No wheels or ball bearings were used in the making of this video:
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Open thread 6/10/24 — 56 Comments
Nice! More beautiful floaties.
When I see them practicing w/o the floor-length dresses it reminds me of Furry Freak Brother’s Fat Freddie’s Cat with his little legs going diddle-diddle-diddle as he scurries around.
So I just walked out of a McDonald’s in Champaign, IL. Haven’t been in one in years – I was in a hurry. Three people working there, including one “working” the counter. Among the three, none spoke English well enough to understand that I wanted cream for my coffee. I mimed it out like a game of charades. Pretty weird experience.
“Pretty weird experience.”
One can surely empathize.
(But how does one pantomime cream for one’s coffee? Actually, not sure I want to know… OTOH, my wife once tried to pantomime yogurt in Georgia (the country)…the problem being that the yogurt there generally is made from sheep’s milk whereas she assumed it came from a cow…guess that’s what you call a cultural gap…but the taxi driver walked into the grocery store in a nick of time and was able to translate, everyone having a good laugh…)
– – – – – – – – –
And lesson for the day:
Never, but NEVER wear red to a rodeo (unless yer a rodeo clown, perhaps):
“Rodeo bull named Party Bus escapes Oregon arena, tosses woman in red as crowd runs for their lives…”— https://nypost.com/2024/06/10/us-news/rodeo-bull-party-bus-escapes-sisters-rodeo-show-in-oregon-injuring-3/
No doubt that bull is very unhappy at what’s happened to his state. One CAN surely empathize…
If you had asked me just a few minutes ago what a rodeo bull in Oregon might be named, “party bus” would NOT have come to mind. And if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I’m still not sure it will come to mind. Totally improbable.
When did we start using “emphasize” as opposed to “sympathize.” I missed the email
would tom wolfe be alive to write about this, well ‘effective altruism’ was quite a scam, I’m sure Kaye has dutifully tithed to all the right parties, there was also a very dark comedy by Dana Vachon, which made Wolf of Wall Street seem tame, a film about a scam artist, Laurence Belfort funded by a Malaysian scam artist, with Chinese and Saudi ties, even Michael Thomas would have found it hard to satirize that, the Harold Robbins of Finance, his last Players, which was ostensibly about the 2008 crash, but missed all the sharp notes, his firm, Moelis, it rings a bell, let me check my notes,
Dunno Steve, did you ever try to SYMPATHIZE with a BULL??
(I’d much rather just empathize…course that might just be me, mind you…)
– – – – – – – – – – – –
OTOH, if I WERE a bull that size; and somebody had the nerve to call me “Party Bus”, I’m not sure I’d behave any differently….
(Is that sympathy or empathy?)
there is culture that endures like that piece,
and others that will remembered like hudson hawk (the former thought itself a too clever lark, a terrible sendoff for James Coburn)
and jupiter descending
Mike Plaiss: next time, try the Culver’s on South Neil Street. Or for a real old-school experience, Merry Ann’s Diner on the corner of Neil and Kirby.
I was in Urbana-Champaign last September to attend a conference and visit an old friend and colleague who has Parkinson’s. Many of the people I knew and worked with at UIUC in the 1990s are dead or ailing, so it was a bittersweet visit. One bright spot was a reception for the conference attendees with a command performance by the Marching Illini in Memorial Stadium. I’d never been in the stadium before. It was a beautiful early fall evening on the prairie. The kids in the band–eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old white, yellow, black, and brown kids who will be inheriting the dysfunctional country we are bequeathing them–absolutely nailed it. The drum line, the baton-twirlers, the complex on-field evolutions–everything. It was so American. It impressed the hell out of the foreign conference attendees, none of whom (I would guess) had ever seen a Big Ten marching band at the top of its game. It left me in tears. I just hope we don’t have another war.
From query:
Cows are red/green colorblind, which means they lack a “red” color receptor in their retinas, instead only having green and blue receptors. Effectively, this means cows see everything red as a shade of green or brown, and that cows have a reduced range of colors compared to humans.
It was political.
Hubert,
I did my Undergrad at the U of I in C-U and was in the Marching Illini. Glad to hear you enjoyed the performance!
The Israeli hostage rescue was a close call and involved a huge gun battle and the disabling of two of the vehicles used to transport the hostages out of Gaza. From the Wall Street Journal.
How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed
The two Israeli commando teams had just pulled off a historic rescue mission, freeing four hostages from homes where they were held captive in central Gaza. Now came the hardest part: getting out of Gaza alive.
A shootout that started Saturday in one of the homes expanded into a full-on gunbattle on the packed streets of Nuseirat between the commandos and responding Israeli forces and militants, the Israeli military said. With the teams’ cover blown, the Israeli Air Force began striking dozens of militant targets in a bid to divert Hamas’s attention and give the hostages a fighting chance to get out.
In the crossfire, a vehicle packed with special forces and hostages was hit and disabled, said David Tsur, the former commander of Yamam, the Israeli police team that carried out the extraction. An Israeli armored vehicle then swooped in to rescue the rescuers, but it too was disabled by fire, so another force arrived to deliver the hostages to helicopters waiting to take them to Israel, reported Army Radio, an independent news organization run by the Israeli military.
“There was a thin line between being a huge success and a huge failure,” said an Israeli military official.
The raging firefight almost prevented the hostages and the commando team from making it out alive. It also prompted a ferocious response from the Israeli military that helps explain the high casualty count among Palestinians, Israeli officials said. The officials also said they estimated Hamas fire killed Palestinians in the chaotic shootout. An Israeli commando was killed.”
