caesar novus
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Posts posted by caesar novus
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Below find a review on Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate by Claire Holleran Oxford, 304 pp,
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Ho ho he he... yes, i felt that "unnerving" aspect was the elephant in the room, and had considered defending it in my first example of irish immigrants dying on jobs too dangerous for US slaves (digging malarial canals and such). Before proposing the greater good of that arrangement, allow me to unburdan what unnerved me.
The whole issue of romans torturing innocent slaves as a routine procedure before they are called to legally testify irks me, to say the least. Actually the rules do address real issues where the slaves would be motivated to hide important truths, and later laws were issued to apply this less widely. I think we dont know much of how this was implemented, so i propose to dream up an acceptable modern version.
Many murders in the US are done in public with witnesses. The witnesses wont say a word when police ask, because their neighborhood is under threat of revenge killings by the thugs. So how about we reinstate torture of witnesses, for the good of all?!
Force them to eat only healthy food in moderation, watch only educational tv (ballet?), and listen only to opera. Bam, they will finger the street gangs so comprehensively, the neighborhood becomes quiet except for the crunch of cheese doodles.Well, back to the sweatshops. Maybe rome as well as a few modern places has congealed social mobility, but normally this can be a ladder for motivating folks to better themselves. The irish climbed out of desperation and hostility as famine immigrants to the US, just like 3rd world asian immigrants leapfrog to sucess today (in spite of highly discriminated against by univ. Calif. admission racial quotas, due to predicted good success). Meanwhile the long time residents of rustbelt declining cities, instead of relocating towards jobs like their recent ancestors did, are encouraged to stagnate as a paid off victimology group.
I traveled thru crummy third world areas long ago that have uplifted themselves tremendously since, thru willingly tackling bad jobs such as in east asia. Counterexamples, like enduring indian sweatshops actually seem the product of blind compassion rather than tough darwinian love. Their govt puts a smothering restraint on details of the economy like preserving outdated jobs, and little attention on the normal functions of govt. Southern europe is also suffering from superficial generosity rather than tough fairness.
Aww, i'm running out of steam before completing the case, but it is natural for free people to better themselves unless there is social or environmental interferance. The slaves were the oppressed ones (with some roman exceptions), but at least had a slight safety net in being worth more when healthy. The bottom rung of free workers at least had a shot of changing their profession or location.
I was trying to connect the dots to this amazing psychology book presentation of how blind compassion sometimes leads to unfairness and loss of liberty, but time is up...
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From 'as the romans did' i note even the romans could recognize slave health was an asset to protect. Varo, on agriculture, says 'it is more profitable to work unhealthy areas with hired workers than with slaves'... and presumably better than jeopardizing indentured servants promise of work, which he was also discussing.
Also that book quotes 'the digest of laws' as saying in spite of laws declaring slaves as nonentities, 'according to the law of nature, all men are equal'. I note that the US constitution tried to head off a socialist interpretation of this by saying 'all men are created equal'.
I guess it all depends on the point of time... the early republic didn't even have slaves iirc. Later in the empire, there seemed to arise more humane rules for slave treatment although i dont know if well enforced. Hadrian got positively soft hearted in banning the torture of all slaves before testifying in court... well he at least banned fishing expeditions of torture then testifying of slaves who probably weren't witnesses.
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But has the internet brought about a paradigm shift? After all, with the net one can be 'close' to smart people while still on another continent. Just this morning I was discussing parapegma in
Yeah, this morning i had a heartwarming forum exchange, solving each others problems in Azerbaijan and some other far flung place. But also i am standing back from other forum discussions i initiated that met vicious attacks and rage on with neanderthal debate. I sense this forum kind of holds back engagement at times to steer way clear of that.
The harvard professor made a point that live, nondigital contact is key due to you being able to read puzzlement in the face of your listener, and having to reset. I guess in this forum we could reply with puzzled emoticons. Really, there are demographic trends toward young highly educated types clustering up in trendy cities, although they avoid cold weather ones. We know the cases of retreating to idyllic empty spots, but that tends to be older folks who know what they want to focus on.
I think cities are of most value as a temporary developmental thing that broadens your perspectives and might shatter complacent assumptions, although may end up seeming banal once the lesson is learned. From a backwoods background, new york, paris, and hong kong were a huge revelation to me; now they annoy me. Nowdays you can retreat but keep certain compartmentalized sophistication alive with the internet.
