Home » Open thread 7/14/23

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Open thread 7/14/23 — 41 Comments

  1. RE: UFOs—

    Well here’s an interesting claim.

    Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart, who did the interview with David Grusch, seemed to be irritated by a questioner who asked where was the proof for Grusch’ claims.

    Coulthart paused for a few seconds, and then said how about this, there is a UFO overseas which is so large that it can’t be moved, so a building was built around it.*

    Well, take the surveillance capabilities of Google Earth and apply an AI search algorithm and you might be able to find the structure.

    In fact some have pointed to a very large, peculiar, circular building on a mountain top in South Korea as a candidate. **

    * See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUZUyck6KoU&t=1075s
    ** See https://curiosmos.com/is-the-us-hiding-a-massive-ufo-so-big-it-cant-be-moved/

  2. Just want to wish huxley a happy Fête nationale française (Bastille Day to us Anglophones) with a video version of La Marseillaise: the video is a pastiche (another good French word) of French history, from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon and the poilus of WWI, with Joan of Arc and Louis XIV thrown in for good measure:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=215W-29Gt7s&ab_channel=DukeofCanada

    Anyway, happy Quatorze juillet to everyone.

  3. Today is Bastille Day, a day I always enjoyed when stationed overseas, as the French embassy would invite us and serve good champagne and wonderful canapés. I’m sure they’re doing the same thing in Paris, if the city is not burning yet.

    Oops! I see PA+CAT beat me to it.

  4. A wonderful rendition of the Marseillaise is in the movie “Casablanca,” when French patriots sing it in the face of German occupying officers.

  5. Another open-thread comment about something I read somewhere else.

    Even though I’m not qualified to judge its contents, I’d like to recommend an article entitled “The Gay Frogs Election” written by “Raw Egg Nationalist” (https://tinyurl.com/3xs3ecvh).

    Believe it or not, the article was published in “The American Mind,” the online magazine of The Claremont Institute. There are few American organizations more soberly conservative. In and of itself, it’s telling that someone who calls himself Raw Egg Nationalist is a conservative, and that gay frogs have become a topic for conservatives to debate. It’s not a world that Reagan, much less G.K. Chesterton, would recognize.

    Among other things, Mr. Raw Egg links the transgender craze to an environment flooded with endocrine disruptors.

    Here’s a sample paragraph:

    “I have no doubt that social pressures and the descent into pervasive mental illness are at least partially to blame here. The data are extremely compelling and, again, the basic mechanisms are plausible at the common sense level: it’s easy to imagine how social pressure, magnified by social media, could combine with mental illness, again magnified by social media, to create an epidemic of young people who think they’ve been born the wrong gender and are desperate to convince others they’re the same too. But if we really want to get to the bottom of it all—indeed, if we want to get to the bottom of why we’re so unhealthy and unhappy, full stop—we’re going to have to get serious about environmental pollution. The evidence is compelling. Overwhelming, even.”

    Once again, the national obsession with sex change rears its ugly head. Maybe changing people’s minds is easier than I thought. All we have to do is apply chemicals and propaganda.

  6. Kate– I always got a chuckle out of the dueling songs in that clip from “Casablanca,” because around New Haven, the tune of “Die Wacht am Rhein” is better known as “Bright College Years”– here it is, from the YouTube channel of a guy who archives traditional German songs:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0kMqI9sGRM&ab_channel=Dr.Ludwig%27sarchive

    “Die Wacht am Rhein,” incidentally, was written in the 1840s in response to repeated French attempts from Louis XIV onward to annex the portions of western Germany closest to the Rhine– it’s not a Nazi song by any means, though its origins are definitely anti-French.

  7. PA Caty,

    Thanks for sharing that! I love school songs. I still remember my High School fight song and my College fight song and Alma mater.

    “Bright College Years” reminds me a bit of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” although without the sarcasm. “Gaudeamus Igitur” shows that much has remained the same on University campi for nearly a millenium.

  8. The giant sunfish is one of several favorites of mine when visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The shorebird exhibit is also nice because you can identify the birds you seen on the local beaches depending on luck and bird behavior.

