June 30th; Thursday. Read Terri's copy of
'
The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History',
text by Colin McEvedy, while watching over Sean's dogs. McEvedy has a cheerful,
jovial tone of writing - in one place referring to a revisionist view that Neanderthals were not so hairy or
gorilla-like by calling this the view that the typical Neanderthal was a fellow you could reasonably share a park bench
with. The atlas pairs a map page (drawn by John Woodcock) to each text page, and goes from prehistory (a few tens of
thousands of years BC) to the probable boundary between Late Antiquity to the Early Mediaeval world (4th century AD). My
only doubts there would be in pushing Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora (5th into mid-6th century AD)
out of Late Antiquity, where I'd say they obviously belong. But of course you have to draw the line somewhere. On
each page, McEvedy is careful to include a couple of sentences at the end about West African kingdoms, China, and India,
which appear at the very limits of the standardised map centred on the Mediterranean. The disconnectedness of events
in those principalities at a far remove from Europe in its way justifies the drafting of the eurocentric map rectangle.
June 29th; Wednesday. Finish reading the
extraordinary unauthorised biography
'The Real Anthony Fauci'
by Robert Kennedy Junior, trial lawyer son of assassinated onetime US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.
This is a book which everyone should read. Meticulously footnoted, it documents the corrupt harm done by Tony Fauci since
he became head of US medical agency the NIAID in 1984, a post he still holds today. His role in creating the wholly
unjustified covid-19 debacle fits perfectly into the pattern of previous vaccine-promotion scandals he has perpetrated. Later
in the story, Bill Gates enters the story as another overpowerful character imposing vaccines where they're not only needed,
but are in fact positively harmful. It is also Gates, rather than Fauci, who began drilling officials from governments around
the world in military-style simulations (SARS 2017, Clade X 2018, Crimson Contagion 2019, Event 201 2019) intended to
condition them into overriding law, freedom, and common sense with authoritarian proto-world-government police-stateism.
June 28th; Tuesday. Speculation that covid-19 was
deliberately designed to have a fertility-reducing effect is now revving up with
regional measurements,
new data,
more new data
the suspicious paper trail,
and emerging vaccine revelations.
June 27th; Monday. The onetime DDR, and its people's
deep training in distrusting governments, now shows up in
a map of
covid-19 & vaccine injuries. The old East/West German border is literally
visible simply plotting for the health gains from beneficial vaccine hesitancy.
June 26th; Sunday. Perhaps eating more insects won't
work out so well.
June 25th; Saturday. Forbes reports
Pfizer's booster protection fades in weeks.
June 24th; Friday. Another good piece from
Conservative Woman, tracing back covid-19 through twenty years of
laboratory mischief.
June 23rd; Thursday. Musician Louis Cole of Knower here
performing a piece (with a room-sized horn section) that seems to be based on the sound of traffic:
My Buick. Notice the 3 girls on the terrace not really dancing.
June 22nd; Wednesday. Putting darker news to one side for a moment:
1) Men from Pakistan's hill districts
taste cheesecake for the first time. They're wonderfully
gracious about this fabulous new food, wishing good things on its obviously talented creator /
2) How did ancient Egyptian sound? /
3) More cartoon linguistics: family words (at around 12 seconds, a bit oddly
phrased - I suppose he means "sister of sister" versus "sister of brother") /
4) Clocks & time words in other languages /
5) Fascinating - interpreters during the conquest of Mexico - did that politically adroit woman interpreter speak subtly different
versions in each language? /
6) 'Teen Spirit' in Latin /
7) 'House of the Rising Sun' in Old French /
8) 'Seven Nation Army' in Attic Greek /
9) Did the Roman Empire come close to having a steam-powered industrial revolution? Part 1 /
10) Roman steam-powered industry Part 2.
June 21st; Tuesday. Intriguing story about the Bank of England's
curious tardiness at repatriating some Austrian National Bank
gold from its vaults. Seven years seems a bit slow for a distance of seven or eight hundred miles. Is that two
miles a week?
June 20th; Monday. It seems the Ukrainian leader had a plan to destroy
the country's 46 US-funded biowarfare labs before
the Russians could capture them.
June 19th; Sunday. Quick round-up of developing news from the ongoing
covid-19 QR-coup attempt - most of these from the Epoch Times.
(i) The latest euphemism for mRNA-vaccine injuries:
"Sudden Adult Death Sydrome" - hard to think of a better way to say "We're totally making this up" /
(ii) Pfizer vaccine triples myocarditis incidence /
(iii) Mass vaccination spikes all-cause mortality /
(iv) 'Vaccination' increases risk of covid-19 infection /
(v) Higher covid-19 infection rates
among vaccinated children: US government data /
(vi) mRNA vaccines reactivating dormant viruses /
(vii) A warning that a revived version of bird flu might be the next attempt to create pandemic panic /
(viii) How the evidence-based
medicine movement helped to create this disaster - having doubted the movement for
over a decade, I tried to explain the basic problem to a British magazine editor in mid-2020, but without success /
(ix) The Amish don't get autism, but they don't vaccinate either /
(x) A 20,000% rise (that's roughly 200 times as many cases) in heart disease for people under 40 after mRNA-vaccination drive.
June 18th; Saturday.
