Werner Herzog releases 11,000 hand-painted rats to the streets of Delft.

Ratak Mondosico:

On his arrival, Herzog went to some pains to assure the press that the film crew were not coming as ‘an invading army’ – but that they might ’cause some inconvenience once in a while’. However, when word got out about his plans to use rats, tremors of apprehension began to spread through the ancient town.

‘My film is about a community that is invaded by fear,’ he explained in an attempt to assuage the unease he sensed building up. ‘The rats are a very decisive element, almost a key to the film because they signify this invasion of fear.

‘We are using laboratory rats from Hungary,’ he went on. ‘They are albinos with red eyes and very beautiful. Very beautiful and very scary! They are also quite small and distinct from savage rats; they are tame, and will be sterilised so that they cannot reproduce. We only want to release them in controllable places, like very narrow streets. We will block all the escape routes; we will close the doors; we will build a fence. Not one single rat in the whole world can escape!’

However, as the newspaper stories which followed these pronouncements graphically reveal, Herzog’s optimism was not fulfilled.

A total of 11,000 rats were bred in Hungary for the scenes, and then imported to the barn of a local farmer where they were to be kept until required. Upon seeing them, however, Herzog was not satisfied with their appearance and had them all painted grey…

Even so, Herzog was still faced with the local burgermeister’s refusal to grant permission for the rats to be freed in the streets.

‘I had to resort to a stratagem,’ he explained. ‘I pretended to pack up and leave Delft – but before anyone could stop me I suddenly released the rats and shot the scenes. A lot of them ran away, I’m afraid. We never found them.’

Corinthian-style helmet from the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) found with warrior’s skull inside. Note marks of helmet on the skull.

Museum of Artifacts:

On the morning of September 17, 490 BC, some 10,000 Greeks stood assembled on the plain of Marathon, preparing to fight to the last man. Behind them lay everything they held dear: their city, their homes, their families. In front of the outnumbered Greeks stood the assembled forces of the Persian empire, a seemingly invincible army with revenge, pillage and plunder on its mind. The two sides faced each another directly, waiting for the fight to start. The Athenians stalled for days, anticipating reinforcements promised by Sparta. But they knew they could not wait for long. The Persians, expecting as easy a victory as they had won against enemies so many times before, were in no hurry.

The Greeks, knowing the time for battle had come, began to move forward. Ostensibly, they advanced with focus and purpose, but beneath this firm veneer, as they looked on a vastly larger enemy — at least twice their number — many must have been fearful of what was to come. The Persian archers sat with their bows drawn, ready to loose a barrage of arrows that would send fear and confusion through the Greek ranks .Eventually, though, the infantry on both sides engaged in battle. Moving towards each other and perhaps with the Greeks running the final 400 metres whilst undoubtedly under fire from the Persian archers, the two armies clashed.

Few hours later the bloody battle ended. Herodotus records that 6,400 Persian bodies were counted on the battlefield, and it is unknown how many more perished in the swamps. The Athenians lost 192 men and the Plataeans 11.

From Inside Polo.

Could have been worse:

House Seats lost: 2010 Obama: -63
1994 Clinton: -52
1958 Eisenhower: -48
1974 Ford (Nixon): -48
1966 Johnson: -47
1946 Truman: -45
2006 Bush: -30
1950 Truman: -29
1982 Reagan: -26
2018 Trump: -26

David Prentice suspects that ordinary Americans are also angry, and that there are more of them.

[The Democrats’] rage is part scary, and part humorous. I just don’t know whether to laugh or cry on a daily basis. The left, and their media crazies, have devolved into a caricature. Part toddler, part sucker (for their own leftist PR), part self-proclaimed superior elitists, and part demon. Frankly, a sorrier state of mind hasn’t been seen on the left since the Red Guards terrorized China.

