So many people are probably wondering: what is the difference between freezing rain and sleet? I mean, they can’t be that different, right? Well, we picked something completely at random—and in no way related to police work—to showcase the difference between the two.
(B)ehind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy. As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, schoolteachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb...“Overall, this community has exercised enormous restraint,” Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which represents many minority-owned businesses that have been hit hard by the ICE raids, told me. “But we have been pushed, probably intentionally, towards civil unrest.”..
I went upstairs to see breakout sessions where people were being trained for direct confrontations with ICE. Inside a classroom, several dozen people ranging in age from 14 to about 70 faced off against three trainers playing ICE agents, in a loud fracas that lasted several minutes. Afterward, the trainers offered the volunteers a critique. One gray-haired lady said she had found the exercise difficult, “not being a ‘Fuck you’ person.” Others got tips on how to brace themselves more effectively so that the agents could not easily knock them down...The nonprofit groups that run these training sessions are not organizing or directing the anti-ICE protests taking place in the Twin Cities. No one is. This is a leaderless movement—like the Arab Spring protests—that has emerged in a spontaneous and hyperlocal way...Inside the schools, many administrators have been making their own preparations over the past year. Amanda Bauer, a teacher at a Minneapolis elementary school that has a large portion of immigrant students, told me that administrators informed parents last fall about their emergency plans for ICE raids by phone or in person, because they were already concerned about leaving email chains that could be mined by a hostile government...Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis...A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed. Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him. “I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”...Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.All this sheltering has created an economic crisis that has grown worse by the day. Many immigrant-owned businesses have seen their sales drop by as much as 80 percent, said Allison Sharkey, of the Lake Street Council. Large numbers have shut their doors entirely, fearing for themselves or their employees. Sharkey called it “an assault on our entire Main Street.”..
"In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, vortex plane, oblique angle, or a Durkin, is a type of camera shot that involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame. This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side. In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. The Dutch angle is strongly associated with German expressionist cinema, which employed it extensively..."
""The Third Man Theme"... is an instrumental written and performed by Anton Karas for the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man. Upon release the theme proved popular, spending eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's United States Best Sellers in Stores chart. Multiple versions have been performed and recorded, selling tens of millions of copies, and its success influenced the release strategy of later film singles.The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed. One night after a long day of filming The Third Man on location in Vienna, Reed and cast members Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Orson Welles had dinner and retired to a wine cellar. In the bistro, which retained the atmosphere of the pre-war days, they heard the zither music of Anton Karas, a 40-year-old musician who was playing there just for the tips. Reed immediately realized that this was the music he wanted for his film..."
Video from the Lady in the Pink Coat
byu/tommyknockerman8 inLeakednews
While I was pondering this problem, I was simultaneously reading about ancient Babylonian versions of the flood story. Of course, there are different approaches regarding how to reconcile these with the Torah's account, which are not our concern here. But I suddenly realized that they describe the ark as being made of reeds - which, in Hebrew, is kannim, the very word that our verse uses, albeit vocalized differently. And this was apparently the standard technique used for creating boats in ancient Mesopotamia - they were made of reeds, sometimes hybridized with a wooden frame for greater strength. (Note that this technique would have been unknown to later generations in other parts of the world, where boats were made exclusively from wood.)
"In the years before Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC the Judeans certainly did more than sit about and weep. They adjusted and settled. In time they became Mesopotamian citizens. By the time Cyrus arrived by no means all of Nebuchadnezzar's displaced persons wanted to go "home" to Jerusalem. However, the Judeans' ancient and somewhat ramshackle religious identity had meanwhile been crystallising into permanence due to their encyclopaedia of history, custom, instruction and wisdom. They became literally the people of the book. From this angle it can be argued that the Babylonian Exile, far from being the disaster it is usually judged, was ultimately the process that forged what became modern Judaism."
"Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile."
"It is hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at them. They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of the other languages, new ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake."
"All these people appeared in Europe shortly after the flood. All have been described [by archaeologists] as outsiders: people who migrated from some distance... all seem to have been more culturally advanced than those [original European residents] whom they displaced. Perhaps not so coincidentally, at that time in the middle of the sixth millennium B.C., Europe began a rapid ascent into what has been called a "Golden Age"...
"In the [Mesopotamian] epic of Gilgamesh the seven sages are credited with building the walls of Uruk and bringing the arts of civilization to the Sumerians - irrigation, farming, and the use of copper, gold, and silver. The question of where the Sumerians came from is still unanswered.""The oldest known written versions of the flood were committed to clay tablets over two millennia after [this flood] event in Sumerian, the language of the first known writing, a language with no known roots and no known descendants..."
