religious orders cover up egregious crimes to preserve the honor of the Church, whose stern authority had trumped the message of the rabbi from Nazareth about truth and justice and love. Same thing here.

We have substantial evidence of egregious crimes committed by Trump and his cohort, and lingering smoke from a few suspicious fires, and those are not the ones warming the corned beef and cabbage. Indeed, St. Patrick himself might be motivated to chase all the snakes out of MAGA-land should he wash up on these shores today, but then, why would he, since he never did so in Ireland?

And that’s the kind of alternative fact perfectly made for the descendants of brutalized Irish immigrants who continue to do so much to dishonor their ancestors this St. Patrick’s Day as they try to restore a regime best left to our nightmares. So it’s left to the rest of us who share their DNA to follow our own rebellious obedience based on the fear that if we don’t protect our legacy of justice and truth, and keep the O’MAGA snakes out of the White House, then we all get consigned to national hell. Which, of course, is what Trump’s Green Machine doubtless thinks of we Irish in opposition.

It’s a typically Irish problem, but salutary to remember that when it comes to defeating tyranny, the Irish always win.

Can the technology behind Bitcoin be used to build a belief system?

Can the technology behind Bitcoin be used to build a belief system?

Michael McKinley

In the late 1940s, when he was a struggling writer of pulp fiction, L. Ron Hubbard said, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”

And so he did, one that came to be the billion-dollar international powerhouse known as Scientology. Indeed, it is not just Scientology that is rich. Religious entities generally are flush with cash in the United States. In 2017, religious organizations and causes received an estimated $127.37 billion out of the record $410 billion that Americans gave to charity.

The confluence of significant material resources with belief in a transcendent reality has often led to novel syntheses of spirituality and technology. Sometimes those are fanciful, perhaps utopian, plans for entirely new belief systems. At other times, believers repurpose new technology to sustain traditional religion into a new era, and even to fight social injustices such as human trafficking. There are recent examples of both approaches involving blockchain technology.

In May 2018, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Matt Liston and artist Avery Singer launched a new religion at the New Museum in New York City—and tried to leverage a technology usually associated with finance for more spiritual purposes. They proclaimed that they had created the religion 0xOmega not to make money for themselves, but to use the power of the blockchain to make religion democratic and to allow followers to redistribute its wealth.

“In looking at religion through this technical lens,” Mr. Liston said at the launch, “I discovered...religions are essentially coordination tools. They allow humans, as a society, to coordinate toward a common utility. Cryptocurrencies are mechanisms to coordinate society without a central trust authority.”

In other words, religion without a leader on the model of currency without a central bank.

After all, what cryptocurrencies already have in common with faith is that they depend on trust in something that cannot be seen. Money, as we know it, gets its value from our belief that its denomination will be accepted as valuable when we use it to buy or sell other goods. (Once upon a time this value was backed by gold, but it is now secured by our trust in the issuing government.) But cryptocurrency has neither intrinsic value—it cannot be redeemed for gold, for example—nor any physical form, printed or otherwise. It exists only as data in the ethereal network where it is offered, and no central bank or governmental authority controls its supply or guarantees its value.

“The impetus for this religion was looking at blockchain tokens and systems and particularly Bitcoin and saying, wait a sec, this is a religious belief system,” Mr. Liston said. “Bitcoin has value because people believe in it and evangelize it, and the more that value increases, the more incentive there is to evangelize it.”

0xOmega’s plan is that believers will contribute to this new religion with either traditional cash or cryptocurrency, which will then be converted to cyber tokens, thus becoming currency whose value exists within the religion. Currently, this plan is only on the drawing board; 0xOmega has registered a domain name, but its website is not yet up and running. Once it is, members will be able to decide by the consensus of the blockchain what the religion means and does. In the meantime, its founder has some more thinking to do.

“I’m interested in engaging with the religious community,” Mr. Liston said, but after the launch he was inundated with attention from the business and tech world, which he thought missed the point. “I really took some time to get away from all the attention. Being called a ‘prophet’ all the time was not flattering, but anxiety causing. “I wanted to think about this in a broader context, through the millennial situation about being divorced from both reality and belief systems, and so thinking about it in terms of general culture.”

