Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Monday 4 December 2023

Lord Bragg & BBC In Our Time - The Millenary Edition



In Our Time is a weekly BBC R4 conversation hosted by Melvyn Bragg with usually three top scholars or academics in their field of study. I've been wanting to complete this since the 1000th episode I drafted, and so it's now or never. 


We must press on.


 I've been listening to IoT from the early episodes if not just a wee bit later than 1998. The information we're allowed to overhear, the quality of conversation, is valuable and often precious, but not just for what we learn. It continually adds more context to what we already know. I can't say school was a good experience for me but IoT has contributed to my ongoing education more than any other source in my life.


A thousand episodes is an extraordinary achievement. IoT is now an online resource that will always encapsulate the life and times of Lord Bragg, with a range and depth of subjects that are now steadily topping up ours.


Now, on that subject when I was an adolescent before Melvyn Bragg was ennobled, he had a Television production called The South Bank Show. He was always comfortable around authentic, inquiring minds and a wide range of interesting people. To top it off he was handsome on the Telly and a public intellectual you'd want to hang around with, and he still is. Do you know how hard it is to be all those things in British culture and still be well regarded?


Tough call. There are many pretenders but fewer successors and regrettably impostors are everywhere, lisping their way though the third act. Jonathan Myles-Lee perhaps came closest. Now there was a man who likewise had an enormous appetite for, the true, the beautiful and the good.




It's impossible for me to hold back on a few theories I've picked up, like lucky pennies and tuppences over the years from listening to IoT. 


This may come as a surprise to many listeners but Lord Bragg is awake, and red-pilled. Maybe even initiated, and possibly not as well. The questions asked of his guests are seldom easy to answer. It's not doctrinaire responses we're looking for it's the differences in the views of the guests as well when they're all singing from the same spreadsheet. It's all informative.


From time to time questions are answered with a little hesitation that is not expected from our best and brightest. One of the best questions regularly asked by Baron Bragg is 'How do we know that?' and the answer is we don't. We're relying on accounts often written centuries later.


I invite you to revisit the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - March 2017. I can't emphasise enough to listen over and again till a familiarity with the material emerges. This may then fuel your own questions about the official version of human evolution with respect to the climate, weather and atmosphere that initiated our launch from primordial soup to sentient biped. Be sceptical and if you have the ability, be cynical.

Got that?

That's the warm up although there are more absolute gems in that episode, but the objective here is to be limbered up for the kind of detached and cool headed analysis from the Climate Change episode produced much earlier on 6 January 2000



It takes a sort of cobbled-stone stubbornness, and refreshing use of reason, logic and curiosity to listen properly to In Our Time. Kissinger said only academics fight over tiny details, as the stakes are so low.



Don't get me wrong. In our Time is invariably warm, authentic and collegial, it's edited but not in a way that seems anything less than generous. Though rare, I've noticed over the decades that a guest or two appear to be scoring points. It's out of order. They diminish themselves while blaming the victim for the very qualities of restraint they are lacking in. I only mention it because Melvyn Bragg doesn't engage in tit for tat and also leaves it in the episode for us overhear. That's aristocratic integrity. You can't buy that, especially from a working class background.


Over the years I have learned more about great women in history (often the first notable writers in the United Sates and Europe) from Lord Bragg than anywhere else. I  was a prolific book reader who tried as many genres as possible up to my 30s. I've said it before in the Hildegaard of Bingen post but its worth a reminder. If feminism means emancipating women with opportunities they are ordinarily excluded from, Lord Bragg is the greatest living feminist I know. It's unmissable that he enjoys and appreciates women as well respecting them. 



One more playful observation. Again, over the years so it doesn't happen every time but I've noticed that Melvyn (if I may) has the ability to make people laugh at the drop of a hat. Now he may deny that, but it's a quality suppressed through self control, because his work isn't as an entertainer. Funny, charming and erudite are all qualities he has but Lord Bragg is a serious contributor to understanding the nature, as well as the times that our lives are living in.


