Joe Biden just had a little Greek eruption

 

Germany's Alternative für Deutschland is against EU bailouts of Greece and Italy and against EU membership for Ukraine

 

In discussing the party's policy platform, Weidel said AfD's future allies in the European Parliament should oppose the disbursal of taxpayer money to the "debt states" of Europe - a reference to countries such as Italy and Greece - and the idea that Ukraine belongs to the European Union, after it opened membership talks this week.

Reported here.

Greek historian Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953, flips his lid, laughably blames every single problem in America today on the Baby Boomers in a wildly insane rant, my favorite being . . .

 

 . . . the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border . . ..

Here.

Immigration policy in the United States was forever radically altered in 1965, by no one born in the Baby Boom.

The average age of a US Representative in 1965 was 51.4, the Congress of which overwhelmingly passed the destructive reform 320-70, which ended the American commitment to social homogeneity prevailing from the 1920s.

This was an act of American hubris, born of victory in WWII. One would think Hanson would know about that.

Their average birth year puts them in 1914, children of the mentally-ill Progressive Era (1896–1917) which gave us the income tax (1909), popular election of senators (1913), prohibition of alcohol (1919), and women's suffrage (1920), all of which were sufferable as long as their was social stability. Well, except for the prohibition.

The biggest problem affecting Baby Boomers is a lazy attention to our own history, and perhaps self-hatred.

Petronella Wyatt, 54, is single, childless, and depressed, and blames her feminism on Protestantism lol

 

 It was among Protestant communities that feminism first emerged, and it is in Protestant countries such as America and Britain in which feminist beliefs have been at their most vocal and strident in tone, like a religion with no dilution of agnosticism. Margaret Thatcher, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto, and no Catholic country could have produced her like.

 

More.

 

No one dares blame the crazy old Pharisee. That would be a bridge too far.

 

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.  

 

-- Galatians 3:28

You can't put bitcoin in your pocket like gold and silver, and gold doesn't require 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually for its existence

Crock of shit this bitcoin is. Same for anything digital.

But crypto has a dirty little secret that is very relevant to the real world: it uses a lot of energy. How much energy? Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million. Producing that energy emits some 65 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually — comparable to the emissions of Greece — making crypto a significant contributor to global air pollution and climate change.     

More.

 

LOL Day

Today:

Martin Luther King, Jr. On the Nature of Love

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

One of the great public intellectuals in all of American history [who said] ... "Agape is more than romantic or aesthetic love. Agape is more than friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. …"

 

But not for all women.

 

2019:

 

Biographer Garrow pens explosive report on Martin Luther King Jr.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

 “I always thought there were 10 to 12 other women,” Garrow said. “Not 40 to 45.” In many of the accounts that Garrow documents, the FBI reported that King had been drinking. ... The document does not say that King participated in the rape, but ... “looked on, laughed and offered advice.” ... King and the singer allegedly had sex with the prostitute in a hotel room, before the man that King called earlier showed up and had sex with her, “while both [the singer] and the Rev. King watched the action from a close-by position.” ... The prostitute allegedly stated to an investigator that “that was the worst orgy I’ve ever gone through.”

 

King was mistaken about agape, incidentally, simply repeating now discredited scholarship. He was no Greek scholar. Close readers of the New Testament know that agape isn't uniquely special, however special it remains in the fantasies of some theologians.

 

You can love darkness with agape (John 3:19), love the praise of men with agape (John 12:43), love worldly treasures with agape (Matthew 6:24), love the best seats in the synagogues with agape, love the shows of respect to you in the streets with agape (Luke 11:43), and love little with agape (Luke 7:47).

 

Tenure track Economics professor shocked to find out that corrupt college administrators have been improving poor grades FOR DECADES without telling the professors

 But for an administrator to then change those final grades—behind my back—simply to appease them? How could that possibly be justified?

The response from my department chair, who has been at the college for 17 years, floored me: “This has been occurring ever since I started at Spelman.”

“That’s corrupt,” I blurted out. [In a statement emailed to The Free Press, a Spelman spokesperson wrote that “The College, its administrators, and faculty, exercise appropriate judgment in the delivery of our exceptional learning and living activities in order to maintain consistency across Spelman’s campus.” Spelman declined to comment on any of the specifics in this story.]

