Meme - "Country MuSIc MAKES PLANTS GRow!"
"MUST... REACH.. OFF. BUTTON."
Meme - "Atheism turned me into a little cringe retard when I was a teenager. On christmas day when I was 14 I came downstairs during the night and destroyed the tree and left a note for my family. I can't remember exactly but the note was something like
>I have removed the Angel from the tree and replaced it with a Bunsen Burner. The real bringer of light
>I have removed the chocolate from the tree. Science doesn't allow chocolate to grow on trees
>I have removed the decorations for the same reason
>The presents beneath the tree will be burnt if ever see them placed in the presence of religion again
My dad beat the shit out of me and gave all my presents to my brothers."
Meme - Van S.: "Who cares about kw? Why don't you disclose the actual hp, which is used by the majority of the world?"
Cars.co.za: "Thanks for your comment. We have to use kW for our primary market which is South Africa. Down here cars are powered by petrol, not hay."
Meme - "When ya girl is sucking you off in your sleep but you remember you have no girl and you live alone with your uncle"
Meme - "VASELINE MY CHOICE OF LUBE DURING SEX. I SMEAR IT ON THE DOOR KNOB SO SHE CAN'T ESCAPE"
Meme - "When you get in trouble at school and teacher says she wants to talk to ur father *crying black boy*"
Meme - "Dont say its all gods plan and then blame Satan when things go wrong"
Meme - Le Tricheur @latricherie: "Mais vraiment à quoi sert Jesus ? Faut penser à aller se faire voir à un moment donné"
Christine Boutin @christineb...: "Et vous ? Qu’avez-vous fait pour stopper les désastres ? Jesus nous laisse Libres et c’est un immense cadeau . Tout cela n’est le résultat que de nos lâchetés, négligences, paresses ..."
Le Tricheur @latricherie: "Je parle du joueur de Manchester City lâchez ma veste et passez une bonne journée."
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Evolution of Crocodiles - "‘They were at their peak, then really, because there were many species living all over the world doing a whole bunch of different things in terms of their diets and behaviors. And so in the Triassic period, this was the span from about 250 to 200 million years ago. It was the crocs much more than the dinosaurs that were dominant on the land. Really, the dinosaurs were the supporting actors at that time, and it was a croc drama that was playing out on the supercontinent Pangea. This was the time when all of the world was gathered together at once. And these Triassic crocs really make a mockery of the few, the pittance of crocs that are still around today. Today's crocs are all really similar. You know, let's face it, a crocodile, an alligator, a gharial. These are all subtropical or tropical animals. They're basically semi aquatic, they move a bit between water and land, they're predators. But in the Triassic, there was so much more, there were crocs that were nearly the length of buses. There were crocs that were at the top of the food chain, but in a different way than today. These crocs back then had heads that were nearly the sizes of bathtubs and filled with steak knife teeth, almost like mini T rexes. But there were other crocs that were covered in spikes and horns, others ate plants, some even ate insects probably. Some had cells [sp?] on their backs. Some lost all of their teeth, and had beaks if you can imagine, that a croc with a head that kind of looked like a turtle, and some of them even sprinted on their hind legs. They walked upright on two legs kind of like we do. And they, together during the Triassic Period, these crocs, they were the dominant animals much more than dinosaurs. And by that, what I mean is there were more croc species. They lived in more places. They had a greater variety of diets and behaviors and lifestyles. And really, they were keeping the first dinosaurs in check for several 10s of millions of years across the entire Triassic Period, until about 200 million years ago, when the Triassic period ended.’...
'There's a reason that it's called Jurassic Park, not Triassic Park. If it was Triassic Park, it would be a book and a film about a bunch of crocs'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Edward Gibbon - "‘What did the Empire mean to Gibbon, what was going on?’
