I don’t know how long ago this was filmed or who filmed it:
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Open thread 1/26/2026 — 32 Comments
-10 here in my part of Colorado, 50 miles N of Denver, not the mountains. Supposed to get up to 42 later today. Not much snow, but it will stay on the driveway until this afternoon. Not going out.
Stay safe and warm. Hope you all are good.
Well, here ya go, it turns out that we have been misinformed by all these many centuries of scholarship, and that the person writing as Shakespeare was actually a Black Jewish woman from Africa.*
Tomson Highway was born on 6 December 1951 in northwestern Manitoba to Pelagie Cook and Joe Highway, a caribou hunter and champion dogsled racer…. Cree is his first language and he was raised according to Cree tradition before being sent to residential school….
– – – – – – – –
And in other news, the NYT once again appears to confuse so-called journalism with the “world’s oldest profession”…
Don’t be slut shaming the NYT, there are probably things even sluts and whores won’t do.
Snow on Pine,
This, from the article you linked, seems an apt synopsis of the theory:
University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute Director Kate McLuskie, said the Bassano “theory” is “… entirely circumstantial, or depends on quasi-allegorical readings of the texts. It is elegant and ingenious, but has no documentary foundation. A beautiful story that is not less beautiful for being entirely false.”
School of War podcast (Aaron Mclean) interviews Walter Russell Mead on his WSJ columns about the Davos conference, the changes indicated, etc. (54:00 min): https://youtu.be/_Yy0FxKa8YA
What I find odd about theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, the foundation for many, as the one cited by Snow on Pine, is: “Shakespeare had no formal education.”
Communication is one of the most fundamental things all able minded humans engage in. It’s like questioning whether a wren could have actually composed a beautiful song because it didn’t attend Julliard. What percentage of authors of great works had “formal education?” Homer, Tolstoy, Melville, Dickens, Clemens, Dante??? Were any lyricists educated in lyric writing?
Most all of us come out of the womb to notice and appreciate language and we are exposed to language constantly in our waking hours. Theorizing Shakespeare could not have authored the plays and sonnets attributed to his name due to his lack of formal education is like claiming Steve Prefontaine could not have been a great runner due to his lack of formal training*.
*Yes, Prefontaine had trainers once his talent was discovered, but since he was a bipedal primate he didn’t need trainers to know how to run.
In fairness to humanities departments, the person generating this thesis appears to be innocent of time studying English literature.
==
The headline cutters are knuckleheads. Moroccans have caucasoid facial features and tan complexions.
==
It’s an exercise in self-aggrandizement of two sorts. Look at me! and He stole his work from a WOMAN.
==
I’m recalling David Horowitz account of why he abandoned graduate work in English literature (in 1963): “it seemed as if every furrow had been ploughed”. Perhaps that’s the issue here.
Ran Gvili’s body found in Gaza by IDF, returned to Israel.
@Rufus T. Firefly:Theorizing Shakespeare could not have authored the plays and sonnets attributed to his name due to his lack of formal education
I am not one of those who thinks Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, but this is a bit of a straw man.
Usually Shakespeare-skeptics are not saying something this simple and obviously wrong. Instead, what they say is that Shakespeare’s work includes knowledge that a person without the right education shouldn’t have had. For example, correct use of “inside baseball” legal terms, allusions to ancient Greek and Roman writings, that sort of thing.
An uneducated hillbilly might be a great poet and an untutored genius, but if his poetry includes references to the Riemann hypothesis, a joke whose punchline involves the infinitude of prime numbers, and an acrostic that spells out CARLFRIEDRICHGAUSS then one would have ground to suspect it was not really the work of an uneducated hillbilly, and further that the education was likely in mathematics. Supposing the hillbilly genius had independently discovered the infinitude of primes or the Riemann hypothesis, he could not have known the name of Gauss without some exposure to the education.
