caesar novus

No, Britain isn't doing the worrying. It's what is behind the claims of German/EU official, which borders on a technical gimmick. It's nothing UK specific and was not anything the UK asked for or specifically agreed to. I have lost a detailed explanatory link, but will try to summarize more fully than https://www.rt.com/uk/354758-brexit-eu-debt-leave/ Every EU country makes commitments to pay for their share of EU budget; UK will probably follow thru with 4 year contribution of e60b it promised before the vote. However, on the spending side EU makes promises for various construction projects that exceed their own budget, and this has built up year to year to I guess 200b now. Someone divided this by 8 to come up with a bill to the UK, although technically no EU country can have debt to EU and some EU lawyers say the UK could ignore it. Several articles likened this to credit card limits, which I don't really follow. They said for instance for that bridge in Bulgaria or UK, some EU official would say go ahead and build it to be refunded later by EU. So I guess they get a non-EU loan first, or maybe from some EU bonds? They seemed to say a lot of projects are backed up waiting for the budget and country commitments to catch up. It is this promise-making that appears to be out of control from any democratic process and smells elitist to me. Anyway, I include bridge picture from Trajan's column which a civil engineer professor called still the most efficient solution for most places. He said some wooden trusses were put in the wrong place, but that may have been just the sculptor.

I think that 25b "owing" interpretation is limited to a few German sources so far. By that logic Germany may "owe" UK even more due to annually paying only half of it's NATO commitments of 2% of GDP. UK overpays but most of Europe pays 1% or less. If I have this right Germany should pay 35b more per year, or UK could have saved annual 31b to drop down to German levels of NATO contribution. Some of this backlash against Brexit smells of spurned lovers overcompensating, as if they were originally more Anglophile than they let on. Maybe Junckers used to sleep in Union Jack pajamas? Anyway paying off the 25b may be worth it for cutting future losses. As I understand it, this number primarily involves EU porkbarrel projects like building bridges in Bulgeria which the EU promised to pay for but didn't yet. Even when the pork was spent in the UK, what chance did UK voters get to shut down or streamline such projects. BTW a bridge building professor told us that virtually all bridges should be of the truss type from Roman times if cost accounting was rational. The fancy modern designs are done to reduce local labor hours whose wages are artificially boosted by gov't, vs more material expenditure which is affordably bought on free intn'l market.

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=roman has umpteen lecture slides on many Roman topics. Quality varies, but easy to find an interesting slice of Rome with catchy visuals. Also http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=rome and other obvious search terms. Slides don't work for me under safari, but firefox ok.

Populism is sweeping the world with ignorant and harmful consequences, I guess accelerated by social media/news. The US founders tried to remedy excesses of Greek democracy and even Roman republicanism, but even that is overturned now. Education has become indoctrination. Science is only quoted in bits that agree with ideology. Nationalism may seem backsliding, but something needs to address excesses of robo-globalism. I used to read and like Boris' articles before he became a public figure, but I may have to line up with Mary (even though her writings on Romans carries whiff of eccentric sensationalism).

I've got to add a postmortem postscript based on surprising news reports. The last tendril of the storm dumped a foot of rain on us, but without wind or the usual hysterical siren activity. Seemed like a kind of peaceful cleansing... the news reports mostly found minor flood incidents on the same scale of normal flooding happening every few months. The amazing part was the emergency HQ center for all gov't agencies supporting a million people had it's power knocked out (alone). And it's emergency power booted up but the transfer switch wouldn't feed it in. All those bossy, highly paid, condescending preparedness freaks were in the dark and out of touch except for one guy who had brought a laptop and handheld radio to a remote storm watching location. The main damage was gov't created. A sort of homeless favela that had been allowed to form on an industrial stream washed masses of toxic trash into a recreational bay (too protected to self cleanse). These folks were not down and out but each had more possessions (stolen and found) than residents of a McMansion neighborhood, which were aimed at selling to nearby recyclers. The federal govt had blocked local govts from preventative cleanout based on misguided compassion, so the shoreline is now wrecked with a million cubic feet of rusting and splintering hazards.