  9. @Cornflour:Mr. Raw Egg links the transgender craze to an environment flooded with endocrine disruptors.

    There’s really no reason to think there is anything physical behind transgenderism. Hormones don’t pick out your clothes for you and they don’t put makeup on you. When you look across all the peoples of the world over all history and see the enormous variety in how people express gender, it cannot be possibly be hormones that cause the desire to dress and act a certain way and be treated a certain way; there are too many ways of being male and being female.

    Transgenders can say, all they like, that they feel like they are “really” the other gender, but it is impossible for anyone to know what it is like to actually be the other gender and while they may be sincere in saying this, it is impossible that it is true.

    As a man, I can see how women act, how women look, and how women are treated. But I cannot know what BEING a woman is like any more than I can know what is to be a fish. I could dress up as a fish, act the way I see fish act, and get people to go along with it, but that would not make me know what it was to actually be a fish. It would only allow me to experience pretending to be a fish.

    Have you heard of furries? Some of them claim they really ARE animals, inside. Like the transgendered, there is no way they can possibly know this. Like transgenders, this set of people has ALSO exploded. Are we to assume some massive mixing of animal hormones or DNA or whatever into the environment?

    Both of these explosions coincided with the rise of Internet and social media, where like-minded weirdoes can easily find each other and reinforce one another’s opinions and behavior.

    Transgenders, like furries, can say whatever they want about how they “feel inside” but they cannot possibly know what that feels like. What they desire in both cases is to play the role. The role is all they can know and playing it is all they can ever have no matter how they dress or what kind of surgeries they get.

    neo’s story above about her physical development, or Ellen Page’s: no biological man ever had those experiences. They had different ones that biological men have, which neither neo nor Ellen Page ever had or ever could have.

  10. RTF– Since you like school songs, do you know the West Point fight song, “On, Brave Old Army Team”? (Known to the Long Gray Line as the OBOAT Song). It was written in 1910 by Philip Egner, then the director of the West Point Band, and has been considered “one of the 12 best songs in college football.” Here’s an instrumental version with the lyrics as a visual:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEqkdoEXXQ&ab_channel=Hydra

    My dad used to sing “On, Brave Old Army Team” to me when I was a kid– he didn’t go to West Point (he didn’t meet the 5’6″ minimum height requirement for cadets in the late 1930s), but he always thought of it as “his” school.

    Fun fact: Do you know why West Point’s colors (mentioned in the song) are black, gray, and gold? They represent the three basic ingredients of gunpowder: charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Sulfur and charcoal act as fuels, while saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is an oxidizer. They still know how to make things go boom in Michie Stadium.

  11. France’s history, in modern eyes, began with the storming of the Bastille, it seems, with a brief remembrance of Jeanne d’Arc, a medieval Christian nationalist. She led French forces against heavily French-English forces. All were Catholics.

  12. Kate–

    My high school French teacher used to say that French history began with Charles Martel’s victory at Tours in 732, because it pushed back the Islamization of western Europe. It is a tragedy for the West in general as well as for France in particular that the French Revolution was so fiercely anti-Christian.

  13. PA Cat, your French teacher was right about Tours. If only Europe would recognize what Islamization is doing to it today!

  14. PA Cat and Kate,

    I first read about the battle at Tours in the book “How the West Won.” In that telling, it was an incredible upset victory by Charles Martel. Perhaps the French fighters were better or more motivated, but his strategy was superior.

  15. RE: My UFO post above–

    I would imagine that the military has such a thing, but I wonder if there is a publicly available and searchable database holding all of the satellite images taken in the past by things like Google Earth or other civilian observation satellites.

    If so, it might be possible to settle the question about this particular construction by finding images of the hilltop in South Korea, mentioned above, before and during the process of the building in question being constructed.

