Berlin Wall Remembrance

The Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of tyranny and oppression and the division between light and darkness, freedom and slavery, for 10,316 days. It has now been, as of today, 10,316 days since it was permanently breached en route to being dismantled. Image courtesy of  Milos Vojinovic‏ @infinite_milos on Twitter (all rights reserved).

Ali's Well Scene All Right

Today I played this "Ali's Well" segment from the 1962 cinema classic Lawrence of Arabia to show my students both the tribalism of the period as well as the first rumblings of Arab Nationalism as well as the physical climate and geography of that part of the world as well as the cinematic portrayal of British involvement in Arabia (and subsequently Palestine) in World War One in the context of the current Middle East Conflict unit for my tenth grade world history student teaching placement at Atascadero High School. This is undoubtedly one of the best movie scenes of all time.

Wall-Falling Wackiness

These people watched the Berlin Wall fall. These are their surprisingly quirky and humorous stories and back-stories. I shared this with my students the last day of the Cold War unit. 

Beware The Ides of March

Every March 15th is the Ides of March. The comment is from William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The painting is Morte di Cesare (Death of Caesar) by Vincenzo Camuccini.

Wehrmacht Amputation Image

Earlier last month I encountered this image on Google Images while searching for something else Wehrmacht-related which I can no longer recall. Anywho, I found this image strangely compelling and powerful. This image was shot in Russia in 1942 and shows a German soldier being treated by comrades after taking a high energy hit from a piece of metal (bullet or shrapnel) which amputated his left arm which rests in the foreground. It is highly probable none of the these men pictured survived the conflict. What a waste of fine infantry and humanity. If anybody can tell me more about this as a result of their own prior knowledge I am quite welcome to more information. Photographer unknown.

First & Only Übermensch

Diogenes of Sinope was an iconoclast, contrarian, shit-stirrer, square peg, misfit, early Cynic philosopher, and perhaps a bit of a nut. He certainly the sort of Free Spirit still celebrated in the West where Hellenistic ideas changed the way people think and talk about things and what they value and thus essentially how they live, especially since the Renaissance, and which continues to this day.
Notes:
*Click on image to zoom in so that small print can become legible.
**Cynicism has changed in meaning from the days of Diogenes to the Modern Era.
*** Übermensch means "super-man" in German and refers to a superlative man concept conceived by Nietzsche.

Faces of Human History

I saw this on Pinterest (yes, I'm on Pinterest but not very often) and was drawn to its profound beauty, mystery, and wonder. These are faces of human history frozen in the current generation of young women scattered across the globe. However, these visages record the story of human migration, hybridization, and adaptation going back 60,000 years give or take. I could not determine the author of this image.

Graphic of the Day - Catastrophic Hieroglyphs

This morning on Twitter I espied this cool modern appropriation/reinterpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs applied to contemporary concerns about impending and ongoing mayhem. It accompanied the fascinating and insightful article "What the ancient past can teach us about the chaos of 2016." Image by Dom McKenzie (all rights reserved).

Armenian Genocide Remembrance

A month ago tomorrow was the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. On the Cal Poly campus a commemorative and educational display of vinyl panels placed upon the ground in the area of the Dexter Lawn was set up for a day. I took these images with my iPhone in a high-glare environment which turned out so-so but will suffice for our purposes here.

Numbers encircled by red are estimated casualty counts by region.

The numbers are subject to much contentious debate, but regardless, something terrible happened despite Turkish denials.

More estimated death counts. Of this Hitler wrote in 1939 in smugly referring to his intended genocide of Poles, spoke thus of the Armenian Holocaust: "Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?" As with so many other things, he was wrong about that, too.

One panel was previously stolen according to organizers, but no mention of when and whom stole it is unknown: Turkish or Armenian thieves? All photos by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Eighth Wonder of the Modern World

The New Zealand protectorate of Niue commissioned the Mint of Poland to produce a 7-ounce .999 pure silver round coin. It features an early modern map of the world by Dutch cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu and on top lists the Seven Wonders of the Modern World and a features Swarovski crystal at each point on the globe one of those wonders is located. This is a limited edition run of these of just over 1000 so needless to say I will never own one. Image courtesy of Getty Images (all rights reserved).

Don't Burn This... It Has Fire In It Already

Dang Thuy Tram

A few weeks ago while traveling through Southern California I listened to the following most extraordinary account on National Public Radio's local affiliate KCRW. I have been haunted by the story of Dang Thuy Tram ever since. Her story is both breathtakingly beautiful and soul-crushingly sorrowful... contradictions in orders of magnitude seldom achieved outside of wartime. You may read about this story involving not only Tram but her surviving Vietnamese family and more recently adopted American family HERE. Below is a player for the half-hour broadcast that everybody would do well to hear.