Today's discovery science channel had an Unearthed episode on the Parthenon, and discussed it's exterior paint. First they showed odd bits protected from the weather that had blue and red paint on it. Next they showed a guess of the overall look, which was mainly natural marble with a bunch of decorative banding near the top. Finally they addressed the question how could you stick any paint to glossy marble 2500 years ago. A Greek artist demonstrated a guess made by dissolving gummy tree resin into melted wax, then adding color powder. You would etch the marble to create lines so unruly paint wouldn't cross beyond it's border, and keep reheating the paint and the brush itself. The trick was to apply very hot to burn off any dampness on the marble to allow a bond. Science HD channel seems one of the last to offer meaty 1 hour documentaries on the ancients, without cheesy docudrama. They seem allergic to Rome so far, and want to glorify less accomplished cultures to my eye. When younger I had exactly that bias too. China wall episode was good at least visually, but kinda pathetic glorifying the mortar as miraculous due to perhaps having rice gruel in it... no match for Roman mortar tho.

Here I sit typing outside in what was hysterically promised to be a massive tropical storm from a weakened hurricane. Even weather reports on TV were pre-empted by big brother robo alarms which couldn't be muted even if you hit pause button or changed the channel. Well, the wind is less than usual, sky is greyer than usual, sprinkles are a little more persistent than usual... just what anybody would expect from checking doppler radar etc of oncoming storm. Oh, you can feel a sinister quality to even weak wind gusts... it's how fast they accelerate rather than their tame speed. I've seen it umpteen times; we luckily have a massive mountain that hurricanes have to cross first, and the forecasters are oblivious to the demonstrated historical fact that it snuffs out much circulatory power out of such storms. They probably know; only recently did their models pay attention to geography, but they probably don't dare stick their neck out and depart from proven flat-world forecasts. Maybe faked out a guy who repairs wind-blown roofs and is an instructor pilot to boot; I see him blogging he has boarded up his windows. This time I really detect fraud. The storm has long been rated at the slowest possible speed to raise any alarm, and was forecast to not drop even one knot after mountains and cooler water for an unprecedented period until it passed all populated areas. There is a disaster industry where politicians and scientists huddle and warp the message for both good and bad intentions. I suspect the storm has long been under dangerous wind speeds, but the nerds were afraid of the small chance it would ramp up and force them to flipflop their warnings. Forget the truth, don't inform us lowly taxpayers but pump condescending spin to keep us manageable. I have sat thru a scientific review of the Japan tsunami event, and came to see many public warnings of such waves are overblown compared to what is known to science. Even if you have infinite power behind a quake, it takes unusual predictable geology to allow that to translate to big waves. Most places cannot create dangerous waves... they are like huge engines with a tiny propeller that can't exert it's force. Anyway, I think politicians show worse motives here. Wasn't it the Romans who instituted bread and circuses, which google calls "a diet of entertainment or political policies on which the masses are fed to keep them happy and docile." Now they exhibit benevolence by overhyping storm dangers and needlessly opening shelters etc which is much cheaper and more visible than working on crumbling infrastructure. They monopolize news in their hardhats, for instance triggering buying frenzies on bottled water... a ridiculous product that can make folks sorry they didn't get nutritious drinks at the same price. The brain runs on sugar alone, and once I was stranded in the Sahara with nothing but lemonade sport powder for several days - comfy because wells and shade was available in my spot.

One source is authentic roman painting/frescos depicting building exteriors. A quick scan of google pictures suggests most are off-white with occasional red columns. A strong exception is posted below from inside a Pompeii villa. There was a period when it was fashionable to show fantasy architecture in paintings, and maybe some of the colorful ones show some distant exotic style. vs pompeii amphitheater district cityscape:

I wonder if that is near where a TV documentary showed loads of (silver?) coins found a couple years ago, and declared it the best guess for battle location. Or will there be an eternal hopscotch as more distant coin finds are made. Regardless of the location, I recall several sources depicting Romans as kind of sabotaging themselves there with several poor decisions... same with some battles with Hannibal too. I forget the details, but they gave deja vu with various commercial air accident reports in the sense of there was not one, but a series of issues that went snafu. The point being a professional Roman general or commercial pilot is too competent to respond badly to one simple issue. Rather it is when several issues come up together that they lose focus or get tricked. It is often underlined that airline crashes due to pilot error turn out to have multiple causes if you look hard enough, and maybe that could be a theme for a class project on Roman battle defeats too.