And not only contact in the form of chit-chat; i have found sources of inexpensive favorite foreign food i can order by internet. I just guiltily quit ordering complete ready meals sourced from thailand... they weighed a ton since no water or prep was needed, and the free shipping must have cost them a fortune. I still order (actually subscribe to) certain special pasta sourced from italy with free shipping, after finding local versions hopeless.
There is another proposal of turning education upside down with internet tools by the famous originator of http://www.khanacademy.org which gives short cliff-notes videos on subjects (romans not well covered). He proposes kids watch lecture videos at home, then all classtime is doing homework with close teacher supervision:
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I woud like to wrap up with a quote about rome as a magnet, but i cant locate it again, even in the section of plus and minuses of city life. Anyway it went along the lines of even folks with comfy country villas wanted to be in near visiting distance to the exciting powerhouse of rome.
This was underscored and perhaps explained by a dazzling lecture i just saw by a harvard professor on his book (please excuse my pasted in syntax)
Triumph+of+the+City+How+Our+Greatest+Invention+Makes+Us+Richer+Smarter+Greener+Healthier+and+Happier who sees cities as learning machines, where your proximity to smart people measurably raises your knowledge and income just by being near. And the appearence of poverty is a measure of the pluses cities offer to the poor who flock in from rural areas.
I found an online lecture by him which is unfortunately US and nyc centric due to his audience, but think of the principles he espouses, and how they may apply to rome... maybe pioneers of benefits of urban life...
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The explanation for this deep and very secluded peacefulness is as follows: a corridor lies between and seperates the wall of the bedroom and the wall of the garden, and this intervening empty space absorbs every sound.
Pliny the younger goes on and on about the the brilliant configuration of every room of his amazing seaside villa retreat. Every view and angle to the sun seems optimized beyond imagination... how could life be that well contrived so long ago? My home also happens to have an odd wraparound corridor, which on the surface seems to waste floor space and lengthen walk times, but does have the advantage he describes.
offered to give up your household to another women, to a fertile womenOne of a number of depressing sounding tributes to ideal female behavior... so self sacrificing for family procreation. I realize reproduction needed an intense focus due to high mortality of kids, but the romans seemed in a better position than most of the ancients to allow a wider role of women.
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I was channel surfing by a 1965 movie "von ryans express" with no particular interest... except it depicted ww2 pows escaping thru all sorts of roman ruins! Darn, it wasnt broadcast in hi def, but my decoder let me back up and review the various site backgrounds in their state almost half a century ago. This could be a type of thing to look for if there are other classic movies like that.
It reminded me of the quite different italy i first saw almost 30 years ago. Pokey trains, dysfunctional queues, but sweeter in different ways. Just slightly off the beaten track you could get lost in magnificent unguarded ruins. Part of the movie seems to be among the palentine palaces that are down near the racetrack. Now off limits i think, but i accidentally stumbled among them long ago, not seeing any person or forbidden sign. I remember the most fancy tiled floor i can imagine (all wavey and fragile looking), and felt terrible walking on it but could see no other way to exit.
Well, they may have included caraculan baths and tivoli. You could see that bakers monument by the wall from the train... surely that and other views must be obscured by buildings now? Things seemed in better preservation although casually unkempt... still worth it to freeze frame on details even if you recently saw it live.
And i noticed the light upon marble used to have exactly that warm yellow quality they showed around rome. That sounds silly, but i think it is the type of pollution from high sulfur fuels of that era, and you could see an ugly yellow haze near the horizon. But looking at marble, it acted like amber shooting glasses and enhanced detail (due to blocking blue, which is less focusable), and even gives that happy feeling like candlelight vs flourescent. Now we seem to have a bright white slight haze type of pollution, which can wash out detail (clear days still common then and now).