I really like your sense of humor. Where did you come up with ball bearings?
A lot of rodeo bulls recognize that it’s a show and once the ride is done will take a lap for the applause and go the stables on their own. I don’t recall which but one of them threw a rider who didn’t get up and went over to see if he was OK.
You’ll play hell finding the vids because all the searches and even YouTube now drown the results in bad news, no matter how many exclusinary many search arguments.
where the wolverines will come from, if any,
I hope to be getting to know the place pretty well Hubert. Here for my daughter’s orientation/enrollment/and-all-other-bureucratic-crap.
@miguel:well ‘effective altruism’ was quite a scam
There was one guy who perpetrated a big scam, who also believes in “effective altruism”. The media decided to emphasize his effective altruism beliefs so that they could downplay his progressive Democrat beliefs and connections with Democrat politicians. That’s why they made so much of his partner’s online comments about sex, too: to make these people look like weirdos in a cult and not like businessmen fleecing their customers and buying Democrat politicians with the proceeds. They wanted to make sure you thought “effective altruism” when you heard his name and not “bribing Democratic politicians”, and it seems that mission is accomplished.
The “effective altruism” movement in general is harmless and well-intentioned. They are dangerously susceptible to logic, though, and most of them seem willing to prefer logical arguments to real-world experience, and as most of them are young, few of them enough have real-world experience to know how little logic rules in the real world.
Bob Wilson:
Thanks for the summation of the rescue. I grieve not at all for the Gazamites, only for the one IDF soldier killed. Sounds like the IDF planned for possible contingencies. Gazamites got another deserved dose of FAFO. This ain’t Mogadishu mofos.
Well yeah, but effective altruism—AKA neo-ponziism—for whom?
@Barry Meislin:Well yeah, but effective altruism—AKA neo-ponziism
This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s nothing about “effective altruism” that implies Ponzi schemes: the media has created a narrative about Alameda and Sam Bankman-Fried so that you would associate them and their actions with “effective altruism”, instead of with “theft and bribery benefiting Democrats”.
They didn’t run a Ponzi scheme, and no effective altruists would have wanted them to. They just stole people’s money. It’s more like a bank president spending depositor’s money on horse races and expecting to cover the theft with the winnings, than like a Ponzi scheme.
“Effective altruism” is mostly about a mathematical approach to getting the most good out of donated money. Most of them, but not all, follow some sort of utilitarian philosophy. They tend to push people to hands-on philanthropy to the very poorest people, like mosquito nets for Africa, and if you try to do something for, say, jobs training for unemployed slide-rule craftsmen, they’re going to expect you to show that it does more good than mosquito nets for Africans does or they’re not going to want to participate.
Likewise still puzzled over Eisenhower not tipping Germans to keep an eye on certain Normandy Beaches – yet another unfathomable mystery of the MSM mind.
Rufus: yes, I remember you mentioning in passing that you’d gone to UIUC. The area around campus has changed a lot since I was there. Almost unrecognizable. As for the band’s performance, I more than enjoyed it. It made me proud and gave me hope. Wish I’d caught them when you were there.
Mike Plaiss: congratulations–good choice. Rufus can probably suggest places to eat and visit in U-C, but here’s one: the Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello, Illinois:
An English country house and garden park in the middle of the Illinois prairie, about 30 miles west of Champaign. Great destination for a weekend outing.
Allerton is a great suggestion! Absurdly unknown by the vast majority of students and faculty, but an interesting, unique place.
Hubert, a few months ago circumstances conspired for me to spend a day on campus doing remote work so I set up in the student Union with my laptop. Campus has changed so much! My guess is everything I would recommend is long gone; including the Flying Tomato Brothers.
Thirty years after the discovery of it’s true, world shaking significance by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, why has only 5% of 11,600 year old Gobekli Tepe—a site which ground penetrating radar indicates covers the equivalent of 90 football fields, and contains many more circles, hundreds of unexcavated pillars, and who knows what else–been excavated?
One would have thought that this unique, extremely important, and mysterious site–of prime importance for understanding human evolution–would be a beehive of activity, with very thorough excavations and investigations being carried out by swarms of archaeologists from all over the world, yet, according to this report below, archaeological work there is essentially at a standstill, and has apparently been at a standstill for decades.
Instead of ongoing excavation and robust archaeological investigation, we have tourism, as flashy modern shelters have been built over that excavated part of the site which were uncovered decades ago–shelters whose supporting pillars have apparently been jammed into unexcavated parts of the site–many substantial roads have been built over unexcavated sections of the site, disturbing them, moreover, and inexplicably, two large groves of trees have also been planted over as yet unexcavated parts of the site.
A disturbing investigation, linked below, discovered that a billionaire Turkish industrialist and his conglomerate, having donated $15 million dollars toward work on this site, has essentially gotten control over it, and through his membership in the WEF (the World Economic Forum ), it appears, says the investigation, that it is the WEF which is calling the shots here, as there is talk of “leaving further excavations to future generations.”
Six or eight years ago, a friend asked me what I thought was one of the more important “miracle” technologies to come out in the last few decades. My first thought was Wi-Fi. It’s very cool to have a pervasive, unregulated, and high bandwidth RF technology that frees people from cables.
But arguably, lithium batteries are another amazing one.
Hubert & Rufus: the Allerton Farm (not to be confused with the Allerton Hotel in Chicago) may well go on my to-do list! I’m thinking about a trip out that way in the fall. (It would have been sooner, but central Illinois in July might be a bit toasty.)