J. Romm in New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/134975/erotic-bard-ancient-rome skeptical of speculative

I just got a shock of recognition that this and some of my other posts assume that bad/sick taste equals amusing. Maybe not so to some, so first check if this crass Roman singer seems funny. In this movie he is ubermacho, but youtube also shows the original broadway version where he was softened to be quite effeminate. IF you can find amusement in that, below is what I originally posted. Maybe there is something wrong in finding musical hilarity in modern tragedy, but the singer is half Cherokee satirizing his redneck relatives lifestyle.

Sheesh, I dunno. I have several video courses on roman architecture yet can't recall much external color other than accents on recreations. Maybe they didn't have good waterproof paint? Roman republic was mostly brick, which is it's own coloring. Their internal color could be so garish it almost makes me seasick and I would hope for plainer exterior. They got multicolored stone from Egypt (for interiors?) then were revolutionized by discovery of nearby white marble at Carrera which got a lot of use. A lot of stuff was in tufa which one source claimed was thought a poor man's marble with it's honey color. Pompeii has grafitti/announcements on some external walls, which means we should know what the background color is... I haven't finished my last video course on Pompeii which may say. P.S. the Pantheon exterior always looked like an ugly lump to me. Not sure if it lost some facing but a Yale Univ course claimed it wasn't meant to be seen from the outside... it was jammed within building complexes that led you to the interior thru almost a tunnel (meant to enhance the surprise).

deleted

P.S. Many sources quoted an American observer, the famous civil war general Sheridan and I found his writeup here http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Sedan.html . It's strange how he is treated like royalty and personally hosted by Bismarck and the Prussian king near the key battlefields, with an intimate view of Napoleon3 surrendering. I mean he even shared a bedroom with (english speaking) Bismarck, who taught him how to be a harder drinker. The night before Bismarck lost 20k killed by the French, he focused not on battle plans but whether Sheridan thot US opinion considered France as the bully. Other sources explain Sheridan had earlier acted against Napoleon3 by secretly donating his surplus civil war weaponry to the Mexican rebels trying to throw the French out, and "out" did Maximilian go. The US remained the only major power not threatening Prussia to stop carving up France. Sheridan reported to President Grant the US had nothing militarily to learn from that war, just that France had terrible leadership vs Prussia. But I think he was too far from the front after the initial surge of the French drove the VIP observers permanently to the rear. Sheridan isn't a gifted writer, but it's interesting to hear details like where do I go to the bathroom with dignity when all buildings are packed with wounded and it's literally knee deep with their dead outside. How can I requisition food when the troops are crazed with thirst and hunger while being forced to bury the dead. Sheridan should have been overrun at the first battle, but the loopy French general who was overwhelmingly winning called for a retreat.

I thought I would do a quick sanity check for this issue... how rectally retentive EU policy may be sabotaging the very pensions they try to save. I found this "Double hit scenario" confirmation writeup from "European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority" http://www.europeanpensions.net/ep/Double-hit-scenario-cannot-be-ruled-out-EIOPA-says.php%20.php I may have this a bit wrong, but it seems so true to national characters that continental Europe found the volatility in stock markets 8 years ago too unsettling for pension use and mandated a mostly bond approach. Where are you now, with "safe" bonds giving 0 or negative yields?! This can have dire impacts on everyone, now that to hire a meter maid a gov't or corp has to find a billion euro to put aside to fund that one pension. UK (and I think the Dutch) are far more stock-saavy and know how to surf the financial seas greatly to their benefit. I mean about a hundred times more activity in stock investment per capita than the other countries by both individuals and institutions. And it has real impact... when a corporation has EU mandated burden after burden imposed on it, they simply pass on the cost to consumers. The very folks that celebrate this have to pay for it as a REGRESSIVE kind of pseudo-tax... impacting the poor and middle incomers disproportionately in higher cost of living. EU is fine for small countries that desperately need a higher level of organization, but not for large countries with demonstrated excellence of organization which could only be dragged down by naive meddling from the others. Britain please free yourself, even if regions north of the Hadrian's wall have to be spun back to the EU. Revive the commonwealth and build it even bigger than the EU!

