[Who gets credit for monuments?]

I hope everyone is following this "saverome" instagram account with almost daily coverage of Roman monuments:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAFeYrRxQ8H/

 

This one points out that Trajan just put up a bare pole for his famous column! It's famous carving of Dacian conquest or whatever may have been designed at the time, but was actually implemented or paid for or at least installed later, such as by Hadrian. So it's not an expression of one leaders ego, but maybe more of Rome itself.

 

Was Hadrian unusually humble... remember he left a predecessor's name on his pantheon? Or maybe that had a slightly different story which I think was also covered in instagram. Anyway the facade of architecture may have a different author than the person famed for the initial build. I recall many renaissance buildings in Florence started without a facade, then it was added (or not) much later possibly in different tastes. I think British tourists actually funded the facade of the famous cathedral there for example,  

[news by twitter]

(shes in Congress)

I had to edit this in after later fact checking: She has only been an assemblywomen representing part or all of Las Vegas to Nevada. She tried to run for US congress, but was voted out early within the repub. primary.  A New York City transplant, her goal according to wiki is to arm female students against male predators.

 

some of you guys are nuts, seriously lol

Us guys? I have never noticed any non-cop carrying a gun, except a hunter wearing fluorescent orange (usually looking harmlessly half asleep and just getting away from the spouse). I think what you see is a theatrical statement to protest local courts letting killers out to kill again and again... sort of proclaiming if they can't protect us we have to do it ourselves. Granted, the news does claim skyrocketing gun sales, but:

 

In my state there is near zero (legal) gun ownership and gun murders. Wiki sez we have only 183 handgun carry licenses out for well over a million residents - basically just ex cops who fear revenge from their perps getting out of jail. Otherwise it is near impossible to transport even an unloaded permitted gun, and you need psych and med tests as well as a gun course for permit. Well, now we have a ton of white collar enforcement bureaucrats who can carry service pistols and have shot people when drunk. There must have been several in the 9/11 airliners who didn't act because they expected a landing somewhere.

 

It's very interesting to see a Wiki table of gun ownership and crime by state; you can click the columns to sort the drastic differences for year 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state . Urban Washington DC is quite an outlier with virtually no (legal) guns and a war-zone gun death rate. I grew up in the cluster of rural states with gun ownership exceeding 40% and negligible gun murders (like 2 for the state, or less than 1 per 100k pop per year). Typically these are unused hunting guns inherited from old timers.

 

I briefly lived in Texas which seems to be statistically in the middle. Lower gun ownership unless you add the illegal ones. Probably intended against people more than animals... the higher crime rate in that big state leads to a lot of scary crime stories in the news. They started issuing concealed gun permits when I was there with almost nobody turned down - a farce. California has strict gun laws and less ownership but worse gun crime. The worst gun crime is in sort of poor and poorly managed S.E. states.

[news by twitter]

Yup, main stream media is not really what it once was, Twitter is much more "real", "live" and "raw" btw.

I can understand that major media has to confirm sources and beware of slander, but it must also be timid due to that diminished role. Even the slightly right-biased network waited a day to make this more than a (half valid?!) workplace grievance type of thing, in spite of early evidence of jihadist statements, and neighbors admitting fear of reporting apparent all hours suburban bomb factory due to appearing racist. After several incompetent acts by media folks, next time I will publicly tweet them realtime about it... I forgot their names this time around.

 

Twitter, once you bump it out of top story or whatever to the live mode, had surprisingly few bad leads. When a false name was widely tweeted for the female shooter, there were a lot of jeering tweets from the mideast that it was an impossible or joke name. There were various probable invasions of privacy of the shooters that sounded like state administration folks were dumping secret data, and I liked that even though they could have done it for an innocent person like me. The police radio transcripts were great, but I think info could have led to them being shot if the shooters had access to them... also can hinder prosecution for reasons too complex to spit out there.

 

whats up with the urge of US americans to shoot at each other

The URGE may be understandable and psychologically healthy. The US, more than Europe or other anglo countries, has a noticeable subset that is so flamboyantly mischievous that any sane person might feel urges. Although mass public killings are up maybe due to publicity and copycat, average gun violence is way DOWN the last 20 years... as is all violent crime. According to The Washington Post, gun killings are down by half and gun woundings are down more by 3/4: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why/

 

with assault rifles??

Assault weapon sales in California are banned, and the guns in recent event were legal non-assault. Assault is a misused term, often applied for sinister appearance rather than functionality. I guess the large reloadable clips are worst thing... certainly it is rare to hear of automatic (as opposed to semi-auto) capability. Semi auto by itself is not the sinister thing often bandied about by the press; many criminals would have fared better using old fashioned revolvers.