Gobekli Tepi—You might remember that the uniqeness of this huge site is that it was constructed at a time–almost 12,000 years ago–when human beings were supposedly at the “hunter-gatherer” stage of human evolution , and consisted of small, isolated, nomadic groups of probably related individuals–say a dozen or so each, max–roaming the landscape, scavaging whatever they could find to survive, then moving on, living on the edge of starvation; it was supposedly “root hog, or die” for our ancient ancestors at this time.
This time was supposedly so far back it was before the domestication of animals, before the development of agriculture, before the possible accumulation of the surplusses of food which would have made the creation of semi-permanent or permanent settlements, made some free time and specialization possible, was before the creation of pottery, (and before writing?), with the wheel to be invented several thousands of years in the future.
Yet, the building of such a massive site as Gobekli Tepi (and the many other similar sites which are reportedly being discovered in this area of Turkey)–obviously involving the quarrying and transportation of very heavy stones, their carving, and the planning and construction of this site–would have required lots of manpower, very deliberate organization, long term planning, coordination, a knowledge of building techniques, measurement, and geometry, artistic and carving skills, likely worker housing, and all sorts of other skills and tools to boot–and all this impossible without large surpluses of food—combined to make a massive effort and construction, one perhaps extending over what could have been hundreds of years of effort.
It would also seem that some method of communicating, of preserving and transferring knowledge/information from one group or generation to another had to have been present.
Thus, as we had understood the evidence of human evolution, on many fronts, the creation and construction of Gobekli Tepi should have been impossible.
Answering the many questions Gobekli Tepi raises is why it is so important for the excavations and archaeological investigations at Gobekli Tepi to move forward, and to not be stopped in the name of commercial or political? interests.
P.S. Of course, as we have been taught, before the invention of writing.
Rufus: the Illini Union is a great building, with wood-paneled reading rooms and odd nooks and crannies everywhere. It also has a very nice hotel wing on the second and third floors with quiet, simple rooms and great views of the Quad and Foellinger Auditorium. I stayed there a couple of times on earlier visits. No parking, however. The new hotel (the I Hotel) and conference center is on the south edge of campus, near the Assembly Hall. It has plenty of parking.
There are still a few of the old restaurants near campus: Timpone’s (where my late father and I had dinner on our first night in Urbana after a father-son road trip from Massachusetts), Manzellas Italian Patio, the Kohinoor. But many of the old landmarks–the Great Impasta, Milo’s at Lincoln Square in Urbana, the Black Bear Lounge at Jumer’s Castle Lodge, and Kennedy’s–are gone.
Philip: central Illinois is brutally hot in mid-summer, with a khamsin-like wind that blows off the plains. I recommend early fall: late September or early October. You’ll get a little foliage then.
TommyJay @7:44pm,
When science textbooks 200+ years in the future focus on this era my guess is mapping the human genome will be one of the most significant advancements. I doubt they’ll mention wi-fi or lithium ion batteries.
Phillip Sells,
Not only toasty, but noisy. It’s cicada central right now.
Hubert,
I didn’t know the Black Bear Lounge was gone, but I’m not surprised. That was a cool place. I stayed at the Union when I was on campus interviewing graduates for positions I had at a company in Florida. It was a special feeling being back on campus about 15 years later, as an employer; staying in a fancy suite above the paneled lounges I used to study in.
Gobekli Tepi–The array of knowledge, tools, and techniques necessary for the construction of Gobekli Tepi did not just appear overnight, out of the blue, and especially not from a bunch of half starved, nomadic, hunter-gatherers.
The creation of Gobekli Tepi certainly seems to place the notion–that those who created Gobekli Tepi had received the wide array of knowledge and technique needed to construct this massive site from some more advanced, predecessor civilization–within the realm of possibility.
Perhaps Graham Hancock is not too far off after all.
Snow on Pine,
“certainly seems to place the notion that those who created Gobekli Tepi had received the wide array of knowledge and technique needed to construct this massive site from some more advanced, predecessor civilization within the realm of possibility.
Sure, it’s within the realm of possibility, but it seems like the least likely explanation of all, possible, relevant explanations. Why not exhaust more likely scenarios before concluding “space aliens did it?” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We have civilizations that left records describing how they did things more impressive than Gobekli Tepi without the help of space aliens. Is it possible Gobekli Tepians (Gobekli Tepites? Gobekli Teponians?) used similar methods and either didn’t keep records or their records have not been discovered or are lost to time?
These folks don’t think it’s safe– helium leaks on the way up. Boeing might disagree. Might want to ask the two astronauts who rode the vehicle on the way up.
Interesting details about the docking process.
Why Starliner is NOT SAFE to Return Astronauts from the ISS!
As expected The Unicorns did it, decause Snow on Pine can’t explain it (although he isn’t expected to know).
Is this the root of Unicorn fixation?
Rufus T. Firefly:
As I understand it, Snow on Pine and Graham Hancock are not arguing space aliens, but an earlier human civilization which was destroyed in a cataclysm (think Atlantis) whose survivors seeded hunter-gatherer groups with more advanced technology to build structures like Gobekli Tepe.
Keep in mind that conventional archeological timelines rule out Gobekli Tepe, thousands of years before the pyramids, as a possibility. So now archeologists and Egyptologists have a bit of a problem to explain.
Something serious ~12,000 years ago occurred around the time of the Younger Dryas, a marked shift in climate, right about the same time as Solon’s account in Plato of the fall of Atlantis.
