My father dug up the family coat of arms. It has a scissors on it, among other things. Apparently someone was very successful in the textile industry around the time of Henry VIII. The rising bourgeoisie. (No way of proving that I'm actually descended from that branch, of course).
At first I was crushed, but when you think of it a scissors can be a pretty fearsome weapon under some circumstances. Pry my scissors from cold dead hands, etc. We're by no means a bunch of wimps.
Swastika motifs are common in Asia as a Buddhist symbol, though they're mirror-image and foursquare compared to the Nazi one. There are also two brick chimneys here in Portland (Or) with swastika motifs in the bricks. I have no idea what the story behind them is.
Claims that feudalism was a Norman imposition on Anglo-Saxon justice were a functional part of the English Revolution of ca. 1688. Talk about the Magna Charta and Bad King John was part of that. Of course, the Shetlanders are arguing for the Norse legal forms of Canute, Bloodaxe, Bluetooth, Gorm, et al.
I agree that there are people who will really think that that's a picture of water. Probably lots. And it will go from there, too. Messages in the Sumerian alphabet. Remains of Soviet missile bases. Lemuria.
As far as that goes, the non-water part seems a little to much like some kind of life form. Sort of XXX, actually, like it was weird alternative Martian genitalia.
Oh wait -- I think that about everything.
However, I have a satellite picture of Eurasia which has obviously had the colors tweaked. (I also presume it's a composite map). But it gives you the most fantastic immediate perception of the layout of the continent -- land, water, forests, mountains, deserts, semideserts, farmland. Something I have a good basic knowledge of, and yeah, it's artificial, but they did a fantastic job.
I might say that my comment can be generalized: be careful about taking advice from mediocre, unsuccessful insiders in any field.
Of course, when the big shots give you advice, you have to ask yourself what their angle is. But usually they're successful because they know things other people don't, and probably also because they were willing to take more chances.
I was amazed at the response to my comment. As far as I'm concerned, every word that comes out of my mouth is both true and wise, but I've gotten used to the fact that not everyone agrees, and it discombobulates me when I get a predominantly positive response the way I did on that thread. Unique in my experience.
Patrick's Berenson quote was chilling.
I remember when we found out that Oklahoma City was home-grown and everyone relaxed. I didn't. I felt woprse than before.
Well, I understand why my Iranian friend relaxed. And apparently Congressman Helen Chenoweth (R, Id.)didn't relax; she saif something like "Now maybe people will listen".
Ethel the Blog. Not new, but not well known enough.
I basically think that if someone else had done it, it would have been a great thing to do. Intrinsically there was nothing wrong with it, but from other things he's done we all know that if Bush had been involved in the Immaculate Conception in some way, he would have fucked it up one way or another.
The way it was done puts the lie to the idea that things are going well in Iraq, though. He snuck in and out of town after dark, like a ten-most-wanted fugitive visiting his beloved mother one last time.
It doesn't seem to have played as well as Rove had hoped, according to a Newsweek poll. That does surprise me. And Matt Yglesias was more militant than me for once.
I buy cheaper, more-humbly-packaged candy. If you've ever been around one of those hot-shit packagers when they're strutting around talking trash, you'd understand why.
My take is that the Republicans expect protests of the Diebold machines and are all ready with an orchestrated counter-attack claiming that Democrats are unwilling to accept the results of the democratic process, but want to steal the election. So we'll end up with a Bush caretaker government until the dispute is resolved.
I'm disturbed that no one has picked up on the poor man's weevils. The rice I buy occasionally hatches out flies with very fragile bodies. (I don't us a lot of rice, so sometimes it sits for a few months.) Once I happened to look at my rice jar and noticed that about 20 of the grains of rice had succeeded in crawling partway up the side of the jar. Upon closer examination, they were cute little maggots. Quite an interesting visual effect, proof of God's great design, since they were the same size, shape, and color as the rice.
I do remember home delivery of milk. Also home delivery of groceries by a horse-drawn cart, and a stocky, lame blacksmith with a foot-powered bellows, and a rag-and-bone man with a horsecart scavaging at the dump, and ice chopped from the lake and stored under sawdust for use in coolers. We weren't allowed to go into the ice barn because they knew we'd pee on it.
Man! I'm old.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially on controversial issues. It's sort of a volunteer operation, and depends on the quality and bias of the volunteer.
To me the most important thing to look at is not just what is actually happening, but what powers are being held in reserve which have not been used yet. There's a kind of extraordinarily cheap, stupid realism that says "What are you worried about? You're acting like they're monitoring the library books you're reading, but they're simply not doing that. Take a deep breath."
It's really hard to say how stupid that is. All civil liberties awareness involves looking at the powers government has, rather than simply the government's acts. The question to ask is, in case of a declared state of emergency (etc.) or political unrest, what restraints are there on the police? Starting with Reagan and also under Clinton and Bush II (not sure about I), there have been major increases in police powers, combined with the loosening of restraints and oversight on the police and also a relaxing of the rules prohibiting the use of the military in domestic policing.
And we always have to worry that a "state of emergency" (not the correct legal term) can be declared by administrative fiat and might be as trumped-up as the WMD claims.
To say nothing about the fct that Ashcroft will be in the drivers' seat.
The black-helicopter people went over the top, they were insanely hostile to the Clintons, and were otherwise a pretty unappetizing bunch, but some of what they were saying was valid. Clinton's civil liberties instincts were very poor.
God chose to made dogs in such a way that they are able to lick themselves in places where it is impossible for us to lick ourselves. A lot of the hatred of dogs comes from envy. Each species is beautiful in its own way; for example, we have the opposable thumb, and they don't.
OK, then, what about kosher pickles. That's cucumbers in salt water, no vinegar, right? Where in Leviticus is that one covered.
In the West also (Texas, bleeding Kansas) the Civil war was brutal, with the civilian massacres, etc., characteristic of civil wars elsewhere.
A friend of mine who went to college in the middle 60's says that the Southern-revisionist story of the Civil War was orthodox almost everywhere. Immediately after the war the abolitionists were blamed for it by many, including many Yankees. ("The Philosopher's Club" talks about this). With the end of Reconstruction the anti-Abolitionist point of view became stronger, and as the Southern voting bloc in Congress became more important it became part of the political consensus. The Civil Rights movement shook the consensus, but since Reagan it's started to reestablish itself.
It's very odd that the solid RepublicanSouth should have such a hatred of Lincoln, but if you look at voting maps of 1870 or so and 2000, a very high proportion of states have switched parties in one direction or the other.
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