Nancy, Chuck and Stenny Hoyer kneeling in memory of St. George. I kid you not. She had to be helped up. Poor thang! pl
RSS- Russians taking reflexive control to a new level
- A New Beginning By Walrus
- It’s Over; Pogo Was Right – By Walrus
- “What are Israel’s protests and general strike about — and how big are they?”
- “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel”
- Tom67 on Mongolia
- “NASA Composite Booms Deploy, Mission Sets Sail in Space”
- Open Thread – 30 August 2024
- “Putin’s alternative pipeline flops quietly”
- SpaceX is about to send four people on a wild — and risky — mission into the radiation belts.
Shuck and Jive for the geriatric set. The pandering is unbelievable.
The pushback is coming, some are starting to point out St. George’s drug usage, criminal record etc. Like Candace Owens, I don’t know why black people keep putting the worst of their kind on pedestals.
Sacre Bleu!!! What a performance! Thus arrayed they could be taking an oath to embark on a crusade, ca. 1096.
WPFIII
The “jump the shark” Deplorables moment comes early this year!
There is something about those scarves that has raised a charge of “cultural appropriation.” I don’t know the details because the reference was a video and SWMBO was asleep so I could not play it.
The “flyover” country populated by us “deplorables” is spreading from coast to coast across the nation.
The far left crowd will be left in restricted and isolated pockets in certain metropolitan areas with their overall powers greatly reduced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9Si5pkAqg
“You only get power in reaction to a threat”
William F Buckley Saul Alinsky interview. Maybe old hat for some.
“I had to say something about the American politicians shameless and ignorantly using the Kente fabric as a prop in their virtue signaling.
*I’m usually more mild mannered than this so please forgive me, I’m upset.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/obianuju/status/1270053042340139008
Bill
Here’s a video about the cultural appropriation.
https://twitter.com/obianuju/status/1270053042340139008?s=21
Sir,
I don’t get their political antenna. Who were they trying to reach with their wokeness?
Don’t worry. Her Lordship will get right to renewing the Patriot Act that just expired, as soon as she can be helped up from her genuflection.
jack
Just pandering for Black votes.
Imagine the pose AIPAC will require…
well, at least they are not washing anyone feet–yet–like they did in North Carolina.
This picture is worth the heaps of black scorn it has triggered. The black push back against this stunt has been monumental. This is a campaign fodder money shot.
Wearing only a single tribe’s signature garb shows zero understanding of the murderous tribal prejudices that have wracked Africa both before and after the few decades of ” western colonialism”.
Much like wearing the wrong gang colors in the wrong hood will and does get you killed in Democrat controlled ghetto America. Why didn’t Maxine Waters warn them?
Another picture worth a million words: Bill Whittle does a brilliant job comparing red pill America and blue pill America – and why “coming together” may not be a worthy goal: https://www.dailywire.com/news/whittle-two-americas-are-you-on-team-red-or-team-blue-video
13 minutes very well spent if you still have problems making the case for red pill America among your blue friends and relatives. It chips away at the extreme of both sides – purple mush in the middle may dilute the rewards and punishments of both ends of the spectrum. Combine these extremes with great care.
Remember Theater of the Absurd? The Democrats are living it.
Their ability to reason has atrophied–that is, if they had ever developed an ability to reason logically.
I saw that photo op earlier and felt nothing but shame for the people who ever voted for such idiots. But a person has to understand that their BFFs all come out of Hollywood fantasy land.
I’m now waiting for Professor Schumer to get before a MSM camera and give us lowly children a lecture about all of this. When he talks he’s like the self-righteous professor that the students stealthily stick a “Kick Me” sign on his back. (I usually feel too sorry for Nancy, who just mumbles incoherently through her loose dentures.)
Did Nancy have to hit her Life Alert button?
Was the funeral in Houston open casket so St. George’s children could finally see him after years of absence?
Jack:
It is stupid, I agree.
The academic cap & gown that is worn at graduation started its life as an act of sincere imitation and homage by the Italian scholars of Islamic universities – which, at one time, were sources of learning and scholarship.