I’m keeping my powder dry on this, but I am persuaded that human history is more complicated and goes farther back than official explanations. It’s worth paying attention to this discussion.
“Solon’s account in Plato” of Atlantis is a parable made up by Plato, like his cave or his just city in Republic, it’s actually like a sequel to Republic. In the hundreds of years between Solon’s time and Plato’s no one mentions it, Plato put the words in Solon’s mouth just like he did with Socrates…
I have never understood those who wanted to go find Atlantis. They’re missing the point. It’s like wanting to dig up the foundations of the houses of the wise man who built on rock and the foolish man who built on sand, or find the lamps of the ten virgins who waited for the bridegroom but five ran out of oil because they didn’t think ahead, or find the pig pen of the prodigal son.
parable — a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle
I wouldn’t call Solon’s account a parable. It’s not short and contains much detailed, seemingly historical, information. It’s nothing like Jesus’s parables.
Here are both sections of the Atlantis story from Plato:
The Atlantis story is a data point in this argument, not the whole of it.
Rufus, saying:
Not only toasty, but noisy. It’s cicada central right now.
, caused me to wonder quite suddenly if the cicada might be the state insect of Illinois or anystate else. It is apparently not. But, amusingly, according to our dear Wikipedia, the stonefly is described as the “state macroinvertebrate”. That of course implies that there is also a state microinvertebrate, Lord knows what it might be. Paramecium? Some species of nematode?
F. Frederick Skitty, my favorite Freak Brothers character!
Find here Plato with cicadas (tettix) at Phaedrus, [230c]:
Soc: Then again, if you please, how lovely and perfectly charming the breeziness of the place is! and it resounds with the shrill summer music of the chorus of cicadas. But the most delightful thing of all is the grass, as it grows on the gentle slope, thick enough to be just right when you lay your head on it. So you have guided the stranger most excellently, dear Phaedrus.
I’m completely open to humans building all kinds of stuff tens of thousands, even one hundred thousand years ago. Why wouldn’t they?
P.S. Not the least question about Gobekli Tepi is why, after all this effort to construct the site, the site was then apparently deliberately covered over, buried.
They started hoarding dirt. That behavior is very hard to break, even for Unicorns.
P.P.S.–Was this site–as many other ancient sites were–aligned with particular stars or constellations, with the moon, or with the seasonal rising and setting of the sun?
With only 5% of the site excavated, and much yet to be discovered, who knows?
If it is true that excavations have essentially ceased, and have been dormant for decades, this is a tragedy, a roadblock deliberately set up against the gaining of knowledge about the history and heritage of the people of the World at a World Heritage site.
The Lord of the Rings is not short and contains much detailed, seemingly historical information, but I’m pretty sure it would be a waste of time looking for Noldorin artifacts or hoping to excavate Moria or Gondolin. The primary difference between Middle Earth and Atlantis is that we have a lot more written information about what Tolkein was trying to do by writing at great length about a history he’d invented, and also his writings were never put on such a high pedestal as the ancient and medieval world put Plato’s. But Tolkein, like Plato, wrote a lot that was not fiction, and perhaps one day eventually there will be people trying to locate Moria or Gondolin and complaining that archaeologists aren’t taking them seriously.
As for ancient civilizations, stone and dirt were as in abundance then as they are now, and there is a great deal of time to cover between the first true humans and the oldest accepted civilizations, and I’m sure there are many interesting structures to discover, some of which will be surprisingly old. None of that depends on Atlantis one way or another, and using it to help make the case is pretty counterproductive. And there’s no reason not to align sites with stars if you’re going to build a large structure and you expect the parts of it to line up–what else are ancient people going to have available?
But it’s worth remembering that mines don’t grow back over human time scales, and a Bronze Age-level civilization of any size should have depleted the easy ones in their area. Yet they were still there for the Greeks and Romans to exploit (and they mined them out). So if you think there’s some kind of Atlantis-like thing out there to discover, you’ll either have to show where the mines depleted in that time are, or you’ll have to start saying that physicists and chemists and geologists are all wrong too. The ones looking for UFOs don’t ever hesitate about that, of course.
Very well stated, Niketas.
People tend to develop structures where conditions warrant and use/reuse whatever is at hand. Even in modern times, when we have great engineering, utilities and resources, the vast majority of people (90+%) live near the ocean, a major river or the sea. 300 years after Columbus the largest, inland North American settlement was St. Louis and 300 years after Columbus the largest, inland North American settlement was Cahokia, in the same spot.
Niketas Choniates:
Your approach is a clear example of the Excluded Middle Fallacy — texts are either fiction or historical truth.
I have great respect for the Bible but it is neither fiction nor historical truth. It’s a tricky business sorting that out. But still worth the effort.
PS. If you are replying to me, I’d prefer you address me as huxley.
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Nice! More beautiful floaties.
When I see them practicing w/o the floor-length dresses it reminds me of Furry Freak Brother’s Fat Freddie’s Cat with his little legs going diddle-diddle-diddle as he scurries around.
Thanks once more.
Lower left hand corner but without kicking any shit 🙂
Beautiful costumery.
So I just walked out of a McDonald’s in Champaign, IL. Haven’t been in one in years – I was in a hurry. Three people working there, including one “working” the counter. Among the three, none spoke English well enough to understand that I wanted cream for my coffee. I mimed it out like a game of charades. Pretty weird experience.
“Pretty weird experience.”
One can surely empathize.