I shall be adding episodes below that I feel have been most important to me over the years. There's no rush to list them all immediately, and so I'll start with Strabo who like Jesus, nobody had bothered to document until centuries later.


Strabo's Geographica

States of Matter

Edward Gibbon

Parasitism

The Upanishads

Wednesday 17 May 2023

Hildegard of Bingen










Hildegard of Bingen is credited with writing the first plainchant music that excels in the acoustic environment of a purposefully designed church or cathedral. You may not know her but it's unlikely you haven't heard the liturgical style of music that invites a talented singer to check out the acoustics of old religious architecture on their first visit, such as this young lady who is hearing her voice for the first time, just like you and I were with her.



I was introduced to Hildegard by Lord Bragg conversing with Miri Rubin, William Flynn and Almut Suerbaum. I will drill down into the difference between scholars and academics later as they're all largely bought and sold as indeed am I and you - I will say that the official account for Hildegard has potholes. How would a fifteen year old, bricked in to a prison cell at a convent where the acoustics match that of Julian Assange's prison cell in Belmash, invent a genre and practise, experiment and enjoy her work that Cathedrals are designed for (among other qualities)?


Furthermore why would a 15 year old girl who devotes her life to God through abstention and isolation step out one day and ostensibly run the monastry as it were, before moving on to set up her own vision in Rupertsberg which most certainly is not Bingen.


Or let's put it another way. If a fanatical devotion to God through a life of mental flagellation and service changes such that one day the bricks are torn down as there's no door to exit, just a slot for passing food in and waste out. Why isn't that explained by anyone? Why would the elevator pitch for the story, the hook as it were, be left out?


I'll tell you why. It's because her story isn't one leveraged by just the forces of love, patience and protection, but one that demonstrates amply an early life hijacked by compression, suffering, prayer and abstinence.


Where is the good?


Might it be true?


Is beauty indistinguishable from the eye of the beholder?


Cloistered away from prying eyes and whatever it takes to emancipate a 15 year old anchorite from their anchoress dungeon.


History is written by the prevailing forces In Our Time. This is a fact seemingly everyone knows when pressed for an answer, but only a handful will provide examples of.


Lord Bragg nails it when he asks where did she get the books from?


Melvyn doesn't just fight British womens corner he defends women full stop. He's your champion.


Prove me wrong.


Some churches have Cathedral like audio quality built into the internal architecture. In fact, many churches are designed with acoustics in mind to enhance the sound of choirs and plainchant. The acoustics of historical churches have been extensively studied. Orthodox churches in the old world typically have reverberation times around 1.5 seconds for a small village church, 2.5 seconds for a larger urban or monastic church, ranging up to 6 seconds for a cathedral-sized church². 


Sunday 7 May 2023

Yassaui Mergalyev







You may recall that I was recently floored by a dancer with the Kyiv City Ballet Gala at Southampton Mayflower theatre, and that I couldn't locate his name or the extraordinary music he danced to.

Well, I received a lovely email from the artistic director who corrected a few errors I'd made (now updated) and shared with me the dancers name and the music that was driving me nuts trying to locate. When I looked down the concert program the first name I picked out was Yassaui Mergalyev because of the Asiatic name, and my brief experiences of former Soviet Union states, yet still I managed to get the music wrong or clicked on a different rendition of the classical piece called November by Max Richter. If you haven't heard it, I hope you find a few minutes to listen at some point.

Now then, as soon as I had Mr Mergalyev's name I did a search and saw a bunch of videos but two of them appealed to me because they were so grainy and posted well over a decade ago. The location, Kazakhstan I believe, might not be The Bolshoi but on that stage, you and I can view those minute and a half clips, from a (distant galaxy) or generation ago as if we are talent spotters trawling the planet for the new and the best, and it's among the most extraordinary footage you or I could have ever expected. You can see for yourself how exceptionally talented a dancer Yassui Mergalyev is.