 

Assault rifles use downsized cartridges vs. regular rifles which is the opposite of sinister.  I can't comprehend the apparent swing of hunters to using semi auto AR-15 rifles. Their cartridge is wimpy enough to be banned in several states for deer hunting as a wounder rather than killer. I guess these guys are role-playing or used to their service weapon, but it's an old fashion design anyway - I would much prefer the short, efficient bullpup assault designs that followed on from europe.

[news by twitter]

I followed a couple of TV networks during today's San Bernadino mass killings in California, and what a waste of time compared to what I then found on twitter. The media and police spokes(wo)man just self censored for hour after hour. They were also very incompetant by misreading what was happening onscreen... I could hardly stand it.

 

On twitter - once you found the best search terms, which is hard - it all was too clear. You could find transcripts of police radios with clear early grasp of the situation, which TV bozos probably knew based on their failed fishing attempts to get a live cop to say it instead. You could see helicopter photos showing all... now you realize the TV version was selectively smudged out (they admitted it was on delay for censoring purposes).

 

Twitter pointed you to various amateur videos, including right next to the final shootout with bangs and all (why don't folks turn their phone horizontal for landscape recording?). They had tweets by coworkers of the suspects, who dumped (confidential?) parts of their job record and infractions and recent travel history. Sure there was some mixed up info by ideologues, but about the only professional news web page that comparably broke realtime facts was "Times of India".

 

I'm really disappointed by the major media, from TV networks to the Bing or Google news sites... maybe they are afraid of lawsuits. Have to sometimes get your hands dirty with raw twitter for breaking news (even has good ancient Rome tweets as well).

[Amphitheater games maybe not so cruel to animals]

I attended a surprising lecture by zooarcheologist Michael MacKinnon on Roman games that I thought should be noted somewhere. He seems to be a lecturer for hire https://www.archaeological.org/lecturer/michaelmackinnon with immense experience digging all round the Mediterranean for animal bones from the Roman era.

 

He finds tons of bones, but almost none of exotic animals! He shoots down most finds by other diggers (the giraffe bone in Pompei dates to recent, the bear and lion paw and tooth in north Africa was likely a skin/trophy). A few ostrich and other bones found in Italy, but not in numbers that begin to support the Roman pictures and descriptions... maybe much exaggerated!

 

He has searched in vain for Hannibal's elephant bones... what Roman would go to the effort to relocate or burn or grind to dust bones of very large animals, especially since they don't do it for domestic animals? He has combed almost undisturbed African amphitheater sites for exotics in vain.

 

His debunking seems all the more believable since he seems eager to prove Romans were cruel to animals. He uses circular logic in saying the Romans probably let many exotic animals die in transit "because the remainder brought a high price anyway". This seems silly to me that they wouldn't value the opportunity of making even more money by reasonable treatment. He calls the Roman trappers more cowardly than depicted in the mosaics because the mosaics show them using animal babies as bait... but that is full disclosure!

 

He speculates the dangerous stuff was done by local Africans, but I think it was plenty dangerous for all. Read the free Amazon kindle book memoirs of someone building the Mombassa railway in 1800's who lost a worker to lions every few days. Even the overseers with (not always reliable) rifles were in terrific danger, especially because they had no reasonable spotlighting technology at night.

 

So he appears to be saying Romans weren't often as cruel or macho as they pretend to be, at least with respect to exotic animals in games. Gladiators never fought animals, but 2 other kinds of specialists sometimes did (including doomed criminals). The lecturer seemed more believable due to his bias against animal cruelty... I am a vegetarian, but found him almost at the witch-hunter extreme.

 

P.S. on the way to this lecture I listened to another debunking lecture recording about holy land archeology. A women with some of the most experience digging or writing up digs in Masada claims Josephus accounts were likely fictionalized. In a 36 lecture series, she says several of the mass suicide accounts of Josephus have no archeo basis,,, that is, the well known evidence is otherwise explainable. Furthermore Josephus had several motivations to depict dramatic suicides, and his readers expected him to selectively fictionalize for dramatic effect. I forget the lecturer's name, but possibly more evidence for my withful thinking that the Romans were nicer folks than commonly depicted!

 

P.P.S this site won't let you log on if you override the 2 tick box defaults.

[Capua, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiae and Oplontis]

Thanks, I thought I would compare a few experiences in dealing with the logistics. My last Pompeii visit was on maybe the most crowded day of the year... a Sunday during culture week when all state museums were free and full of Naples folks out for a picnic and socializing. I got in at opening time and used a successful theme park strategy of racing to the opposite side away from the main entrance and working my way back towards the mob (which tend to dally by the first things they encounter).

 

I started with a very newly opened little villa with widely publicized frescos, and it was surreal to have it all to myself for 20 minutes. As the crowds filtered nearby, I mopped up the back areas. By the time I hit central areas, I could see I made a mistake by not making reservations for some closed off villas. I had seen in forums how even Italian speakers had trouble using the quirky reservation web site, but I hadn't known so darn many of the villas are now by reservation only. It soon became difficult to even walk thru the crowds, so I hopped a few train stations to peaceful Poppea.