Mr. Liston, who is 26, is part of that millennial spiritual drift, despite the fact he was raised in a religious household. “I grew up in a Conservative Jewish household. I grew up kosher, I can read Torah, but I don’t think I got the God gene,” he says. Even so, launching a new religion has brought him closer to his own. “In taking a step back from the theology angle of it and looking at religion as a coordination technology, I explained it in a way that made sense to me and all of a sudden became more interested in my own Judaism.”

He stresses that his goal is not so much to convert people to a new religion as to find more creative uses for blockchain technology. “I’m going to be collaborating with some writers to write speculative fiction about it—stuff that’s in between philosophy and science fiction—that’s scripture for [0xOmega] and I want to paint a picture of how people could be thinking about this in several decades’ time. It’s an experiment in taking a fiction and using accelerated hype cycles to make the fiction more real over time,” he said, which would happen by embedding it in the consciousness of the followers of 0xOmega over the next century.

A “hype cycle” uses a graph system to represent the evolution of specific technologies—from birth to social adoption to decay—and in that cycle the blockchain is still in its infancy, with Bitcoin making its debut in 2009. Getting a handle on the blockchain can seem as challenging as explaining the doctrine of the Trinity, but the idea behind the pseudonymous and still unmasked Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention is a little like Google Docs. When you share a Google Doc, as many people as you have shared it with can make changes to the document, which updates in real time. There is no middleman stopping you, as there is when you hand in a document to an editor or a teacher to review. For Bitcoin, the “doc” is the global transaction ledger, and allowing anyone to update it eliminates the need for a middleman, like a bank, when sending and receiving money. It also eliminates the fee the bank takes for acting as an intermediary.

Bitcoin has value because people believe in it and evangelize it, and the more that value increases, the more incentive there is to evangelize it. However, unlike Google Docs, which allows other users with access to the link to change and even delete your work, the blockchain allows only new entries and protects against the revision or deletion of existing data. It can be thought of as a digital spreadsheet that can exist on an infinite number of computers with no central authority running the shop, but in which rows can only be added to the bottom.

When you request a transaction—for example, to buy cryptocurrency or, in 0xOmega’s vision, to create a sacred text—that request goes out to a network of computers. Those computers use an algorithm to verify the transaction. Once verified, that transaction is added to other transactions to create a cryptographically signed “block” that is then added to the digital ledger known as the blockchain. The blockchain becomes a permanent record, which cannot be undone. Because the cryptographic signature of each new block depends on the signatures of the blocks preceding it, the blockchain can only be added to; its past, the record that must be trusted for a currency to work, cannot be changed.

It is this feature of the blockchain—its ability to guarantee a record without a central authority—that 0xOmega wants to leverage. The world’s religions are governed by sacred texts and traditions, with central arbiters who mediate between heaven and earth. The pope, the Dalai Lama, the chief rabbis and Islamic scholars all remain the ultimate earthly authorities for their faiths, while the faithful have little direct influence on their religion’s core beliefs except to choose to believe or not.

The “omega” in Mr. Liston’s creation comes from the concept of the Omega Point, developed by the 20th-century Jesuit priest and philosopher-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., who theorized that the universe is converging toward an endpoint at which all things living will reach union with God. This is an idea that has caught the attention of artists as diverse as Salvador Dalí, Don DeLillo and Flannery O’Connor.

For Mr. Liston, the challenge was to create a way for believers to push toward this cosmic endpoint more consciously. “I thought it would be interesting to see if you take existing religions, with religious scholars putting everything in a format that can be digitized—something like, say, Conservative Judaism—and it can be engaged with in this way and updated. We’re in a time where everything is accelerating very quickly, and religion can evolve and adapt by using a system like this.”

The whole project, despite seeming very alien to religious beliefs, brought me closer to religion. Participants in 0xOmega might decide they want to amend parts of the blockchain religion’s texts, starting with the “flame paper” that Mr. Liston and Ms. Singer released at the launch. The “flame paper” is a play on the usual crypto start-up’s “white paper.” They released only 40 hard copies of it at the New Museum and have asked that people not upload the “flame paper” publicly until the religion is active online. (So far, no one has.)

Mr. Liston also hopes that 0xOmega could “do good in the world,” beyond offering a mechanism to specify its own beliefs, by allowing followers to express their faith through donating to charitable causes, or, as the Roman Catholic Church has done for centuries, patronizing the arts.

