I always wondered where that reference came from, it never made any sense.
Mind you - I'm guessing about the reference. It seems right....but don't be telling your friends that as fact until you check it out with another source.
Okay strike Eusebius that was wrong. And strike Josephus I was wrong on that one too. Wow. Wrong on Chaucer too...way too late. So I goofed on the last three.
I was going to say....You could also do Pepin, Charles the Fat, Clovis...I believe Boethius. And you were given Justinian simply by looking at the board icon for the Dark Ages 🙂 ....you could also add his wife, Theodora, to the list while we're at it. And yes, Stumpfoot, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D., so it's quite easy to remember that he reigned during this period. My point with this is that it's difficult to recall figures from this era. Despite the 500+ year span of this age (more than the Middle Ages, more than the Renaissance, more than the years of ancient Greece that influence us), it has gone by largely unnoticed. I bet if you asked random people on the street the question (like Jay Leno does) you'd be lucky if you got 1 in 10 to give you even one person who lived during the Dark Ages.
I'm sure that the government has enough practice studying the field to know how to track things – perhaps not everything, but some things. For example, if you deliberately feed misinformation (say an incorrect code to access a certain database) you might be able to tell how quickly this code was used to try to gain access. From there you can also narrow down the people who received that information, and try to understand things about the leak. This is just an example but I'm sure things can be done.The U.S. has a long history of spying so I'm sure it knows how to spy and how to catch a spy.
You know I think touching on the media is really important. As you say, harping on bad news or ignoring good news should really be considered when the history books are written. I have been thinking that Iraq might be the first conflict to be won or lost in the media, although I'm sure that there have probably been other conflicts in the past that have also been greatly affected.William Randolph Hearst was on to something when he decided to "make" a war in his newspaper if a war didn't materialize in truth. Public perception can clearly sway the public's perception of reality. I'm not going to say right here that deliberate misinformation has been disseminated by the media, but rather it has been colored by the eyes of the media's own bias.
Has anyone gone to see it yet? I wanted to go this last wekend but wasnt able. I hear more and more thats it's very graphic in its depictions of the sacrifices.
Yeah but they said similar things about Passion of the Christ, which I didn't think was so much the case. I get the feeling that Hollywood critics curiously tend to become violence-sensitive when it comes to Mel Gibson movies.
To add to this, as Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview I was watching yesterday, there will be no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri. The insurgents seem to be guerilla in many ways – in their tactics, in their organization, in their political strategy. I think this takes away the satisfaction of the traditional victor.
I found that the date of December 25th was the day of celebration of Natalis Invicti, a sun feast during the days of the Roman Empire which peaked in 274 during Aurelian's reign. In my understanding, it seems that the Christians in essence adopted a date already celebrated for pagan reasons and simply changed the underlying reason for the celebration:
The earliest rapprochement of the births of Christ and the sun is in Cypr., "De pasch. Comp.", xix, "O quam pr?clare providentia ut illo die quo natus est Sol . . . nasceretur Christus." - "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born . . . Christ should be born." ... Already Tertullian (Apol., 16; cf. Ad. Nat., I, 13; Orig. c. Cels., VIII, 67, etc) had to assert that Sol was not the Christians' God; Augustine (Tract xxxiv, in Joan. In P. L., XXXV, 1652) denounces the heretical indentification of Christ with Sol. Pope Leo I (Serm. xxxvii in nat. dom., VII, 4; xxii, II, 6 in P. L., LIV, 218 and 198) bitterly reproves solar survivals....
This adoption of a pagan event for a Christian holiday does not appear to have been unique; I believe the festival of Lupercalia was similarly adopted and later used for the feast of St. Valentine in February.
Well, the Wikipedia Black FridayBlack Friday[/wiki] states about a dozen “Black Fridays”, three of which fall in the latter half of the 19th Century (none of them are it). The most common use for “Black Friday” in my mind is the date after Thansgiving when companies are finally supposed to be operating “in the black” for the calendar year. Hint: think 1880s.
But couldn't some of what you say be said about Hamas or Hezzbolah? I think that they essentially “own” parts of lebanon and help the people out there. Yet I believe some would call them terrorist groups. I am interested in hearing what people have to say about terrorist group...where they draw the lines. I should start a public poll with this - terrorist or not? Guy Fawkes, Hamas, Hezzbolah, Al Qaeda, Weather Underground, the instigators of the Boston Tea Party, ELF/ALF, etc etc. I'm sure we can think of some others as well.
Why would they include rioters in a “terrorism” program? I suppose that anarchists might be a form of terrorist, but only vaguely. While they might both share a common interest in bringing down a government, I think they differ in other regards. Of course this begs the question of how to define terrorism….sounds like a good thread that I should start.
I watched The Deer Hunter with Robert De niro and Christopher Walken. That was a good Vietnam Movie, also showing the aftermath of those that went there and how they suffered even after getting home.
Neve seen it, but I've heard it's really good. There were a few other post-'Nam war movies out...Heaven and Earth...Born on the Fourth of July...Rambo.....
Author
Posts
Viewing 15 posts - 4,981 through 4,995 (of 5,614 total)