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Great photos. I feel like we had a conversation about #25 before.Were average, low ranking German soldiers allowed to return to their homes immediately after the war, or were they detained/put to work elsewhere for some time? I noticed the one of the Germans tending to the cemetery.
There's been so much politicization of the issue that I think it's hard to separate fact from fiction/exaggeration. I think there are several issues to deal with:1) is the earth warming?2) is the earth warming because of man's activities?3) will #1 or #2 be harmful to man?4) if #2 is answered in the affirmative, is there anything we can do to stop it?So is #1 true? If so, what news is this? The earth used to be a molten mass when it was first formed. It later cooled. So shouldn't the earth's climate really be considered in the thousands, if not millions of years of climate history? And if the climate has cooled/warmed at all before the last 150 years or so, doesn't this raise the potential for the earth's climate to act independently of man's activities? Anyway, there are just so many people who want to dip into the trough of "climate change" as a means of establishing their own power bases that the whole thing makes me skeptical.
And along with that, it's a two-way street with he amount of American debt that China has bought. So while China is a threat to the U.S., other more immediate threats are those nations which have more limited exposure to globalization (e.g. North Korea, Iran).
I think it's been known for a while that China would be the next real competitor/threat to the United States. The massive amount of people alone makes it a formidable foe, and the fact that the nation is semi-isolated (compared to the West) makes it possible for China to do things that might otherwise not work in places such as Europe. One of the interesting things is that China is succeeding not because of its communist economy, but in spite of it; from last I heard, there is a large chunk of the economy which actually operates on capitalist principles. Today, China's political arm cannot flex as much as it wants because of so much international investment in the country. If China does anything drastic, it could potentially wreak havoc on its economy if corporations start pulling out – another effect of globalization.
I just saw that and was going to post a link here. You beat me to it. The photos are wonderful. I wonder how they got the grass so short in that photo of Mark Twain. Must have been a push-mower with blades set really close to the ground.
I had wondered if there was a relation between the two of them.The present earl is Andrew Bruce (11th Earl).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bruce,_11th_Earl_of_Elgin
Wow, I was totally mislead for a moment by that first one – one man for “[c]leaning and maintenance” of the obelisk fence along the border. At first I thought it was one man at a checkpoint along a vast border…which would have been more problematic
That seems to be exactly it:
The British High Commissioner to China, Lord Elgin, retaliated by ordering the destruction of the palace, which was then carried out by British and French troops.
I just read what Newt Gingrich had to say about the shutdown, and he helped clarify the question I asked yesterday. Gingrich was in office when the last shutdown occurred in the mid-1990s. He says this:
Back in 1995-96, there was the understanding that government shutdowns were an unpleasant but integral part of the legislative-executive power struggle. That power struggle is built into the American Constitution. The Founding Fathers wanted to protect freedom by separating powers so every branch had to negotiate with the others.
So it seems that shutdowns are a healthy sign that our form of republican government is working. The alternative - one branch of government having its say all the time - veers off the path of the balance of powers. I know that James Madison in particular was fearful of the potential for tyranny that resulted from too much power in the hands of one faction. I think that he would be one who would think that the shutdown is therefore better than the alternative.
Two issues – first, I meant to compare America to Europe simply to say that there was precedent for morphing national borders, which would have made the real possibility of a break something that was understandable to nineteenth century politicians. Today, the relative stability of national borders makes the prospect of countries (or even states) breaking apart more difficult to accept, IMO. Even if Lincoln did not think it prudent for the South to secede, he evidently felt more strongly about the Union than he did about the prospect the right of states to break apart. Something else had to be driving this desire for the Union, I suspect.Second - whoa, you think there's a European war looming in the next decade or so? Maybe we should break this off into another thread, but this sounds like something to talk about. Are you saying an intra-European war, or just a war involving European countries with the outside? I can understand the fracturing of the European economy in the future, but an all-out war?
I envision a room where education administrators are gathered together, discussing the idea of getting iPads for all students in the district. “It will help them be more competitive in the future workforce!” blah. “It will allow them to be more efficient with their homework!” blah. “It will….” “It will…..” I have to wonder whether the idea that “it will cost much more than any benefit received” is mentioned in said room.
What was the event at which the British ransacked one of the great Chinese palaces in the nineteenth century? I want to say the strike was commanded by a figures with the last name “Elgin”, but I don't know the exact name.
I have no idea, either. I would suspect, though, that there probably is some iconographic meaning attached to the snail and to the battle between knight and snail. Here is perhaps an obvious meaning attached to snails in Christian understanding:[html][/html]If I were attempting to get to the bottom of it in a serious fashion, I would consult an expert in mollusks and look into climate patterns in the Middle Ages. Almost all the examples of knight vs. snail images on that page come from the late thirteenth or first half of the fourteenth century. I believe this was still during the medieval warm period, and I wonder if snails were therefore more problematic for agriculture during this time than they were a hundred or two hundred years later. I have to imagine that some medieval texts discuss the attitude toward snails from a practical perspective, and this would guide us in our understanding of the cultural symbolism snails possessed.