At the launch, the artist Singer presented one of 0xOmega’s potential sacred objects. Currently in use as 0xOmega’s Twitter avatar, the Dogewhal is a narwhal with an infinity-symbol tail and a Doge head (based on a picture of a dog widely shared as an internet meme) wearing a beret. The Dogewhal also has tattoos which include the Ethereum logo, that being the cryptocurrency platform from which 0xOmega will launch. It will not be Ethereum’s first religious-themed use; the “Jesus Coin” now has nearly 18 billion crypto coins in circulation, in spite of what started as a satiric mission to “decentralize Jesus.” A company called Lotos is working on an Ethereum token aligned with Buddhism, and BitCoen began as Kosher but has expanded to include the world. Blossom Financial’s Smart Sukuk offers Halal cryptocurrency options to Muslims.

The Dogewhal is 0xOmega’s first potential sacred object, and through it, Mr. Liston explains how the decentralized religion will allow its followers to create the faith. Once the object is accepted as sacred by online consensus, a Dogewhal token will be auctioned. “The proceeds of this auction go to a DAO, which is unique to this token, and the proceeds of the DAO are used to create the sacred object,” Liston explained at the launch, which means the artist who made the Dogewhal would get paid. “And now you have a token that exists on the blockchain, which we’re calling ‘prayer’.”

“DAO” is a deliberate double entendre, referencing both the “way” or path from ancient Chinese philosophy and serving as an acronym for “distributed autonomous organization,” which is what 0xOmega aims to achieve with blockchain technology. Every transaction on 0xOmega will be taxed—a few cents shaved off—with the proceeds going back into the DAO, which then feeds the engine to develop this or more sacred objects.

0xOmega also incorporates the concept of pilgrimage, where processes such as “the weather plus a random number determine a holy site,” Mr. Liston explained, “and if you prove that you travel from one location to the holy site you have completed spiritual work and you earn tokens.”

There is also an analogue of the afterlife for 0xOmega. Immortality on 0xOmega is planned through downloading a user’s Facebook or Google data. Tokens would be earned by contributing this data, which would then theoretically allow 0xOmega to build a model of how you think (assuming your data is true). When you die, these personality-data tokens on the blockchain would be placed in an “afterlife DAO,” directed by that same model. The living, Mr. Liston suggests, could go on interacting with this model, which would continue to use your 0xOmega wealth long after you are dead.

Douglas Cowan, a professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a scholar of new religions, sees 0xOmega as fitting into a longer human quest to connect to the divine. “The Holy Grail in the internet era is a search for a religion that exists only and entirely online,” Mr. Cowan said. “Short of having sort of transhumanist uploading, I think it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to go looking for it because we don’t live our lives online. We live our lives in the real world, and the kind of things the blockchain is doing is technologically facilitating a process that has been going on offline for thousands of years.”

Mr. Cowan does see, however, a way to use the blockchain to make religion—or at least its administration—more efficient. “I can imagine St. Swithin’s on the Green parish is not doing so well. And they say, ‘So maybe we should rent out the hall. Where is the deed? Bob had the deed. Bob died years ago….’ We’re talking about applying the latest tools in terms of computing to the organization of religious life.”

This is precisely what the the founders of the Catholic Blockchain envision. They are a group of Catholics devoted to using the power of the blockchain to better serve the global Catholic community. Devin Rose, a software engineer in Austin, Tex., who co-founded the Catholic Blockchain, sees using this powerful new technology not to create a new religion, but to help a long-established one function better. “We can’t change religion because it comes from God and God is immutable,” Mr. Rose said. “But we can change how Catholics interact with their church through the blockchain.”

A link between blockchain—often associated with anonymous, untraceable transactions—and Catholicism seems odd on first glance, and Mr. Rose is quick to acknowledge that “Blockchain and cryptocurrency and all that goes with them often gets associated with criminals trying to hide their activities.” To be sure, the world of cryptocurrency, with 2,202 currencies listed as active on CoinMarketCap (as of May 23, 2019), has its share of gangsters and pranksters. Then again, Dogecoin, which started as a joke based on the same meme of the Japanese shiba inu dog that helped inspire the Dogewhal, today has a total value of $251 million and has already sponsored Nasdaq race cars and water wells in Africa, as well as helping to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Mr. Rose and his Catholic Blockchain innovators, however, are not interested in creating a new currency, but rather in developing a better way for the Catholic Church to manage everything from sacramental records—baptism, marriage, holy orders—to allowing investment in church property in a way that could be used to generate income for both the church and investors, Catholic or not.