I cant vouch for that long movie being worth it in normal entertainment terms, but did notice the female star (who gets killed by frank sinatra) should be known by those of uswho saw the viral youtube video posted in this forum.. Raffaella Carra is the blonde dancer in the video with nonsense lyrics meant to sound like english to non english speakers, and here is the dance sequence alone without some of the cute color interruptions done in the viral remix job:
http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMoK0focAFE
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I thought i would post a few quotes and notes on "as the romans did" book by jo-ann shelton...
yet many of us envision these ... people as marble statues standing grimly silent in museum hallwaysThats why i love them! In a few moments of viewing their architecture and especially their statues of real people (vs mythic fluff) i get the gist of their sublime values listed below without needing years of scholarly study.
qualities necessary to a successful farmer became esteemed as virtues: diligence, determination, austerity, gravity, discipline, and self sufficiency....
a "national character" ... they percieved of the ideal roman as being stern, diligent, and self-sufficient <note 2 -the american self image is remarkably similar>
Wow, i think that last note is very dated and shows i am using the older 1988 version of this book.
But maybe i shouldnt over idealize the past like dionysius does starting on p 194. He calls the once noble freeing of slaves turned into a corrupt dysfunctional process. Slaves poisoning masters with slave-freeing wills, slaves turning to vice to earn cash for freedom, and even masters freeing slaves for selfish reasons. Ah, the good old days when fellow citizens were upright freed slaves rather than corrupt ones, he bemoans.
Law was romes most original and and most enduring achievement....
The roman mind - pragmatic, prudent, methodical, orderly, yet adaptable and able to compromise...
She points out this spread across the western world, and another author mentioned it spread further thru colonization of asia and africa. The other author mentioned it was altered thru uk common law somehow though... maybe napoleonic too?
What a contrast of these positive points from 1988 uc santa barbara to another branch of univ calif berkeley, whose current online course seems to condemn rome as simply evil.
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I think there is a similar cluster of waiting skeletons at the base of a shoreside cliff at pompeii. Not labelled and you can barely see as you exit the site from that quite isolated (but connected by walkway) well preserved villa with the many painted rooms. An archeo book told me about it, and i think the least bad view was almost straddling the exit gate or at a restroom door just beyond the gate.
Anyway a couple years ago i revisited herculeum and found the walkways improved, and on reflection the drainage ditches were elaborated. But i still think the basic protection from the weather and tourists was in a shambles. In one day a handyman could go around and greatly improve cockeyed tin roofs no longer aligned over frescos, etc. I realize pompeii is in a worse mess, but i think its scale alone makes it more impressive. But herculeum has vast areas not yet dug up.
I hope packard the benefactor for this restoration sold his hp stock long ago... the company which really invented silicon valley is in a dozen year death spiral due to horrible management. Norway and other places with gender mandates for corp leaders should take note of the catastrophe that ensued when hewlett-packard was the first big company to overlook experience and track record for a female placeholder. Not a reasonable one, like several you see at the helms today, but someone who bled the company in half during a good economy. And it continued to replace ceos with more "inclusive" but tech ignorant male and female characters, and now the employees, the shareholders, and the legacy face impending extinction.
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Rome is increasingly demonized for slavery, ignoring the softer edge it often had relative to peer societies. In fact, a few tweaks of their law might have made it much nicer, if i fairly interpret the depiction by the book "as the romans did".
That book enumerates all the ways you may become a slave, and i note almost all of them could be considered as a rescue from possible death. Children left to starve, political or military rebels given a reprieve... only very briefly was this applied to debtors as opposed to indentured servitude. Ok, some folks were illegally put in chains, but that wasn't condoned. The regretable exception are those born into slavery... better if the romans made them indentured servants beside their parents until adulthood.
There is the positive issue of the many ways of exiting slavery, both given and earned. The children of these freedman gained treasured citizenship, and one source claims most of the citizens of rome descended from these freedman and upset the others due to sometimes not sharing values, etc. Here i think the romans were maybe too generous and should have required some earned way to citizenship.
As for the treatment of slaves, some urban ones had it extremely easy and could either enjoy life or make themselves rich (then free). But what about most of them, like the farming slaves? I think they could have improved things by not allowing a slave to be a foreman. This is a well known way to create a sadist, as we know from the example of concentration camps. The oppressed person gets an outlet for revenge, and does not value the owners need for wellbeing of human property.
The worst case treatment seems to be in mining. I can only guess the owners squandered the health and lifespans of those slaves because it was so profitable relative to the price of replacement slaves. Even in southern us the most dangerous construction projects were not done by slaves, but new irish immigrants eager for any wages. This is because the us had very early banned imports of slaves which made their replacement cost sky high... so rome might have at least introduced a slave sales tax.
