Hannes Wessels is angry that his teenage daughters are being indoctrinated with the Left’s Victimology approach to History. So angry that he produced a rant full of denied, ignored, and absolutely unspeakable truths.
That “truth†goes right to the core of busting the myth about colonialism being a blight on the continent [of Africa] and the independence that followed being a blessing, when in fact, the very converse is true. That would be made embarrassingly obvious if the countries of Europe and North America were to make it known that they were back in the slave trade and boats were on their way to the ports. The response from the forsaken millions, destined for lives of endless poverty, would doubtless be overwhelming, and the rush for the ships would be unstoppable. If the demand were to be there, I have little doubt Africa would soon be bereft of people. The vast majority would choose to abandon their purported “freedom†on a continent fast reversing back into anarchy and savagery and become “unfree†again under European suzerainty.
Hobbes in Leviathan painted a grim picture when he suggested that the natural state of mankind is a “war of all against all†in which men’s lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.†Unfortunately, in most cases, especially in Africa, he’s been proved right. But if there is a chance to escape this dystopia, it rests with that part of the world where Europeans built societies on a foundation forged out of the Christian ethos. But of course, nobody is supposed to know that, either.
Science News reports recent analysis proves dogs have lived with humans in North America longer than previously supposed and that the genetics of some dogs kept by early inhabitants of North America have not survived to the present day.
Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The previous age estimate was based on a radiocarbon analysis of burned wood found in one of the animals’ graves. Until now, nearly 9,300-year-old remains of dogs eaten by humans at a Texas site were the oldest physical evidence of American canines.
Ancient dogs at the Midwestern locations also represent the oldest known burials of individual dogs in the world, said Perri, of Durham University in England. A dog buried at Germany’s Bonn-Oberkassel site around 14,000 years ago was included in a two-person grave. Placement of the Americas dogs in their own graves indicates that these animals were held in high regard by ancient people.
An absence of stone tool incisions on the three ancient dogs’ skeletons indicates that they were not killed by people, but died of natural causes before being buried, Perri said. …
She and her colleagues studied two of three dogs excavated at the Koster site in the 1970s and a dog unearthed at Stilwell II in 1960. These sites lie about 30 kilometers apart in west-central Illinois.
Perri’s team found that the lower jaws and teeth of the Stilwell II dog and one Koster dog displayed some similarities to those of modern wolves. Another Koster dog’s jaw shared some traits with present-day coyotes, possibly reflecting some ancient interbreeding.
A new genetic analysis positions the 10,000-year-old Illinois dogs in a single lineage that initially populated North America. Dog origins are controversial, but may date to more than 20,000 years ago (SN Online: 7/18/17). Ancient American dogs, including the Koster and Stilwell II animals, shared a common genetic ancestor, cell biologist Kelsey Witt Dillon of the University of California, Merced reported April 13 at the SAA meeting. That ancestor originated roughly 15,000 years ago after diverging from a closely related Siberian dog population about 1,000 years earlier, she said.
Dillon’s team, which includes Perri, studied 71 complete mitochondrial genomes and seven nuclear genomes of dogs from more than 20 North American sites, ranging in age from 10,000 to 800 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA is typically inherited from the mother, whereas nuclear DNA comes from both parents.
Much of the genetic blueprint of those ancient dogs is absent in present-day canines, Dillon said. Only a small number of U.S. and Asian dogs share maternal ancestry with ancient American dogs, suggesting the arrival of European breeds starting at least several hundred years ago reshaped dog DNA in the Americas, she proposed.
Joos van Cleve, St Jerome in his Study, 1528, Princeton University Art Museum.
Paul J. Griffths drafted a letter to a young person aspiring to become an intellectual.