 

All my earlier visits (spring or fall) had little problems with crowds. On a week stay in Capri I took advantage of the extreme late hours Pompeii was open (9pm? still sunlit!). Any time my daily outings such as hiking the Amalfi coast ended a bit earlier than expected, I would hit Pompeii before grabbing a ferry to Capri. It was nearly deserted and in cooldown mode, although the ground radiated the remains of inhuman heat... nice.

 

Years earlier, there just didn't seem to be that many tourists. I remember cursing my luck at one of the the most famous villas because there was one tour group inside, blocking my view. I should have followed them at a distance because they next headed toward a dazzling villa that is now closed indefinitely. I hate those freeloaders that hook up and crowd out tours, but at a distance I could have made up for the fact the site was out of guide maps that day.

 

At Herculeum, I have always had trouble seeing what the fuss is about. Maybe because I never had a guided tour (my first Pompeii visit was with a charming but not very educational guide). Herculeum seems to have closed their cafe (unlike Pompeii which put one in a WW2 bomb crater), but I did find a vending machine in a little building with bathrooms (possibly for staff?). I leave Herc for last during days when I may have been too busy for lunch and am getting crazed for electrolytes or whatever.

[Dating the Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum]

assumed that the coin was lost as soon as it was minted.

.

First you need to examine the context of the coin, if possible... is it integrated among the old stratigraphy, or could it have been dropped in later. If the former, then you say the stuff among the coin dates from no earlier than the minting date (not equal to it).

 

People sometimes talk in a shorthand, but I think they are assuming and in agreement with above. However in real life there can be uncertainties about the context, etc and you have to weigh in other evidence. And if you found many coins together in a wide range of minting dates... you might treat the youngest coin as closer to the deposit time than from a single found coin (which would be more like the average mint date in hoard).

[Dating the Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum]

It's not really news or an isolated case... reading Mary Beard's not very recent book "The Fires of Vesuvius" covers the long known later eruption date evidence, and questions a bunch of other popular and scholarly assumptions.

 

Pompeii has coins, skeletons, and graffiti from decades after the eruption as well, as people tunneled to retrieve/loot stuff before the site was forgotten. But there is a suspicious paucity of furnishings and skeletons, suggesting the city was mostly deserted not just days before the peak eruption, but long before. Some of the infrastructure like for water wasn't yet repaired from the years-previous earthquake.

 

I didn't finish the book, but it seems you can go to almost any current explanation and find it based partly on air (and the human need for certainty). For instance, what was this building for and who owned it... is currently treated as 80% likely A, 10% likely B, and 10% chance something unknown. But examine the evidence for even apparently obvious cases (like a supposed brothel) and you must accept it is 80% unknown, 15% B, and 5% likely A.

 

Well, maybe that is just Mary saying that, but she claims much of what we see now is restoration based on imagination rather than a time capsule. I used to hate the way folks on travel forums would gush over hiring private Pompeii guides who were more style than substance. But now I think that the agnostic truth is too hard to bear, and that romantic imaginings are a reasonable attitude to have while appreciating the site.

[Romanian treasure hunter finds what could be oldest forged coins in hi]

immediately told the authorities and will now lose nearly all of the money because of local treasure hunting rules.

.

I read an article about the state of non-official archeo recovery, esp in Europe, and they said it was often catastrophic outside Britain which has rules that reward the honest discoverers. I think they said France was particularly bad in driving discoverers to the black market.

 

But then they said Britain was catastrophic in enforcing a non-binding UN rule about repatriating art to the supposed owner countries. In order to avoid confiscation, this has frozen donations of private archeo/art collections to museums, unless they were obtained prior to the rule of maybe 30 years ago. So that has driven charitable or estate donations to the black market as well.

[Geneticist Traces Mysterious Origins of Native Americans to Middle Eas]

It just pains me that the video of his talk wasn't posted online, while most others of that series was. I think it is just the familiar groups that we already know were much more numerous and agricultural than previously thought. I think he said the farming technology and village type settlement was almost similar to Europe at 1491. I went to an anthropology lecture about 10 years ago that said similar things about the Amazon being packed with settlements doing fancy irrigation... so it must be published elsewhere too.

 

UPDATE: here is another youtube talk he gave.. maybe you can find an even better one. Reminds me he points out the advanced urbanization in parts of the Americas...

[Geneticist Traces Mysterious Origins of Native Americans to Middle Eas]

I haven't kept up with that news much, after being disgusted on how ancient human remains are being snatched from scientists in the US under the assumption that they are "owned" by contemporary tribes. Are such remains still confiscated and effectively destroyed before they can be objectively examined?

 

Anyway I heard a bit of a lecture that said the Alaskan land bridge wasn't used because it appeared at the wrong time. Of course you would often have ice bridges, and very simple boats could skirt the edge. It seems you could have a diversity of groups coming by various means at various times.