Mine work isnt inherantly hard... you could have many short shifts thru the day for instance, but this would skyrocket the costs. The us south was equally uniqely cursed after the invention of the cotton gin. Beforehand slavery seemed to be slowly and thankfully dying out, but the cotton gin made it lucrative in rich muddy soils that were hard to otherwise make productive because plow animals sunk in them. Little natchez mississippi had more millionaires than manhattan, but maybe if they were charged a big sales tax for slaves this activity could have dried up without war.
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To see a really dramatic documentary of an inside the cockpit perspective of facing intimidating aa fire, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40knj0qg_Us&list=FLQgYULq9KCN-zkdBWpRWeRA&index=1&feature=plpp_video
which covers the 1982 bombing run of an obsolete vulcan over the well defended runway in the falklands. The crew hardly expects to survive aa, but soon has more to worry about like overcoming being lost or out of fuel. Their success rested on the efforts of an armada of 13 tankers, the crew of one of them getting more decorations than the bomber crew due to side dramas.
The forum where i got this video link included really wild schemes to extend hits on runways on argentina mainland, using a lead vulcan that primarily targeted aa. All using quickly improvised equipment, some from junkyards. But the hit of a single bomb of the first mission sent an adaquate warning message.
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I can think of further things that muddy the picture, like both "taxpayer" groups would be supporting a sizable army regardless of lack of administrators. BTW, prof Gregory Aldrete of University of Wisconsin devoted 3 lectures to comparing them, after 6 lectures on the Han and Romans separately. I still think there may be a lesson to be learned from the differences if I knew more details. For instance you might expect the Han to benefit from more policing, but I believe he said both Romans and Hans frequently died from bandits on internal travel.
And the connections to the modern crises is hard to make since "economies" is a recent concept. I was alluding to the dilemma that public sector staffing during a downturn wants to go down to save money, but wants to go up to provide a stimulus (if you can find some genuinely useful task for them). An overstaffed society cannot do a stimulus and an understaffed one cannot do cutbacks, which limits their options.
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I heard a talk (imperfectly) about roman vs surprisingly similar han dynasty, and got interested in the claim han had almost a thousand times more administrators for a nearly identical land area and population size at similar points in time. I wondered if the romans suffered from the light staffing, or did that austerity allow the economy to grow more freely or support bread handouts, baths, amphitheaters?
I see some comparisons were made in the past here, with a lot of concern about bias for some reason. But it seems an interesting and timely tradeoff to brainstorm. The hans apparently wanted a huge centralized meritocracy to smother any regional attempt at cronyism or whatever. Even today i think chinese central govt fights regional govt corruption.
The romans on the other hand were reluctant to expand staff when expanding their borders and allowed cronies, privatized tax collectors, and local puppets to fill the void. Either approach may have their advantages, but if the scale is 1000 fold apart, something must have been carried to the breaking point and made a cautionary tale.
A possible connection today is what to do in shrinking economic times... public job cutback (like austerity in greece), or stimulation (like beloved fdr1930s make-work or currently failing us green job training programs). Sicily has a wild middle path: to not let go any of 26000 forest rangers, easily 1000 times their staffing needs on worldwide per tree standards http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/sicily-fact-of-the-day.html
Well, i know it wont prove much... but was administration so terrible by the understaffed romans (they did staff up more late in the game) or was it paradisical for the han population supporting 1000x public servants? I want to focus on the concrete benefit/cost they provided to their society, not the fact that juicy jobs became available. Any society could (and does) fund plum jobs that returns no benefit to taxpayers they burden.
There was also an interesting comparison of the armies... han had meritocratic professional leaders and conscript soldiers. Romans had politician amateur generals and professional volunteer officers and soldiers. The speaker marveled the roman model in either case worked as well as it did. It was from some teaching company lecture series on ancient civilizations.
PS Edit: my 1000x factor was a bit, but not too, high... I checked back with "History Of The Ancient World A Global Perspective" "lect 32. Han And Roman Empires Compared" to find Han estimated at 1 bureaucrat per 450 population vs Roman 1 bureaucrat per 250,000 population. So many Roman provences had only 3 formal administrators, although various informal helpers such as provence-owned clerical slaves.
