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Well it doesn't get any more turbulent than this. This morning, we read that the Democratic platform had omitted references to God and to Jerusalem. Later during the day, this was reversed. If anyone saw the floor vote on this measure, it was anything but unanimous.
I think that party platforms do not carry any real weight, but instead are symbolically noteworthy. After all, they are a barometer of the where a party is at a particular moment in time.
The Democratic platform apparently changes to whatever they think will get them elected.
Yes, I think that is one conclusion which can be made. Along with that, I think it shows the Democrats' political philosophy isn't based on a coherent set of ideas that are rooted in unchanging truths. Instead, it's a more ephemeral series of ideas. Of course there will be some changes in any platform over the years, but one would expect more consistency in general.
2/7 for me – also “out of ideas”. However, I did learn from those answers that the company Nabisco was originally the National Biscuit Company. That, I did not know.
Interesting, I did not know that. This is also kind of strange:
I got my hands on his script and read it late into the night. It was unlike anything I had read before. It was absurd, in the very best way. The script featured Maximus being cast out of purgatory by the Gods and sent to destroy the growing cult of Christianity.
Not only was the original Gladiator supposed to be a historical film, rather than a mytho-historical one, but having a plot to destroy burgeoning Christianity doesn't sound like it would go over all that well.
I have long since thought that these types of “departments” in different sectors of society greatly contribute to the high cost of doing things and low levels of achievement. Think about how much education costs in America, and then think about how much money goes to these modernist departments. Then think about what they “produce”, like what is found in the article above.
One wonders how much money goes to pay the salary of a “Chief Diversity Officer”, and the entire “Diversity Office” at the State Department.
That's pretty neat. The sword is a bonus. Hopefully the government doesn't force him to hand it over.
Well, I have yet to hear a person on the left slam Apple or even Google for making “too much profit”. The complaints are almost always against companies the left considers “evil” to one degree or another – banks, oil companies, etc. That in itself suggests to me that the whole “99%” issue is wrapped up in more politics than first meets the eye.I am actually tempted to something – the next time I get into a debate with someone complaining against corporate “greed” and the like, I should propose that Apple should hit with a “greed tax”, now that they're either the largest or one of the largest companies in the world. We'll see how that goes over.
Funny – today I showed it to my advisor (area is Italian Renaissance art) and my officemate (doing his dissertation on Michelangelo) and both of them thought there's no way it could be a Leonardo, based on style. It seems that there's a lack of attention to the details of the horse – muscles, mane, tail, naturalism in movement, etc. – that can be seen even in Leonardo's sketches (see below). My advisor said that Pedretti, the Leonardo da Vinci “expert” at UCLA, has written some good things in the past but is now kind of out there (i.e. his conclusions are not really reliable).
I'm assuming that one end of your charger goes into a USB port and the other into your phone through a mini or micro USB port. They've started making more and more kinds of chargers for those phones, so you're in luck if you want to get more ways to charge it. The other day I also saw a portable charger for $30 or $40 which is solar powered. So all of this is good news for power-hungry phones. Oh, and I imagine that many of those environmentalists are using these cell phones to begin with, so it's hard to bite the hand that feeds them, so to speak.
Am I the first to pundit that the lady governors have rendered Sara Palin irrelevant for the GOP? Each is less shrill and has more gravitas and substance. Condi is still my favorite female politician, and she did wow the audience.
Interesting comment. I'm not sure Skiguy will take kindly to it, and I think that Palin has the kind of “celebrity” that other GOP women can't match, but I do think that the GOP now has more options when it comes to women. I think that Palin is largely the creation of the left and the media which seem to loathe female social conservatives, especially of the more “attractive” kind. When you have one of them who fights back again those same groups – and in a quirky way at that – you have the kind of situation which creates a national buzz.
Historians who study other historians may be influenced by those they study but the essential question to me is do they in turn effectively influence historical actors? I am willing to concede that some historians are influential in shaping events by the affect their own historical writings have on historical actors.
I think you're exactly on to it here. Two things:First – I think that even if a historian has not really been influential in shaping history, studying about who has studied what in a field is of course good just to know what has already been written on a topic. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, I think that this is the kind of thing that is better suited for people advanced in their fields. Most people don't need to know all of this. I will go ahead and agree with your basic sentiments about historiography not being “real” history, affecting “the craft of history but not the flow of history itself”. I could challenge that on technical grounds but I understand what you are saying and will leave it be for now. I will say that just as sportswriters are likely to read articles about other great sportswriters of the past, I don't think it's surprising that historians would want to read about other great historians in history. But again, it's something that people advanced in their fields should care more about than the average student. Second, forget about twentieth century historians for a moment. In my field covering parts of Venetian history, I can tell you that several important histories of the city have been written – for example, in the thirteenth century, in the fifteenth century, and sixteenth century (among others). These histories undoubtedly influenced the way Venetians saw their own city. Because of this, these histories are vitally important to understanding how the city developed over time. I don't think that the historians themselves are actually significant in history for things they did other than with their pens. A history which examined how those figures influenced Venetian history would therefore be a very welcome addition to the field of Venetian history studies.I think that this fits into the part what you said, about historians influencing the course of history. For much of history, when historians were far and few between, written histories were more important than they are today in a sense. Those are the kinds of writings which would have been more likely to influence historical events.So in the end, modern historiography can be rather inward-looking and I can see how it can be criticized on some grounds as not being history. On the other hand, it is useful for specialists in the field. Further, I think that studying older, important histories through time is still very beneficial to study of history itself because they are likely to influence the course of events.I think we agree more than I initially thought.