You can change this thread into a real poll where surprising numbers of lurkers will vote. Or at least start a new one with voting capability. I almost fell off my chair for the poll here "why do you like the Romans" because nobody had checked the one obvious and to me proper reason, but tons of votes on reasons I had considered peripheral. As a non-Brit, I pray that they do the right thing and LEAVE!!! Actually they would convert into a Norway (Iceland, Switz somewhat) style and join EEA and one other acronym I forget which gives virtually all the benefits with few of the dysfunctional drawbacks. I used to always get a weekly British news magazine, and remember how they explained Turkey should have striven to join EEA rather than EU with win-win results (probably Greece and some others too with hindsight). EU seems an elitist condescending organization which doesn't respond to democratic citizen feedback. They are particularly tone-deaf to some of the things that made Britain an inspiration to the world, eg in terms of liberty and finance. A few hundred years ago Britain was run on an efficient low tax rate system that made it wealthier than the continent, and still with plenty tax revenue due to thriving economy. It just burns me up to see e.g. the EU trying to impose taxes on trivial financial transactions. Not the money it would cost, but there would be an implosion of price discovery because nobody would want to sell and buy to incur taxes. This glue in the system is a reason why Japan has many zombie companies and a 25 year recession. Housing prices are inherently boom and bust because the natural friction of buying and selling hurts logical price discovery. Spreading this plague to for instance pensions would leave you unsure if you ever had them funded enough (EU has some other idiotic overreactions that make pension growth hard), I recently imported a couple small boats from Europe (amazing you can do that... in one case it was just a couple mouse clicks and a UPS man brought the thing on a trolley with a modest customs bill). They have stamped on them some mandatory EU limitations that are so draconian I would not be allowed to use them in 95% of the weather here.... pooh, I have had a long life on the water with no need for patronizing nannies or for that matter any kind of rescue. I'm not doing this the justice it deserves, but propose that if Brit does the right thing, I would advocate my country joining the Brit commonwealth which I gather has become rather toothless, but we could revive with free-er trade etc.

If Norway's idea of album art can be overlooked:

I know nothing about those names, and would guess it's hard to know for groups who left no writings or cohesive remaining culture as discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goths#Etymology . Don't let my ignorance deter your search. From here on I will just digress and vent some things from an anthropological perspective to nobody in particular. Not only does a group's name often differ from an inside vs outside perspective... it usually ought to. In fact what defines the group typically is (and should be) different from inside vs outside. Fer instance, a group may define it's boundaries by ideology and culture vs Roman's define it by a mobilized threatening subset with added misc allies. Names don't refer to universal "things" but to dynamic entities that arise with meaning specific to each naming culture. E.G. who are "asians" and where do you draw the line? Try to be excruciatingly correct and ask the "asians" what they call themselves and you will cause insult for your patronizing assumptions. Even if they had the same concept with a name you wanted to adopt, it can be something you not only can't pronounce, but cannot hear properly. Look at the word "ma" in asian languages with umpteen meanings based on the tone. Look at languages with clicks and so on... now we know that the human mind rewires itself with age to increasingly lose the ability to even hear distinctions that your language doesn't use... it's an efficiency step. The same way as you learn to see red hair as a sign of hot tempers... oops. Maybe the Romans at times had some diplomatic contact and would approximate what a group called itself. But I hope they often used names meaningful to them, like mountain raiders, for groups which Romans defined who was in or out. That sounds harsh by P.C. standards but is how language works if you have experience in artificial intell and machine learning of language. Language takes a wide perspective for granted and just makes explicit a shorthand for what is culturally unexpected. I like it when foreign airlines announce a flight to "chic-cog-oh" instead of "shic-cog-oh"; they shouldn't have to be a slave to the quirky exceptions of pronouncing Chicago. I hate the western impulse to pander to someone else's pronounciation... they probably wouldn't even call Cadiz cadeeth but try some odd guatamalan dialect. The western world is becoming increasingly corrupted by misguided attempts of compassion with money or words, but I guess a novel isn't the place to fight this :-)