‘There were already sort of established histories which had precisely done what we might more expect to talk about the rise and fall, or the success and then fall of Rome rather than the decline and fall which Gibbon chooses to use the most most prominent of those written by by Montesquieu, and whom we've already heard mentioned. So it's a deliberate choice on Gibbon’s part. And it's not simply a feature of the chronology that he chooses. It's not just that he's telling us the second half of the story. It is, as David has pointed out, an inherent feature of Gibson's understanding of Empire, which is something which is always self destructive, which is always in a state of decline. That's because Gibbon sees Empire as inherently unstable and unproductive. He's very suspicious of sameness, whether that's large conglomerations of territory, or expansive diffusions of political power, especially, of course, when they're held in the hands of a single individual, such as an emperor.’
‘So we reading something, it tells us that again and again, and again, things are getting worse and worse,’
‘In a certain way, that's right. And that's something which Gibbon struggles with narratively. Of course, how can you possibly write, you know, six volumes of history about 1300 years… about something which is just, you know, sort of petering out, that has no kind of rhetorical lift to it. That’s something which he's particularly conscious of in his last installment in his final volumes, where he actually says to us, as readers, he says, How can I possibly keep going telling you this succession of crime and folly? How can I expect you to kind of follow my narrative line, if I keep doing this, and indeed, he puts new strategies in place, he abandons kind of the chronological succession that he's preserved until that point, he talks about how both the kind of Roman Empire and his own narrative are like a river, which is losing itself in the sands of the desert before it ever reaches the sea.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Franco-American Alliance 1778 - "‘In 1778, France entered into an alliance with the United States of America who revolted against Britain two years earlier. with profound consequences for all three. The French Navy played a decisive role in the Americans victory in their revolution. But French taxpayers found the cost of that unsustainable and soon they too revolted. And when France looked to its American ally for support in the French Revolutionary Wars with Britain a few years later, Americans had to choose where their long term interests lie and they turned from their supposed friend to their former foe, which was the start of a special relationship’...
‘Britain has a 137 million pound budget deficit at the end of the Seven Years War. At a time when its annual total revenue was 8 million pounds per year that the the debt service alone, the interest on that debt was 5 million pounds a year. And the British government, particularly Parliament looked to the colonies and said, not unreasonably in my view, you ought to pay a little bit more than to, or you ought to pay something to to help us address this deficit. To give you just a important fact, the average resident of Massachusetts paid one shilling per year in taxes, the average resident in England paid 26 shillings a year. And so Parliament not unreasonably looked to the colonies to pay. However, for the reasons Kathy alluded to, it represents a fundamental challenging change to the relationship between the colonies and Britain. And as a consequence of that, that sets in these tax policies set in train, a chain of events that will result in the War of Independence breaking out in 1775.’...
‘Most French public opinion is very much engaged with the American Revolution. First of all, for many French, much French opinion, enlightened opinion, this was the Americans trying to create a political order based on the ideas of the Enlightenment in the New World. So that's very, very exciting. And as Kathy's already said, one of the people who seem to embody This was Benjamin Franklin, you know, a scientist who dressed simply with a new, you know, new world style, as opposed to the kind of the fripperies of of the old regime in France... When nobles who survived the French Revolution wrote their memoirs, many of them kind of commit the idea to papers, what were we doing? What were we thinking? We had no idea that we were going to unleash the world went on ourselves by encouraging, by flirting with these with these ideas.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Marcus Aurelius - "‘How Greek was Rome, at this point, you can quote Horace, if you want’
‘I will quote Horace, yes. It's fascinating that in this day of fascination with post colonialism, and with decolonizing the curriculum, that the mother of all empires, the Roman Empire, was actually overwhelmed by the culture of one of the countries that it itself conquered. And as you said, Horace said, that captured Greece managed to capture its fierce conqueror. And it's the case that if you look at Roman architecture, it’s borrowed from Greek, Greek art is the basis of Roman art. There will be no literature in Rome without Greek literature. Education, the education system started with Homer, with Greek texts. And perhaps most importantly, of all, the Roman elite spoke Greek as a normal part of their of their language. And, of course, the, maybe the soldiers on the street didn't but the elite did, to the extent that we're very used to hearing about from Shakespeare that when Caesar was being assassinated, he said et tu brute. But actually, what he said was καὶ σύ, τέκνον in Greek, he said and you, child. So at the moment at which he’s actually being killed, you might think he would go to his mother tongue, but for him, the mother tongue is Greek. And that's the Emperor Caesar.’...