You need a life in which you can spend a minimum of three uninterrupted hours every day, excepting sabbaths and occasional vacations, on your intellectual work. Those hours need to be free from distractions: no telephone calls, no email, no texts, no visits. Just you. Just thinking and whatever serves as a direct aid to and support of thinking (reading, writing, experiment, etc.). Nothing else. You need this because intellectual work is, typically, cumulative and has momentum. It doesn’t leap from one eureka moment to the next, even though there may be such moments in your life if you’re fortunate. No, it builds slowly from one day to the next, one month to the next. Whatever it is you’re thinking about will demand of you that you think about it a lot and for a long time, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re distracted from moment to moment, or if you allow long gaps between one session of work and the next. Undistracted time is the space in which intellectual work is done: It’s the space for that work in the same way that the factory floor is the space for the assembly line.
This is a difficult requirement to meet, even though it’s a simple one to understand. Most people’s lives don’t permit it: They spend, and must spend, most of their waking hours pursuing the goods necessary for survival, and the few breaks in those routines are short and unpredictable. Three hours a day, every day, of unbroken, undistracted time, is an unimaginable luxury for most people, now and in the past. But you’re writing to me from the richest country in the world, in which a significant slice of the population has that luxury, or could have it with a little discipline and imagination. Having a full-time bread-earning job doesn’t necessarily prevent it. (Faulkner, it’s said, wrote As I Lay Dying during the hours between midnight and 4 a.m. while working the night shift at a power plant.) Neither does being married or a parent of children—though full-time caring for infants, small children, the sick, or the old, without help, effectively does. Because you live where you live, and because your life has already afforded you the luxury of time for reading and thinking, it’s probable that you can meet this requirement if you want to. You might need to discipline your appetites for food, drink, clothes, sex, and amusement, because those are all expensive; you might need to renounce some of the consumer goods you’re told you can’t live without; and some of your relationships might suffer. But it’s possible. You’re young: You can begin to plan for it now. You should begin to plan for it now.
With undistracted time comes solitude, and along with it, usually, loneliness. These can be affectively unpleasant. But there’s a lot to be learned from them. When loneliness obtrudes, tugging at your sleeve, invite it in as accompaniment to your work. Its company will provide unexpected texture to your time of thinking, and may help that activity as often as hinder it. Learn to be alone for your time of work.
crypt†@nmgrm: the left is culturally dominant because of decadent subsistence patterns, the collapse of industrial agricultural civilization will serve to decolonize our minds from progressive ideas of history.
Ace is having loads of fun watching Starbucks’ management’s PC acrobatics:
23. Now Starbucks is saying this was all contrary to their policy and, presumably, anyone who wants to sit in their shops and not order anything and use the bathrooms has the right to do so as long as they like.
24. Starbucks, in other words, has just announced its stores are not stores primarily, but are now privately-funded shelters and bathroom facilities for the homeless. You don’t have to spend a slim dime in the store to sit as long as you please and use the bathrooms.
25. That’ll be great for Starbucks’ business. Their yuppie douchebag clientele love the homeless in the abstract, but we’ll see how much they appreciate their coffee shops being jammed with them, close-up-like, occupying most tables and chairs.
26. I don’t even want to defend Starbucks; I want them to have the full taste of Social Justice Warrior progressivism. If this is the company’s ideology, then they should live that ideology to the full.
The Sun reports on the latest “always something PC out of Sweden”:
A controversial burial method that uses liquid nitrogen to freeze and disintegrate a dead body is being heralded as the future of cremation by its creator.
Dubbed “promession,†the process takes place in a custom-built machine – just slot your dead relative’s corpse into the device, and watch as it removes their coffin, freeze-dries the water out of them, and shakes whatever’s left into dust.
This powder is then popped in a biodegradable bag (the size of a pack of potatoes) and buried in a shallow grave, and any leftover metals (like tooth fillings) are given back to the family.
As BBC Earth Lab notes, liquid nitrogen can cryogenically freeze an object at around -200 degrees Celsius.
This radically changes its internal properties, zapping out all the water and making it extremely brittle.
It can then be shaken or smashed into a powder.
Apply that to a human body, which is around 75% water, and you can imagine the transformation that takes place.
Promession is the brainchild of Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, who claims it is more cost-effective and eco-friendly than burial and cremation.