An appreciative review of an 1879/1898 popular astronomy book by Agnes Giberne. On the same wonderful website,
two 8th-century texts from each end of the Old World show how to memorise and calculate
using only the hands.
June 17th; Friday. More interesting stuff on
China's
war in the mind.
June 16th; Thursday. Cordial drinks with
Irish Michael &
Tom the
translator.
Michael reminds us of the late Norman Stone's praise for
Dominic Cummings' academic brightness.
British government changes
definition of a covid case, again, to make the figures look worse.
June 15th; Wednesday. Was there a deliberate
cull of the
elderly?
June 14th; Tuesday. A claim that
current supply-chain disruptions, food shortages, inflation are all to slide in the globalist/Davos
'Great Reset'.
June 13th; Monday. Finished Terri's copy
of 'Aristotle/Horace/Longinus -
Classical Literary Criticism', a slim Penguin Classic bringing together three
essays about poetry and drama, one from each of the three ancient writers. I keep hearing that, even
though he still counts in a few other subjects he helped transform (ethics, logic, biology), Aristotle's
theory of drama is taken remarkably seriously in Hollywood, even today, and gets taught on screenwriting courses.
However T. S. Dorsch, in the introduction, says the importance of his famous laws (unity of action, place, time;
the 6 rules of tragedy) was exaggerated by later readers of Aristotle.
I was interested to discover a trick I often use - switching tense or person or number in mid-story - is labelled
by Longinus as 'polyptoton'. I felt like the Moliere character surprised to find he's been speaking prose all
his life. Hints of
Horace's wit
and off-the-cuff style comes through in his text, but overall the book reminded me just how thankless
translation really is. Reading the English, only mild differences between the three writers' voices
really shine through. I got a faint sense that the understanding of literature slightly improved over time across
the three men, but little else. Probably my fault.
However
Longinus,
Horace, and Aristotle do share one thought which seems alien in our era. They all use as a basic theme that
some topics & styles are proper, dignified, elevated. This sense of dignity, grandeur, higher taste
underpins their sense of literary merit. This is even if they see big roles for humour, variations of tone,
mixing and matching everyday "low" language with "high" language to best overall effect. Even the satirist Horace,
who is far from slavish about social status, shares this spectrum from what is to what isn't "fitting".
That's to say all three writers' view of art is built on the concept of nobility. Frequent use
of the word 'vulgar' as a negative term underlines this. Like any really basic assumption, the notion that there
are natural aristocrats and other people of naturally lower status is so big it's hard for modern readers to
even see it. Nobility was part of everyone's world. This view there's a natural difference between people of
refined, elevated taste and the others was so much in the air the ancients breathed (especially when
writing for aristocratic patrons, of course) these texts must feel puzzling for many present-day readers.
June 12th; Sunday. A February piece on
those US biowarfare labs in Ukraine, that some people just a couple of months ago
were quite aggressively telling me were "complete nonsense". Now in a limited hangout, Pentagon sources have
changed their story to admit there are 46 US-controlled biowarfare labs in Ukraine. The claim is
they are only doing defensive threat-reduction work. Although there is now an admission they exist when earlier this
year the official line was (despite Victoria Nuland's gaffe) that they don't exist, Washington still maintains
they couldn't possibly be the primary motive for Russia's invasion.
June 11th; Saturday. Meanwhile, in the
continuing campaign to outlaw cash and force us to use digital money only, three notable developments.
(1) Shanghai banks have closed cash machines using the pretence that
dirty notes carry viruses /
(2) Card-reader failures in Germany show
eradicating cash is stupid /
(3) Chinese bank protest stopped dead by simply
turning covid-QR codes red.
June 10th; Friday. Depopulationists
in the 1960s, and their unhinged ideas of how to deal with the global non-crisis of excess people
("Useless eaters" in Noah Harari's charming phrase)
here and
here. Versus
depopulationists now.
June 9th; Thursday. News that
the mRNA gene-therapy injections might cause
prion diseases is fairly new.
June 8th; Wednesday. All-cause mortality
data: Australian vaccine deaths mount.
June 7th; Tuesday.
Peculiar 1968 song (with quite odd anti-lyric lyrics) from Peter, Paul, & Mary caught between musical fashions.
Then Knower covering a Daft Punk tune in 2013. Two happy, boppy tunes with cynicism half-buried in the words.
June 6th; Monday. More on
relabelling covid-19-vaccine injuries as
"monkeypox".
June 5th; Sunday.
Chipping people: an old article about brain implants.
June 4th; Saturday. The digital-ID endgame:
Global passport plans /
Supermarket biometrics thanks to
Mastercard / The World Economic Forum shares
its wet dream / Critics of the WEF say how they see
that dream / Specific countries begin to enact the
digital police state / Another perspective on
The Great Reset / Armstrong Economics describe the goal of
digital identity / How the new police state is being rolled out in
Ukraine / More details on the Ukrainian embrace of
Davos Surveillance.
June 3rd; Friday.
Enjoyable short film about Kepler & Penrose.
June 2nd; Thursday.
Davos grandees warn nation states not to try to resist the coming takeover. Ed the Techie responds with
this jigsaw.
June 1st; Wednesday.
Plot within Tory party to remove Boris J. as leader partly motivated by yearning to
re-merge with the euroblob.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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