  16. Frederick – Your comment brings to mind the famous Nagel paper about subjective conscious experience.

    One thing that I don’t get about gender ideologues is whether they are embracing or abandoning materialism. Many of the current gender ideologues are the same people who were re-posting electron microscope scans of endorphine molecules a few years ago and insisting that the photos depicted “happiness.” At the same time, there is no physical manifestation of transgenderism. Gender ideology provides no physical framework for detecting the presence of a “male brain” in a female body, or visa versa besides the say so of the individual.

    So are gender ideologues positing the existing of an ephemeral “gender identity” akin to an immortal soul? Or are they taking materialism for granted and assuming that there is an as-of-yet undiscovered physical difference? (It seems to be the latter on the LGB front. No “gay gene” has been discovered, but the whole “born that way” belief system seems to posit some undiscovered physical differentiation.)

    I am aware of at least one paper that purported to show that brain activity patterns in gender dysphoric individuals match those of opposite sex individuals. Assuming that the results are reproducable, I’m not sure how significant that would actually be. If one assumes the habits, dress, and mannerisms of a member of the opposite sex, it is really not surprising that they would display brain activity similar to that of the opposite sex.

    (Also, my response to gender ideologues who raise that paper is typically to ask, if there is a physically measurable indicator of gender dysphoria, how could we justify sterilizing and permanently mutilating children without first checking for the physical indicator?)

  17. TommyJay–

    I just reread VDH’s account of the battle of Tours (which he calls Poitiers) in Carnage and Culture — he mentions the sturdy armor, heavy weapons, and close formations of the Frankish soldiers, which gave them a great advantage over the Arab horsemen (somewhat like the advantage that the British infantry squares at Waterloo had over Napoleon’s cavalry)– as well as Charles Martel’s strategic skill in surprising his opponents by blocking the road to Tours and using the trees to hide the true size of his army. Hanson concludes that Tours is one example among many that “permanent victory in war, ancient or modern, is impossible without crack foot soldiers.” Charles Martel was a gifted leader who was fortunate in the strength and discipline of the soldiers he commanded.

  18. PA+Cat:

    My seventh grade was at the colège Internationale of the American University of Beirut, where most of the teachers were French coopérants. My teacher did a great job of teaching us about Martel and his victory at Tours. A few of my classmates were the children of French expatriates in Lebanon, but most were the sons of wealthy Arabs from the gulf states. They didn’t seem to mind learning about Charles Martel stopping their ancestors at Tours. I’m sure that has changed now, if AUB even exists any longer.

  19. Apropos of the way women (and girls) are treated: Will someone please put a muzzle (or catcher’s mask) on Brandon? His latest depredation happened yesterday in Helsinki: “How do you even write a story about the President of the United States repeatedly licking a young child, sending her into a fit of terror? I don’t know, but I’m going to try. . . . You expect Biden’s senility to be on display when he appears in public, and his creepiness around minors even prior to his mental decline is well documented. What you don’t expect is for him to start profusely licking a child as if she’s an ice cream cone. I don’t even know what to make of this [video below]“:

    https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/07/14/watch-joe-biden-terrorizes-a-young-child-at-nato-summit-by-licking-her-repeatedly-n776350

    The video is truly appalling. It’s past time for JoJo to be given his retirement dinner.

  20. @Bauxite:So are gender ideologues positing the existing of an ephemeral “gender identity” akin to an immortal soul? Or are they taking materialism for granted and assuming that there is an as-of-yet undiscovered physical difference?

    No, they’re just saying whatever it takes to get their way: they are rationally responding to incentives, but they’re not reasoning, just feces-flinging.

    This stuff is all top-down, it’s important to remember. Without the Pritzker and other billionaires’ money, the Federal money laundered through NGOs, and the corporate financing tied to DEI, they go right back to being obscure and hilarious, like Klinger on M*A*S*H.

  21. Re: Bastille Day

    PA+Cat:

    Lovely video!

    Before I read much history, I thought, yeah, Bastille Day…Fourth of July — different flags, same great taste!

    But in plain historical terms Bastille Day was a shabby victory and the French Revolution evolved into a genuine horror.

    The result of the French Revolution was the First Republic. The French have had to overthrow their Republic numerous times since. They are now on their Fifth Republic.