Oops, I took a look for that Italian style post WW1 work and found it was Stravinsky's Pulcinella ballet. It was Stravinsky whose other work was so austere, and Pulcinella just sounded least-bad to me. Many of these works are avail free on archive.org, and I edited in a link to Serenade for Strings. A ton of apologies for diss'ing Shostakovich style, which was actually too diverse to fall into a style. My mp3 player garbled up the order of the Shosta. lecture segments which left me confused. If Maxim or Dimitri Jr. happen to read this, keep in mind I at least made the effort to attend the former's concert in Hong Kong where he let the conductor baton fly out of his hand.

I do most errands the green and healthy way, with long walks along busy roads. I drown out traffic noise with noise cancel earphones, typically playing historical lectures. Still I miss parts, such as due to the arrogant ear-bleeding level of gov't sirens going to typically false med emergencies such as to request recreational pain pills. So I switched to histories of composers like http://www.robertgreenbergmusic.com/great-courses/ where there would be song samples and content that won't suffer much by occasional interruptions. By the way, I just read that since our police sometimes clear vagrant campers from 100% blocking sidewalks on my busy route, a top federal official has punitively blocked milliion$ of our fed tax money from reaching here. Idiot limousine lefty... he expects us to abandon foot travel for electric cars. Many of these vagrants are not poor but admit to being awash in benefits like fake disability. Some flew 5 to 10 airline hours to reach this place, famous on the internet for "blind compassion" where they can spend their benefits purely on intoxicants with no obligations. Anyway, I'll point out some lecture anecdotes that surprised me. My listening was fractured, so I sought confirmation in (fractured) Wikipedia which normally contradicted the lecturer. Start with Shostakovitch, the stark modernist of a century ago. I have visited his son and grandson in their home, so I hope I don't sound ungrateful for only liking one work which was sort of a redo of some Italian work. Right after WW1 there was disinterest in the harsh mechanical sound, so he sought out income from a quite delightful and accessible piece that I wish I remembered the name of. He redid many of his own works as well, just as they were falling out of copyright. Most of the lectures were about the drama of him trying to survive the wrath of Stalin. I liked Shost. quotes on Stalin being worse than Hitler for Russia, which still acknowledges the almost infinite horror of Hitler. Putin has whitewashed the textbooks about Stalin, and the west is content with Hitler rather than Stalin or Mao as symbolizing the essence of killer. The lecturer digressed into a conspiracy theory that Stalin was murdered because he was about to start a war with China and terrorize Russian Jews. Wiki seemed to carefully shoot that down in favor of the conventional natural(ish) death theory. The supposed assassin Beria seemed unlikely. He was a depraved counterpart to Hitler's Heydrich, both sort of secret intel police heads that enjoyed personally torturing and killing... especially young civilian girls picked up off the streets daily. It was not too long ago when construction at Beria's old mansion turned up many young female skeletons in his garden. Daughters of high officials up to Stalin were warned to not accept a ride from Beria. Reading histories of Stalin (a terrorist even when young), Beria, and Heydrich are somehow more depressing than Hitler who at least espoused some appeal toward ideals rather then being brazenly devoted to nothing but evil. Lastly Tchaikovsky and his music, maybe only matched by Vivaldi in terms of accessibility. I came to realize that practically his only work I grooved on was "Serenade for Strings" https://archive.org/details/SerenadeForStringsInCMajorOp.48 which the lecturer said was flagged by "serenade" to uniquely be a pleasant interlude. Other works seem dramatic to bombastic accompaniments to his high strung life. The lecturer called him a serial molester of slightly underage boys, including his servants. One committed suicide, which was followed by writing of his ultimate gushy heartbreak work (I think in Swan Lake) which I have seen middle aged women melt to. Wiki doesn't take that shrill approach, saying just that he enjoyed man-friends more than his bizarre marriage, and that he died in a cholera epidemic rather than suicide for being outed. I have heard endless hand wringing supporting the latter theory, that he was driven to suicide due to society's homophobia. The lecturer took a strange middle path, that Tchai .killed himself out of vanity to not be remembered as a gay composer. He was about to be reported as gay to the Czar in some minor investigation, but there were no punishments for that except raised eyebrows. The lecturer said Tchai. knew how to easily avoid cholera outbreaks, but was so jealous about his hard-won conventional legacy that he took a poison that mimicked that agonizing, drawn-out-for-days death!