Trinity 69 Years Ago Today

Sixty-nine years ago today the Atomic Age officially began with Trinity and the course of human history was forever altered. Under the raw footage below these words are much more profound words about that fateful day 69 years ago which you really must read. They are by a friend of mine who is an aficionado of that entire episode of history whose passion comes out in this wonderful piece of writing. It is everything I strive for in my own writing but rarely achieve: short and sweet!

July 16, 1945. 5:29 a.m.

We are approaching the end of World War II. A war that has cost 55 million lives globally & introduced some of the most inhumane events to the history of humankind.

Japan is now encircled & being bombarded by the... American Navy. Okinawa has fallen at the cost of 12,000 American, 100,000 Imperial Japanese, & 100,000 civilian Okinawan lives.
2.1 billion dollars has been spent on the Manhattan Project, based upon the idea that splitting the nucleus of an atom will release such tremendous energy that, if enough atoms are split in a chain reaction, one bomb could destroy an entire city. A single bomb.

On July 16, all of the key players—Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Fermi, General Groves, etc.--are gathered at the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The countdown begins. At zero, the test bomb detonates atop a tower there in the desert.

At 16 microseconds (16 thousandths of a second), this photo is captured on film. The explosion is already 400 feet wide & spreading at an impossible pace. The center of the explosion is as hot as the sun. It is equally as bright throughout this area of New Mexico. As the nuclear explosion casts off such a bright flash that it turns night into midday, it is documented that a blind woman, 150 miles away, asks, "What's that brilliant light?"

The tower beneath the atomic bomb disintegrates & the white sand throughout the area melts to green glass, now called Trinitite. Watching the growing ball of flame, Dr. Oppenheimer murmurs a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "NOW I AM BECOME DEATH; THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS."
World War II will be over in 29 days.

Science has demonically but successfully united with government & military. For his role in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer would be nicknamed "The American Prometheus." (Prometheus was the Greek god who introduced fire to mankind before we were ready for it.) It was Oppenheimer who code-named the Trinity Test after a line from the poem by John Donne: “Batter my heart, three-personed God.”

Now here's the rest of the story:

The planet Uranus was 1.8 billion miles from earth in July of 1945. Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. It takes 9,677 seconds, or 161 minutes, for light to travel between the two planets.

The U.S.S. Indianapolis, bound for the island of Tinian & loaded with enriched Uranium & Plutonium for the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs, respectively, has left port from Hunter’s Point, San Francisco. She crosses the San Francisco Bay & is passing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge & entering the Pacific Ocean at 7:11 a.m. local time, July 16, 1945.

This is 161 minutes after the apex of the Trinity Test.
At precisely this moment, as the tragically--fated USS Indianapolis is bringing hell to the Pacific Theater, the light from the Trinity Test would be reaching Uranus. The planet Uranus, after which "Uranium" is named.

The Atomic Age has begun. 

By Andy Piantanida

Never Forget End-Cretaceous!

Nuke Testing Sequence (1945-1998)

A friend of mine posted this on his Facebook Wall. I noticed it and was immediately taken with it. Enjoy!
Note: for more info on this please read HERE.

A Millenium Of European History

Quote of the Day - Thomas Jefferson

"A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable" ~ Thomas Jefferson

Vesuvius AD 79 Surge Redux

This is remarkable but features only the last segment of the entire video featuring a sequential montage of scenes such as would have been seen from Pompeii as it was being destroyed by Mount Vesuvius from August 24 through August 25, 79 AD. HERE is the entire video which is well worth watching. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the embed code so I can't simply use it on this blog.

Quote of the Day - James Joyce

"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America" ~ James Joyce on this date in 1912.

Dionysus Was A Wine Snob

I'm currently reading the book "Divine Vintage" by Randall Heskett and Joel Butler which is a fascinating history of not only wine but necessarily on a related note the history of human civilization as well.
On page 20 I found the following wonderful quote:

 "Wine was available only to royalty and the wealthy. According to a later Greek story, Dionysus, whose origins were associated with a more ancient eastern deity, fled from Mesopotamia because people there drank only beer. This was a Greek way of explaining the barbarian nature of Babylonian society; they drank beer and not wine."

 This strongly suggests that our modern tendency to associate wine consumption with higher social/cultural status and in comparison beer consumption with lower social/cultural status has an antecedent in ancient history. Apparently, going way back to ancient human civilizations the winos looked down their noses at the beer-guzzlers.

My Top 10 Rants At Present

Quite a number of things have been chapping my hide lately and a few of them feel like a flaming stick up my ass. I've been planning on posting such a list for some time but tonight I feel pissy enough to actually get around to doing it. Below is my current list in no particular order of significance.