More here.

The poor guy got fired in the end, for naively believing that the commitment to excellence meant grading fairly according to long-accepted standards.

Exact same thing happened to me . . . in 1988, at a so-called world class institution of higher learning, where it's all wink wink.

The process got turbocharged in the 1960s by the draft dodgers. They fled to college, or to Canada. Liberal institutions gave them a pass on admissions, and once there relaxed standards to keep them enrolled to escape being drafted. These ne'er-do-wells stayed in school as the Vietnam war dragged on. Many went on to grad school as standards weakened some more. Rinse and repeat.

They are the ones who went on to educate today's hordes of complete lunatics now populating college campi.

Standards were lowered everywhere quite quickly from the 1960s, including at elite small religious colleges by the 1970s where stubborn professors with standards were already then not being renewed, the polite way of firing them.

We are reaping what we've sown.

The rot set in a long, long time ago, and it reflects why the country is in the sorry state it is.

It can't be fixed. The country as we know it will have to collapse first.

Three semesters of Latin used to be required to get into Harvard, let alone graduate from it. That standard was already under attack in 1917 in the name of "science". The widespread requirement of three semesters of college Latin was gone by the mid 1960s. Now you will be hard pressed to find any college requiring any foreign language at all to graduate. Princeton is now infamous for eliminating Latin and Greek for a degree in Classics, you know, the study of everything Greco-Roman. 

The process has its own inertia producing this history. It's inherent in the thing we call America.

 

Greece arrests dozens for arson fires, WaPo doesn't mention it

 Greece struggles to contain Europe's largest wildfire on record...

CNN story reporting dozens arrested for arson fires in Greece says fires were caused by climate change

 

Greek police arrest dozens for arson as EU’s largest-ever wildfires rage

CNN NewsourceAugust 29, 2023

Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters
Destroyed corral where eighteen bodies were found following a wildfire near the village of Avantas.

By Eleni Giokos, Xiaofei Xu and Niamh Kennedy, CNN

(CNN) — Greek authorities have arrested dozens of people on arson-related charges as deadly wildfires – the largest ever recorded in the European Union – rage across the country. 

Wildfires in Mount Parnitha, north of the Greek capital Athens, are still out of control Friday, with more forest destroyed overnight.

The biggest fire front line in Greece remains near the northeastern town of Alexandroupolis, in the Evros region.

The burned body of a man was found on a rural road near Dadia national park, near the border with Turkey, state media AMNA reported Friday.

Earlier this week, 18 people were found dead near a village in northern Greece. The fire brigade said Tuesday they may have been migrants. Another person was killed in a fire northwest of the capital Athens on Monday.

Greek police have made 79 arson related arrests, Greek government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis told public broadcaster EPT Friday. 

“What is happening is not just impermissible, but obscene and criminal,” Greek Climate Crisis Minister Vassilis Kikilias said in a statement.

“You are committing a crime against the country. You will not be spared. We will find you and you will be held accountable in Justice,” Kikilas added. 

With more than 73,000 hectares burned, the fires in Alexandroupolis are officially the largest wildfires ever recorded in the European Union, according to EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič. 

Wildfires have intensified around the globe, providing a stark reminder of how the climate crisis is upending lives and inflicting billions of dollars a year in damage.

While wildfires are often ignited by lightning strikes or human activity, they are becoming more frequent because of human-caused climate change. Scientists found, for instance, that climate change made the extreme weather conditions that fueled the 2019-2020 destructive fire seasons in Australia 30% more likely to occur.

More.

The only undergraduate college in this 10-page list requiring four units in a foreign language to graduate is Bard College

 Many require no foreign language at all at the undergraduate level, and as a consequence . . .

Presently, 23 U.S. states do not require the two years of foreign language study that is required for admittance into many colleges.

Check it out.

Meanwhile the chowderheads at Princeton's Classics Department have dropped the Greek and Latin requirement entirely for Classics majors.