A search turned up Romans starting rabbit farming in Spain... also they were a symbol of fecundity and related things, with links to certain mythological figures. Maybe depends what woman is waving what over the bunny.

I downloaded a free Amazon Kindle book which was a memoir of a Brit reporter stuck inside Paris under siege by Prussia. 1870 was an interesting period where the unified architectural redo beloved by the world today was being started, and then fired upon, for the oddest of reasons. Napoleon3 was trying to suppress urban revolutionists on one hand by making wide blvds that couldn't be barricaded against gov't military response, and on the other hand by baiting the Prussians into a war which could bolster French patriotic unity. Well, like another free Kindle memoir from the Confederate war department in US civil war, it was an interesting time covered by a rambling lousy memoirist. It worked better when I mixed in readings of a quality history book of FrancoPrussian war, which was one of the bloodiest yet most needless of the 1800's. Bismark also wanted to bait France into war in order to rally and unify Germany; southern parts of modern Germany had been losing interest in joining up with Prussia, just as Parisians were increasing hostile to their agrarianist national gov't. Well, I haven't read that far and am already forgetting stuff, but I have the nerve to make a few observations. Napoleon3 is thought to be the dunce because he was tricked into declaring war first over a ridiculous nicety about how a wedding was called off. Bismark got the appearance of not initiating war and was able to win it with better organization and cannons (although worse small arms). I do give points to Napoleon3 for trying sort of a "suicide by cop" approach of wandering a field under fire when things first looked hopeless (his companions were hit), then surrendering to stop bloodshed well before ammo ran low. Bismark wanted to shell Paris vs his superiors trying a standoff first. My most bold observation is that there seem tremendous echos of 1870 tactics in WW2. It almost seems like WW2 wasn't an attempt to redo the freakish case of WW1 more effectively, but to address or relive the more conventional issues of 1870 war. In the case of 1940 France, it was still hobbled by terrible communications and disunity which made it hard to benefit from some superior technology like tanks and fortresses. In the case of Germany, so many of the oddball concerns of Hitler which were in his generals memoirs seem to be avoiding pitfalls from the 1870 war. Hitler was obsessed by the exact performance of every small arm, maybe recalling the much superior 1870 French rifle and crude machine gun. Many 1870 units squandered ammo to a disastrous extent, and Hitler insisted certain wasteful units not be resupplied with ammo as a punishment that could mean wipe out. Speed of deployment problems of 1870 would be ruthlessly corrected, etc... I may not be explaining this well, but there seem echos galore.

good pictures; I wonder who is the figure with an upturned crescent moon on his head.

I ran across some interesting tidbits about Palmyra... not sure if absolutely true. First, the liberation of Palmyra was assisted by a "Russian Rambo" who upon being engulfed by the enemy, called a fatal airstrike on his own position. http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/30/europe/body-of-russian-rambo-flown-home/index.html Also in November 2015 Minerva, it says the eagle on US dollar bill started out from a Roman eagle sketched in Palmyra. Such sketchings were made in mid 1700's and were widely published as an architecture source book. In Wiki under "great seal" you can see the scraggly Roman type eagle before it was converted into the present bald headed eagle. I wonder what those founders from the enlightenment age would say about current plans to change U.S. currency depictions from aspirational ideals to pity whoring.... portraits of blind albino eskimos in wheelchairs or something of the sort. Also they show various photos of Palmyra taken in mid 1800s. They infer Palmyra was ruined by Aurelian as much as by time. Around 270 he put down a rebellion by Queen Zenobia with wholesale massacres and destruction.

Constantine and Maximian on silver and bronze http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/04/30/workers-unearth-large-trove-roman-coins-at-spanish-park.html