That cap & gown made its way back to the East, as new Muslim universities, channeling the Italian scholars, paid sincere initiation and homage to the Western universities.
It is regrettable that Zoroastrians could not copyright items such as “the Wise Lord”, “the Lord of Light”, “the Lord of Lies”, “the Lord of Darkness”, “Paradise”, “Hell”, “Purgatory”, “Last Judgement”, “Resurrection”, “Revelation” etc.
They could have made a lot of money by licensing them to all the religions that came after them.
It is interesting that US officials seem to have a propensity of announcing yet another sanction against Iran while standing on Persian rugs.
I think they should stand on something closer to European cultural heritage: beaten down dirt, covered with straw, and then covered with felt.
Babak
I was under the impression that they are imitations of monastic gowns.
Who knew SYNCHRONIZED PANDERING could be so hilarious?!?!?
That was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time, especially when poor old Nancy had to be helped up by 2 people! Oh boy, I suspect it’s going to make a truly comical RNC political ad. Plus, it looks like they’re all wearing FAKE Kente cloth, maybe a printed polyester substitute instead of woven cotton and silk. Tsk tsk tsk…
PS: Maybe the Speaker should spend less money on facelifts (one more and her eyebrows will be on top of her head) and get her creaky knees fixed instead. Meow!!!
Deap,
“Why didn’t Maxine Waters warn them?”
Probably because Maxine herself has no better understanding or idea of any of the cultural history behind these garments/colors than her white colleagues. What incentive would she have to really educate herself in such matters, anyway? In my experience with the American urban black population and their private attitudes toward African immigrants, the former often exhibit quite a bit of disdain and derision towards the latter. I saw it a lot in living DC where you have significant numbers of both groups. I’m not saying it’s universal or even the majority opinion, but it’s much more widely held that you’d think. It’s just not made very public. And the politicians largely see African cultural heritage as a useful political tool more than anything of real historical importance.
I believe Babak conflates the House of knowledge in Baghdad during the Golden Age of Islam – around the 800-1400’s with the later European University educational system which created the model of wider knowledge dissemination. It is the European model that remains a uniquely western construct and is now imported around the world for higher education.
Though “reading a subject at Cambridge” may come closer to the Middle Eastern House of Knowledge models. Certainly the legendary Library in Alexanderia was another similar house of knowledge collection, but not a university system.
There was an additional knowledge collection model run by a woman in Morocco during that same time period, but it did not lead to the far wider distribution of knowledge and academic discipline later found in the European university models.
Naples Italy was the site also of a very early university and indeed at the time in the 1100’s, it was a cross roads city between Europe and the declining Middle East. Andaluz Spain, under islamic domination, also had its knowledge collection moments.
However, for most parts of the early world, religious centers served most people for any disciplined educational and literacy engagement. Yes, it is true. The Irish did later save Western Civilization at one time when that world had gone dark by copying Christian texts.
The break though was the western development of the printing press and movement away from Latin that finally opened the concept of education for all that we see as the primary model today.
One debt we owe the Islamic world is their preservation of the works of the early Greeks (pagans) who were lost to the Christian world, and whose re-discovery via the Silk Road trafficing led to the flowering of the European Renaissance circa 15- 16th Century. Thank you. The Socratic method of teaching remains enduring, along with Platonic principles.
Hats off to Greece who really started it all. And to the world of Islam for preserving their texts. But really, hats off to the Silk Road which was our first experiment with cross-cultural globalization.
Matthew,
I don’t recall AIPAC ever oppsoing Schumer of Pelosi in their their many years in office.
Jack –
I always liked the colors in that Kente cloth. Years ago when I still wore a tie before retiring to the good life I tried to buy a Kente cloth tie. The vendor refused to sell it to me. He claimed I was going to do something nasty with it.
Babak –
With all due respect to Zarathustra, perhaps he should have paid some licensing fees himself. Resurrection, Hell, and Paradise predate him by a millennia. And probably much longer.
Think this is bad?
See that picture of the “police” chief in Webster, Ma. lying face down?
Being Mass., probably get a medal and a raise.
Trump does a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal church. Democrats reply by taking a knee for slain George Floyd. Who’s next and which was more effective?