(But how does one pantomime cream for one’s coffee? Actually, not sure I want to know… OTOH, my wife once tried to pantomime yogurt in Georgia (the country)…the problem being that the yogurt there generally is made from sheep’s milk whereas she assumed it came from a cow…guess that’s what you call a cultural gap…but the taxi driver walked into the grocery store in a nick of time and was able to translate, everyone having a good laugh…)
– – – – – – – – –
And lesson for the day:
Never, but NEVER wear red to a rodeo (unless yer a rodeo clown, perhaps):
“Rodeo bull named Party Bus escapes Oregon arena, tosses woman in red as crowd runs for their lives…”—
https://nypost.com/2024/06/10/us-news/rodeo-bull-party-bus-escapes-sisters-rodeo-show-in-oregon-injuring-3/
No doubt that bull is very unhappy at what’s happened to his state. One CAN surely empathize…
Heck, while we’re at it:
Never but NEVER date a guy whose pick up line has anything to do with “EMPATHY”…(even if he’s a millionaire)…
“Millionaire banker who allegedly punched woman at Brooklyn Pride event preached importance of ‘empathy’”—
https://nypost.com/2024/06/10/us-news/millionaire-banker-who-punched-woman-at-brooklyn-pride-event-preached-importance-of-empathy/
Hey, maybe I should put out a shingle…
If you had asked me just a few minutes ago what a rodeo bull in Oregon might be named, “party bus” would NOT have come to mind. And if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I’m still not sure it will come to mind. Totally improbable.
When did we start using “emphasize” as opposed to “sympathize.” I missed the email
would tom wolfe be alive to write about this, well ‘effective altruism’ was quite a scam, I’m sure Kaye has dutifully tithed to all the right parties, there was also a very dark comedy by Dana Vachon, which made Wolf of Wall Street seem tame, a film about a scam artist, Laurence Belfort funded by a Malaysian scam artist, with Chinese and Saudi ties, even Michael Thomas would have found it hard to satirize that, the Harold Robbins of Finance, his last Players, which was ostensibly about the 2008 crash, but missed all the sharp notes, his firm, Moelis, it rings a bell, let me check my notes,
https://www.moelis.com/our-team/eric-cantor/
Dunno Steve, did you ever try to SYMPATHIZE with a BULL??
(I’d much rather just empathize…course that might just be me, mind you…)
– – – – – – – – – – – –
OTOH, if I WERE a bull that size; and somebody had the nerve to call me “Party Bus”, I’m not sure I’d behave any differently….
(Is that sympathy or empathy?)
there is culture that endures like that piece,
and others that will remembered like hudson hawk (the former thought itself a too clever lark, a terrible sendoff for James Coburn)
and jupiter descending
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWbDpAxtK_Q
Mike Plaiss: next time, try the Culver’s on South Neil Street. Or for a real old-school experience, Merry Ann’s Diner on the corner of Neil and Kirby.
I was in Urbana-Champaign last September to attend a conference and visit an old friend and colleague who has Parkinson’s. Many of the people I knew and worked with at UIUC in the 1990s are dead or ailing, so it was a bittersweet visit. One bright spot was a reception for the conference attendees with a command performance by the Marching Illini in Memorial Stadium. I’d never been in the stadium before. It was a beautiful early fall evening on the prairie. The kids in the band–eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old white, yellow, black, and brown kids who will be inheriting the dysfunctional country we are bequeathing them–absolutely nailed it. The drum line, the baton-twirlers, the complex on-field evolutions–everything. It was so American. It impressed the hell out of the foreign conference attendees, none of whom (I would guess) had ever seen a Big Ten marching band at the top of its game. It left me in tears. I just hope we don’t have another war.
From query:
Cows are red/green colorblind, which means they lack a “red” color receptor in their retinas, instead only having green and blue receptors. Effectively, this means cows see everything red as a shade of green or brown, and that cows have a reduced range of colors compared to humans.
It was political.
Hubert,
I did my Undergrad at the U of I in C-U and was in the Marching Illini. Glad to hear you enjoyed the performance!
The Israeli hostage rescue was a close call and involved a huge gun battle and the disabling of two of the vehicles used to transport the hostages out of Gaza. From the Wall Street Journal.
How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed
The two Israeli commando teams had just pulled off a historic rescue mission, freeing four hostages from homes where they were held captive in central Gaza. Now came the hardest part: getting out of Gaza alive.
A shootout that started Saturday in one of the homes expanded into a full-on gunbattle on the packed streets of Nuseirat between the commandos and responding Israeli forces and militants, the Israeli military said. With the teams’ cover blown, the Israeli Air Force began striking dozens of militant targets in a bid to divert Hamas’s attention and give the hostages a fighting chance to get out.
In the crossfire, a vehicle packed with special forces and hostages was hit and disabled, said David Tsur, the former commander of Yamam, the Israeli police team that carried out the extraction. An Israeli armored vehicle then swooped in to rescue the rescuers, but it too was disabled by fire, so another force arrived to deliver the hostages to helicopters waiting to take them to Israel, reported Army Radio, an independent news organization run by the Israeli military.
“There was a thin line between being a huge success and a huge failure,” said an Israeli military official.
The raging firefight almost prevented the hostages and the commando team from making it out alive. It also prompted a ferocious response from the Israeli military that helps explain the high casualty count among Palestinians, Israeli officials said. The officials also said they estimated Hamas fire killed Palestinians in the chaotic shootout. An Israeli commando was killed.”
https://archive.is/Ic2gG
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bj3c11gvb0
I really like your sense of humor. Where did you come up with ball bearings?