1. Highly ideological people who lack the chops to face me in debate directly with facts but feel compelled to resort to straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, false causality fallacies, Parthian shots, and other such rhetorical devices (not limited to full-bug-out retreats) of those who know they can't win in a stand-up fight with the facts. I have experienced all these of late and dispatched them without mercy. The exceptions are one of my Parthian shooters got in his car at my yard sale before I could set fire to his dogmatic assertion that Wal-Mart has NOT effectively sent American jobs to China. The other Parthian Shooter unfriended me on Facebook and blocked me there and on Twitter but not before making trite and condescending remarks of a most vapid and candy-assed and self-righteously indignant nature. 
2. I hate tweekers, as in "hate-hate." As a Christian I love the sinner but hate the tweeker. I am certain they can be cured for the cost of a bullet cross-hemisphere to the brain. They are starting to become a problem in my life and the lives of my loved ones by way of being scary and disruptive and unpredictable neighbors who attract an unsavory and ill-tempered element into the neighborhood. In the good old days neighborhoods and communities took care of such problems sans the need for the constabulary and other legal avenues.
3. Liberal hypocrisy gets worse year after year. I realize Conservatives are no better but of late their hypocritical excesses have not been on display to the extent it has for Liberals. From the Liberal (and to some extent black) bias of the Zimmerman saga/non-story story to the water carrying for a Liberal President who has one-upped his Conservative predecessor's "extraordinary renditions" of non-citizens (to which I never objected unlike my Liberal friends who feigned outrage) with now the assassination of American citizens abroad sans trial (to which I don't object personally but my Liberal friends also don't seem to in a convenient turn of inconsistency) by way of drone strikes on foreign soil. Add to that our President using the I.R.S. to help him win a very narrow reelection last year by way of using the I.R.S. to disproportionately go after Tea Party and Patriot Groups in a turn of malfeasance reminiscent of Richard Nixon. Liberals to this day love to excoriate Nixon for doing the very same thing but outrageously call Obama's sins of the same sort a "false scandal". Add to that his being responsible for having a then-defense secretary (Leon Panetta) whom outed the Pakistani doctor whom helped finger Osama bin Ladin which doctor is now in prison for the rest of his life on treason charges in Pakistan. Top that off with the same Liberal President possessing a Vice President who outed the SEAL Team (Six) which killed Osama bin Ladin leading to that unit being targeted by Al Qaeda. Then predictably Al Qaeda got to them and wiped out 15 members of Seal Team Six along with 23 other personnel in the shootdown of a Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade two years ago. This makes another Bush-era Liberal cause celebre, to wit, the Natalie Plame Affair pale by comparison as no Americans died and yet Liberals at the time went ape shit about that one. 
4. Speaking of the Zimmerman Trial that sure did expose a whole lot of racism in America... within segments of the black community whom tend to come from an arch-Liberal political persuasion of ethnocentric race-baiting, guilt-mongering, blame-gaming, shit-stirring, responsibility-dodging, fact-obfuscating apologetics-for-bad-behavior-purveying on a scale that boggles the mind. This receives little notice given how long and gradual it has been worsening and how bullied into acquiescent quietude White America has been since the 1970's or thereabouts. That time frame is not a coincidence as it is around the time the civil rights movement for black Americans lost it's moral superiority and purity once and for all following a decline that began around the time that more angry elements poisoned the movement. This was symbolically capped off with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mistakenly tying the civil rights movement to opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967, which ought to have remained a separate issue. Of course, then there is the fact the Liberal newsmedia (they hate that label claiming it does not exist the way the Italian mafia has for years denied the existence of the Italian mafia). Methinks they protest too much! Anywho, the aforementioned Fifth Column Fourth Estate generated an artificial narrative of what happened in this case that played upon the reverse racist propensities and proclivities of those susceptible to such hackneyed and morally-bankrupt impulses and perceptions. By the end of the trial an entire segment of society that was disproportionately Left-leaning and more melanin-rich was convinced of the injustice of an incident which never actually happened as they falsely perceive it to be up to the present. Thank you MSNBC, et al, for your excellent job of informing a large populace of voters and encouraging ethnic harmony and national unity!
5. Speaking of race: I'm tired of that word being abused and misused. When most people use the word "race" or one of its variants they ought to use "ethnicity" or one of its variants. There is no racism anymore given that the Neanderthals and Denisovans are now extinct... perhaps in part as a result of "racism" by early modern Homo Sapiens. However, there is nowadays most certainly ethnicism and ethnocentrism which can be ethnically-exclusive and promote ideas of ethnocentric superiority of the sort that is often misnamed "racism". There is also a myth that blacks continue to systematically and regularly suffer from white racism and white advantage as opposed to what the facts suggest which is that community's own shortcomings and subcultural proclivities and self-indulgence and indeed multiculturalistic ethnocentrism has harmed it and alienated it and separated it from the rest of society to which many of its members seem inclined to blame upon white Americans. This latter subculture and ethnicity of America as a group has quite some time ago gotten over the "black thing" and yet Black America seems stuck in the past and unaware of the changes in the rest of America. For good measure look at the fact that White America helped elect a self-identified black man as President. It has even reelected him in spite of the fact he is no good at his job by just about any measure.