“You are still in an organic form, which means you are not broken down, you are still food for the soil and if you spread it around you will be food for birds, or fish, or whatever,†she told Wired in 2013.
Wiigh-Mäsak said she was driven to create the process through a concern for the damage done to soil by burials.
I may hold out for a Viking funeral, just arrange to be planted in my root cellar sitting in my chair, or have my cremains (or freeze-dried particles) loaded into shotgun shells (like Hunter Thompson) and used for multiple rounds of Trap.
Glenn Reynolds remains as indefatigable, witty, and preeminent among conservative bloggers as usual. One of his particularly effective blogging techniques is the use of amusing, and implicitly classifying and categorizing, post titles.
I happened to notice his use the other day of a scornful response to left-wing insolence and irrationality: “Sod off, Swampy!”, and I began wondering where that came from.
So I looked it up, and found that it goes back to a Greenpeace protest at London’s International Petroleum Exchange in 2005.
Kyoto protest beaten back by inflamed petrol traders
WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,†one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.â€
Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.†Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.â€
Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,†a spokesman said.
Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,†Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.
“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.†When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.
Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.
They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry†trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.
But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,†a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.â€
Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.â€
Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.
A spokeswoman from IPE said the trading floor reopened at 3.10pm. “The floor was invaded by a small group of protesters,†she said. “Open outcry trading was suspended but electronic trading carried on.â€
Eighteen police vans and six police cars surrounded the exchange and at least 27 protesters were arrested. A small band blocked the entrance to the building for the rest of the evening.
Richard Ward, IPE’s chief executive, said that the exchange would review security but denied that protesters had reached the trading floor. However, traders, protesters and press photographers confirmed to The Times that the trading floor had been breached.
The BBC has decided to attempt to rebut Kenneth Clark’s magisterial tour d’horizon of Western Art, the 13-part 1969 television series “Civilization.” This rejoinder on behalf of our contemporary Woke Multicultural Establishment begins appearing Tuesday evening in the United States on PBS.
Kenneth Clark singlehandedly took viewers from Greek Antiquity to the 20th Century, but correcting Clark’s Eurocentric emphasis on Dead White Great Men apparently requires three presenters: Classicist Mary Beard, the talented (but respectably progressive) historian Simon Schama, and (the Nigerian and therefore full-fledged representative of the viewpoint of persons and cultures of Color) David Olusoga.
Andrew Ferguson, at the Weekly Standard, has seen the series, and warns us what to expect:
[Civilizations] is kind of Clark-like —a catalogue of glorious creations followed by a vision of an art form in an advanced state of spiritual exhaustion. The difference is that the decline of an art form saddened Clark. Each of the episodes of Civilisations that I’ve seen ends with a celebratory profile of a contemporary artist. Invariably their work suffers in comparison with what’s gone before—how could it not?—but the moments serve a summary purpose.
The episode called “How Do We Look?†closes with Kehinde Wiley, the artist who recently completed the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama. The narrator describes Wiley as a practitioner of “the modern art of the body,†which “draws its power†from “challenging the tradition of classical art.†Of course he lives in Brooklyn but “he has traveled all over the world to explore the legacy of colonialism and the different ways we see.†Suddenly we see him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, moving from masterpiece to masterpiece. A tinny ensemble plays Vivaldi—a fusty reminder of the distant past. “I love the history of art,†he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.â€
“Sinister†sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive.
Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last.
“But far more,†he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.†His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.
In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,†he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.â€
Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.
Legend has it that the young William Shakespeare was caught poaching deer at Charlecote Park and was brought up and charged before Sir Thomas Lucy, the owner and local magistrate.
Hamlet, it turns out, is really all about hunting.
Shakespeare repudiates two fundamental tenets of humanist culture. First, the core belief that history is a repository of wisdom from which human societies can and should learn…. Second, the conviction that the true value of human life could best be understood by a return ad fontes—to the origins of things, be they historical, textual, moral, poetic, philosophical, or religious (Protestant and Roman Catholic alike). For Shakespeare, this is a sham…. Like the past in general, origins are pliable—whatever the competing or complementary urges of appetite, honour, virtue, and expediency need them to be.