 

I heard an author talk for the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" where Charles Mann summarized latest research that is accepted consensus but not well known. As I recall it depicted a massive, settled, sedentary population in the Americas that greatly modified their environment by irrigation or clearing by fire. The Europeans encountered more sparse nomadic types because smallpox, etc preceded them like a shockwave and depopulated. The susceptibility to such diseases was sort of a freak because the types of big animals that can originally host (and thus engender resistance) died out much earlier for unknown reasons. He gave interesting answers to naive audience questions (laden with positive stereotypes), such as to emphasize the extreme cultural diversity of original inhabitants.

[The Cross as jewelry]

I always thought the wearing a cross to commemorate the death of one's spiritual leader and Savior a strange concept.

 

What would people wear had Jesus been hanged, mauled by lions, or (more mercifully) decapitated, instead?

I don't think it is a symbol of "means" of death, but rather what power is behind it. And not against the Romans in particular, but against whatever unjust "establishment" is in place. Remember the Roman officials exasperated at Christians breaking rules simply to become martyrs, and asking why don't they just jump off cliffs instead of provoke them to reluctantly enforce capital punishments.

 

On the other hand, depictions of Jesus in Mexican churches can be incredibly gruesome with all sorts of extra instruments of torture and blood. All such things could make a messy or ambigous symbol though, vs a cross which has a quite unique interpretation.

 

BTW I am skeptical of decapitation as being that merciful, even when not botched. I have read 1000 diary pages of a German jew who survives WW2 pograms as a free observer ("I Will Bear Witness"). For some reason the report of the electric gillotine seems among the worst. It is mainly used for disloyal non-Jews, and serves customers every 2 minutes. They line up about 2 dozen victims, and they have to listen to the intimate details of their impending fate (Jews are locked up within earshot and later marvel at not being the only victim class).

 

And I question if extreme head trauma is so fleetingly felt. I regretfully saw film of Mussolini's botched firing squad for son-in-law Ciano and other VIPs. Ciano's few seconds of reaction to a drastic head wound can be read because unlike the blade victims his arms were still attached. They make the strongest expression of infinite pain I hope I will ever see, and had to be consious because the hands approach the fatal wound. Also in the frame are a more on-target exploding skull, and a complete miss (with followup since the idiot didn't play dead).

 

So I think a quick death can be a false blessing, especially if with a long anticipation. The Jewish author reports a huge number of deaths reported as "shot while trying to escape". Even though this is often 85 yr olds on crutches, it may be more merciful because they would kind of surprise them and trick them into crossing a chalk line that substituted for a camp fence. This is a camp within Germany, where they had so far hidden tales of intentional executions.

 

Maybe the most merciful was what the author was trying most to prevent. The Dresden Jewish cemetary had tons of husbands and wives with the same day of death... these were not executions but suicides by barbituates. The author kept talking folks out of this when they faced an impending worse horror, even when he thought he probably shouldn't. Apparently the gestapo made a fairly tolerable barbituate widely available because they were trying to avoid publicity of Jewish killings (but maximize the publicity of punishing disloyal gentiles as a lesson).

[Revolving Dining Room in Emperor Nero’s Luxurious Palace Really Exis]

That is a bizarre article that seems to muddle the facts, at least as they were reported here 4 years ago... I even visited the "discovery" then. The background of the author seems to be mainly in spiritualism and meditation: http://www.ancient-origins.net/users/aprilholloway . She has an article on Vikings that seems even more devoid of news but rather a googled rehash with catchy photos. BTW you can click to bring up her original Nero article with better photos.

 

EDIT: if you don't switch to the original version of the article http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/revolving-dining-room-emperor-nero-s-luxurious-palace-really-existed-001824 you only see ENTIRELY irrelevant photos from about a half mile away parts of the palace.

 

As I understand it, Nero's palace wasn't discovered in 2009 but rather closed to tourists around then due to water erosion (some drastic remedy was recently proposed). In 2009 they appeared to find the revolving dining room, and I looked down the hole in 2010. Even if you switch to the "original" web version of her article, it still suggests these have just been discovered. That version shows a deeper hole than I saw in 2010, and a reconstruction.

 

So I don't know if there is news here, other than their polished web site may not be very trustable. As for the dining room, it seems to me more like a narrow doughnut layout rather than spacious dome. In words they give a more grand impression, and the illustrations seem to contradict one another. But if you focus on the pillar, note how little space there is to the walls beyond.

[The Mediterranean route into Europe]

Actually there is a lot of DNA info hidden in our relatives that is about to be lost, and maybe we should take and preserve mouth swabs at the next family reunion. For those like us who want more info on the mothers side, I think we can triple our info by targeting the maternal grandfather (his m+f  flags). If he is gone, one can look for his other descendants, or back up to descendants of his ancestors... just use the weird logic of the way male and female flags are passed down. Also the mito. dna of one's father can add a lot. Sealed, frozen swabs might let one run the tests years later when they are cheaper and smarter.

