SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic

Writer, former Managing Editor of Catholic Stand, autodidact, Knight of Columbus, oddball uncle to some amazing adults, penitent and erring disciple of Christ.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Layne's Laws of Ignorance™:

1) We don't know how much we don't know.

2) We don't know how much we can't know.

3) No matter how much we think we know, we know less than we think.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

In shorter terms: You have the explosions during testing so you don't have explosions when it counts. That's what testing is for.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Everybody’s calling the Blue Origin explosion last night a failure. They’re missing the point.

New Glenn didn’t go quietly. It roared during the static fire test, lit up the Florida sky, wrecked the pad and took down the lightning tower. Nobody hurt. That’s what pushing real hardware to the edge looks like in 2026.

Blue Origin’s whole mission is moving heavy industry off Earth so the planet can breathe. You don’t get there playing it safe.

This was raw data at several thousand degrees. One big boom closer to making it work.

The tower fell. The mission didn’t.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

Wading through fake ops like this makes it hard to return to X after a break.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Just dropped off a suit and shirt at the cleaners. The guy asked, "Will it be alright if it's ready by Thursday?" Not thinking about it, I said, "Yeah, I have no pressing need for it sooner. "

I'll be here all week. Try the sea bass.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

There's always a way to make beheading "tall poppies" sound noble.

[Kevin McLeod @bannon1975]

@MW74164398 This, this is exactly the point! Brilliantly put. Creating a bigger gap between the top and bottom should never be the goal of any system. We need a system that helps all groups, and ultimately creates kids who love reading. It's such a great thing to do.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

I see. @jk_rowling turned out to not be a member of the cult, just a great writer with some center-left politics, so far-left former fans must work out their anguish by recoding her work into "fascist" apologetics.

Boy, those grapes are sour, aren't they.

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

fundamentally the problem with telling any new stories set in the world of harry potter is that jk rowling didn’t notice she set up magic to be an allegory for being part of the ruling class

the allure of the original harry potter books is finding out you are secretly a prince, and rich, and being invited to your hidden kingdom where you learn how to exercise your royal power before taking the throne. this is a juvenile fantasy set in a juvenile world; you can’t tell adult stories about adult protagonists in this universe without running up against the fundamental power imbalance between wizards and muggles. muggles can never learn magic - peasants can never simply decide to become ruling class - and wizards get to arbitrarily manipulate their memory whenever they want to maintain their invisible rule, and nobody in the wizarding world sees a problem with this. muggleborns exist but are indoctrinated into wizarding life via boarding school - the ruling class indoctrinating talented outsiders. nonhuman magic is tightly controlled and regulated - the ruling class maintaining its monopoly on power

harry potter is a story about the reptilian conspiracy, from the pov of the reptilians. it pretends to be about fighting fascism in the form of voldemort but the way the premise structures wizard-muggle relations (and relations with nonhumans, eg house-elves) is itself almost inherently fascistic

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

I have a crazy idea: What say we wait until Nolan's "Odyssey" is released in the theaters before we declare it a failure? That way, we at least look like we're judging Nolan and the film on their merits.

[Alain Astruc @alainastruc]

I think I finally understand what is wrong with Nolan: his universe is adverse to myth. It is made entirely of causality, and causality alone.

He may be the most gifted filmmaker working in big-budget Hollywood today. But he is going to crash on myth the way sailors crashed on the rocks below the Sirens.

When I criticized the teaser, I was told: wait for the trailer. When I criticized the trailer, I was told: wait for the film. Then I read the two-hour interview Nolan gave to Time Magazine, and something clicked.

The tell is in a detail Nolan offers with obvious pride. He found a solution to what he saw as a narrative problem: why would the Trojans believe the horse was empty and drag it inside their city? His answer is to make the horse half-submerged, sinking into the sea, so the Trojans would rescue it rather than accept it as a gift.

It is a solution to a problem that never was one because it is a myth. The Trojans bring the horse inside because it is a gift and it has wheels. The poet tells you something plainly impossible with the same tone he uses to describe the sunrise, and in doing so he is signaling that the level of reality goes beyond mere causality and exists on other levels.

He is the kind of guy who would explain that Santa can fit through the chimney because he designed it wide enough from the start, using proper construction methods and reliable materials. And then explain how the reindeer are fed to sustain that much effort in a single night, and how Santa elaborated a clever logistics route to deliver all the gifts on time.