Irony alert:
Was Chauvin ever assessed through the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory?
Deap,
It is my understanding that the true revival of ancient Greek thought in the West really dates from the arrival of Byzantine Greek scholars in Italy after the fall of Byzantium. These scholars brought with them the full canon of ancient Greek thought in the original Greek. Although it is certainly true that Islamic scholars had communicated at least some strands of ancient Greek thought to the Islamic world, this was due to their acquaintance with this tradition from earlier contacts with Christian scholars in conquered lands in the Middle East. They filtered this through the prism of Arabic, but the full exposure of the West to the original ancient Greek thinkers and scientists awaited the arrival of the Byzantine Greeks with the texts in the original Greek. And not only Aristotle became available in the original full form texts, but also those of the Platonists, too. Witness, for instance, the profound influence of Plato and Platonic thought on the works of Ficino and Bruno, only possible because of the availability of these ancient texts.
Babak, the Zoroastrian world view had a profound influence on Jewish thought during the times of Jewish presence in Persia. The development of eschatological thinking was directly influenced by the concept of a one way, historical progression of time of the Zoroastrians as opposed to the eternal recurrance of divine archetypes of those who did not conceive of existence in these one way historical terms. See the scholarly work of Mircea Eliade in which this debt of the Jews (and subsequent traditions such as the Christian and Islamic) to Zoroastrian thought is acknowledged and delineated.
George Floyd was a career criminal.
His funeral was for a hero.
?????
He was a bad guy who had a bad experience with (stupid) police.
In 2020 Amerika, there vill be NO FACTS.
Only emotional dimwits howling at the moon.
@Deap and all the rest of you. Chaos and mayhem all around and still we have the calm and perspective of true scholarship. That’s what I come here for.
Babak, one might think (hope) for even a minimal reduction in the sanctions by the US. Just for change sake, if nothing else. To see what if any effect it might have. I’m weary of all the sanctions. That does not mean, as some people might try to read it, as me condoning anything. I just want a bit of change to ascertain what the reaction might be.
Fred – Schumer and Pelosi are surely just riding the tiger for partisan purposes. Not that expertly, either. It’s their job to get the votes in. If activist prog is the way to do that they’ll go that way with as little thought as they dress themselves up in polyester Kente.
Not that they’re dim. To me Mrs Pelosi seems highly intelligent. But conviction politics is their tool, not their central concern.
They’re playing with dangerously disruptive forces as they pursue their single-minded quest for votes. No holds barred partisan politics isn’t that safe a game at present, not with those tools.
More and more middle of the roaders are looking on sceptically at that game. I came across an article today from a man who does not, as you do, study the Culture Wars. Seems he’s been too engrossed with our local affairs over here to have much time to spare for them. He nevertheless comes to much the same conclusion –
“The people pushing BLM couldn’t give a tinker’s toss about racism. This is just about destabilising the country in the hope of fomenting revolution. This is where the state can’t afford to cede even an inch to them. I’m all for a liberal and tolerant society but we can’t afford a supine and cowardly government which doesn’t even recognise the threat. That we caved into the mob this week is worrying. If the government won’t defend the country from agitators then voters will look to someone they think will. And that doesn’t end well either.”
https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/politics/it-starts-with-a-statue/
Oddly enough I still see Trump as the bulwark against the civil disorder that will inevitably follow if the “Culture Wars” get up more steam.
Leith:
Greek and Roman historians placed him at 8600 years from the present.
Which religion did you have in mind?
Jonst
From your lips to God’s wars.
However, somethings are just too entrenched now in the United States to change: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and soon Venezuela and I supposed Russia and China.
Until all the human beings in the United States who support those policies age and die, no change could be expected, in my opinion.
In case of US sanctions against Iran, the situation is even worse than say Cuba: in pursuit of destroying the enemies of Israel, the United States has besmirched her own honor. There is no way back now.
Fred: I was beign sarcastic. Imagine how much they will grovel at the next AIPAC conference if this level of threater is the new normal.
“But I shall spare seven thousand in Israel: all the knees that have not bent before Baal, all the mouths that have not kissed him.”