Mark Twain is in his way an example. He himself was a Shakespeare-skeptic, even though he himself was a literary genius without much formal education. And the reason is because Mark Twain knew all the inside baseball about Mississippi riverboat piloting and he dropped that information into his own work. Only a few hundred people would have been qualified to catch him using it wrong. Even Mark Twain’s pen name was inside baseball, in two ways: a superficial way, because “mark twain” is what the leadsmen would say in two fathoms of water, but in a deeper way because he once satirized an ancient and venerable steamboat captain using that name long before Mark Twain ever published a line, and only a few hundred people would ever have even known that story before Twain published it in 1883 (even supposing the story to be false, which even fewer people would be in a position to know).
Mark Twain on that ground decided that Shakespeare could not be what people said he was, because of Shakespeare’s correct usage of obscure legal terms was like Twain’s correct usage of obscure piloting terms.
I don’t say that Twain or any of these other people are right, I’m saying that their argument is not as simple as “uneducated people can’t write great literature”.
From the Wikipedia article about the Bard, which I have also read about in biographies:
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King’s New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.
His father was an alderman and his mother a daughter of a local landowner, not the profile of an unlettered rustic.
As has been discussed here, most all 1st world nations are below replacement rate (Israel? Hungary?).
The China news reminded me of Physicist Michael Faraday’s famous reply to a questioner who asked, “Mr. Faraday, the behavior of the magnet and the coil of wire was interesting, but of what possible use can it be?”
Faraday’s reply is recorded as, “Madam, of what use is a newborn baby?”
The quote has been handed down through the centuries because we humans universally understood the juxtaposition; human babies require a lot of care but develop into very useful things, and are therefore worthwhile.
Would modern westerners even understand the context of Faraday’s answer? Now we are so enlightened that we no longer find the result of value. To use another idiom often stated regarding scientific experimentation; we are throwing the literal baby out with the bathwater.
NIketas,
You completely missed my point. Is it possible Shakespeare’s best buddy was a barrister and they spent many a fortnight in the local public house discussing law over a pint? Is it possible he had an uncle who worked on a boat and had been to every major port on the coasts of Europe, Asia and Africa? Is it possible he had a wealthy Aunt who had an extensive library and let young William read from it?
How is it possible Abraham Lincoln was one of the most brilliant lawyers and legal minds this country has seen? He didn’t attend a top tier law school, or any law school for that matter.
Humans communicate verbally. I know a lot about MOPAR automobiles from the late 60s to early 70s. I’ve never owned one. My wife and children do not know this about me. Noone I’ve met in the past 35 years knows this about me and it will not likely end up on my tombstone. But from the ages of 16 to 20 I spent a lot of time with some guys who were obsessed with these cars; bought, repaired, sold and drove them, and I was an extra set of hands and muscle many long hours, in their parents’ garages.
Humans pick up all kinds of interesting words, ideas, phrases, knowledge… by hanging around with other humans. Someone was intelligent and creative enough to write the plays of William Shakespeare. Why can it not be possible that person was, actually, William Shakespeare*?
Look at the different areas of science and math Newton forged new ideas and theories in. Einstein and his annus mirabilis. No human had ever done either before or since. Does that, therefore mean a single human did not accomplish what both men accomplished?*
*And, of course Shakespeare borrowed from others, maybe even incorporated other’s works into his own. There isn’t a work of art extant where the artist did not borrow from others.
**And, sadly, I have read postulates by men obsessed with antisemitism who insist Einstein’s work was not, in fact, his own. Even one theory, similar to this Shakespeare theory, that it was a woman, his first wife, who had the insights and he stole from her. Although I always found that one odd because his first wife was also Jewish. But, I guess the antisemitic liars will cross that bridge after they knock Albert off his pedestal.
Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime! What’s the average number a professional author typically writes? 10? 20?
Stephen King has written about 70 books. Amazing!
If we didn’t live contemporaneously with Mr. Asimov it would seem impossible that he wrote 500 books. One of our most prolific authors, Stephen King only wrote 70 (so far). How could someone surpass that total 7 fold? Impossible.
But there really was an Isaac Asimov and he really did that.