Those unbelievable pirouettes that I've seen world class ballet dancers misstep when drawing to a halt, because everybody is vulnerable to dizziness, no amount of training takes it all away, a lot yes, but not all, yet Mr Mergaliev delivers easily the most unprecedented number of turns for a male dancer that I've yet witnessed. 

Finally in the first clip, the dances' denouement ends in a what looks like for a microsecond, a stumble or fall, but no. The music is surgically severed exactly on-point and we apprehend all of a sudden that it's a choreographed collapse and thus takes us somewhere I've not seen outside of Nureyev or any of the biggest names. It's a large claim but you can see for yourself.

It's a real treat even to the untrained eye.

First Draft. I'll clean up later as I must crack on.

Thursday 27 April 2023

Image Provenance



If anyone has any information on these, can you get in touch please?

I've done my own digging and the only facts I have; are they were first published this year. They might be AI generated (the resolution is too high in my opinion) or the last option is they were sequestered and have now been leaked.

Update: I've changed my mind about AI









Monday 10 April 2023

Brand New Interview - Graham Hancock - Mauro Biglino & The Elohim





All of the topics in the title have been discussed here over the years so use the search engine box or the tags at the end of the post if additional contexts are desired.

The universe is vast, I only have quantum-grasp of infinity from what was taught to me during my extended (15 minutes) Dimethyltryptamine experience that Clif High describes as hyperspace and is a much better word than the usual descriptions of entheogenic adjectives. There are no words to describe it, it's more real than this reality and the ability to convey the experience in Materium is difficult and inevitably misleading if not impossible - Though I have tried.

It is my view that the human experience for thousands of years has been manipulated not just by largely oblvious humans but by relatively small groups of non-human entities. A milder and more pedestrian explanation of this might be something like the Sons of Cain version of history whereby their genetics are superior to ours due to some hybrid experimentations and so forth.

I can only comment that a faction of this theoretical or prospective group are creative in ways that are inspirational. They do more with less and that's something humans should clutch to our souls as close as possible.

Other than that, Mauro Biglino has provided us with updated information with respect to this fresh-off-the cloud video interview that was much more surprising than I ever thought imaginable. 


I try to operate on the basis that I can only learn, when I recognise I'm wrong and that looks to be the case in this instance, but paradoxically it may well be a more tightly harnessed argument for the unsettling crypto-terrestrial explanations such as Mac Tonnies expanded on before his premature demise from myocarditis in his 30s. Mauro suggests in this fascinating discourse, they may never have left but instead gone underground.




Mauro Biglino used to be the Vatican's highest authority on bible translation till he proved there were no translations for words such as Elohim or the Shaddai but did demonstrate they weren't spiritual, and so apart from the context we can only speculate on the exact meaning of unworldly small mouth noises, but we can safely say the Elohim are plural not singular. The Vatican fired him, airbrushed his name out of the catalogue of 150 books bearing his name on them and he now gets death threats for presenting his work to the people.

Historians invariably kowtow to the Archaeologist who slur their words to be a science. I pay most attention to scholarly research that is edgy not banal or self-serving. 



I study rock, I don't suck it.

TBC

Wednesday 5 April 2023

The Peloponnesian Wars - Thucydides - VoxDay



My father has never acknowledged that I've ever been correct apart from one frivolous occasion a few days after decades of silence I mentioned it to him with a grin on my face. He has many fine and admirable qualities not least of which is his Ãœbermensch quality to work harder and longer than most people, including myself, would consider 'decent not inappropriate' (sic).

He's getting on now (aren't we all) so I look on his curmudgeonly traits warm-heartedly and with humorous thoughts I keep to myself, though I'm careful not to convey that I'm mocking him, despite dropping harsh red pills from time to time and the occasional black pill when cornered.