The fruitless search for absolutes by which to act or judge is doomed to failure: “Hamlet turns to moral philosophy, love, sexual desire, filial bonds, friendship, introversion, poetry, realpolitik, and religion in the search for meaning or fixity. In each case, it discovers nothing of significance.â€
The absence of any moral certainties means that it’s a “kill or be killed†world, and the most impressive chapter in Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness establishes how the language of predation saturates the play. Lewis’s brilliant analysis here gives fresh meaning to long-familiar if half-understood phrases, including the “enseamed†marital bed, “Bait of falsehood,†“A cry of players,†“We coted them on the way,†“Start not so wildly,†“I am tame, sir,†“We’ll e’en to it like French falconers,†and “When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.†Thirty years ago this analysis might have been the basis of an important, if localized, study—but that sort of book could never find a major publisher today. Here, it becomes a clever way of establishing what for Lewis is the play’s bass line:
Whatever an individual might strive to believe, he always and only exists as a participant in a form of hunting—one in which he, like everyone else, is both predator and prey.
Ann Althouse snarkily quotes Robin Givan of NPR on Mark Zuckerberg’s choice of attire for testifying before Congress.
This was sort of a grudging suit and tie. The tie wasn’t really knotted very well. It kind of hung loosely from his neck.
“His shirt looked like it was a bit too big. The suit kind of looked like, OK, here’s the most basic suit I can find…. and that’s not to say that the suit wasn’t expensive. It simply wasn’t tailored…. This was a moment when this 33-year-old sort of disruptor really had to come face to face with the fact that he was no longer disrupting. He was in a position in which he had to fix things. And the suit really just underscored very visually that [Zuckerberg] was crossing from being an outsider into now being an insider…. He has, one, used fashion as a way to distinguish himself and to send a message about what it is that he believes he’s doing and where his company is situated in the broader cultural context. But I also think it matters because one of the reasons these hearings are in fact televised is because they are political theater. Part of theater is the costuming, and that helps us understand who the players are, what their goals are and what the messaging is.”
Then, in characteristic Althouse fashion, herself delivers the coup de grace:
I agree that it’s theater. But:
1. All clothing is theater (the RuPaul adage is “We’re all born naked the rest is drag”), and…
2. We need to ask what theater he provided, and I disagree that the bad suit and tie showed that he had crossed over to insiderdom. It would have been perfectly easy for the billionaire Zuckerberg to call in people to dress him in a perfectly fitting suit, a suit that would read to the theater audience as saying that he had arrived in the halls of power ready to assume what he acknowledges are the serious responsibilities that have arisen around him. By wearing a visibly bad suit, he sent the message that he is still the disruptive kid. The authorities got him into this suit, and he chose to look like the kid whose mom dressed him to go a funeral or whatever. He’s the guy who did what he had to and adopted the outward trimmings, but only and always with the look of intended to get back into his T-shirt and jeans.
—————————
Left coast billionaires wear hoodies and short pants as a badge of honor. Their ability to not wear a suit-and-tie, in their minds, proves that they’ve really made it, escaping the conventional servitude of the adult business world.
I blame my own generation.
When my graduating class arrived at Yale, you were required to wear a jacket-and-tie to dining hall meals. Yalies customarily consequently went around every day in sportcoats. Rebellious free spirits might remove their neckties, and fold them and put them in their pocket between meals.
Well. along came my own Yale class. It was very early in the semester that this troublemaker or that would show up for breakfast in pajamas sport coat & tie, which was soon inevitably followed by swimsuit jacket-and-tie, and finally nudity jacket-and-tie.
It really did not take very long before the Administration caved. After which… la Deluge.
There are geezers today, running around in t shirts and short pants, who still take pride in overturning the jacket-and-tie rule in Yale Dining Halls.