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Andalusian Poems translators Christopher Middleton, Leticia Garza-Falcon
http://www.amazon.com/Andalusian-Poems-Christopher-Middleton/dp/0879238879
I was just suffering thru the stoic meditations of the fifth good emperor and could no longer stand his austerity... maybe if he had lived it up a little more, his son wouldnt have turned into a most self indulgent emperor. Anyway i sought from my bookshelf a dose of the opposite, in a book reveling in more sensual pleasures... tastefully and succinctly observing the delights of foods, nature, maidens, and the alhambra.
I had heard a sample read over the radio by a translator, and rushed down to his signing event. I bought it without asking for a scribble, but just now noticed it was already pre-signed by both translators. Not a minor issue, as i can see by the elevated multi digit used prices on amazon... this book may end up as a photocopy for me and the original goes bye-bye.
Anyway, the book has a large introduction which can be a bit scholarly, but addresses the issue of the original arabic versions from around the year 1000 being lost. They make a case that they actually benefited by going into spanish before english, which sounds less crazy when you see the result. The poems are even visually attractive with the text layout making playful fluid shapes, such as varied line lengths to mimic the outline of the object being praised.
Well, its hard for me to articulate how nice this book is, and anyway it is hard to get and quite short for the price. But maybe it can encourage the search for other collections of poems from that bohemian corner of the medieval andalusian world. Believe me, anglo classics of nature or love poetry are hopelessly clunky, fussy, and smarmy in comparison
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In ww2 the allied bombing forced germany to starve the russian front of their most effective anti tank artillery 88 gun. Hordes of guns and gunners twiddled their fingers all over germany for what in most places a rare visit. The allies eventually realized the main value of bombers were as live bait,
Speaking of I-told-ya-so, that pretty fascinating wiki article seems to say about a third of military budget was tied up in not terribly effective german homeland aa... for political rather than military priorities. Surprisingly supportive for allied bomber effectiveness (by just being there), and surprisingly detracting for the weak will of a supposed dictatorship.
For example, in January 1943 -
Yes there were injuries on the ground due to shells falling back to ground and exploding there but I suspect generally defenders on the ground tended to be more concerned with shrapnel from exploded shells. It was effectively invisible and fell back over quite wide areas causing a higher risk death and serious injuries amongst anyone exposed on the ground.
Oh, i guess most entire-shell ground impacts came from first-time response to surprise attacks. At pearl they flung many shells up without setting fuses, and similar in more recent beginings of conflict. I only recall one account of someone running thru 88 fallout in a berlin air raid and i think that spent shrapnal was considered more injurous than fatal.
I had almost riffed a bit about the most extravagant and maybe wasteful project of ww2... not the bomb, but high flying b29 which actually cost more... to debug the pressure cabin and so on. This must have been partly to fly above aa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41 gives max heights and effective heights of various aa, but not the japanese ones. Of course high flights over japan proved a failure, and mainly low night runs were done with b29s.
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You might like a new military documentary series called History Exposed which brings newly declassified info to old battles. The one on the 1990 gulf war covers how the iraqi aa guns and missles were blinded by targeting their radar guidence. Some cruise missles only carried radar reflectors and others spewed only carbon fibers that would short out power lines to defensive computers. This plan was hard to sell originally, but led to only blind aa firing.
A wild weasel pilot who baits aa radar and tries to kill it gave possibly the most clumsy book talk in history about his memoir at http://www.booktv.org/Program/13904/Viper+Pilot+A+Memoir+of+Air+Combat.aspx
Aa kills a lot of folks on the ground... big shells that sometimes failed to burst in the air hit schools and vehicles surrounding pearl harbor. Accounts for a lot of damage falsely attributed to stray bombs even today. At pearl the guns only dialed in when waves of friendly planes came back to land and many were hit by jumpy gunners.
In ww2 the allied bombing forced germany to starve the russian front of their most effective anti tank artillery 88 gun. Hordes of guns and gunners twiddled their fingers all over germany for what in most places a rare visit. The allies eventually realized the main value of bombers were as live bait, not only tying up guns but attracting fighters to be eliminated by escorts. The invasion via france was hard enough even though german air force had only recently been neutralized.
There is the story of the radio proximity fuse which made it easier for us ships to shoot down japanese plane attacks. Or todays phalanx automated machine gun/cannons that target missles or planes that have gotten within a couple seconds away. The balance shifts back and forth for aa gun effectiveness thru time.
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Once the price is out of range for the mainstream market, publishers may as well multiply prices times five or ten to harvest the money from libraries that buy regardless of cost, do they not? So that is an invitation to access pricey books at a lib.