The basic idea there is to invite the barbarians in, to make Classics better, you know, as in the fall of the Roman Empire to the Visigoths in 410 AD better:

“Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” 

 

 Thankfully, the Visigoths at Princeton still have some standards. They require German majors to pass 2-3 courses actually taught in German.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings

... by the middle of the Second Century ... there were few Greeks and Romans left. They had destroyed themselves by miscegenation, internecine wars, and that fatuous tolerance with which they permitted themselves to be displaced by their subjects and slaves. ...

-- Revilo P. Oliver, "By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them", Liberty Bell, August 1985

World Health Organization protects Xi Jinping's feelings, adopts Omicron for new South African variant B.1.1.529 instead of Nu or Xi

alpha beta gamma delta epsilon

zeta eta theta

iota kappa lambda mu nu

xi omicron pi 

rho sigma tau upsilon

phi chi psi omega

 

This is the first thing you learn in Greek 101, the alphabet. You've got it down when you can say it from memory after lighting a match and you don't burn your fingers, which you will need to write all the funny letters.

Looks like WHO needs to retake the course, however.

This new South African variant, B.1.1.529, will be very confusing since almost a year ago there was a South African variant everyone got hysterical about but it didn't take over the world. The India variant did instead.

That South African variant (B.1.351), was beta, retroactively so designated at the end of May 2021 with all the variants, which is probably why no one remembers it.

The UK variant (B.1.1.7), dominant in the US in April, May, and June, is alpha. 

The gamma variant (P.1), from Brazil, never amounted to much in the US, though that was fear-mongered, too.

The India variant (B.1.617.2) is delta, dominant in the US from July 1.

Epsilon covers variants from California, B.1.427/B.1.429.

Zeta is another Brazilian one, P.2.

Eta and iota cover variants from New York, B.1.526/B.1.525.

Theta was first detected in the Philippines, P.3.

Kappa's another one from India, B.1.617.1, as is B.1.617.3, which oddly hasn't its own Greek letter designation even though it's on radars.

Lambda is from Peru, C. 37.

Mu variants come from Colombia, B.1.621/B.1.621.1.

Nu and Xi are being skipped:

The WHO made the announcement about the B.1.1.529 variant out of Johannesburg, South Africa, passing over a letter many observers presumed would be next — “Nu” — as well as the subsequent letter, “Xi,” which composes part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping‘s name.

I'm looking forward to Beijing being called Peking again one day. 

I mean, who orders "Beijing Duck"?

At any rate, the reality, as one wag put it,  is that they are all Xi variants.

 

And as another answered, the final variant will be communism. 

 

MacArthur was right about China:

Here in Asia is where the communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest. 

 

Elites today everywhere are on their side.

 

 

Of all the things wrong with this scene with Beto, the worst is the clash of casual shorts with classic Greek key carpeting

Thankfully this man will not be president of the United States.

Yeah right, media in the 1980s was a golden age

America was so innocent in the 1950s.

The Greatest Generation was like no other.

The American Founding was a miracle.

We have to get back to the authentic Christianity of the first century.

Oh the glory that was Greece and Rome.

Rush The Ridiculous must be reading online again, claims Aristippus of Cyrene was the first to say "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die"

The line quoted here is not actually attributed to Aristippus as a quotation, but rather as a conclusion of his philosophy, which in its turn goes too far. As usual Rush reads the first hit on Al Gore's amazing internet, reads it badly, and believes it.

Skull full of mush much?

Epicurus is traditionally credited with the idea because we have an actual line which is similar, but it is so widespread in antiquity it is difficult to know who first came up with it.

At any rate the ethical hedonism taught by both Aristippus and Epicurus involved self-mastery, not license.   

Not that the licentious sense was unknown in antiquity.

The Greek geographer Strabo (64BC-24AD) knew it, purportedly from an Assyrian inscription on the tomb of Sardanapallus, legendary last king of Assyria, who was legendarily decadent:

Sardanapallus, the son of Anacyndaraxes, built Anchiale and Tarsus in one day. 'Eat, drink, be merry, because all things else are not worth this,' meaning the snapping of the fingers. -- Strabo, Geographica, 14.5.9f.