A lot of rodeo bulls recognize that it’s a show and once the ride is done will take a lap for the applause and go the stables on their own. I don’t recall which but one of them threw a rider who didn’t get up and went over to see if he was OK.
Not him, but Top Dollar.
You’ll play hell finding the vids because all the searches and even YouTube now drown the results in bad news, no matter how many exclusinary many search arguments.
where the wolverines will come from, if any,
I hope to be getting to know the place pretty well Hubert. Here for my daughter’s orientation/enrollment/and-all-other-bureucratic-crap.
@miguel:well ‘effective altruism’ was quite a scam
There was one guy who perpetrated a big scam, who also believes in “effective altruism”. The media decided to emphasize his effective altruism beliefs so that they could downplay his progressive Democrat beliefs and connections with Democrat politicians. That’s why they made so much of his partner’s online comments about sex, too: to make these people look like weirdos in a cult and not like businessmen fleecing their customers and buying Democrat politicians with the proceeds. They wanted to make sure you thought “effective altruism” when you heard his name and not “bribing Democratic politicians”, and it seems that mission is accomplished.
The “effective altruism” movement in general is harmless and well-intentioned. They are dangerously susceptible to logic, though, and most of them seem willing to prefer logical arguments to real-world experience, and as most of them are young, few of them enough have real-world experience to know how little logic rules in the real world.
Bob Wilson:
Thanks for the summation of the rescue. I grieve not at all for the Gazamites, only for the one IDF soldier killed. Sounds like the IDF planned for possible contingencies. Gazamites got another deserved dose of FAFO. This ain’t Mogadishu mofos.
Well yeah, but effective altruism—AKA neo-ponziism—for whom?
@Barry Meislin:Well yeah, but effective altruism—AKA neo-ponziism
This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s nothing about “effective altruism” that implies Ponzi schemes: the media has created a narrative about Alameda and Sam Bankman-Fried so that you would associate them and their actions with “effective altruism”, instead of with “theft and bribery benefiting Democrats”.
They didn’t run a Ponzi scheme, and no effective altruists would have wanted them to. They just stole people’s money. It’s more like a bank president spending depositor’s money on horse races and expecting to cover the theft with the winnings, than like a Ponzi scheme.
“Effective altruism” is mostly about a mathematical approach to getting the most good out of donated money. Most of them, but not all, follow some sort of utilitarian philosophy. They tend to push people to hands-on philanthropy to the very poorest people, like mosquito nets for Africa, and if you try to do something for, say, jobs training for unemployed slide-rule craftsmen, they’re going to expect you to show that it does more good than mosquito nets for Africans does or they’re not going to want to participate.
Sams, kinda new thing there and persisting. Just another wrinkle in the fabric: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/391378
‘BBC’ Asks Why Israel Didn’t Warn Gazans Before Rescue Operation
Likewise still puzzled over Eisenhower not tipping Germans to keep an eye on certain Normandy Beaches – yet another unfathomable mystery of the MSM mind.
Rufus: yes, I remember you mentioning in passing that you’d gone to UIUC. The area around campus has changed a lot since I was there. Almost unrecognizable. As for the band’s performance, I more than enjoyed it. It made me proud and gave me hope. Wish I’d caught them when you were there.
Mike Plaiss: congratulations–good choice. Rufus can probably suggest places to eat and visit in U-C, but here’s one: the Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello, Illinois:
https://allerton.illinois.edu/
An English country house and garden park in the middle of the Illinois prairie, about 30 miles west of Champaign. Great destination for a weekend outing.
Allerton is a great suggestion! Absurdly unknown by the vast majority of students and faculty, but an interesting, unique place.
Hubert, a few months ago circumstances conspired for me to spend a day on campus doing remote work so I set up in the student Union with my laptop. Campus has changed so much! My guess is everything I would recommend is long gone; including the Flying Tomato Brothers.
The past is truly a foreign country.
https://rumble.com/v50rn6k-you-wont-believe-this-disturbing-gobekli-tepe-update.html
Gobekli Tepi–
See the report, out today, linked below.*
Thirty years after the discovery of it’s true, world shaking significance by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, why has only 5% of 11,600 year old Gobekli Tepe—a site which ground penetrating radar indicates covers the equivalent of 90 football fields, and contains many more circles, hundreds of unexcavated pillars, and who knows what else–been excavated?
One would have thought that this unique, extremely important, and mysterious site–of prime importance for understanding human evolution–would be a beehive of activity, with very thorough excavations and investigations being carried out by swarms of archaeologists from all over the world, yet, according to this report below, archaeological work there is essentially at a standstill, and has apparently been at a standstill for decades.
Instead of ongoing excavation and robust archaeological investigation, we have tourism, as flashy modern shelters have been built over that excavated part of the site which were uncovered decades ago–shelters whose supporting pillars have apparently been jammed into unexcavated parts of the site–many substantial roads have been built over unexcavated sections of the site, disturbing them, moreover, and inexplicably, two large groves of trees have also been planted over as yet unexcavated parts of the site.
A disturbing investigation, linked below, discovered that a billionaire Turkish industrialist and his conglomerate, having donated $15 million dollars toward work on this site, has essentially gotten control over it, and through his membership in the WEF (the World Economic Forum ), it appears, says the investigation, that it is the WEF which is calling the shots here, as there is talk of “leaving further excavations to future generations.”
Why?