“For example, say you had a Catholic school that wasn’t being used as a school anymore but is being rented out,” Mr. Rose explains. “You could invest in that process, and get tokens, which would be valued on the success of the propertyrental, and the money you paid would be used either to help with upkeep or for other purposes in the diocese. You could even buy chunks of church property that weren’t being used, and make a return the same way, so that it’s good for both parties.”

Mr. Rose, like many other engineers working in blockchain, sees its advantages not only for record storage and revenue through “smart contracts,” but also for financial transparency. “One of the problems the church has encountered is people not being able to see where their donations go. On the blockchain it would be very clear where church money is being invested.”

One of the problems the church has encountered is people not being able to see where their donations go. The Vatican has made a commitment to “enhancing financial transparency,” according to René Bruelhart, who heads its anti-money-laundering agency. Last year the Vatican joined the European Union payments system as part of that commitment.

While the Vatican has not taken up blockchain technology for financial transparency yet, it has considered it in other contexts. During a Vatican meeting in November 2017 to address global slavery, one address explored the ways cryptocurrency is used by slave traders, and how the blockchain could be used to detect human trafficking and possibly even to help vulnerable people maintain their own identity records and call for help.

“Cryptocurrencies allow fast transmission of money from one person to another, no matter how far apart geographically those persons are, and with some cryptocurrencies such transmissions can be done privately and anonymously, making them attractive to money launderers and human traffickers,” Mr. Rose explains. “But at the same time, because blockchains are immutable records, people in danger can insert messages into transactions on the blockchain, an S.O.S. in an electronic bottle, and others monitoring that blockchain could discover the message and find a way to help rescue the person.”

Despite concern about cryptocurrency’s long-term stability due to Bitcoin’s stunning recent volatility, institutional investors are climbing on board, merchants are accepting cryptocurrency, and the blockchain technology upon which it all rests is continuing to demonstrate its power to change the world. As for Matt Liston, the whole process of creating a blockchain religion and preparing for its launch online has changed his view on religion itself. Because of his technological journey, Mr. Liston is discovering anew something humans have connected with for millennia.

“This has made me more respectful and serious about other people’s religions,” he says. “And a lot of my generation are really divorced from religious beliefs, and it left a void in how society operates, and it left people searching for meaning. The whole project, despite seeming very alien to religious beliefs, brought me closer to religion.”

A Message from the People of York to their Duke

The City of York, an ancient walled settlement in the north of England, home to the splendid York Minster Cathedral and today, more than 200,000 people, was once the site of one of England’s worst atrocities.

On March 16th, 1190, the entire Jewish community of York was massacred as the ghastly apogee of a wave of anti-Semitic riots.

The 12 century saw the idea of Christianity reach its lowest, bloodiest remove from the message of Jesus. The Crusade against Islam in the Holy Land had begun, with England’s recently crowned king Richard I about to set off to kill Muslims himself. The so-called Christian fervor spurred a wave of violence against the Jews as well, one that not only infected England, but France and Germany.

Yet it was in York that the rioting became mass murder. A mob tried to burn down the home of Benedict of York, the wealthiest Jewish man in England. The terrified Jews of the city, about 150 men, women and children, were officially protected by the king, and barricaded themselves in the wooden keep of his castle.

The rioters were encouraged to take their blood lust to its homicidal end by Christians who owed money to Jewish money lenders. These Christians saw a chance to wipe out their debts by wiping out the Jews—and by burning the records of their debt, so that they wouldn’t have to repay that debt to the king.

Seeing death as a certainty when knights attacked the castle and the mob bayed for blood, most of the Jews chose to commit suicide—rather than renounce their faith or get slaughtered by the mob. The men killed their wives and children, set fire to the keep, and killed themselves.

King Richard felt this massacre was an affront to his royal self, and held an inquest. The city was fined, but no one was ever held to account. There was no atonement. And the King went off on his bloody Crusade.

The terrible events in York have stained the city’s moral reputation for more than 800 years, and they have grappled with it admirably, but today they have found a way to cleanse some of it.

Andrew, the Duke of York, has settled the civil case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, who alleged he sexually abused her as a minor. There is a kind of debt to history in this story too, an infamous photograph of Andrew, grinning with his arm around the teenage Ms. Giuffre, at the home of Ghislaine Maxwell, who “introduced” them, and who beams out at the camera—allegedly held by Jeffrey Epstein.