Even when you dont have a withdrawal card for the library that may carry it, i find visiting in person isnt as revolting as it used to be. Local university lib used to be a gathering of vagrants in a cloud of bedbugs, inflicting cybercrime via the free pcs. I'm not just stereotyping, but have helped their victims before. Anyway, now they put the free pcs on high tables with no chairs, and only the predators are too lazy to stand, leaving a nice environment for a better class of freeloaders like me to flip some pages nearby...
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The Italian justice system has solved the problem of no warning before this and any future quake http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_21829020/italy-convicts-7-scientists-manslaughter-failing-predict-killer
L'AQUILA, Italy -- Defying assertions that earthquakes cannot be predicted, an Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter Monday for failing to adequately warn residents before a temblor struck central Italy in 2009 and killed more than 300 people.The court in L'Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years each in prison.
Any scientist can now put a recording on their phone saying an earthquake may be imminent, and meanwhile move to Barbados.
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CN would you be interested in turning this to a real review?
Maybe there should be a book review section under the ET CETERA area for non Roman books. I'll chuck in a few more non roman comments here though.
(he was thrown out of the peace corps for trying to overthrow his host government)That was the way Paul Theroux enigmatically described the charge against him in one book. For some reason I feel moved to reduce my charges to match the writeup by somebody in wikipedia. It says he merely protected someone trying to overthrow his host government (still thrown out, as he should have been).
And it is traditional for a reviewer to show engagement by nitpicking some facts in the book. I start by disputing his "Pacific" claim that kamakazes attacked pearl harbor, because they were invented later than 1941. Weirder was his comment that prez JFK was torpedoed in ww2 melanesia (starting his rise to fame rebounding from that). JFK was not a victim of normal warfare, but due to his inattention and unreadiness his idling tiny speedboat was expertly rammed by a huge, ungainly Japanese ship. The Kennedys are practically hometown saints for him probably, and for him to simply make up (probably unconsciously) this more heroic version sheds doubt on other of his quite meticulous scribblings.
The Third Reich in Power [Audible Audio Edition] by Richard J. Evans (Author), Sean Pratt (Narrator)
This book unexpectedly captured my attention as a bedtime listen sometimes. It covers the "peacetime" mid 1930s in sort of a socio-political view. Mostly about the radical changes imposed on work practices, such as for farmers or teachers. Really shocking changes, sometimes for populism reasons that remind you of today, or sometimes to establish totalitarianism. I wonder if the asian communists copied some of these approaches such as militarizing teachers and encouraging students to bully them for straying from party lines.
One advantage is Pratt the audio narrator is a gem. Not the usual overly theatrical or else bored drone. Just engaging and matter-of-fact enough. Have you heard some of those Canadian TV documentaries spoiled by zombie narrators? Many documentaries take advantage of Canadian gov't subsidies, and apparently union rules promise narration jobs to bored or even contemptuous (of the Romans or whatever) drudges.
Actually this is part of a trilogy. I originally listened to his "3rd reich at war" one in an attempt to get a more neutral view, with the allied accounts being prone to triumphalism. I didn't realize the author had an arguably non neutral background of marxist and feminist analyses. Anyway he started off with a forward saying it was not going to be comprehensive about the atrocities. But as I recall it was nothing but atrocities, especially the more unusual and chaotic ones... just too numbing to dwell on, and why Croatian ones unrelated to Germany or Italy?
Then I listened to his "3rd reich comes to power" which was interesting because they trailblazed some of the techniques used today. Like hammering on the undecided demographic, and making ideologically unlikely concessions to entice micro slices. Today under 10% in the US are undecided, so much of the airtime is to address their idiosyncratic concerns. The 1930s saw heavy use of campaigning by airplane and radio, and so on... I forget if he covered much bullying by brownshirts... maybe I dozed off as not much of a politics person.
But back to "3rd reich in power". I agree with the Guardian review http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/01/historybooks.features that Evans makes a good case that the 3rd Reich was basically a movement in radical modernism rather than a regression to the old. It pretended to look to the past to entice certain demographics (catholic rituals and symbolism was considered effective and worth emulating). but it introduced an endless line of absolutely whacky "reforms". Many of them had to be retracted when they didn't work, because of the other great goal... getting the economy strong enough for war.