6. This is not to say that I have not been a bit annoyed with Conservatives lately. They now are inclined to viciously attack our President for doing things like spying on the American people via NSA when that was going on under the Patriot Act throughout the Bush 43 Administration, but where was the Conservative outrage then? Note: those intelligence-gathering activities did not and do not bother me on a practical level but as someone concerned with the ever-growing size and power and expense of our federal government I doubt the constitutionality of where things have wandered to and where they are headed. I also fail to see the real need for much of this Homeland Security activity and internal intelligence-gathering (which has become lavishly lucrative for many firms which is the real driving force of it). When there were failures in following then-in-force methods and procedures in American counter-terrorism that directly led to the few successful terrorist attacks on our own soil such as 9/11 and the Boston Bombings. However, I digress. Where was the Conservative outrage on expanding government after 9/11 where there is now outrage in the expansion of government under Obamacare? Where was the Conservative outrage regarding our invasion of Iraq on a false premise while there is now constant Conservative consternation over much more minor involvements in Libya and Syria to which we are far less invested in blood and treasure?
7. On that Syria note I must confess that I am flabbergasted that the Obama Administration is sending monies to Sunni rebels in Syria of which some are Al Qaeda-affiliated formations whom are also receiving support from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf Sunni-majority nations. On the other side of the axis is the Syrian government which is Shiite-dominated just like their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon and both of which are supported by Iran, the world capital of Shia Islam. First off, why are we taking sides in a fight in which we don't have a dog? Second, why are we supporting rebels some of whom we are Al Qaeda-affilated, a terrorist network at vicious war with us and against whom we are fighting and killing and detaining people at Gitmo at great expense in blood and treasure?  Thirdly, why are we sending these people money twice since they are not only receiving direct payments from us but also indirect payments as their support from other parts of the Sunni Islamic world comes from money we paid those oil-rich nations for their oil?
8. I have experienced an odd and annoying work experience lately with an employer who shall go unnamed here as I don't wish to burn bridges: I'm technically still employed by them although I'm not getting called in to work for them. After passing my job interview with flying colors and having my hand shaken and being quite literally welcomed to the team and having attended all meetings and the one work shift to which I was called in I now find myself on the outside for not having ingratiated myself enough to the ruling caste and acting like an excited little puppy to be there for just above minimum wage. Now I'm hearing of dissatisfaction growing in the ranks with one employee quitting due to harassment by other hens and attendance is light thus far even for big events such as the recently half-filled big-name event. Perhaps if they called me I could help them out. 
9.  Something I have long noted since I started reading blogs but that has been violently shoved in my face to a far more intensely distasteful degree in recent weeks since I became fully-engaged on Twitter and have followed some popular bloggers is this: the perpetual, petty and pernicious pedantry and sniping and nitpicking by those on the Right at those on the Left (and the reverse as well) over mostly minor and irrelevant fluff and/or distorted and exaggerated cause celebres. The Tweets just keep coming until I unfollow various and assorted bloggers since they are fanatics of the sort Sir Winston Churchill described as "one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". The content is sometimes very funny and clever after the tradition of famous wits but most of the time is monotonous and mundane, strident and shrill, not to mention belaboring a point and being prone to beating a dead horse. I have trimmed back the number of bloggers I follow to merely two and I'm contemplating cutting them loose, too.
10. I have many loved ones and acquaintances who are hooked on a variety of "reality television programs" which on some level most of us realize are as real as "professional wrestling". However, most people don't seem to appreciate how selectively and creatively edited these programs are and to what extent people in these programs are playing to the cameras and the degree to which the producers steer the narrative not to mention control the personnel lineup on each show. If these shows were reality then there would be no "casting" and nothing would need be planted or prearranged. In the past several months charges of planting items in storage units for the program Storage Wars went to court but were ultimately cast out. I have had a personal conversation with a guest of Cash & Treasures whom hosted on adventure and told me what I already guessed had to be the case: stuff is planted so the pretty host of the show can find it in a one-hour television show. While watching another program (Call of the Wildman) at my mother's house the other day I saw the characters in the show opening up cupboards in a kitchen in an abandoned house and like a game show some had raccoons and such animals while most did not. The whole scene seemed so staged and unlikely. How did a raccoon end up in a cupboard with no means of ingress and egress aside from the closed cabinet door? Why did it hardly seem to react to the sight of humans and cameras? How could such an abandoned home hold so many animals just wildly leaving there and so conveniently to be found by the "Turtleman" and his entourage? This kind of programming is simply a means to maintain network ratings while saving a lot of money not hiring actual unionized actors and writers and directors and such as one would in a program that is entirely "fictional". Thank God for The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.