This photo-- ocular proof, as Othhelo put it --was going to be an issue at the trial Andrew had said he wanted to vindicate his name. The photo was not real because Andrew’s fat fingers were too thin; it was Photoshopped in Ibiza with some Irish dude standing in for Andy; the sun goes around the earth-- you name the dodgy defenses marshaled against it -- but other forces stopped that trial from happening.

Andrew will pay, reports say, as much as £12 million to Ms. Giuffre and a charity of her choice which supports survivors of sexual abuse. Where that money comes from is yet to be determined, but it’s clear Andrew saw settling as a much better option than being deposed by Ms. Giuffre’s lawyers in March 2022. After all, it’s his mother’s Jubilee Year, and there’s a memorial for his late father in March, and he couldn’t really show up with that court case hanging over him.

Of course, he will always have it hanging over him, and of all the punditry that will appear to parse why Andrew settled, the fact that he has done so has created a stunning clarity for the people of York upon learning of the settlement. They saw Andrew’s settlement, in which he admits no crime, as a way to remove another stain associated with their city. And so the Labour Party’s Rachael Maskell, who represents York, said Andrew must stop being the Duke of York.

“Although it is a relief that Prince Andrew has finally acknowledged and expressed regret for his close association with a convicted sex offender and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein,” Maskell said, “his long delay in doing so and initial response to the charges and Ms Giuffre have been source of deep hurt and embarrassment to many people across the city. Carrying a title does create an ambassadorial relationship with that place, and for somewhere with a global reputation, such as York, this is extremely important.”

The city which for centuries has had to deal with its terrible massacre of its Jewish population has also spent centuries trying to atone for it. While Andrew has not been accused of murdering people in the name of religion, he did a fair job of trying to kill Virginia Giuffre’s story, and her reputation and certainly her spirit and her innocent youth. And now, the City of York’s request to the Duke of York to drop his title as an act of contrition will be mixed into the history of that city, whether he drops his title or not. The fact that York, stained by history, asked not to be stained any further by Andrew, is enough.

Lincoln’s First Murder

On the chilly night of March 7, 1838, a wild-eyed man rides his horse into Springfield, Illinois, intent on getting revenge. His name is Henry Truett, and he believes he has been defamed.

 The accused is Dr. Jacob Early, a 36 year-old physician, a man much respected in the community.

 Henry Truett, 30 years old, confronts Jacob Early, sitting by the fire in the parlor of Spottswood’s Hotel, the finest in town. Truett is a land registrar-- a key figure in the westward expanding USA, where landowners have power and influence. Jacob Early has apparently and publicly called Truett incompetent—and corrupt.

 Early protests, and Truett grows enraged. Witnesses scatter as Truett produces a pistol. Early raises a chair to defend himself, and the pistol fires. Jacob Early is mortally wounded. Truett flees, but the witnesses chase him down and hold him for the law. And a certain hanging.

 Abraham Lincoln served with Jacob Early in the Black Hawk War, a conflict begun when Chief Black Hawk and a group of native Americans crossed into Illinois and were attacked by the U.S. militia in 1832.  Lincoln faced death with Jacob Early. And now his friend has been murdered.

 But Abraham Lincoln is hired to represent the killer, Henry Truett.

 It is 26-year-old Abraham Lincoln’s first murder trial. He needs the money. But he also needs the win. This six-foot-four, raw-boned, hangdog country boy knows that his future as a lawyer, and, as an ambitious politician, requires entry into polite society. It all rests on his success now.

 Abraham Lincoln-- America’s sixteenth president, and the most famous after George Washington—starts out as an impoverished young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and makes his way through the frontier society of early 19th century America to triumph for the defense in his first murder trial.

 Lincoln had arrived in Springfield earlier that year, a failed merchant who had taught himself the law. Too poor to rent his own place, he lives above Abner Ellis General Store with proprietor Joshua Speed, who becomes Lincoln’s best friend. Indeed, they share a bed, not uncommon on the frontier, and they both pursue the town’s single women at Springfield’s Sunday Socials.

 He shares a law practise with John Stuart, a mentor who will later become an enemy. It is through Stuart that young Abraham Lincoln becomes part of the legal team that must keep the wealthy Henry Truett from the gallows. Lincoln first has to talk down the rough town vigilantes who want to lynch Truett, and he sees that he needs to postpone the trial until the temperature of Springfield cools a bit.