 

I have no obsession with this... I just inherited family tree research notes that was easily collected by ancestors who traveled back to the home country. It seemed to conflict with the DNA test info, but probably not in light of current dna test limitations. My family tree is 10 years shorter than I stated, but still amazingly provincial, ending only at the time the plague probably stopped people keeping records. Even 150 years after leaving the home country, marriage has apparently only been with folks originating from that country. So the Corsican war bride or whatever that dna test suggests may have been an important defense against recessive genes

 

Thanks for the alternative Brazilian singer suggestions; thru the internet I have overdosed on Astrud (and Ella F) after hearing their complete works over and over. However I do appreciate the way Astrud kind of  murmurs lyrics to herself instead of the brash way singers usually do, and also she pronounces vowels the way most english speakers only have heard from their mothers early, fond babytalk. For variety I had made a spotify playlist of 1200 Chet Baker songs, who sounds quite like some of the best female jazz singers for some reason.

[Modern Chariot racing - this should become olympic!]

I just watched a rerun of a Jordanian Travelogue (Stanley's on the go) which featured tourist chariot rides in an ancient hippodrome in Jaresh. They emphasized how dangerous it was even in it's present form, and I would guess from recent youtubes that tourists now just watch rather than ride. They emphasized that the movie chariots were much heavier and more sturdy than sporty historic chariots.

[The Mediterranean route into Europe]

Oh, you sound like my heroine Astrud Gilberto. Her web page said that her bossa nova was considered a bit inauthentic back home in Brazil, because her father wasn't the local mixed blend. Actually there may be some cultural rather than DNA truth to that since I think her dad was a German music teacher. And she complains about a famous but unpleasant Russian-American musician who I think brought out her best work... these synthesized influences maybe allowed her to elevate b-n to world acceptance.

 

Anyway, I have a gripe about my mit. dna tests, and will try a thought experiment of Astrud dealing with the same thing. First I will admit that my tests were a decade ago, and before the company recently went defunct they would offer ever changing interpretations on a web site. BTW they included health predictions which turned out to be changing and inaccurate, except for guesses of my physical properties which were right.

 

I have 647 years (!)  of marriage or birth records for both sides of family, and they matched their paternal prediction. Actually this company specialized in the almost inbred background of our region because lack of global mixing simplifies analysis for predicting how you will die for instance. The maternal prediction was weird, and got weirder in later "refinements" which practically included the whole world. At first it they highlighted Corsica and a maybe bit of Latvia, which oddly enough were distant targets of our raiding parties about 900 years ago and might suggest a war bride.

 

So I tried to educate myself on how to interpret mit. DNA, and will try to apply possibly fractured logic to a case such as Astrud. I would love to be corrected though. Look at her 4 great grandmothers... only one should show up in cloned mit. dna. Not her 2 German g-g-m. Say the other 2 are respectively from Asia-> native American, and more recently Africa. Only the mothers-mothers side shows up in the mit. dna... say it is an african mutation from 40k years ago.

 

So all other influences are flushed from mit. dna except the direct mother daughter path from long ago africa back to genetic eve.  IF the test shows other locations (I bet it would) these must be where close relatives migrated AFTER 40k years ago from Africa to India or Andorra for instance. Therefore further diversity they show isn't the incoming genetic influences but the later (and irrelevant) diversions by others.

 

IF we were tracking the native American ggm there should be some diversity reflecting the path out of Africa thru Asia. But only what that mother-daughter chain experienced as personal mutations passed on. At first this seems an ultra tiny sample of your backwards-spreading family tree, but something strange happens when that tree has to shrink down and mix to get back to one Eve. Not a religious Eve, but there is point where the first mutation happens which is like the last exact clone of Eve (which happens maybe a couple thousand years distant from last clone of Adam, oddly enough).

[The Mediterranean route into Europe]

am thinking of undergoing one of those genetic tests to see what comes up.

Kosmo can correct me, but I think females entirely lack the y-group chromosomes that they use to track the male half of your family tree. Males carry clones of both the fathers y-group and mothers mitochondrial genes. So it may help to get a male relative tested for the y-group. I recall the national geographic tests being done in halves at half price for this. Or pursuade a male relative to get the whole test, or give it as a present (if you are sure they are related).

 

These are not the normal functional genes that are discussed in the blogs, but strange useless ones that are much easier to track heritage from since they don't mix but are cloned. Another issue (if I am correct) is that these totally ignore the vast majority of your family tree... only applying to your fathers-fathers-fathers... or mothers-mothers-mothers individual at each generation.

 

Furthermore they track specific mutations that often happened so many tens of thousands of years ago (they can usually estimate when your markers developed) that these proto groups were hiding behind a glacier in turkey somewhere long before they split up to arrive in Finland, Portugal or whatever. An old marker is disappointing because it tells you so little and for such a vanishing small sample of your family tree. For an old marker they will tell you that groups over half the world have it, yet that migration happened AFTER the mutation and your ancestors never went or came from there.