'Greeks became senators, and Greeks could even become consuls. So there was a huge overlap between these areas. Of course, some Romans were always a bit worried about the Greeks are being a bit too feminine with their arts and their philosophy. But when we see Marcus Aurelius writing something like the Meditations, he writes, of course, in Greek'
‘Was this a real Greece, that, or was an idealized or heavily appropriated version?’
‘Well, for both the Greeks and the Romans of the second century, there was a fantastic projection of what we ourselves are interested in, as the classical city, the city of Athens in the fifth and the fourth century. So quite remarkably, most of the people who wrote grown up Greek, that is to say, the elites, the doctors, the philosophers, wrote Greek of a sort that was being spoken and written by Plato, some 600 years earlier. A little like us sitting around talking Chaucer to each other, on the grounds that we're really English. So it's quite remarkable there is this sort of fantas, fantasized version. People, if you read Greek novels of the period, and there are some great Greek novels of the period, they write as if Rome didn't exist, and as if they were living in a world of the fifth century BCE. So there was indeed a fantastic sense of an ideal Greece, which people were trying to live up to’...
'Virtue is the only thing good in itself for the Stoics everything else, which people call good, such as wealth or status, or even health are usually to be preferred in Stoic terminology, but they're not actually good. So this means and this is what I think is crucial for Marcus, this means that our virtue and happiness are up to us and and not dependent on external factors outside our control'...
‘The crucial thing is if we did not have the text of the Meditations, we would simply say, here is an extremely strong, powerful ruler of one of the biggest empires the world's ever seen, who was involved with military activity. And during the course of it, some Christians were killed, I don't think he cared a great deal about them. They weren't important enough at that port point. And he would have gone down as a decent Emperor. But the fact is, the Meditations has become one of the best publicity documents for power that's ever been’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Longitude - "‘One way of reading this whole history is that it's an event in the history of British insurance, because the British exerted more or less a monopoly over marine insurance. And the determination of longitude at sea was an absolutely decisive event in driving down transport and risk costs for voyages.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Medieval Pilgrimage - "‘What lengths would people go to to collect or control these relics from or for the shrines?’
‘Beople went to great lengths to acquire them because they were so valuable. In fact, they were often so valuable that they couldn't be bought for regular money, because somehow exchanging them for filthy lucre would debase them. And since the saints, to which the body parts belonged, still, technically, were alive and dwelling in heaven, they had opinions about where their physical bodies should be kept. And if they weren't being venerated properly, they would allow themselves to be stolen. And stealing relics was so common that it had, it had a name, it was Furta Sacra, the theft of, of sacred objects. And this happened was famously in the ninth century in Conques in France, where Benedictine monks were so desperate to acquire a powerful relic that they resorted to this, their monastery lay just off the main road to Santiago de Compostella. And they wanted to deflect the route slightly so that the pilgrim traffic would come through their town. And they heard of a relic in Agen that was powerful. It was a relic of a child saint named Saint Foy, who had been martyred in the fifth century under Diocletian. One of the Benedictine monks, his name is Arinisdus, he he went from Conques to Agen posing as a priest, and he asked to join the community there. And he spent 10 years waiting for his moment. And as soon as he was alone with the relics, he grabbed them, ran back to Conques, where his brothers were waiting and enclosed the relics in this glorious reliquary made from golden Roman spolia.’...