Google Gemini:
There were no legal cases against William Shakespeare’s authorship during his lifetime. The authorship question emerged much later, primarily in the 18th century, long after his death.
What speculation might emerge about Asimov 200 years after he is dead?
Credentialism is just one refuge of scoundrels.
@Rufus: I didn’t miss your point at all, but I think you missed mine. FWIW I think Shakespeare wrote his own works.
The people who think Shakespeare was a lawyer, don’t think that merely because he dropped legal terms. They think that his use of them indicates a knowledge much more complete and intimate than hanging around drinking with a lawyer would indicate.
Lots of people hung around drinking with Dick Feynman and it didn’t make them physicists or able to convincingly talk like one to a physicist. There have been lawyers who said Shakespeare must have been a lawyer.
I don’t think those Shakespeare-skeptics have made their case, but the case they are trying to make is considerably different from what you caricature them as making.
Isaac Asimov’s output is not a singular as it looks, incidentally. REALLY prolific writers often write under more than one name. There have been enough writers who have written hundreds of books that there’s no need to be skeptical about Asimov.
On the other hand, there are fictitious writers of hundreds of books such as “Franklin W. Dixon”. The evidence that “Dixon” is fictitious is not purely based on internal evidence from “his” books, of course (as well as its not being a secret). And in fact I’ve heard of a real writer whose real name is unfortunately Franklin W. Dixon and so has to write under a pen name. But the evidence for Asimov being real doesn’t make “Franklin W. Dixon” real, and the evidence for “Franklin W. Dixon” being fictitious doesn’t make Asimov fictitious.
Re: “Franklin W. Dixon”
For those who spent their childhoods more profitably than I, “Franklin W. Dixon” is the collective pseudonym of a stable of authors who wrote the Hardy Boys mysteries.
“They think that his use of them indicates a knowledge much more complete and intimate than hanging around drinking with a lawyer would indicate.”
I guess you are right that I do not get your point because I have no idea what that statement means. I’m pretty sure when humans get to Mars they’ll find Andy Weir’s account of what a mission is like to be fairly accurate. Andy Weir is not a Martian nor has he been to space. He’s not trained as an astronaut. Never worked for NASA.
This sounds like attorneys having much too high an opinion of what it takes to “think” like an attorney and understand English law.
Remarkable people do remarkable things.
I remember the Beatles “Paul is dead” controversy. There was some back-and-forth debate, but no one as I recall played the winning card. The McCartney replacement not only had to look like Paul, he had to be a genius songwriter like Paul.
QED. Paul was not dead.
As for Shakespeare I submit:
_________________________________
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Whoever could write this, could IMO do many other things well as well.
@Rufus T. Firefly:I guess you are right that I do not get your point because I have no idea what that statement means.
It means that it’s hard to fake expert-level knowledge. Depending of course on what kind of expertise it is. Mark Twain’s expertise as a riverboat pilot is a good example, and so is Dick Feynman’s expertise in physics.
A short while ago our gracious hostess posted an AI-generated “Feynman lecture” which a few of us instantly spotted as faked, with the “tell” being the anachronism of the subject matter. Plenty of the people who left comments at YouTube were fooled. It wasn’t that Feynman wasn’t real, it wasn’t that recordings of him don’t exist, it wasn’t that the Casimir effect isn’t real, it was more subtle than that.
This sounds like attorneys having much too high an opinion of what it takes to “think” like an attorney and understand English law.