He freely shares with me that he knows Egyptology is a pack of well-crafted but to the sceptical observer - dissonant lies, fabrications and watered down, milquetoast official history. Parsing that information with other quackademic histories is where I back off. I guess he knows I can talk too much about them so it's probably more discouragement than denying for example that Sasquatch, Yeti and other super-bipedal stories are hard to dismiss when facing endless testimonies on the subject from all around the world.

Last Thursday I dropped by his woodturning business and instead of talking, I suggested he study VoxDay on Jordan Peterson and tapped the url into his laptop. He took one look at Theodore and said to me in pursuit of refutation of my claims that he 'could tell by looking at his face 'that he's a 'bastard'.

Bingo. I had him by the balls.

I learn a lot from VoxDay and am not without internalised critiques, but VoxDay is not a person I would cross. I said 'you're right, he is a bastard'. More accurately he is a Dark Lord. He's also a polymath with a wide-ranging history of professional pursuits and accomplishments. You may recall his cartoon publishing biz, Arktoons, included this globally viral memetic which is the most famous and impossible to find using any search engine. You'll find other Dark Lord cartoon strip images similar to the one below, but not this one and it's also reduced resolution now it's incarcerated in internet gaol.


It took me 45 minutes to find the image above so I'm weary of blogging, this is your lot for the time being.

Sunday 15 January 2023

Professor Ronald Hutton - Gresham College - Early Roman Paganism






It's an exceptional presentation and sometimes hallucinogenic in its Damascene honesty. 

Unforgettable. 

What was the name of the college again?

Monday 9 January 2023

Compelling Diocletian Arguments





A lot of history is biased, which is why Diocletian requires more attention. A lowly born Roman emperor. Did some amazing things, made some cruel sectarian decisions.


Most importantly he diluted his power with The Tetrarchy ;its unprecedent and he retired to Split in Croatia. He grew vegetables and felt more proud of that than any of his power endeavours.


This narrative is completely counter cultural to orthodox history. Guys who do the right thing in the end, are easily airbrushed from the past or branded as traditores.




Saturday 24 December 2022

Beaver Wars (So Much Beaver)












Tom the Vivisectionist of Versailles (alongside my trusty stalwart Dominic Twinkle Eye) has a much more prosaic explanation for my money changers outburst and so I'm obliged to defer to his deeper research.

The first rule of history club is never be outraged when presented with more history.

Otherwise we never learn anything do we?

Friday 16 December 2022

They Softly Took Over The Matriarchy - The Rest Is History




The boys have been on fire for weeks during the global fitba Q cup . It's an information hose so I need to listen to them a few times to let it all sink in, but if you're not listening to The Rest is History podcasts, they're the best conversations on the internet in my limited explorations of who does what online.


I've long held that so much of history is going to be rewritten with gusto and renewal and now I can see it in the coming weeks, months and years ahead, but while I scavenge for new intel, there's no harm in learning the orthodox version of events. Dominic and Tom have wide ranging and completely pompous-free discussions and opinions on more history than you and I have read, so it's a good workout (laugh out loud funny too quite often). It's Cross Fit gym for training the mind to learn, process, adapt and reintegrate which is what that video now made private, talked about when exploring the subject of feedback loops in 5GW.


I couldn't resist posting this one though as I too was transfixed by Maria Gimbutas matriarchal and matrilineal pre Neolithic society, back in 2012. It just made sense to me at the time. The divine Feminine as leader and the Masculine as defender (Boadicea?). It's a model that leverages our (male and female only) hormones and fecundity as longevity presenting as warrior protection.


Dominic was prudently sceptical but only because Tom has a weeks research under his belt which is like turning up to a knife fight with a gun when they've done none at all. Then Tom shares a tidbit (sic) I'd not come across before. This matriarchal society was taken over by the patriarchy emerging from that wispy history called the Indo European [Aryan?] invasion. It's here we learn they didn't achieve it through violence and force. 