[1 Kings 19:18, the Lord speaking to Elijah at Mt. Horeb in the still, small voice.]
Knowledge of Greek (pagan) philosophy was never lost in the east. The eastern Church fathers were by and large well acquainted with it and not a few were formally educated in it. You can find Plato hiding amidst the frescoes in the narthexes of some Orthodox churches, along with Moses and other OT patriarchs and prophets. From Plato and Moses you get Philo and the Alexandrian Jews. From Philo draw a line to Origen. From Origen draw a line to Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and the other early fathers – all of these reference Platonic notions in implicit or explicit terms, as do other apologists.
Any notion that the Church canceled Plato would be erroneous. Conditions in the west following the collapse of the Western Empire were responsible for the so-called Dark Ages there. The Church didn’t cause the collapse but it suffered because of it, the most obvious symptom being the Schism.
Matthew
Don’t forget the groveling to any manifestation of negritude. And then the massed anti-white horde tore down a statue of Columbus in Richmond plus poor John Wickham.
… See the scholarly work of Mircea Eliade in which this debt of the Jews (and subsequent traditions such as the Christian and Islamic) to Zoroastrian thought is acknowledged and delineated.
Posted by: JerseyJeffersonian | 09 June 2020 at 11:34 PM
That’s quite funny really. Mircea Eliade? Really? I do have his work at hand, you want me to look something up to prove your point.
WPFIII: “Thus arrayed they could be taking an oath to embark on a crusade, ca. 1096.”
It’s eerie and hilarious how spaced apart they are. Monty Python-esque.
optimax,
Five kids by three different women, none in marriage. Hadn’t seen his son since the boy was five. The mother he called for as he was dying also unmarried, it seems. These patterns must be hard to break.
Chauvin may have actually done the kids a favor. I read that their college educations will be paid for. And now they have a martyr for a father instead of the corner drunk.
Babak –
No unanimity among historians regarding his time on earth. Some may have claimed 8600 years ago. Others have claimed he proceeded Cyrus by only a century or two. I’d bet he was in the middle somewhere, perhaps four millenia ago as proposed by linguistic historians and also posited by Encyclopaedia Iranica. But we may never know. Too bad Alexander allowed his troops to burn down and destroy the library in Persepolis.
In any case just like Christianity & Islam, his religion was NOT completely unprecedented and made out of new cloth. His inspiration came from the the religion and culture in place when he was a child. Ahura Mazda was present in older Central Asian Indo-Aryan religion, as was Asura in those Indo-Aryans who migrated to India.
Great guy though. I’m not mocking him. He is cited as being the first philosopher and the father of ethics; preceding Plato, Buddha, and Confucius. He was the first that we know of to propose ‘one God’. I wonder if his ideas on monotheism spread to Egypt and inspired Pharaoh Akhenaten’s single god in the 14th Century BC?
Just imagine what would happen if Republicans were 1/10th as proactive in courting the white vote…
Democrats want a do-over and “Jamaican” Kamala Harris has issued a no comment:
…….” These scarves were traditionally worn by the wealthy land-owners and dignitaries of the Ashanti (or Asante) tribes of what is now known as Ghana. They were made of silk, making them not only rare but also symbolic of wealth. More importantly, they were adorned by those who were involved in the pervasive slave trade the wealthy of the Ashanti tribe embraced.
You read that right. The elite in the Ashanti tribe who wore these stoles throughout history were slave owners and even slave traders. They were a scourge throughout the reason, taking people from tribes they would conquer and selling them as slaves. According to Wikipedia:
The Ashanti live in Ashanti specifically in Ashanti capital Kumasi metropolis and due to the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, a known diaspora of Ashanti exists in the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica. Slaves captured by the Ashantis and sold to the British and the Dutch along the coasts were sent to the West Indies, particularly Jamaica, Barbados, Netherlands Antilles, British Virgin Islands. the Bahamas etc. Ashanti are known to be very opposed to both the Fante and the British people, as the Ashanti only traded with the Dutch in times of their ascension to becoming a hegemony of most of the area of present-day Ghana.