It could be. Or it could be the same kind of thing that trips up people who try to pass themselves off as combat veterans, they can fool people who don’t know anything about the military but can’t fool people who are professional military. I’m not an attorney and wouldn’t know, and there’s been a lot of new law since Shakespeare’s day anyway and I don’t think any modern attorney would have a good way to know unless they made a special study of law at that time.
honestly these sophistic exercises, like that one about thermodynamics, in the other thread, other that dick the butcher in henry v111, did Shakespeare really speak of many legal cases, thar was the source Thomas Bolt used right if memory served, had Hamlet led to a legal proceeding, there would have been something of an insanity plea, the Norsemen suggestes what a Danish court of that era, would really be like, one might imagine the haniwork of the quirky Sokal and his paper denying Gravity,
asimov used observation and imagination often extrapolation, to conjure up the Foundation, blending Toynbee and Gibbon’s Roman Chronicle, long before there was anything resembling AI, he conjured up the three laws of robotics, that was in the era of vaccuum tubes, wells who was more scientifically trained followed the likes percival lowell and schiaperelli for his Martian adventures and Burroughs went even further, in his John Carter tales,
his vision of Mars is more real to many than the actual Martian landscape
Due credit to AI for helping me find this Shakespeare essay that I remember from 2005 by Theodore Dalrymple. There is also another much longer one if anyone is interested.
We both have stated we believe Shakespeare wrote the collected works of Shakespeare.
Ipso facto, we both believe the arguments calling his authorship into speculation are unconvincing.
With whom are you debating?
huxley,
Precisely.
Look at the collected works of Mozart, George Gershwin?!?!
They both accomplished more in their short lives than peers who lived twice as long. BECAUSE THEY WERE MOZART AND GERSHWIN.
@Rufus T. Firefly:With whom are you debating?
I don’t agree with them, but I don’t think it’s fair to misrepresent them either.
Well, she is certainly entertaining…gobsmackingly, rollickingly, head-shakingly so.
(Pretty sure, though, that all she really wants is her 15 or so seconds of fame.)
And so…essentially “much ado about not so much”…
Or perhaps…just a case of “O brave new world that has such critters innit”….
(To be fair, she could have at least mentioned whether said Jewess was Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Italian or Yemenite…. Talk about sloppy research…but I, for one, am on tender hooks, which, Marissa, was actually a very painful if not terribly well-known “tool” in the Spanish Inquisition’s rather impressive repertoire.)
I do love my animal videos.
Here’s a YouTube channel which is a just a woman filming the squirrels at her window. So she calls her channel:
She puts nuts and food and water out for the squirrels. Now she has a first-name relationship with many of them.
Some squirrels will take nuts from her fingers. Some will catch a whole walnut thrown from a few feet away. Some just scamper up, hesitate, look around, back away, then come back.
The lady loves God and squirrels. Obviously she’s crazy. But I can’t stop watching. 🙂
The Feds have cracked the Anti-ICE protesters organizations and communications. It reveals that foreign funders are involved (a half million dollars cited), and that Walz’ Lt Gov “Flan” (mentioned on Signal group chats) or Flanagan is involved.
Hence, Matt Morse 20m video with Chat logs and X.com citizen investigations, and his title (roughly saying) the rats are escaping the ship…to Cuba perhaps in one case!
A world of criminal conspiracy and RICO hurt is coming.
Even FBI Director Kash Patel interviewed this morning implies this.
In other words, our side has gained major leverage over this passive aggressive campaign to block Federal Officers from carrying out their duty.
A veteran Green Beret with close military experience in dealing with insurgencies in the Middle East concludes that if this is allowed to metastasise, then “distributed resistance” will wear down stronger authorities. And spread widely in rebel “sanctuary” locales.
News this week will likely confirm tjis outline and we’ll see the rolling up of these advanced insurrections disguised as protests.
The hammer is coming down.
He mentions “Signal-gate” as the cause for Walz change. Text messages implicate, for instance, Amanda Koehler’s involvement, Walz very own campaign strategist. At 6m, Nick says that’s “just the cliff notes version.” He’s very concise. Much more is yet to come out.
He says that not only is the Walz Administration involved in organizing obstruction of Federal Officers in their duty, but so are local police and city and county officials.
A Minneapolis City Council woman is implicated in organizing this cabal. Domestic terrorism Is alleged. And Amanda Koehler’s web presence has gone dark. And FNC get’s a telling quote from an expert on NGOs.
For those wanting written and detailed account, this is it for tonight.