Watch him justify the armor despite its fantastical look, or explain the absence of orchestra because there was no orchestra in Ancient Greece. There were no IMAX cameras either, Christopher. A simple authorial act would have sufficed: because I like it better that way. That honesty might have opened a door out of causality.

This narrative prison is precisely why people eventually seek out avant-garde and experimental cinema, why they feel something release when causality finally breaks. Because causality is already the weight of our ordinary lives.

As long as Nolan stayed away from myth, his causal world of mirrors and clever tricks and puzzles worked beautifully, sometimes brilliantly. But this is something else. This is the gut of myth. This is the Dionysian spirit of mud and blood and the salt of the sea. This is the beautiful lie that makes you erupt with sacred joy.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

I can't like this enough.

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Sr. Mary Joseph Calore, SSCJ @sscjusa]

In 1937, Rupert Mayer stood in his pulpit at St. Michael's Church in Munich and preached against Hitler.

By then, Germany had been a Nazi dictatorship for four years. Most priests remained silent. Most bishops tried to negotiate with the regime. Most Germans cheered. Mayer preached the opposite.

He was 61 years old—a Jesuit priest in a black cassock, standing on a wooden prosthetic leg. He had lost his original leg 21 years earlier. Here is how he got there.

Rupert Mayer was born in Stuttgart on January 23, 1876, the son of a prosperous merchant. He wanted to be a Jesuit from his teens, but at his father’s request, he became a diocesan priest first. He was ordained in 1899 at age 23, and a year later, he finally entered the Jesuit novitiate.

By 1912, he had settled in Munich, the city he would serve for the rest of his life. After World War I, Munich was a broken place—full of jobless veterans, hungry families, and people drifting in from the countryside with no housing or hope. Mayer went to work. He collected food and clothing, found jobs, and walked the streets at night to visit the poor. He walked, then hobbled, then walked again on that wooden leg.

He had lost his leg during the Great War. Having volunteered as a military chaplain, he served in field hospitals and the trenches across France, Poland, and Romania. On December 30, 1916, a grenade exploded near him, destroying his left leg. He was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class—the first priest to receive one of Germany’s highest military honors.

Back in Munich, he never stopped. By 1921, he was preaching at St. Michael's and celebrating Mass at the train station at 3:10 AM so workers could attend before their early shifts. The city began calling him "the Apostle of Munich."

Then came 1933. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, and the Nazi Party began closing Catholic schools and trying to replace Christian identity with Nazi ideology. While much of the clergy stayed quiet to protect what they had, Mayer went straight to the pulpit. He preached against the Nazis by name, stating that a Catholic could not be a National Socialist and that Hitler’s racial theories contradicted the Gospel.

The Gestapo began sending informants to his sermons. In 1937, they ordered him to stop speaking in public altogether. He obeyed the letter of the law by avoiding rallies, but he returned to his pulpit and preached harder than ever.

He was arrested on June 5, 1937. At his trial, he told the judge: "Despite the ban imposed on me, I shall preach further, even if the state deems it a punishable act." He was given a suspended sentence, but he didn't stop. He was arrested a second time in 1938, then a third time in 1939. This time, the Gestapo tried to force him to break the seal of confession to reveal the names of Nazi opponents. Mayer refused.

At age 63, the one-legged priest was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and placed in solitary confinement. His health collapsed quickly. Fearing that his death in the camp would create a martyr, the Nazis moved him to Ettal Abbey under house arrest in 1940. For five years, he was forbidden to preach, leave, or receive visitors. He waited and prayed while his country destroyed itself.

On May 11, 1945, American soldiers liberated the Abbey. A U.S. officer personally drove Mayer back to the ruins of Munich. He climbed back into his damaged pulpit at St. Michael's and told the congregation: "Even a one-legged Jesuit, if it is God's will, can live longer than a 'thousand-year' dictatorship."

He spent his final months preaching reconciliation and forgiveness, refusing to call for revenge. On November 1, 1945, while preaching during Mass on All Saints' Day, he suffered a stroke and collapsed. He died within minutes, still in his vestments, still in his pulpit.

Mayer’s story matters because when most chose survival over witness, he chose the truth. He could have stayed quiet, but as he told a Gestapo interrogator, ....