"[King Darius I the Great] governed skillfully and managed a vast empire long before that of Alexander the Great, a regime that encompassed all the prior realms of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Ionians, Persians, and Medes, extending to the east as far as the Indus Valley, to the west into Europe, and to the south into Africa, flourishing in economy and culture.""Apparently what had so deeply moved Smith was the realization that the [cuneiform] fragments he had assembled contained an independent version of the biblical deluge. The heathen words told almost exactly the same story as the Hebrew narrative, right down to the selection of a survivor of the deluge through the intervention of a god, the forewarning that gave time to build a wooden ark, the refuge in it of every kind of animal, bird, and reptile, the grounding of the boat on the side of a mountain, the details of dispatching a swallow, raven, and dove to find land, the offering of a sacrifice, and the pledge that the gods would never again return the world to its primeval watery chaos." "... after the feast one of the goddesses flung her jeweled necklace into the sky to be the sign of a covenant never again to drown the world." "There was no doubt that the deluge described so vividly in the Gilgamesh legend had been inscribed on stone tablets long before the writing of the first books of the Old Testament."The fact that the Mediterranean basin had once been a desert is confirmed by the discovery that the Nile River has an immensely deep central gorge (now filled with sediment) as a result of erosion when the Nile used to empty into a much lower basin. The separation of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic occurred during the Messinian time interval between 7.2 and 5.4 million years ago. "The transition from sea to land and back to sea had taken less than half a million years." "Although no humans lived five million years ago, had any been present, they would have witnessed the Mediterranean desert disappearing permanently beneath a mile of salt water in a matter of a single human lifetime.""... the Sumerians and Akkadians, and even the Greeks, did not believe in a reward after death. Death might be postponed through a petition to a god, but no one could escape it. The body returned to clay, and a duplicate "phantom" entered a new abode through an aperture in the grave, leading to an immense, dark, silent, and sad netherworld where one had a torpid and gloomy existence forever."
Reposted from 2022 to accompany other posts.
"What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life I caused to embark upon the vessel; all my family and all my relations, The beasts of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all embark. I entered the vessel and closed the door...For six days and nights Wind and flood marched on, the hurricane subdued the land. When the seventh day dawned, the hurricane was abated, the flood which had waged war like an army; the sea was stilled, the ill wind was calmed, the flood ceased. I beheld the sea, its voice was silent, And all mankind was turned into mud! As high as the roofs reached the swamp;...I beheld the world, the horizon of sea; Twelve measures away an island emerged; Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessel, Mount Nitsir held the vessel and let it not budge... When the seventh day came, I sent forth a dove...
"Around 12,500 years ago, not long after the first flood, pottery appeared for the first time in southern Japan. Some 1500 years later there is evidence of pots being made in China and Indo-China. These examples of pottery making antedate any from Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by 2500-3500 years. Stones for grinding wild cereal grains appeared in the Solomon Islands... as early as 26,000 years ago, whereas they were not apparently used in Upper Egypt and Nubia until about 14,000 years ago..." [p. 18-19]"The third dry cold period was interrupted suddenly around 8000 years ago by an event which, although only discovered in the last decade, has been described as 'possibly the single largest flood of the [past two million years]'. The melting Laurentide ice cap had dammed up vast volumes of fresh water in glacial lakes occupying a third of the land area of eastern Canada... Geologists have calculated that the combined surface area of these glacial lakes... exceeded 700,000 square kilometres... Calculations of the total unfrozen water volume discharged instantly vary between 75,000 and 150,000 cubic kilometres - enough to raise the global sea-level by 20-40 centimetres instantaneously... The centre of the ice cap that was also flushed out through the Hudson Strait, however, would have rapidly added another 5-10 metres to the sea-level..." [33-35]"This last rapid rise in global sea-levels was presumably also responsible for breaching the Hellespont and flooding the partially desiccated Black Sea... Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman... who discovered this flood, suggest that this may have given rise to the legend of Noah's flood. This is possible for the Middle East, but it does not explain all the other 500 flood stories from around the rest of the world." [38]"Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of flood myths in the world. It is an area with few large river deltas and no recent reputation for flooding, but it lost more than 50 per cent of its landmass after the Ice Age." [62]"... the strong likelihood of superwaves arising from the crustal strains when the Laurentide ice sheet of Canada collapsed and melted around 8000 years ago... The release of energy from the Earth's crust would have produced waves rolling across the Pacific and inundating all shores and flat hinterlands in direct line..." [107]