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNgGnUrCKM
Miguel cervantes–beat me to it.
This is fascinating. A big source of lithium that we in the US already have access to. If it cost effective to extract & concentrate.
It’s a greenie conundrum: Massive amounts of lithium detected in ‘fracking wastewater’
Six or eight years ago, a friend asked me what I thought was one of the more important “miracle” technologies to come out in the last few decades. My first thought was Wi-Fi. It’s very cool to have a pervasive, unregulated, and high bandwidth RF technology that frees people from cables.
But arguably, lithium batteries are another amazing one.
Hubert & Rufus: the Allerton Farm (not to be confused with the Allerton Hotel in Chicago) may well go on my to-do list! I’m thinking about a trip out that way in the fall. (It would have been sooner, but central Illinois in July might be a bit toasty.)
Gobekli Tepi—You might remember that the uniqeness of this huge site is that it was constructed at a time–almost 12,000 years ago–when human beings were supposedly at the “hunter-gatherer” stage of human evolution , and consisted of small, isolated, nomadic groups of probably related individuals–say a dozen or so each, max–roaming the landscape, scavaging whatever they could find to survive, then moving on, living on the edge of starvation; it was supposedly “root hog, or die” for our ancient ancestors at this time.
This time was supposedly so far back it was before the domestication of animals, before the development of agriculture, before the possible accumulation of the surplusses of food which would have made the creation of semi-permanent or permanent settlements, made some free time and specialization possible, was before the creation of pottery, (and before writing?), with the wheel to be invented several thousands of years in the future.
Yet, the building of such a massive site as Gobekli Tepi (and the many other similar sites which are reportedly being discovered in this area of Turkey)–obviously involving the quarrying and transportation of very heavy stones, their carving, and the planning and construction of this site–would have required lots of manpower, very deliberate organization, long term planning, coordination, a knowledge of building techniques, measurement, and geometry, artistic and carving skills, likely worker housing, and all sorts of other skills and tools to boot–and all this impossible without large surpluses of food—combined to make a massive effort and construction, one perhaps extending over what could have been hundreds of years of effort.
It would also seem that some method of communicating, of preserving and transferring knowledge/information from one group or generation to another had to have been present.
Thus, as we had understood the evidence of human evolution, on many fronts, the creation and construction of Gobekli Tepi should have been impossible.
Answering the many questions Gobekli Tepi raises is why it is so important for the excavations and archaeological investigations at Gobekli Tepi to move forward, and to not be stopped in the name of commercial or political? interests.
P.S. Of course, as we have been taught, before the invention of writing.
Rufus: the Illini Union is a great building, with wood-paneled reading rooms and odd nooks and crannies everywhere. It also has a very nice hotel wing on the second and third floors with quiet, simple rooms and great views of the Quad and Foellinger Auditorium. I stayed there a couple of times on earlier visits. No parking, however. The new hotel (the I Hotel) and conference center is on the south edge of campus, near the Assembly Hall. It has plenty of parking.
There are still a few of the old restaurants near campus: Timpone’s (where my late father and I had dinner on our first night in Urbana after a father-son road trip from Massachusetts), Manzellas Italian Patio, the Kohinoor. But many of the old landmarks–the Great Impasta, Milo’s at Lincoln Square in Urbana, the Black Bear Lounge at Jumer’s Castle Lodge, and Kennedy’s–are gone.
Philip: central Illinois is brutally hot in mid-summer, with a khamsin-like wind that blows off the plains. I recommend early fall: late September or early October. You’ll get a little foliage then.
TommyJay @7:44pm,
When science textbooks 200+ years in the future focus on this era my guess is mapping the human genome will be one of the most significant advancements. I doubt they’ll mention wi-fi or lithium ion batteries.
Phillip Sells,
Not only toasty, but noisy. It’s cicada central right now.
Hubert,
I didn’t know the Black Bear Lounge was gone, but I’m not surprised. That was a cool place. I stayed at the Union when I was on campus interviewing graduates for positions I had at a company in Florida. It was a special feeling being back on campus about 15 years later, as an employer; staying in a fancy suite above the paneled lounges I used to study in.
Gobekli Tepi–The array of knowledge, tools, and techniques necessary for the construction of Gobekli Tepi did not just appear overnight, out of the blue, and especially not from a bunch of half starved, nomadic, hunter-gatherers.
The creation of Gobekli Tepi certainly seems to place the notion–that those who created Gobekli Tepi had received the wide array of knowledge and technique needed to construct this massive site from some more advanced, predecessor civilization–within the realm of possibility.
Perhaps Graham Hancock is not too far off after all.
Snow on Pine,
Sure, it’s within the realm of possibility, but it seems like the least likely explanation of all, possible, relevant explanations. Why not exhaust more likely scenarios before concluding “space aliens did it?” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We have civilizations that left records describing how they did things more impressive than Gobekli Tepi without the help of space aliens. Is it possible Gobekli Tepians (Gobekli Tepites? Gobekli Teponians?) used similar methods and either didn’t keep records or their records have not been discovered or are lost to time?
These folks don’t think it’s safe– helium leaks on the way up. Boeing might disagree. Might want to ask the two astronauts who rode the vehicle on the way up.
Interesting details about the docking process.
Why Starliner is NOT SAFE to Return Astronauts from the ISS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl-0CP9GwKE
Take a tour of the Starliner connected to the ISS. I’d say it doesn’t like up to its name Starliner.