Isaiah the prophet knew it in the 8th century BC, antedating any Greek knowledge by hundreds of years:

And behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die. -- Isaiah 22:13.

And of course Paul of Tarsus knew it in the middle of the 1st century AD, which is how most of us in the Christian West know the lines:

If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.  -- I Corinthians 15:32.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

Forget the glowing Wikipedia entry for gay classicist Claude Fredericks of Bennington College, he preyed on students

The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College:

NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press, quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover early on. ...

MATT JACOBSEN: It was never unfriendly between me and Claude, but as I fell more deeply in love with Liz [Glotzer, Jacobsen’s girlfriend and eventual wife], I saw less of Claude. I realized it was kind of ridiculous to hang out with him, cool as he was. And he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, so he moved on to greener pastures, started fooling around with another guy who’d been his student. At the end of the day, Claude was driven by a—you know—perverse interest in me. And that was wrong. I’m a geezer now, and I understand how wrong he really was.

We shouldn't really worry too much about China dumping $200 billion worth of US Treasury securities since 2012

China has cut its holdings of US debt to the lowest level in two years amid trade tensions:

The total has fallen by some $200 billion since the peak in 2012 . . .. Foreign government ownership of U.S. debt hit a record of $6.47 trillion, up 4% from a year ago, as the government’s total debt continues to swell and now has topped $22 trillion. Foreign residents increased their holdings by $23.9 billion.

Yeah, well, in May 2012 grand total foreign holdings came to about $5.27 trillion. In March 2019 the figure is north of that by $1.2 trillion across the globe.

US Treasury securities remain very popular, secure investments which pay better than most anything out there. Your only major alternatives paying better than for the US 10-year are Brazil, Mexico, India, Greece and Italy. Like the world is going to go shopping in those places instead of the US.

Gimme a break! 

From the Jews behaving badly file: Donna Zuckerberg recommends red pillers be quarantined online

That's right, put 'em in a ghetto, you know, like in Warsaw.

The sister of Mark Zuckerberg, discussed here, who doesn't "write classics" anymore than any other person does with one academic degree or another involving ancient Greece and Rome:

The classics writer said that while online anonymity allows people to spread hatred without facing repercussions, all online networks can strengthen misogynistic communities, simply by allowing more red pill members to reach each other. She suggested that misogynist groups could be quarantined, as one of Reddit’s red pill groups recently was.

Despite alarmist headlines, Italy knows it can play chicken with the Euro cheaters up north and win because Super Mario will do "whatever it takes"

That's the lesson of Greece and Italy knows it. If there is no way the EU would let Greece go, there is no way Italy or Spain or Portugal are going to be let go, either.

Meanwhile, enjoy these alarmist headlines from a gold fundamentalist.

Italy Bond Yields Surge In Confrontation with ECB President Mario Draghi:

In theory, German, Italian, and Greek 10-year bonds should all have the same yield. In practice, they clearly don't. The difference is perceived default risk. The odds of Italy leaving the Eurozone are rising.

"One Size Fits Germany" Math Impossibility, Get Your Money Out of Italy Now!:

[I]nterest rates are on the verge of spiraling out of control in Italy. ... In theory, German, Italian, and Greek 10-year bonds should all have the same yield. In practice, they clearly don't. The spread between German 10-year and Italian 10-year bonds is 330 basis points (3.3 percentage points). The difference is perceived default risk. The odds of Italy leaving the Eurozone are rising. On September 28, Italy's proposed budget deficit of 2.4% sent bond yields soaring. And they haven't stopped.

The yield on the 10-year has been a lot higher for a long period of time than it is right now.

Everyone should relax and enjoy the show. Who knows, maybe this will force the other rule breakers to clean up their act a little bit, at least for a little while.

Greece can't get a break: First financial meltdown, then overrun by refugees, now swept by wildfires

Greeks describe harrowing escapes from deadly fires:

"A pair of wildfires have [sic] left at least 79 people dead, and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports dozens are still believed to be missing. In some places around the Greek capital the fires were still burning. Elsewhere people began returning to neighborhoods left unrecognizable."