‘The journey from Venice to Jaffa could take between about 26, 27 days to 60 days at sea. And, and conditions on the boats were extremely poor, according to the accounts of the time, and pilgrims are actually quite likely to die on these journeys. There are numerous accounts of pilgrims being buried at sea or being buried when they reach the Holy Land. And also pilgrims frequently complain about the their treatment once they get to the Holy Land. The locals throw stones at them, they think the locals are trying to steal things from them… what's particularly challenging, I think, to the pilgrims is that they have to pay both their Franciscan guides and the Mameluke camellias [sp?] and dragoman and a dragoman is a kind of interpreter. They have to pay them for everything. You have to pay to go into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You have pay to go to the Sepulchre itself. You have to pay to come out of the Sepulchre. You have to pay to go into each chapel. So that they feel like they're in this very kind of exploitative relationship with, with the whole experience which is supposed to be a spiritual experience. The the lodgings for pilgrims are also extremely spartan. And and the written accounts we have from the 14th or 15th centuries, they talk in a lot of detail about how you must buy a feather mattress in Venice, you must buy your blankets, you need to buy laxatives and spices to cure your stomach. The pilgrims talk about seasickness a lot, but they don't seem to mean seasickness like we think of it. Seasickness seems to be something fatal, more like kind of dysentery. And actually, one thing we haven't really talked about yet is pilgrimage as punishment. The courts could send people on pilgrimage as a kind of punishment’...
‘We know for a fact that people made very elaborate wills before they went on pilgrimage, because exactly, it was so very dangerous. And if you look at 14th century sort of notaries, notebooks from Italian cities, about a third of them are sort of people preparing wills, and many of them are wills of pilgrims to be’...
‘We do in the English language retain something of medieval pilgrimage in words like, the word tawdry comes from the lace that people bought at the shrine of St. Audrey in Ely, this cheap lace that people would take away, or the verb to roam r o a m comes from Romae [sp?], someone who went to Rome or the canter, to canter is the pace of the Canterbury gallop that you go to Canterbury on as a pilgrim. And so there are relics of pilgrimage still in our own own language today’...
'In churches around Germany in particular, there are, there are marks of knives in the stone of the stone architecture, where pilgrims have tried to scrape away some of the stone that's as close as possible to, to where the relics would be kept, in order to ingest those as well, so that you could actually eat the physical church'"
To roam, at least, seems to have a different etymology
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Pierre-Simon Laplace - "‘Why was it so important that he should be part of the Academy?’
‘In Paris at the time, in France at the time, there wasn't very much science going on at universities. Where most of the science happened was at the Academy. So this was an organization that was founded in 1666 by Louis XIV. It had a strictly limited number of members. They were salaried, it existed to advise government on how to fill posts such as the job that Laplace got teaching at a military academy, and the only real scientific publications in France at the time were the publications of the Proceedings of Academy. So to be permitted to read papers to the Academy, to have your papers in the Proceedings of the Academy was the only way to publish mathematics.’…
‘Probability was a mark of our ignorance.’
‘Yes, that is a very much his view. So Laplace was a determinist. And you might think that probability doesn't have much of a role to play in a deterministic universe. But it does, because although determinism might be true, in principle, according to Laplace, we can't know all there is to know in order to work out what is going to happen. So for example, if I toss a coin, it might be that physics will tell me exactly how the coin will pass through the air. But I can't know the initial conditions of the coin and everything about the air molecules surrounding it, and so on, to sufficient accuracy to be able actually to calculate what will happen’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Arianism - "‘What was so compelling about Arianism… it seems to have struck home with, what we're still talking about minorities aren't we? But it seems to have struck home very deeply with people who are prepared to die for and be persecuted or be exiled for it.’
‘It had been orthodoxy, it had been basically what Christians thought. And you get this very strange process in the later fourth and fifth centuries, whereby some of the greatest theologians who’d given their lives for the for the gospel like Origen, were then denounced as heretics because they didn't fit into this new concept, substantial notion that the Godhead was complete and absolute, and everybody was equal and all descended from and being God. But at a second level, and I think this is particularly applies to the Goths. It offered a model that made a great deal of sense to any structure, any society that had a very hierarchical view of leadership. If you are a tribal leader, if you have been leading your people, you know, through the the Central Asian steppes and down into the Roman Empire, you've been in charge, and you've had everybody doing what you've said, then, frankly, the Arian view or the traditional view, the view that Aetius [sp?] was, was promulgating of a Supreme God, who has basically two really good helpers makes a lot more sense. And, again, it's this issue of, there were trinities is in every major religion, that's not a make or break problem, if you're not trying to claim that there is a only one God. And when you come from a pluralistic, polytheistic faith, you know, you don't have that much of a problem of believing there's a kind of Supreme God, who bestows some of his powers down to other ones. And I think it basically made a lot of sense to people, as a model of leadership, of hierarchy, of where power lay. And that in a sense, what you have is you have this remote God, and then this personal experience of God, which is Jesus, and then the sense of a spirit moving amongst you. And frankly, for most people, that was all they really needed to know’...