Maybe the interest of this for me is how it shows trends recognizable today, taken to extremes that we will thankfully never have to experience. Today at the most extreme "conservatives" are associated with social authoritarianism and economic liberty. "Liberals" at most seek the reverse of social liberty and economic authoritarianism. The oddballs are "libertarians" wanting full liberty. But todays "progressive" movement embraced by Europe and just recently in the US leans to both social and economic authoritarianism, which is close in direction if not magnitude of pre-war 3rd reich as depicted in this book.
P.S. for examples of dysfunctional "progressive" mandates, see "Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left" by Alex Berezow http://www.booktv.org/Watch/13939/Science+Left+Behind+FeelGood+Fallacies+and+the+Rise+of+the+AntiScientific+Left.aspx
Minor but provable examples are the biofuels mandate that pollute 300 times more, costs more, and starves the worlds poor. Another is the ban on disposable grocery bags whose substitute causes greater net environmental harm and sicken fellow consumers as you pickup their leftover decaying meat juices or dog fleas from their reusable bag deposits.
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I had restrained myself from posting the "inside story" from smithsonian magazine... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-the-Controversial-New-Text-About-Jesus-170177076.html?c=y&story=fullstory
I dont actually know or care much about the veracity or ultimate meaning of such X-ianity questions, but just wanted to point out it potentially has a strong whiff of contemporary sociopolitics. Karen king is not a random professor but a self described heretical feminist advocate type of historian. Late in that article sez her studies were aimed at teaching us how to live today, which sounds like a bias alert. Here is a snippet from one of her classes...
She asked the students to introduce themselves and say why they -
P.S. i have a plan to defuse these dutch independance tensions in belgium bloodlessly. It is inspired by the last minute idea some 1930s german had in putting a loud festive marching band in front of the line of sinister looking military vehicles coming to occupy austria (maybe done for west czech too)... who among the confused defenders dares to spoil an apparent party?
I propose the belgian seperatists call in north korean female troops as mercenaries, marching to a catchy tune :
There is probably some eu rule against injury to women, so there will be no resistance. Just my personal preference the result isnt yet another little country (there was a new balkan country split off recently of only about a few city blocks), but merge belgium into netherlands and luxemburg. I think belgium/lux was an artificial buffer state created to shield france/uk/netherlands long ago anyway.
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The swiss defense minister doesnt agree, and is stepping up war games to practice machine gunning down hordes of violent euro border-jumpers http://finance.yahoo.com/news/switzerland-prepares-army-euro-zone-131233903.html ... he says adjacent euro countries have downsized their military to the point where they cant even contain worst-case civil unrest. And I remember tony blair being very frustrated getting euro help in containing balkan violence.
Of course the above doesnt allege conflict between any eu countries. But that might have been constructive. If the netherlands and luxemburg would attack and carve up the parts of belgium that speak their respective languages, probably all involved would be happier... and geography as a subject (minus belgium) could be taught in one minute less time for future students.
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Here is an organization that feeds the stray cats daily within those very ruins according to http://www.romancats.com/index_eng.php (then hit the OUR WORK tab).
I dont think that is a good activity in the ruins even though they do seem to sterilize some. At least if they werent fed, some rat and pigeon eradication might be accomplished. I suggest someone sneak in and disguise an ultrasonic siren which drives away critters but is out of human hearing wavelengths.
new book debunks roman shopping
in Libri
Posted · Edited by caesar novus
The problem is if they have reconstructed it to artificially appear as a market, based on fancy and not evidence. Both that market and ostia antica have a lot of features that ring false to me... they dont have that slightly alien and thrilling ancient roman feel, and i asume that is due to overeager and ideological rather than archeological driven fascist era reconstruction. Well, that has been criticized, but here is a summary that puts that effort in some positive light... getting things done where moderns would delay and shrink from:
http://courses.umass.edu/latour/Italy/Mussolini/index.html
P.S. saw a good recent episode of 'unearthing ancient secrets' about roman engineering of colosseum, aquaducts, and the pantheon. I dont get why aquaducts were built sometimes half again too long in needless zig zags to maintain the gentle slope. They say to prevent wear from fast moving water, but why not save tremendous construction and ongoing maintence by having special water ladder drop downs like we do now for fish to climb? I'd suspect the builders were paid by the length, and like taxi drivers were padding the distance, but that seems too brazen.