 Lincoln succeeds in his delay. He is gifted at making things simple-- able to reduce even complex cases to a few key points. He is a great story teller, who uses brevity and clarity to make his point. And Lincoln’s special talent is logical oral argument-- not legal research. He has an uncanny ability to 'read' juries and influence them with his persuasive arguments.

 Lincoln also uses those gifts as a budding politician, making connections and speeches as he ventures beyond the limits of Springfield as part of the legal system in place in early 19th century frontier Illinois.  Lincoln rides out on the 8th Circuit to work his cases, with fellow lawyers and judges, traveling from one isolated town to the next to bring law to the frontier. Lincoln uses the circuit to develop his political network—talking politics, making friends, and learning how to become a president. And the teetotaling Lincoln is also the wittiest-- and most ribald --raconteur in the saloon at night. All the while Henry Truett fumes in the Springfield jail.

 Henry Truett is not happy to be locked up while Lincoln travels the county in service to the law, but Lincoln assures him it will help him in the end-- even though Lincoln spends sleepless nights plotting how he can win the case, and keep his own demons of melancholy at bay. He still mourns his great love, Ann Rutledge, who died of typhoid two years earlier. But he has hope in a new attraction to Mary Todd, sister of a wealthy local woman. If only she feels the same for him.

 Lincoln is determined to win Truett’s freedom. He works with Simeon Francis, a local journalist, to plant stories favorable to the case, and by the time a jury is finally selected in October 1838, passions have cooled, and Truett can receive a fair trial. It’s still a toss-up, for murder is not to be taken lightly even on the frontier, and Lincoln watches as his more experienced legal partners make their arguments.

 Stephen Douglas, a man whom Lincoln will encounter throughout his political life, is the prosecuting counsel. He’s 25 years old, and though a foot shorter than Lincoln, he’s a huge opponent, for Douglas is as eloquent as Lincoln, and as ambitious. He also has a clear-cut case of murder to argue, and his plea for death is convincing. Springfield has just become the capital of Illinois. If it is to be a proper capital city the rule of law must remain supreme and Henry Truett must hang.

 Lincoln’s legal partners know that Lincoln can best Douglas in debate. So, as a testament to their faith in him, they choose Lincoln to give the closing argument. Or perhaps, fears Lincoln, so he can fail and let them off the hook from the anger of Truett’s wealthy family.

 Abraham Lincoln will not back down from his own fears. Using his famous brevity and logic, Lincoln wins over the all-male and white jury, who come to see Truett as a distraught soul who killed in self-defense. Henry Truett is found not guilty.

 Abraham Lincoln’s words have freed the man who killed Lincoln’s friend. He has won his first murder trial—and established the foundation of the legend he will become.

Remembering Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer as Hamlet, Stratford Festival, 1957

In 1992, I won the New Views Screenwriting award from British Columbia Film for my screenplay “Impolite”. It was my first screenplay, I was fresh out of graduate school, and with the princely sum of $500,000 (Canadian) in my pocket, I was going to make my first movie.

The quest story focused on an obituary writer, Jack Yeats, chasing down a dead guy, and on that journey, encountering the slippery twins, Paris O’Rourke, a Catholic priest, and his brother Naples (possibly Satan). The director, David Hauka,  had cast everyone but the twins, when our producer, Raymond Massey, said “Christopher Plummer.”

Raymond’s grandfather, a great actor himself and after whom he was named, had worked with Plummer on Broadway in 1958 in Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.”, a play about the Book of Job, and so that’s why Chris said “Yes.” He would come to Vancouver and appear in this low-budget Canadian indie made by absolute beginners. Another take, perhaps, on Job and his boils.

So, we used a substantial chunk of the budget to house Chris and his wonderful wife Elaine at The Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver, and probably paid him less than what the hotel cost. And then we shot our first movie, in that lovely month of May. I got to spend my days sitting on folding chairs on set by day (we couldn’t afford a trailer, not even a U-Haul, and on one occasion, Chris and Elaine and I sat on a big rock in a park). And then, I sat in the Sutton Place bar by night with Chris Plummer, learning about his glorious life as an actor.