‘There's a wonderful finding of a survey of American evangelicals from 2018. A few years ago, the state of theology survey, where they asked the evangelical Christians surveyed whether they agreed with the statement, Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. And 78% of the respondents agreed strongly or somewhat with this statement, which is one which I think if Athanasius was reading, it would look rather a lot like Arianism’...
‘Survey about 20 years ago, of Anglican Church wardens, who were asked not dissimilar question, but this was with regards exactly to Nativity and to the crucifixion. And something like 35% of Anglican Church wardens thought that the Jesus of the Nativity story was a different person from the Christ on the cross. So I think the ambiguities and the complexities of the Trinity will be with us forever.’...
‘I don't think we should be expecting Christianity to make anybody necessarily less war, like, in the fourth century, when you gotta remember that Christianity, increasing over time becomes part of the culture of the Roman army, and of the kind of victory ideology of the late Roman state. Constantine, of course, has the labarum put on the shields of his of his soldiers. And increasingly, there's a there's a kind of sense that Imperial victory is is tied to Christianity. And so there's there's no particular reason why the adoption of Christianity should make anyone any less inclined to, to military activity, shall we say'
‘You see that also with Genghis Khan’s horde, of which about a quarter to a third, were Church of the East, or as the West calls, Nestorian Christians, and they went into battle, in their massacres, with crosses on their helmets, some of which you can still see in Japan from the force that tried to invade Japan'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Russo-Japanese War - "‘Why was Russia interested in this leisure in this region in East Asia 4000 miles away from Moscow. What was the point?’
‘Well, since the humiliation in the Crimea, Russia had been very keen to project itself as not just a European Empire, but as a Eurasian Empire. And it was something rather like we saw in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, if you’re humiliated in the West, you turn more to the east. And of course, in the 19th century, the expression of that ambition was in terms of territorial expansion, so initially in Central Asia in the 1860s. And then, by the end of the 1890s, Russia had got as far as the Far East, as as far as Manchuria, after the Sino Japanese war. Three years after that, Russia was able to occupy the Liaodong Peninsula, and that's when they built Port Arthur’...
‘Most of the perceptions about the Japanese treatment of POWs derive from the Second World War experiences, and it's actually very difficult to imagine that Japan was very influential in the early 19th century, particularly because of the Russo-Japanese war, in setting up standards for the International, international standards for the treatment of POWs. And like, for example, during the Russo-Japanese War, Russian officers were allowed to rent houses in towns, employ servants, you know, and get wives to come over and children to join them and the sort of lots of very interesting things happening. And then what happens is, of course, there is a continuity into the First World War experiences of POW treatments and captivity treatments, generally speaking, in western experience, Western cases. And so the 1904-5 war essentially allowed Japan to put into practice the ideas that had been embodied in the Hague conference of 1899, which introduced this idea that, you know, POWs should be analogously treated to the troops of the detaining power’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - "‘Somebody should talk about the, the effect or not of laudanum, opium and alcohol, usually brandy mixed together, which he was taking at that time. And a little bit later, only two or three years later was addicted to’
‘So this was a poem that Coleridge just couldn't leave alone, he kept coming back to it... Scholars have identified, believe it or not 18 different versions of the poem from Coleridge’s lifetime. So what does he do when he's revising several things, he cuts out most of the old fashioned words, the outdated spellings, he cuts out a couple of moments of humor. We've already heard the bit about the Mariner’s feeding biscuit worms to the bird, that gets cut out. He removes some bits that seem too Gothic or lurid. He improves the accuracy of the descriptions, Coleridge had never been on a ship when he first wrote the poem. And then after he'd had an experience of going on a ship, he changed some things to tighten up the accuracy. But the most interesting thing is this margin or gloss that he adds on which Jonathan's already mentioned, which sort of explains what's going on or purports to explain what's going on in the poem. Now, this isn't written in Coleridge, his own voice, it's written in a another different poetic voice, probably the voice of a sort of 17th century scholar. And it imposes on the poem a sort of moral framework or framework of causality, that the poem doesn't necessarily always endorse. So for example, the marginal gloss says that the crew make themselves accomplices in the crime when they try and justify the mariner’s killing of the albatross. So the gloss seeks to sort of create cause and effect or impose cause and effect. But this seems to be a framework that Coleridge has bolted on to the poem later, rather than one that was implicit in it all along.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rosetta Stone - "‘Would it matter if the stone were kept, were restored to Egypt?’