 

P.S. I expect we all originate not from Africa, but Ile Amsterdam. This is because there are no genetic markers showing aborigines migrating thru Asia to Australia. Therefore, I have made an imperial deduction that mankind started in this island in the southern Indian ocean and caught passing icebergs to Africa and equadistant Australia!

 

 

[Tacitus and "the most dangerous book ever written"]

The Italian count, under pressure from Mussolini, did allow the Germans to photocopy it (itself an ancient copy, Tacitus original being lost). Then the issue becomes will it be brought to Germany as an icon, then destroyed or looted. Oh I suppose the same could have happened if the "liberation" of Italy was even more violent... witness the loss of Roman Imperial barges that Mussolini had excavated.

 

Anyway, the story told by the son of the count almost defies belief. The manuscript stayed in the villa and the count's family stayed in another villa that was known and repeatedly ransacked by specially-sent German contingents. They all stayed safely hidden in place, until the Italian gov't required the manuscript to be presented in Florence on the day of the mega flood (1966?).

 

So the narrative was interesting, but how over the top was the "dangerous" quote from Wiki? I suppose Germania's prominence wasn't a so much a cause of ultra-nationalism as an effect. But let's not underestimate it as a reinforcement block or warning sign.

 

I'm reading the free kindle version of 1936 Fodor European guidebook where Brits are reassured how safe it is to go to the olympics in Germany for instance. They say the extreme prevalence of uniforms by men, women, and children is not a sign of old style militarism, but their reveling in military wear is equally matched by their love of peace. Then I switch to accounts 6 years later of British merchantmen and sailors on suicide missions to supply Malta, for instance by a sailor who lost his parents to German bombs and was himself sunk, only to be rescued and sunk again days later. Foreigners were especially welcomed at 1936 olympics not only for propaganda, but for foreign exchange which was desperately needed in order to stockpile modern war supplies.

 

To be fair, although naziism became popular I don't think that implied widespread support of foreign invasions or violent racism. Maybe Germans envisioned at most an economic union with Belorussia, Ukraine, and deporting recent jewish economic immigrants. Hitler's invasions were often met internally with dread until victory reports came back. Public violence against jews were surprisingly controversial even at the leadership level, with Goering and even Himmler livid at the way Goebbels put the SA on a rampage for crystal night.  Himmler had ordered a more humane "appearing" event and had demanded his orders be repeated back to him from all locations.

 

I wonder if Germania text had any influence on the composer R. Wagner in the 1800's. Just when I thought nazism could be explained as dysfunctional reactions to marxist revolutions of 1917 in Russia and 1918/9 in Bavaria and economic collapse, I hear some snippets of Wagner's essays in a music lecture series that sound as rabid as Goebbels.

 

On the other hand I am reading a Japanese sub (I-boat) commander that surely read no Tacitus yet stayed unrepentantly fascist postwar. Says they had a right to overlord millions of mainland asia, just as the US occupied spanish Texas-to-California. Sorry, but those spanish territories were nearly abandoned at the time, and the sparse population needed basics of law, order, and defense  from somebody. The sub commander says their massive slaughter of Chinese civilians were no worse than that of American Indians, but the latter was not a systematic killing of dense populations but rather a chaotic or mismanaged arrangement of inevitable jump to the much higher carrying capacity of that land.

[Tacitus and "the most dangerous book ever written"]

That quote in my title comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania_(book)#Reception , and most of the text is in http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/tacitus1.html .

Idea came from sort of a junky but fascinating documentary on discovery military channel (Myth Hunters). Some Italian count was amazingly successful in keeping "Germania" by Tacitus out of the hands of persistant Nazi intruders, only to have it almost ruined in the flood of Florence.

The manuscript was used in medieval times to try to rally Germans to defend against Turks, and again used as a (false) foundation myth in the 1930/40s. Apparently Tacitus was referring to a warlike tribe not actually dna related to  modern Germans, and mostly made it up anyway?

[Courses on Roman engineering?]

A new course that looks interesting. (Remember, only buy these courses when they are on sell, which is quite frequent.)

 

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1132

.

I downloaded it, and spot checks suggest this is a SERIOUSLY good lecture series. "Understanding greek and roman technology" has better graphics, more Roman focus and more enthusiastic presentation than in his "understanding world structures" series.

 

I originally tried to spend my bucks on a subscription to "Minerva" archeo magazine which is giving away free roman coins for the occasion, but their signup website barfed on me. So I realized I had discount codes for similarly priced greatcourses... coupon code w4k4 gave me $10 off thru Dec 30 and priority code 89162 gave me almost the 80% off that the website was offering anyway. The lengthy download barfed in the middle, but let me retry to completion.

[What's the last book you read?]