"I believe that Southeast Asia was the centre of innovations after the Ice Age and long-distance seeding of ideas from the region led to technological breakthroughs elsewhere. The Austronesians may have contributed sailing technology, magic, religion, astronomy, hierarchy and concepts of kingship. The Austro-Asiatic speaking people may have contributed the more down-to-earth skills of cereal farming, and even bronze. A combination of all these traits was necessary for the first city-builders of Mesopotamia..." [221]"If there were so many bad riverine floods in Mesopotamia, as the sedimentary record shows, one very bad one would not be remembered so long. Instead the recurrent aspects would be recalled. The myths from around the world do not usually refer to periodic river floods. In any case most flood myths come from island Southeast Asia, which, unlike Mesopotamia, lost most of its alluvial flood-plains after the great melt when the Ice Age ended." [227]"After 200 pages of concentrated flood myths he [Sir James Frazer] concluded that such ancient myths were widespread on every continent except Africa... A large proportion of the Earth's surface was permanently lost to settlement and agriculture somewhere between 18,000 and 5000 years ago as a result of the sea-level rising... Africa, with narrow continental shelves, would have been relatively spared... " [230-232]"There is now general agreement that the stories of Noah's Flood and the floods of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians are related, although there is no agreement on the original source... There are now at least eleven related Ancient Near Eastern versions, including the two in Genesis and Berossus's account of Xisuthros. The three Assyrian versions were committed to tablet in the seventh century BC. This was perhaps a hundred years before the writing of the Priestly account in Genesis, but probably well after the Jehovistic account, for which a date is still under discussion. The two surviving Babylonian accounts were written thousands of years earlier, somewhere between 1850 and 1500 BC..." [242-8]"Frazer lists fifteen Greek flood stories in his Folklore in the Old Testament, twelve of which record a mountain landing." [258]"A number of the Moon stories I have sketched contain the number seven. I have suggested the lunar week as a possible origin for the use of this numeral... After one, two, and three, the number seven appears more frequently in Old World sacred texts than any other number. This applies particularly for the Bible, the Koran, Babylonian texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead... Although five is a prime... the number of fingers on a hand and a half unit in the decimal system it is not more common in sacred texts than expected... [345-6]"And did God first mould a model from blood and clay and blow into it to give it life? Did he take the bone, Ivi, from man's side among the dark rainforest trees of Southeast Asia?.. Stories of the creation of humanity are universal. They can be divided into two main varieties, people evolving from a totem, such as a tree or animal, and the creator fashioning man from clay. These two archetypes have distinct distributions which overlap most dramatically in eastern Indonesia. The merging of these two themes in that location eventually resulted in the beautiful and mysterious story of the Garden of Eden... In this chapter we trace the origin of the Genesis version of the clay-man myth from Southeast Asia... Polynesian informants insisted on the antiquity of stories stating that the first woman, who came from a bone in the man's side, was called Eevee/Ivi (the word for a bone in many eastern Polynesian languages). Yet most of the Christian ethnographers assumed a missionary source for these stories rather than the disturbing possibility of a more ancient origin... It is likely that they were unaware of the widespread ancient distribution of the story elsewhere and thus could simply not believe their informants. This selective bias is discussed at length by Sir James Frazer." [355-9]"The Garden of Eden story holds a cherished place in Western literature... Yet the Genesis writers assembled this story less than three thousand years ago from a selection of fertility and immortality myths that were in common circulation at the time. The separate elements of these myths are still to be found today in Southeast Asia and Melanesia." [382]"The tree of knowledge played centre stage throughout the snake's temptation of Eve. The tree of life, however, remained in the wings unnoticed until it was nearly too late and Jehovah realised that Adam and Eve could eat from that too, and become immortal like Him. He therefore shooed them out of the garden before they could gain immortality as well as knowledge... Frazer's view was that there were originally two trees, but that the tree of knowledge of good and evil had really been the tree of death contrasting with the tree of life. This hypothesis may explain the verses:'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' (Genesis 2:16-17)Clearly, humankind did not die on that day of the Fall, but instead became mortal." [384]"In certain Aboriginal cultures, the Moon was regarded as a deity with the secret of immortality because it 'died' for three days every month, subsequently renewing itself during the first half of the next month." [386]"The location of paradise has always worried Bible scholars, particularly since the lush forest description given in Genesis fits so poorly with anything we know about the environment of ancient Mesopotamia. Rainfall may have been better 6000-7000 years ago, but nothing fits the picture of paradise as well as tropical jungles such as in Southeast Asia. Both ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians described their respective sites as far across the water towards the rising Sun, that is in the East." [405]