Now I was paying attention. Anything that is the opposite of what I think or believe, warrants closer inspection, just in case there's a chance to change my mind.


What did JFK teach us at the Waldorf Astoria[Astor] Hotel speech?




Infiltration
Subversion
Intimidation

What would I do to invert a matrilineal society I asked myself?


I would welcome unwelcome migrants to invade them. Set up new places of worship. Undermine their institutions. Make the priests wear the robe that women formerly wore...


Then I would make the firstborn son the focus of succession, not the first born girl who can breed and choose who impregnates whom.


The rest of the eternal-war, patriarchal central-banking and usury beast system all falls into place when it's about conquest not populating the universe with our divine progeny while protecting Mother, Mair, Ma, Mum, Mutter, Mutti etcetera etcetera.


Just one departing point. Marija Gimbutas wasn't a hippy chick, flower child, bong huffing 70s SoCal lecturer-babe. She's about as dry as a communist bloc Gobi-desert Babushka simulacrum, though I don't mean to imply she wasn't hot in bed. 

We never truly know do we?

Sunday 27 November 2022

Dissolution - CJ Sansom


I've bragged many times. I used to read The Economist, The FT, WSJ, The Guardian and The Observer regularly. I'd smash American CEOs in international hotel bars on United States political history because I had the best teacher, Joe Barbera. 

He used to say, 'have you read this?' and if I said no, he'd immediately become animated and tell me why I had to read say Kissinger (Years of Upheaval) or Caro on LBJ (Master of the Senate).

Then I went off-piste and discovered I knew nothing...

Since then, I've pretty much read only non-fiction, so I was half hearted about Dissolution, but it was the best from a bad bunch, so I pressed on.

CJ Sansom is a great writer. Its clean historical fiction set in the time of Henry VIII but not that Cromwell, the other one. 

I appreciated getting granular on Monastic nomenclature, particularly the obedientiaries.

The end was quite exciting and a bit of a page turner but in the final overview, I couldn't believe that intermittent parts of the plot hung on indiscreet revelations made by the protagonist Matthew Shardlake. 

Cromwell's investigator. 

Not only that but he put people's lives in danger by shooting his mouth off. Anyway, I've finished it now and I'm on Fiona Maddocks - Hildegard of Bingen.

Friday 11 November 2022

181. The Birth of Babylon - The Rest Is History





Dirty-Girl Cleopatra & The Mittani, Kassites the Assyrians, Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonia, Nineveh, Hittites, Elam, Edomites a reincarnated Nimrod and others I try to recall.

I'm still smarting from the Macron episode, but the boys have served up the best here so no complaints.

Is history best experienced as a conversation? No singular document really does it for me, though I'm avid reader. In my experience most conflicts are fought (I mean to say scheduled) over pieces of paper, but the ideas or boundaries are articulated in those documents.

Most people don't care. 

Why would they?

The fluidity of conversation here is rarely encountered. The only person I know who has a working knowledge of the material presented in this podcast {Babylon, Babylonia, The Mittani etc.} is One Eyed Matt. That would be a great conversation to earwig on.

Amorite
'huh'
I'm awright
'oh i see'
Amorite

Hilarious and hugely informative. 

Never Stop
Never Stop Learning


Monday 7 November 2022

The Rest Is History




It's a terrific time to be alive. An hour and twenty minutes plus 8 seconds from the BBC podcasts department on French Cinema? 

Sweet as.... 

Long form content is not only here, but it looks like it's a trend should we be of the right humours to seek it out...

And yet, in this manner an audio Princess nebulously, yet unmistakeably Lumiere in the face of blindness, co-opts the mise-en-scene, by parting the curtains and purposefully wondering on stage. 

While nobody is looking.

Who among us could have predicted an English woman, Muriel (Zhaga) speaks flawless French more beautifully and with a greater command of language, than any other French women you care, or dare not mention.

Her Giggle is melodic. Flawless timing too.