Links - 7th May 2020 (3)

Remarks by President Trump in State of the Union Address | The White House -"We are advancing with unbridled optimism and lifting high our citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed."
"From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children's future."
"To expand equal opportunity, I am also proud that we achieved record and permanent funding for our Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities."
"The USMCA will create nearly 100,000 new high-paying American auto jobs, and massively boost exports for our farmers, ranchers, and factory workers. It will also bring trade with Mexico and Canada to a much higher degree, but also to a much greater level of fairness and reciprocity. This is the first major trade deal in many years to earn the strong backing of America's labor unions."
"The unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans have reached the lowest levels in history. African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low."
"African-American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded."
"The unemployment rate for women reached the lowest level in almost 70 years -- and last year, women filled 72 percent of all new jobs added."
Literally Hitler. We all know Hitler was so racist that he talked the Jews up before gassing them

Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - "No matter how much you hate President Trump—and I have some world-class Trump haters in my immediate circle of family and friends, so I know how deeply authentic and ferociously visceral that particular hatred is—you have to admit he has some great speech writers."

Trump Gives Presidential Medal Of Freedom To Rush Limbaugh - "Barack Obama famously awarded the honor to Ellen DeGeneres"

Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - " no response to the SOTU address would be complete without a word about House Leader Nancy Pelosi’s unbelievably dumb gesture at the end of the speech. With the camera still steady on a radiantly happy Trump and her, plainly visible behind him, she ripped the pages of his speech in half.Whatever possessed her? Had she already planned to do it before she arrived? Hard to believe that with time to consider, such a seasoned politician wouldn’t see the obvious danger of unintended consequences inherent in that symbolic act. Or was it Trump’s insulting refusal to shake her proffered hand before the speech that triggered her ill-considered thirst for revenge? Even then, she had a full hour to contemplate the gesture’s attendant risk. Whatever, Pelosi’s “Nantrum” (thanks, witty tweeter) is the meme that will live in infamy. Trump was wrong to ignore her hand, but that was only an insult to her personally – or perhaps to her party. Tearing up the speech was an insult not only to Trump and Republicans, but to his guests. And in any case, there is no tit-for-tat possible here, because the expression implies that Trump and Pelosi are peers. They are not. He is the duly elected president of the United States. She is a party appointee, not even a candidate for president... many Americans, a lot of them undecided, would see the gesture as an offence to the office of the presidency. After all, she had gotten a dig in by refusing to intone the usual introduction with the words “honour” and “privilege,” so she had already riposted the handshake refusal. I’m pretty sure Pelosi handed Trump a significant number of votes with that moment of uncontainable malice. Never a dull moment in American politics, eh? Even without impeachment dramas, an Iowa primary disaster and a SOTU spat meme gone viral, it’s a circus like no other."

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis bonded over their mutual hatred of Walt Disney, private letters reveal - "J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close frenemies when they were both still alive and kicking, operating within the same dusty Oxford literature circles and bantering over lofty subjects like theology, personal faith and their own fantastical writing. But if there was one subject that truly brought them together, it was their shared dislike of Walt Disney... the fantasy legends sling bitchy insults and put-downs like a stuffy, academic Gossip Girl, decrying Disney's creative choices in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and referring to the man himself as an ill-educated "boob"... [Tolkien] pledged to never work with him or his company."

Baby bears found in rest stop bathroom near Banff

Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35... Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35. In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old...  Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary.Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).The median of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100 BC cohort...  Not everyone agrees. “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.”In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labour, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis... “The life expectancy of Roman women actually increased with the decline of fertility,” Gazzaniga says. “The more fertile the population is, the lower the female life expectancy.”... Did having money or power help? Not always. One analysis of some 115,000 European nobles found that kings lived about six years less than lesser nobles, like knights. Demographic historians have found by looking at county parish registers that in 17th-Century England, life expectancy was longer for villagers than nobles"... “once the dangerous childhood years were passed… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today.” A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75.Not only are these numbers comparable to our own, they may be even better. Members of today’s working-class (a more accurate comparison) live to around 72 years for men and 76 years for women... if we think we’re living longer than ever today, this is because our records go back to around 1900 – which they call a “misleading baseline,” as it was at a time when nutrition had decreased and when many men started to smoke"