Yep, they’re mad as Hell. They’ve made that clear. Where they’re not so clear on is what they’re so angry about. The Democratic Party has not, after two years, taken the time to explain why or what their positions are. They appear to have none, other than “Trump bad.” I heard from a few overpaid pundits they have points to score on health care. Really? The party that destroyed our insurance system, the party whose leader lied for years about his health care plan, having rammed it down the throats of an unwilling electorate, and they’re supposed to have an edge?

The only real area they have an edge on is their rage. We get it. Everybody gets it. It’s the reason so many pundits have been calling for a blue wave.

But hold on, dear friends. There’s another group who is angry. And who has gotten quietly angrier as leftist insanity has made itself so visible. It’s a different anger. It’s not born of being a toddler. Or a sucker, an elitist, or a demon. It’s a slow rising, reason-driven resolve to overcome the left’s antics. It’s born of watching years and years of the leftist media getting away with their pretense of being journalists. It’s born of watching people having to unjustly fend off the serial insanity of leftist punditry, and the attack dogs of the Democratic Party.

Once again, I do believe the pollsters have missed this entirely. Partially on purpose. It’s why they were so wrong in 2016. No one is polling about the quiet, resolved, and rightful anger of the Trump voter.

But it’s there. In spades. Kavanaugh’s horrifying tribulations simply finalized it.

Given this suppressed anger, I am going to say this so-called blue wave is not real, and without substance. It’s only based on history, meaning the party in power loses in the midterms. This reporting is misplaced. Because this is not automatic.

Yes, the House is up for grabs, but the missing reporting has been on the slow, burning anger of the Republicans.

Let me describe it anecdotally. I have scores of friends who are what I call moderate Republicans. They live in different regions of the country. And without exception have offered to me just how angry they are at what the Democratic Party and the leftist media have done in the last two years. Simmering, slow roiling anger. They are highly motivated to vote, and highly motivated to punish this nasty group of leftists. What has surprised me is the unanimity and passion they have, all of them deeply affected by their anger at the media and the Democratic Party. Dozens of people, normally just living their lives quietly. And they hate what has happened. Quietly. Fervently.

RTWT

Guy Fawkes arrested in the cellar of Parliament with the explosives.

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!’

Early in the morning of November 5, Guy Fawkes crept, torch in hand, into the cellar beneath the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster. In that cellar, he and his fellow conspirators had previously placed a cache of 1800 pounds ((36 barrels, or 800 kg) of gunpowder. Just as he was about to ignite the barrels, blowing himself and the House of Lords to Kingdom Come, the torch was snatched from his hand by a man named Peter Heywood.

Fawkes was arrested and taken before the privy council where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the Scottish lords what he had intended to do with so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered him, “To blow you Scotch beggars back to your own native mountains!”

So went the attempted Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

The intention of the plotters was to use the explosion, timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament, to kill King James I and eliminate much of the ruling Protestant aristocracy. They also intended to kidnap the royal children, then raise the standard of revolt in the Midlands with the object of restoring the freedom to practice Catholicism in England.

At Christie’s, and on-line auction November 8:

In Isaac Newton’s own hand:

In Latin, four full pages and three partial pages of text, on three bifolia, 203 x 155mm, the text on one page partially written in inverse orientation.

Notes on the Turba Philosophorum, one of the most influential of all alchemical texts, a Latin translation of an Arabic anthology of pre-medieval alchemical texts, whose origins may be seen in an attempt to apply Greek alchemy to Islamic science.

Estimate: GBP 80,000 ($100,800) – GBP 100,000 ($130,000).

Erika aka “Devon” Price.

A lot of people on Facebook yesterday were marveling at, and laughing about, this leftie idiot‘s ideological derangement and her absolutely appalling Mount-Everest-sized shrill sense of self-entitlement. Her much-enduring and despite-all-her-bullshit loving family has evidently, for years and years, through what must have been a truly dreadful adolescence well into what-ought-to-be adulthood tolerated her vicious politics and humored her sexually perverse nonsense, but those terrible people failed to climb on board the radical LGBTQ&c.&c. train with her and she, they, zir, or ze is finally fed up.