‘Well, that's a very hard, hard question, of course. In a way, the Rosetta Stone has become this great icon of Egyptian culture. Partly by accident, because the decipherment of hieroglyphs which was so crucial for understanding Ancient Egypt, from Europe, it didn't only happen through the Rosetta Stone, the Rosetta Stone was only one bit of evidence that triggered the decipherment. Now, the arguments for returning it to Egypt, it is quintessentially Egyptian, that is where it belongs. The one thing to be said for it being still in Europe, is that its importance is to do with its horribly entangled colonialist history. It was created in a multicultural society between competing factions in the Mediterranean. It was discovered when the French, the Ottoman Empire and the English were fighting it out in Egypt. And it was, it's importance is really because it came to Europe, because it was circulated amongst European scholars that allowed the European decipherment. If it hadn't come to Europe, in that legal but possibly unethical manner, then it simply wouldn't be an important inscription at all. The other priestly decrees, the Canopus decree in the Cairo museum are better preserved, possibly even more interesting texts. The Rosetta stone’s importance and significance for the world, and probably Egypt, really springs from the fact it moved to Europe. And so to return it back to Egypt. It, it goes against, in some ways, the the regrettable factors that have made it such a significant item. So of all the, the objects that could be sent back from, say, the British Museum, in a way the Rosetta stone is the one which has a really strong case for remaining in Europe, because that's part of the modern trajectory that gave it its its importance. And certainly, it has acted as an ambassador to Europe, for Egyptian culture’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, David Ricardo - "‘There's a theological element to Malthus’s view, which really says, well, actually, poverty is quite good for people because it makes them virtuous, and actually a benevolent God created it this way. So people would be more industrious and they'd be more virtuous. But he's more interested, especially from the second edition onwards in preventive checks, which really might mean something like delaying marriage.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Cave Art - "‘It may well have been that there was a lot of art out in the landscape. And it's really the caves that have protected it from erosion and from ice sheets and so on. But equally we find art in the very deepest, darkest parts of the cave. And there's something special about those caves that are attracting these artists, because it's not a place where humans are living. So I think arti is kinda multipurpose, there's some art which was designed to be seen from a distance. And there's some art that was done in small niches that was designed to be hidden.’...
'The kind of notion that the Neanderthals were kind of dumb, brutish creatures, which, you know, originated in the original definition of what a neanderthal is, when William King defined the species, he identified it as a separate species. And he said it was devoid, Neanderthals were devoid of all theistic concepts. They had no God, if you like, and to him that represented something that was, was very uncivilized and very backward. And to the extent where when they were debating what they were going to call this new species, a German scientist Ernest Haeckel suggested that the name Homo Stupidus, the stupid human. And you would think that actually once you can demonstrate that Neanderthals are painting, and in fact, what they're painting is, is indistinguishable to what modern humans who at this point are only in Africa, and the Near East, is completely indistinguishable. It's, it's the use of very basic mineral pigments, it's painting, symbols, nothing figurative, then you suddenly realize that we should never, you know, we should not have this idea about Neanderthals being kind of dumb and brutish'"