Steven H. Rutledge Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and Informants from Tiberius to Domitian

This had a sensationalist ring for a nonfiction book on Romans, so I dove in. Read the preface and the author undercuts the title (maybe chosen by marketing dept?) on how the informers and malicious prosecutors were not so much a tool of tyranny but sometimes a counterbalance against corruption and intrigue. OK, still sounds interesting until I hit the introduction and first half of book which turns out to be splitting a lot of scholarly hairs.

 

However the second half of book is worth flipping thru because of the thumbnail sketches of ALL known Roman empire snitches and hostile prosecutors... everything that is known about each individual. Gives interesting snapshot of unexpected things, like a merciful intervention by Tiberius on some trivial case. One person is accused of using a chamberpot while wearing a ring with Tiberian portrait - he he. Holy cow, this book costs over a hundred dollars on kindle! Find other formats or weigh it's value to you with this review http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2001/2001-09-39.html

 

Re: Financial digression on previous post (can exit here) .........................

 

Beware of authors picking and choosing stories to support a sensational sellable picture. Banks were originally horrified at the politicians battering and bashing them to give mortgages to the insolvent. Obam himself rammed lawsuits with the usual claims of racism to force a no-income group to be given mortgages, with the result that it ruined their financial lives and they are now publicly regretful.

 

Under both Clinton and Bush this bank bashing by the gov't and fannie/freddie just broke the back of responsible bankers. So they just gave up and let a cadre of kook bankers try to make the new irrationality pay it's way somehow. Now gov't punishes a bank (MS?) for the sins of the bank they altruistically took over at gov't request to prevent damage to customers or gov't bailout. They further grossly over-fine them hundreds of millions recently for a mistake overseas that had near zero financial impact.

 

The main problem with US unions is the legal loophole that allows them to become a monopoly force. FDR was totally against gov't unions because it is a monopoly against the taxpayers. Then JFK legalized this nightmare and we are just behind Spain where air traffic controllers get over a million dollars a year and still paralyze the country with strikes http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1244156/Spanish-air-traffic-controllers-earn-800-000--replaced-automatic-systems.html .

 

Where I live, food and supplies mostly depend on unionized unskilled with extortionate six figure incomes to not strike, such as a morse code officer (completely obsolete do-nothing job forced on company). There is a special national law that protects unions from charges of cross company monopolies (against consumers). Do you remember the abysmal quality of US cars in the days before imports broke their monopoly?

 

The recent bailout of GM (costing unrecoverable billions) was naked lawless populism. The bondholders were robbed... against hundreds of years of law saying they were the last to lose out! This is the traditional investment of widows and orphans, or at least pensions which suffer low returns for safety. But they were robbed because the unions were given the stock that is supposed to take the risk. I'm talking about the lawless way of the rescue, not whether there should have been breaks given to them (like the corp tax break they got).

[What's the last book you read?]

I'm warming up to the Japanese I-boat/sub commander story the most http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77669087 . I think our view of the Pacific theater is weakened by less dialog with the enemy actors post war. That and a language problem leaves us with one dimensional view vs the Euro get togethers of US/Brit/German for post mortem analyses.

 

This author has got a big ego and he's in the right places at the right times with the best equipment, but accomplishes almost nothing. Besides his direct accounts of key battles, and sharing what almost happened (how we unknowingly dodged bullets) he networked with other commanders and consulted postwar documentation (not translated yet?) to give his spin on the history. He has quite an anti-US and anti-prewar-FDR bias that is stimulating to unpack. Watch as he just misses opportunities to shell SFO and torpedo various carriers.

.

I think the whole Zhukov/Stalin massacred their people via tactics is a bit of a relic of cold-war historians

 

[...]

 

Bernake ignored the more conservatives because he's a student of Keynes, he wrote an influential paper on the Great Depression. Avoidance of populist backlash was maybe the very least of the reasons he acted in the manner he did, of course in doing what he did he incurred the wrath of the Austrian school & Tea Party types.

.

My impressions of Russian waste of their own lives was based on anecdotes from early and late periods, such as Zhukov racing peers towards Berlin and spending double the lives if it saves him a day. If he was more careful of lives in the middle periods, that's fine. But if the attrition ratio is comparable to Hitler in retreat, that is no point in Zhukov's favor. Hitler had that crazy scheme of no-retreat fortresses, and liked to starve experienced units of supplies in favor of inexperienced ones to give the opportunity of Darwinian survival of the fittest (punish the experienced troops who may have wasted too much ammo). Also Goebbels arranged to have great numbers of retreating soldiers hung, EVEN when this demonstratedly included innocent and vital couriers.

 

As for Bernanke, I rejoiced when he was appointed... even with no knowledge of what challenges he would face and with what policy bias he would apply. He not only studied the depression in depth (anyone can do that), but moved the state of understanding of it with rare insight. I don't rejoice for the elderly Berkeley professor-ess that will replace him with the same current policy - she seems stuck on that for the wrong reasons and may give us another repeat of the Carter admin inflation.