Democrats went to war for the sake of preserving slavery. Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was mostly from Democrats. Their history of embracing domination over Black people is well document and apparently continues today.”
Stephanie
Floyd’s go fund me is 14 million and rising. Media programming of der people is perfected.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd
Defund government.
With 14 million Floyd’s kids don’t need college to succeed. They can buy gas stations cheap in Minneapolis at the moment and keep the fire burnin in their father’s name–the city will an eternal flame.
Thank you Leith.
The language of Gathas is so ancient, likely part of an Oral Tradition that was transmitted from chest to chest, that it is incomprehensible. This implies that his time was prior to that of Cyrus the Great by at least a millenia.
Many Zoroastrians try to pose Zoroaster as a sort of philosopher since a philosopher seems to get more respect nowadays than a prophet, it seems.
But they are wrong.
Zoroaster was the first one who comprehended or discovered or intuited or to whom was revealed the deep moral structure of the Universe.
To wit, he inverted the hierarchy of gods and super-beings, elevated the Asuras and demoted the Devas. To this day , the word for Demon in Persian is Div, related to Deva in Sanskrit.
He was the first prophet, and the first holy warrior for religion, and the first evangelist who sent men to transmit his message.
He was also the first prophet that was martyred – by the damed Turanians.
His idea of Light as the essence of God is with us to this day, in Christianity and in Islam. In fact, one can consider the electromagnetic field, without which Life cannot exist, to be both a manifestation and the analigue of the Divine Light that permeates the Universe and sustains it.
All prophets came from under the robes of Zoroaster, in my opinion.
to Babak, 11 Jun. 2020: Thank you.
It was my good fortune to have visited the Fire Temple at Yazd and to have climbed the Tower of Silence.
It is not at all implausible that Jesus of Nazareth came in contact with Persians – Zoroastrians, inasmuch as the Persians and Romans carried on border wars–and trade (shades of US-China) for centuries, including the time that Jesus is said to have lived and died. It is also true that very many Jews were part of Persia, and that very many Jews were, of course, part of the Roman Empire, and that the two groups of Jews clashed as often as they collaborated.
Babak –
A prophet for sure.
Although I would argue he was also a philosopher. Not in the narrow sense today in the west that we have of intellectuals in academia (no offense). But in the classical sense of the word he seems to me to have been a ‘pursuer of wisdom’, from φίλος (phílos, “loving”) + σοφία (sophía, “wisdom”).
Artemesia:
The 3 Magi, as Christian Tradition goes, were present at the Birth of Jesus. Now Magi – from Mogh مغ – designated some sort of Iranic priest.
Salman the Persian is also reputed to have been a mogh before joining the Prophet of Islam as a trusted companion.
The Quran states very clearly: “God is the Light of Heavens and Earth…” – recapitulating the doctrine of immanence of God in the Universe in the non-material form of Light.
Leith:
That was one of the major ideas of Suhrewardi, murdered for his ideas at age 38; that Zoroaster, Plato, Kay Khosrow and others were guardians as well as transmitters of an authentic Wisdom – Hikmat – which he called Perennial/Everlasting Wisdom.
His was a philosophy of Light.
A few days ago I whinged about the large numbers of foreign workers in medicine.
But — in the past 2 years a surgeon from Ghana has performed four surgeries on my face. I admit to having been concerned when first I was assigned to this physician, but he demonstrated excellent skills as a surgeon and also as a healer: he made me feel like I was his most important patient. I soon came to realize that every person in his orb was treated with the same care and respect. I count him in my pantheon of Extremplary Human Beings.
After a brief conversation about his homeland, I did a bit of research and learned that Ghana is home to a robust industry in textiles and fashion design, part of the legacy of 18th and early 19th century German colonizers. Although Germans were expelled post-WWI, railroads they built are still useful today.
Ghana and, especially, neighboring Togo were major ports for export of slaves. To the best of my knowledge, German colonizers did not engage in slave trade; rather, they introduced alternative forms of commerce and prosperity-creation.
Those nasty Germans. Who woulda thunk. Not Maxine Waters, Pelosi, Schumer.