  22. PA+Cat,

    As I keep saying, there’s no reporting at all in MSM on Biden and his creepiness. Nothing at all on that disgusting display yesterday. Good thing that wasn’t my daughter or I would probably have been arrested for putting that pervert on his ass with a right hook. Gee, I even get notices on my watchdog account of when a child molester moves into the neighborhood…nothing on Biden though in the WH.

    See…with the MSM, none of D/LiV voters have any reason to question the credibility and sanity of this creep.

  23. yes there were few guards and even fewer prisoners, I guess like the potemkin

  24. @huxley:They are now on their Fifth Republic.

    5 republics, two empires, two monarchies, since 1789. Nine constitutional changes (not counting Vichy), and in the same time period the US is still on the same one.

    The Short Reign of Pippin IV is a Steinbeck novel about a third and short-lived French monarchy in the 1950s. Silly in spots, but enjoyable.

  25. the joke was degaulle asking for a constitution, the newstand vendor said ‘sorry mssier, we don’t stock periodical literature,

  26. Cornflour says: “All we have to do is apply chemicals and propaganda.”

    Indeed. Who would wake up one day and, on their own, decide they need to change their sex or get tattoos, etc. It’s a ‘monkey see monkey do’ world.

  27. cb, that’s only what Pence seemed to say, but I would attribute that to mere imprecision on Pence’s part. There is this word “that” with which he led off his rebuttal, and one must establish what the referent is. The pessimistic reading makes “that” = “the U. S.”, whereas a more benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation is “that” = “the Ukraine not having enough tanks”. One could wish that Pence had been more specific and I don’t think Tucker was trying to set any kind of trap for him there, but I would go with the less cynical evaluation of this particular statement.

  28. cb, that is a pretty curious little thing going on there with the coin, I admit.

    Well, the sunfish video was pretty interesting (up to the last three minutes, of course… smile). That is a rather idiosyncratic biology there, to be sure.

    As for the songs and all, I enjoy “Die Wacht am Rhein” perhaps more than I ought to – I find some of those old military songs quite engaging. ‘Dr. Ludwig”s channel has a number of good selections and I wish I knew which choir sang the rendition that he has posted up of this.

    I only ever sang “Gaudeamus Igitur” once, and that wasn’t even at my own school – it was a joint concert one time with the Worcester Poly glee club.

  29. The result of the French Revolution was the First Republic. The French have had to overthrow their Republic numerous times since. They are now on their Fifth Republic.
    ==
    The discontinuities since 1869 have been a consequence of military invasion and occupation (1870-1, 1940-44).

  30. PA Cat,

    Thanks for sharing the Westpoint song. I can’t say it “struck a chord” with me, but it’s a wonderful story about you and your father. I have a similar memory of my frequently drunk father singing ribald versions of the Michigan fight song, the Notre Dame fight song (not only ribald, but altered lyrics insulting my mother’s, Catholic faith) and a revised, and inappropriate Anchor’s Aweigh.

  31. Philip Sells– If you like old military songs, here’s the Hohenfriedberger Marsch, with the German lyrics scrolling past the face of Frederick the Great, who is credited with having composed the tune:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRyD643cbJg&ab_channel=KarlSternau

    Karl Sternau’s channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRyD643cbJg&ab_channel=KarlSternau) contains a lot of interesting military songs and marches, ranging from medieval soldiers’ songs and little-known WWI German soldiers’ songs to German translations of American Civil War songs, the British Grenadiers, and the French “Chanson de l’oignon” from the Napoleonic era (that last in German is something else).

    Here’s the German volunteer version of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”– it’s actually a part of my family’s history, in that my two great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s side of the family fought in one of the German-speaking Pennsylvania regiments in the Army of the Potomac:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6mQyUVth8I&ab_channel=KarlSternau

    There are over 500 songs and marches on that channel, so it’s a great place to look for military music you won’t find anywhere else.

  32. Very interesting! I tried out the Battle Hymn of the Republic and his intro selection. I could certainly imagine German immigrants singing the former at Manassas or something like that.

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