 

I didn't mean Bernanke had anything to do with populism... he is mostly independant of that, but has to set policy on the basis of counteracting stupid populist elected gov't measures that have strangled growth in the name of employee entitlement or bank bashing etc. It's like being on a boat where the mob has a big rudder pointed in a self destructive direction. Bernanke has only a little steering oar to dip in and counteract it a bit. His policies may look backwards in the abstract, but in the context of what he is dealing with and his small leverage, his most every move has turned out amazing in hindsight.

[Cheatsheet: Roman currency, debasement, wages, inflation, etc.]

I hope a distinction is made between price inflation and monetary inflation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation . Monetary inflation is the devaluing of money, but is most definitely not the same as rising prices or wages. Price inflation is influenced by additional things like resource depletion that may be temporary or avoidable by switching to an alternative.

 

The worst policies come from confusing these two... such as workers, pensioners, gov't payments factoring in "price" inflation rather than just "monetary" inflation. Same for the Romans; shed tears mainly for those who can't keep up with monetary inflation but not price. If the price of grapes doubles due to a bad harvest, switch to having servants pop plums in your mouth for heavens sake.

 

Same thing in the modern case; some get undeserved price inflation payouts for items in inflation indices that they don't need, and it simply robs the folks who don't get the undeserved boost (monetary inflation payout boost OK).

 

Edit: for instance, say copper mines are running low and it takes twice as much labor to extract the same amount of copper. This is price inflation, but not at all monetary inflation. No tears or pension boosts should be paid out to cover this increase in cost of living, or the system just goes berserk and consumes itself. Theoretically the whole working class could have to be devoted to supporting pensioners need just for copper (such as in San Francisco who enforces laws preventing substitution of plastic for copper pipes but doesn't enforce laws against copper theft).

[What's the last book you read?]

Principles of War is downloadable on an army web page of Ft Leavenworth KS pamphlets from Combat Studies Institute. Seems to be a translation (by Joseph West) of a Japanese guidebook only slightly modified beyond ww2 to include one cold war issue. At first glance, looks pretty cool. Brief, eccentric, and to the point. I haven't read much because it is a type of pdf that my ink type kindle is sloooow to render. maybe here http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/PrinciplesOfWar.pdf

[What's the last book you read?]

(reply to above)

 

"Herodotus"... All previous translations are claimed to be obsolete with the new release by Holland, according to http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9097452/the-histories-by-herodotus-review/

 

"Zhukov"... The excessive attrition rate he inflicted on his own army mars his great record, and I hope he had some regrets about this even though virtually mandated by Stalin.

 

"Bernake" [sic]... Bernanke was maybe the only real adult in the room among all leaders of this century so far, with economic lifesaving realism that benefited the globe. His detractors fail to recognize that more ideal reformist solutions were infeasible due to populist politics (Greek rather than Roman style democracy = two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner).

 

Loaded on my new kindle: Now that I no longer even try graphics-rich pdfs that freeze or crash the thing, I am progressing mainly on history titles from the 1930's and 40's, I loaded older books, but it can be so tedious to get past their typically lengthy preliminaries because my kindle is slow to turn pages.

 

One is Mussolini's Rome which claims the present appearance of medieval and ancient Rome is more influenced by his regime than just a few new roads and facades. Also the first 1936 Fodor tourist guide of Europe (free amazon download) gives a prewar view of, say, charming Antwerp just before it was accidentally pulverized by the Luftwaffe. Italy is depicted as being sort of a exasperating banana republic.

 

"Air to Ground Battle for Italy" promises to give a U.S strafing-eye-view of maybe too much collateral cost for the damage they actually did to Kesselring. "Hitler's Hangman" puts a different spin on "plucky Czechs kill a monster". The Czechs overwhelmingly did not want to risk retribution for this assassination, which was pushed by the Brits with suggestions of leaving them Nazi occupied post-war. I guess the respected author promises to show Heydrich was less an inherent monster and more a product of his environment, but we'll see.

 

From the Pacific theatre I have a Japanese principles of war, and a "I-boat Captain" memoir. The latter shows how "peacenik" Yamamato pushed for Pearl Harbor attack against wide opposition, and how the attack almost fell apart due to many last minute challenges. Author is fairly unrepentant and puts various attacks in a defensive spin (what's that term for attacking to prevent their attack?).

 

Well, I've got Roman empire for dummies and idiots... with the auto bookmarking I can sample then flit on elsewhere on a whim. Maybe I should increase the quality of reading by spending on some 99 cent titles that hold my interest longer.

 

I was creeped out by an apple computer highlighting the music I last loaded on my Kindle from an independent Windows system. Who is monitoring this even with 3g off? Anyway, since Kindle doesn't shuffle I have to load music that stands up to heavy repeated playing of the first few titles.