Take a Boeing Starliner on-orbit tour while its docked to space station
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlTsSaj6xEM
As expected The Unicorns did it, decause Snow on Pine can’t explain it (although he isn’t expected to know).
Is this the root of Unicorn fixation?
Rufus T. Firefly:
As I understand it, Snow on Pine and Graham Hancock are not arguing space aliens, but an earlier human civilization which was destroyed in a cataclysm (think Atlantis) whose survivors seeded hunter-gatherer groups with more advanced technology to build structures like Gobekli Tepe.
Keep in mind that conventional archeological timelines rule out Gobekli Tepe, thousands of years before the pyramids, as a possibility. So now archeologists and Egyptologists have a bit of a problem to explain.
Something serious ~12,000 years ago occurred around the time of the Younger Dryas, a marked shift in climate, right about the same time as Solon’s account in Plato of the fall of Atlantis.
I’m keeping my powder dry on this, but I am persuaded that human history is more complicated and goes farther back than official explanations. It’s worth paying attention to this discussion.
“Solon’s account in Plato” of Atlantis is a parable made up by Plato, like his cave or his just city in Republic, it’s actually like a sequel to Republic. In the hundreds of years between Solon’s time and Plato’s no one mentions it, Plato put the words in Solon’s mouth just like he did with Socrates…
I have never understood those who wanted to go find Atlantis. They’re missing the point. It’s like wanting to dig up the foundations of the houses of the wise man who built on rock and the foolish man who built on sand, or find the lamps of the ten virgins who waited for the bridegroom but five ran out of oil because they didn’t think ahead, or find the pig pen of the prodigal son.
parable — a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parable
______________________________
I wouldn’t call Solon’s account a parable. It’s not short and contains much detailed, seemingly historical, information. It’s nothing like Jesus’s parables.
Here are both sections of the Atlantis story from Plato:
https://ascendingpassage.com/plato-atlantis-critias.htm
https://ascendingpassage.com/plato-atlantis-timaeus.htm
You’re not going to read them in a few minutes.
The Atlantis story is a data point in this argument, not the whole of it.
Rufus, saying:
, caused me to wonder quite suddenly if the cicada might be the state insect of Illinois or anystate else. It is apparently not. But, amusingly, according to our dear Wikipedia, the stonefly is described as the “state macroinvertebrate”. That of course implies that there is also a state microinvertebrate, Lord knows what it might be. Paramecium? Some species of nematode?
F. Frederick Skitty, my favorite Freak Brothers character!
Find here Plato with cicadas (tettix) at Phaedrus, [230c]:
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Apage%3D230
sdferr for the thread win!
huxley, Snow on Pine et alia,
I’m completely open to humans building all kinds of stuff tens of thousands, even one hundred thousand years ago. Why wouldn’t they?
P.S. Not the least question about Gobekli Tepi is why, after all this effort to construct the site, the site was then apparently deliberately covered over, buried.
They started hoarding dirt. That behavior is very hard to break, even for Unicorns.
P.P.S.–Was this site–as many other ancient sites were–aligned with particular stars or constellations, with the moon, or with the seasonal rising and setting of the sun?
With only 5% of the site excavated, and much yet to be discovered, who knows?
If it is true that excavations have essentially ceased, and have been dormant for decades, this is a tragedy, a roadblock deliberately set up against the gaining of knowledge about the history and heritage of the people of the World at a World Heritage site.
The Lord of the Rings is not short and contains much detailed, seemingly historical information, but I’m pretty sure it would be a waste of time looking for Noldorin artifacts or hoping to excavate Moria or Gondolin. The primary difference between Middle Earth and Atlantis is that we have a lot more written information about what Tolkein was trying to do by writing at great length about a history he’d invented, and also his writings were never put on such a high pedestal as the ancient and medieval world put Plato’s. But Tolkein, like Plato, wrote a lot that was not fiction, and perhaps one day eventually there will be people trying to locate Moria or Gondolin and complaining that archaeologists aren’t taking them seriously.
As for ancient civilizations, stone and dirt were as in abundance then as they are now, and there is a great deal of time to cover between the first true humans and the oldest accepted civilizations, and I’m sure there are many interesting structures to discover, some of which will be surprisingly old. None of that depends on Atlantis one way or another, and using it to help make the case is pretty counterproductive. And there’s no reason not to align sites with stars if you’re going to build a large structure and you expect the parts of it to line up–what else are ancient people going to have available?
But it’s worth remembering that mines don’t grow back over human time scales, and a Bronze Age-level civilization of any size should have depleted the easy ones in their area. Yet they were still there for the Greeks and Romans to exploit (and they mined them out). So if you think there’s some kind of Atlantis-like thing out there to discover, you’ll either have to show where the mines depleted in that time are, or you’ll have to start saying that physicists and chemists and geologists are all wrong too. The ones looking for UFOs don’t ever hesitate about that, of course.
Very well stated, Niketas.
People tend to develop structures where conditions warrant and use/reuse whatever is at hand. Even in modern times, when we have great engineering, utilities and resources, the vast majority of people (90+%) live near the ocean, a major river or the sea. 300 years after Columbus the largest, inland North American settlement was St. Louis and 300 years after Columbus the largest, inland North American settlement was Cahokia, in the same spot.
Niketas Choniates:
Your approach is a clear example of the Excluded Middle Fallacy — texts are either fiction or historical truth.
I have great respect for the Bible but it is neither fiction nor historical truth. It’s a tricky business sorting that out. But still worth the effort.
PS. If you are replying to me, I’d prefer you address me as huxley.