He had moved on from the days of rye and rye chasers to a glass or two of wine, and as I smoked at the time and he had given up, he would bum a cigarette from me, and hold it elegantly as he recalled great actors he had known, such as peter O’Toole and Albert Finney and Orson Welles and Michael Caine. Plummer was Oedipus and Welles was Tiresias, and they drank a lot. In Hamlet at Elsinore, Plummer was the student prince and Caine was Horatio, who cried so heavily over dead Hamlet that Plummer couldn’t stop twitching as Caine’s tear drops fell upon him, so they had to shoot the scene a few times. And we’d order another round and he’d tell me about acting Shakespeare in England, and starring on Broadway, and about his stellar life in the movies. He’d tell me about everything, except “The Sound of Music.”

Finally, seeing that I wasn’t going to give up, he said “I got paid a lousy $35,000 for that picture and had no percentage of the profits.” The film earned a total worldwide gross of $286,214,076, which, adjusted for inflation,  is $2.366 billion today.[1] I could see his point. And this seemed to be his real source of animosity toward a film beloved by millions. I never heard him call it “The Sound of Mucus.” Just that “cheapskate Nazi musical.”

One night, when we were spending another chunk of the budget on a fancy meal for Chris and Elaine, a fan approached our table with great reverence, and said that she loved him and his work,  and that in her view, he had reached his theatrical apex in The Sound of Music. I steeled myself for a quick slice and dice of this woman, as Chris was as sharp-edged eloquent and he was talented. However, he smiled sweetly and thanked her effusively and signed an autograph for her and her daughter. And when she was out of earshot, he said “$35,000 dollars.”

When he came to my apartment for dinner one night, he offered for dessert (as I had neglected that course) to read us all some James Joyce. And so we were sweetened by Christopher Plummer reading us The Dead, as if James Joyce himself was directing him, and if this was what he did at every incomplete dinner party. He was magnificent.

When “Impolite” played at the Independent Film Festival in New York City that autumn, Raymond and I came down from Toronto, where we had just appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival and had found ourselves up against films like “The Crying Game” and “Reservoir Dogs” and saw what you could do with a bigger budget. There was nowhere on earth like New York City to find ourselves that bigger budget.

Instead, we also found ourselves in the Angelika Film Center waiting with Chris for the trainee technicians to sort out the problem that was delaying the screening of our film (the problem was the trainee technicians). When it was clear that the repair was going to take some time,  Chris suggested we head into the lobby and grab a coffee.

As soon as we emerged into the lobby we saw that it was filled with maybe a dozen men in drag. They were there to see a film about drag that was screening a little later than ours. But they all saw Chris Plummer at the same time, and so Captain von Trapp was once again in the crosshairs of delighted and screaming fans, some of them half-naked in feather boas. I thought he was going to flee on to Houston Street and never speak to us again. But he gave me a look that said “$35,000” and winked on that sly smile of his. And then he signed autographs for those delighted Sound of Music fans, until there were no more left to sign, smiling and joking with them as if indeed, “The Sound of Music” had been the apex of his splendid career.

Time passed. Raymond stayed in the movie business  in Vancouver, and I wrote books, produced TV, and married an American and moved to New York City. Then the pandemic hit, and I went back to screenwriting. I wrote a COVID rom com set in Singapore with a pal who lives there. It’s not bad at all, and so we sent it to Raymond to see if he wants to pick up where we left off. All I ask is that he factors an extra $35,000 into the budget. And we’ll give it to something or someone who needs it, in the name of the great Christopher Plummer.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1965?amount=286214076

A Man Walks into a Bar…

“A man walks into a bar…” is the line that begins a thousand stories, some of them funny, some of them sad, but all of them very human. That’s because we humans have lived a good deal of our history in bars. To meet, to drink, and to do things that change the world.

There’s a rich history to be found in the great bars of the world, and not just the kind that interior decorators love. No, it’s the history of human schemes and dreams—and so, it’s the story of us all.

A Man Walks into a Bar will appeal to anyone who likes their history a little wet and their martinis a little dry. Taking a page from Anthony Bourdain’s successful “No Reservations” food series, our lively and learned host James Penner takes the audience around the world on a grand pub crawl. Viewers will engage with James, and with the fascinating people he meets along the way—the storytellers, the locals, the bartenders, and the unexpected. They’ll also learn about a famous drink in the bars we visit, and can snag drink recipes from our accompanying website. But really, you need neither be a drinker nor a history buff to like this show: all you need to like are good stories, told by a gifted storyteller and his entertaining colleagues.