Every Sunday for the last 12 years, I have called my conservative Republican mom and talked to her for upwards of an hour. I tell her about my work, and try to keep her entertained with cheery, funny anecdotes. I share good news and paper over bad. I keep the conversation flowing and effervescent. In each call, I work hard to come across as someone happy, with lots of friends and lots to do, and nothing to complain or cry about.

I have upheld this ritual through breakups, bereavements, depressive episodes, periods of trauma, and years of acute political turmoil. I’ve only wavered and broken kayfabe a few times — when my dad died, for example, or when Trump was elected. That time, I curled up on a bench and sobbed, begging my conservative mom to understand what her vote had done to me. I shook and sputtered borderline incomprehensible things about how much it hurt for her to vote the way she did, how betrayed I felt as a sexual assault survivor, a trans person, a scientist, or a person who needs birth control.

She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements.

She reacted with the same equanimity she always projects when unwanted emotions rear their needy heads. She wasn’t concerned that her actions had hurt or betrayed me, no, she was worried I was stressing myself out by thinking about it too much. She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements. By refusing to stop glaring at our differences, I was the one hurting myself.

That’s how it’s always been in my family. I am the renegade, the unstable queer one, with big emotions and strange desires that alienate me from my family’s politics. I am responsible for minimizing the conflict that my existence creates. I’m not supposed to express emotion, start fights, or remind anyone of the chasm that separates my life from their traditional, “family-oriented” values.

I’m done carrying that responsibility. It’s been slowly poisoning me for years. …

My mom wouldn’t say she’s socially conservative. Neither would most of my Republican relatives. They like to think of themselves as family-oriented, patriotic, no-nonsense lovers of fiscal restraint, and it doesn’t matter if the reality of the political choices lines up with those ideals. They don’t like to talk about the basis for their ideology, or evidence in support of their views — and they absolutely will not acknowledge the social consequences of their actions. They have always voted Republican, and it seems they always will, no matter the candidate they are given or the abhorrent policies that candidate advances. And for the most part, they don’t want to talk about their beliefs or the reasons for their choices — aside, perhaps, from a few idle rants about the evils of the Clintons. In such a vacuum of reflection and vulnerability, it’s paralyzingly difficult for me to even start a conversation about the harm they’ve done.

In my family, control and invalidation are wielded subtly, and perhaps without conscious intent. Norms are enforced through a gentle blend of selective praise, light mockery, quiet dismissal, and mild admonition. If I take a step toward prescribed, traditional roles, I am celebrated and recognized. If I take a different path, or express a competing desire, I am ignored or ridiculed in a way I can’t quite point to. If I complain about that ridicule, I am dismissed as overly sensitive or told I’m making things up, misremembering them.

I have dozens of memories of family members chiding a teenage me for expressing disinterest in giving birth or having a family. Whenever I expressed a passion for the sciences or a desire to go to grad school, I was treated as though my interests were cute, but fleeting. When I began throwing my adolescent, closeted self into politics — mostly activism for LGBT rights — my mother would tell me, in hushed tones, that it was “okay” that I was doing so, but that we wouldn’t be letting my grandparents know about what I’d been up to.

I wasn’t beaten for being who I was. Usually, I wasn’t even directly berated. The problem wasn’t a specific act of mistreatment or abuse, but rather the emotional and political climate that surrounded me. My family consistently listened to conservative voices that branded me, and people like me, as perverse, immature, deluded, and mockable. My family voted, without relent, for politicians who wanted to curtail abortion rights, LGBT rights, educational access, and intellectual freedom. They unilaterally advanced and rewarded a life path that was traditional, deeply gendered, and rooted in devotion to the family unit, often to the detriment of connections with the outside world. They couldn’t see how these actions wore me down and slowly, quietly, left me feeling broken, incapable of appropriate adulthood, and totally alone.

RTWT

Her family sounds very nice. It’s a shame that parents like that had one child that obviously long ago landed the wrong way on its head.

Look carefully. Click on image for larger version.

HT: The News Junkie.

HT: Karen L. Myers.