One of these is a deadly viper. The other is a harmless toad. Can you tell the difference? - "The Congolese giant toad, which grows to the size of a small hand, would be a hearty meal for any predator. But it escapes being eaten by birds, lizards, and snakes with a trick never seen anywhere else in the world: It looks and acts just like the Gaboon viper, one of the most venomous snakes in Central Africa.Many animals imitate dangerous ones to avoid being eaten. Viceroy butterflies are colored like the toxic monarch, for example, and many harmless snakes mimic venomous ones. But this is the first time a toad has been found to mimic a snake... given their close evolutionary history (both evolved between 4 million and 5 million years ago) and the fact that the toad is found only in locations where the viper is present, it’s likely that the toads and vipers coevolved together"
Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "What's your New Year's Mantra? Mine is..."You found it offensive? I found it funny. That's why I'm happier than you." Happy New Year."

Ricky Gervais, Man of the People - "In a room filled with self-absorbed narcissists, one brave, slightly less self-absorbed narcissist had the balls to speak truth to power—and his name is Ricky Gervais... They have the audacity to call for an “economic revolution” after making fortunes off us working-class stiffs. They look down on anyone who doesn’t vote like them because they can’t possibly imagine a world in which they might be wrong. Fame has tricked them into believing they are the moral arbiter of all that is good and right and just in the world... I have to say, it was satisfying to watch a roomful of self-righteous celebrities be on the receiving end of a roast. Only a cheeky atheist comedian with a British accent could get away with saying, “So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and fuck off.”"

David Burge on Twitter - "Good comedy never punches down on marginalized communities like entertainment industry executives, it challenges sacred cows like all those stump-toothed inbred hillbillies from Pennsyltucky or wherever"

Tim Dillon on Twitter - "The reason critics hate what Gervais did is because they have spent the last two years telling people that boring virtue signaling is the truest form of comedy, and the only person worth talking about is Trump. In 7 minutes Gervais reminded people of what comedy actually is."

Ricky Gervais - "How the fuck can teasing huge corporations, and the richest, most privileged people in the world be considered right wing? #GoldenGlobes"

Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "1. Simply pointing out whether someone is left or right wing isn't winning the argument.
2. If a joke is good enough, it can be enjoyed by anyone.
3. It's not all about you.
4. Just because you're offended, doesn't mean you're right."

Serhii Plokhy On A US/USSR Operation In WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On US bases in the USSR] ‘The Soviets… they really just acted like they did the issues related to dating or sex and the Red Army didn't exist. And one of the outcomes of that was of course, mass rape of, for example, German women and women in Eastern Europe. The US position was that, yes, the Soviets told them that the American Airmen, GIs are not supposed to date the women in the uniforms. So women in the Red Army, but it was expected that they would be *something* their allies, that they would be allowed to date civilian women. Like that was the case in Britain. Again, good memories, bad memories about that, like that was the case in France as well. In the Soviet Union, they actually allowed and even encouraged that kind of dating as long as they thought they needed the Americans, and they thought they needed the Americans before the opening of the second front. So one of the reasons why Stalin agreed to open the bases was to accommodate Roosevelt's request for that because he wanted, he wanted the second front. Once the second front was there, one of the reason to be nice to the Americans disappeared. Then once they they moved the frontier. As a result, the Soviets came in, as a result of that offensive, there was one less reason to have the Americans there and then there was embarrassment of not being able to protect them. So by July of... 1944, what you see are the military counterintelligence groups and the civilian secret police is going there and actually openly harassing women whom the Americans were dating. And resentment towards rich Americans dating the locals in Britain or in France was there certainly. But nowhere there was a secret police go in there and try to break the relationships that originally they encouraged to develop. And that certainly added to the frictions’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Catullus - "‘When I was studying Latin when I was 14, 15, in a convent school, we had selections of Catullus. So there was a lot left out. We had poems that we were told what the translation was of certain words. And they were just not true. So we were told that scortillum meant little cabbage, and it means little whore. But you couldn't have had that in the convent school. And then we were also told, oh, when men kiss each other, as they seem to be doing in this particular poem, that's because Romans are just like Italians today. They're much more outward looking and friendly than you know, us Brits. And you realize it's a completely false education’"