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Charles III — the Third. Chuck 2 died in 1685. Maybe try not to be in such a rush to score culture-war points.

[MAGA Kitty @SaveUSAKitty]

King Charles II (and no, Ilhan Omar that’s not Eleven! 😆🙄) addresses Congress 🇬🇧 :

KING CHARLES: “Now, as you may know, when I address my own Parliament at Westminster, we still follow an age-old tradition and take a Member of Parliament hostage, holding him or her at Buckingham Palace until I am safely returned. These days, we look after our guests rather well, to the point that they often do not want to leave. I don't know, Mr Speaker, if there were any volunteers for that role here today.

As President Trump himself observed during his state visit to Britain last autumn, the bond of kinship and identity between America and the United Kingdom is priceless and eternal.
It is irreplaceable and unbreakable.

This is a city which symbolises a period in our shared history, or what Charles Dickens might have called a tale of two Georges. The first President, George Washington, and my five times great-grandfather, King George III. King George, as you know, never set foot in America.

And please rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, I am not here as part of some cunning rearguard action. The founding fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. 250 years ago, or as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day, they declared independence.”

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

At the end of "Continental Divide", Ernie Souchak (John Belushi) and Nell Porter (Blair Brown) have a quick wedding at the Amtrak station before he gets on to return to Chicago. One of witnesses wonders, "Aren't they going to ... consummate?" And another mutters, "I think they already have." The idea of sex consummating a marriage was dying even then.

[Leah Libresco Sargeant @LeahLibresco]

The NYT ran a special wedding planning section, and this quiz on preferences seems to omit one notable, traditional option.

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

This is what secretaries were, once upon a time — the underpaid, unappreciated people without whose skills and knowledge most companies would have collapsed under the weight of their leadership's ignorance.

[Gretchen Smith @codeofvets]

Every profession has an “unofficial layer” of leadership.

E‑4 Mafia…

the junior enlisted specialists who know exactly how the system works, where the shortcuts are, and how to get things done when the bureaucracy gets heavy.

They’re not in charge on paper.

They don’t have formal authority.

But they carry institutional knowledge, peer respect, and practical problem‑solving skills that keep teams moving.

This photo makes me smile because it reminds me that every organization, military or civilian, has people like this:

The ones who actually know how things work

The informal mentors others depend on

The culture carriers who bridge leadership intent and ground truth

Titles matter. Rank matters.

But so does experience, trust, and knowing the terrain, literal or organizational.

If you’ve ever worked in a high‑performing team, you know exactly who your “E‑4 Mafia” was.
#Leadership #VeteranExperience #OrganizationalCulture #InformalLeadership #MilitaryToCivilian

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

I guess only having oceanfront land counts, not having water access via rivers and lakes.

[Maia @maiamindel]

we're reaching john stuart mill levels of absurd "thought experimetns are just as good as real experiments" scientism with this one

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

"But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and absolutely bonkers to Gentiles."

https://t.co/qGdVAjWxZd

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Five shows to get to know me:
1) Star Trek (TOS)
2) Monty Python's Flying Circus
3) M*A*S*H
4) Soap
5) NCIS

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

Five shows to get to know me
1 Babylon 5
2 Star Trek
3 Fringe
4 Boondocks
5 Buck Rogers

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Why is this "stunning"? "No man left behind" is definitely an American military principle. It isn't always possible to go back for a missing comrade, but when it is, people don't have to be "voluntold" to go.

[WORLD NEWS @_MAGA_NEWS_]

🚨 ALERT: In a stunning statement, Retired Marine Joey Jones says the US airman downed in Iran fully trusts rescue teams will get them out.

“I was bleeding from four limbs with a punctured lung and never doubted they’d come for me. Army pilots would land on a bomb to save us!”

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

Papa Bene foresaw a smaller yet more faithful Church. Not as many people are converting as are leaving. But those who are converting are more orthodox, even traditionalist. Liberal Christianity, as a project and a theology, is circling the drain.

https://t.co/mEQtIhZfQO

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

By golly, I think Chase is catching on!

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

One Monkey

[SK Anthony S. Layne, KoC: The Impractical Catholic @AnthonySLayne]

I'm expanding my cooking range to include Chinese dishes. Tonight was kung pao shrimp, which isn't authentic but is definitely in the spirit. Being on a diet, and it being Good Friday, I manfully resisted the desire to have seconds. Very tasty.