"In their partial rejection of diffusion as the reason for these links [between diverse cultures], folklorists of the twentieth century have had to propose the only two other possible causes of similarity: chance and the inner workings of the human mind. While chance may operate for single obvious motifs, such as the worship of the Sun, I have shown that it is statistically extremely unlikely that complex story-types, sharing from three to ten distinct motifs, could have occurred more than once. Yet this is what would have to happen for the distribution of myths in a diagonal band across Eurasia - with Polynesia at one end and Finland at the other - to have all occurred independently. That these were the core myths that were preserved so carefully by the Mesopotamian, Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilisations can also be no coincidence. All the main stories in the first ten chapters of Genesis are found in this cultural band and all occur in the Far East: the watery creation, the separation of skies and earth, the creation of man from red earth, and Eve from his side, the Fall, Cain and Abel, and, of course, the flood. With the exception of the flood, the relative paucity of evidence for these complex story-types elsewhere in the Americas and Africa not only supports diffusion as a reason for the distribution, but also argues against both chance and the 'inner workings of man's brain' for their similarities.""If we can accept the statistical evidence of trans-continental relationships in myths, then the dating of the first written versions of the Eurasian myths becomes crucial. We are lucky here, since the Sumerians and Babylonians were so assiduous in recording the motifs on tablets and cylinder seals. The date bracket that comes out of such an enquiry reveals that the myths, with their religious connotations, were among the first of all written records in the third millennium BC. Since in the majority of cases the structure and content of the Mesopotamian myths show them to be derived from earlier Eastern versions, we may suppose that the direction of diffusion was East-to-West, and that the date of diffusion may be been earlier than the beginning of the third millennium. This means that East-West cultural links may be older than 5000 years. Such cultural links could only have occurred if there were people in Southeast Asia to hold the stories, and that they were capable of traveling to India and Mesopotamia to transmit them... The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination."
Reposted from 2022 to accompany some newer posts.
Last weekend at a local auction the auctioneer started to enumerate the contents of a lot, then stopped and said it was a real "dog's breakfast." It's a British phrase (he was Canadian), and the meaning was obvious, but I couldn't parse out the derivation. I found this in a 25-year-old New York Times On Language column:"A dog's breakfast is any kind of smorgasbord prepared, in haste or at random, from life's castoffs... The slang lexicographer Eric Partridge cited Glasgow circa 1934 as its place and time of origin, though he noted that Australians also used the phrase with the same meaning as "confusion, mess, turmoil."The derivation summarized: "Although the origin isn’t exactly known, it alludes to the fact that if what you don’t succeed at what you are cooking, then the results are only fit for a dog... It is suggested that this dates from a time before canned dog food when a pup’s breakfast would have consisted of dinner leftovers from the night before; hence, “a mess.”
About the same time, a dog's dinner appeared with a quite different sense. "Why have you got those roses in your hair?" asked a character in "Touch Wood," a 1934 novel by C. L. Anthony. "You look like the dog's dinner ." This expression was defined by the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement as "dressed or arranged in an ostentatiously smart or flashy manner," probably derived from the 1871 usage "to put on the dog ."
The flat-bottom edge is ideal for scraping the brown bits off a pan without scratching the surface. And it has a carved bowl for scooping or tasting a spoonful of tomato sauce for seasoning as you cook.
Cuba needs 100,000 barrels of oil a day to keep the lights on, experts say, and to keep its buses, trains and factories running.But because of President Trump, it is not getting nearly enough.With the Trump administration exerting control over Venezuela’s oil industry, Cuba is receiving only a trickle of the oil it needs — a shortage experts warn is increasingly likely to trigger a humanitarian crisis unlike any the country has ever experienced.From diesel to operate buses to gasoline for cars to jet fuel to power airplanes, oil is in short supply in Cuba. A nation already enduring prolonged blackouts could come to a grinding halt as reserves run out, the country plunges into darkness and its economy craters, according to energy experts and economists who follow Cuba closely.A government-run television and radio broadcaster in central Cuba announced Tuesday that it had been off the air for several days because it had run out of diesel to power its station. Without power many people also do not have running water.
This is not an accidental byproduct of the Venezuela operation. It's quite deliberate -
But following the U.S. raid, President Trump declared that oil shipments to Cuba would stop.“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.The plan to cripple — and ultimately topple — Cuba’s government is widely seen as a dream of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants...At its peak, Venezuela sent its ally some 100,000 barrels a day. More recently, that number had dropped to about 35,000 barrels a day, experts say.“If Cuba loses that, the impact is basically going to be catastrophic,” said Jorge R. Piñon, a former oil executive who is now a researcher for the energy institute at the University of Texas.“The chain of events is that the Cuban economy literally collapses, there is no food in the markets, the trains are not moving, the buses are not moving,” he said...Mr. Trump urged the Cuban government to “make a deal” or suffer the consequences.