X.com poster 0HOUR1 sums it up this way:
“What do we have on these signal chats
“-Government officials
-Anarchists
-Antifa
-Gang members
-Journalists
“Coordinating and attacking ICE AGENTS across the country.
“This my friends is Organized Crime not Protesting.
“RICO”
Arctic Inuit (?) video can’t have been filmed that long ago because the family has a smartphone.
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-10 here in my part of Colorado, 50 miles N of Denver, not the mountains. Supposed to get up to 42 later today. Not much snow, but it will stay on the driveway until this afternoon. Not going out.
Stay safe and warm. Hope you all are good.
Well, here ya go, it turns out that we have been misinformed by all these many centuries of scholarship, and that the person writing as Shakespeare was actually a Black Jewish woman from Africa.*
* See https://www.thecollegefix.com/feminist-historian-shakespeare-was-really-a-black-jewish-woman/
Related: The birth of Canadian author/musician/lecturer Tomson Highway…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomson_Highway
Opening graf:
– – – – – – – –
And in other news, the NYT once again appears to confuse so-called journalism with the “world’s oldest profession”…
“NYT allows Strzok to mislead on watchdog’s Crossfire Hurricane findings in attack on Kash Patel”—
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/nyt-lets-strzok-mislead-watchdogs-crossfire-hurricane-findings-papers
Don’t be slut shaming the NYT, there are probably things even sluts and whores won’t do.
Snow on Pine,
This, from the article you linked, seems an apt synopsis of the theory:
School of War podcast (Aaron Mclean) interviews Walter Russell Mead on his WSJ columns about the Davos conference, the changes indicated, etc. (54:00 min): https://youtu.be/_Yy0FxKa8YA
What I find odd about theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, the foundation for many, as the one cited by Snow on Pine, is: “Shakespeare had no formal education.”
Communication is one of the most fundamental things all able minded humans engage in. It’s like questioning whether a wren could have actually composed a beautiful song because it didn’t attend Julliard. What percentage of authors of great works had “formal education?” Homer, Tolstoy, Melville, Dickens, Clemens, Dante??? Were any lyricists educated in lyric writing?
Most all of us come out of the womb to notice and appreciate language and we are exposed to language constantly in our waking hours. Theorizing Shakespeare could not have authored the plays and sonnets attributed to his name due to his lack of formal education is like claiming Steve Prefontaine could not have been a great runner due to his lack of formal training*.
*Yes, Prefontaine had trainers once his talent was discovered, but since he was a bipedal primate he didn’t need trainers to know how to run.
In fairness to humanities departments, the person generating this thesis appears to be innocent of time studying English literature.
==
The headline cutters are knuckleheads. Moroccans have caucasoid facial features and tan complexions.
==
It’s an exercise in self-aggrandizement of two sorts. Look at me! and He stole his work from a WOMAN.
==
I’m recalling David Horowitz account of why he abandoned graduate work in English literature (in 1963): “it seemed as if every furrow had been ploughed”. Perhaps that’s the issue here.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/421493
Ran Gvili’s body found in Gaza by IDF, returned to Israel.
@Rufus T. Firefly:Theorizing Shakespeare could not have authored the plays and sonnets attributed to his name due to his lack of formal education
I am not one of those who thinks Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, but this is a bit of a straw man.
Usually Shakespeare-skeptics are not saying something this simple and obviously wrong. Instead, what they say is that Shakespeare’s work includes knowledge that a person without the right education shouldn’t have had. For example, correct use of “inside baseball” legal terms, allusions to ancient Greek and Roman writings, that sort of thing.
An uneducated hillbilly might be a great poet and an untutored genius, but if his poetry includes references to the Riemann hypothesis, a joke whose punchline involves the infinitude of prime numbers, and an acrostic that spells out CARLFRIEDRICHGAUSS then one would have ground to suspect it was not really the work of an uneducated hillbilly, and further that the education was likely in mathematics. Supposing the hillbilly genius had independently discovered the infinitude of primes or the Riemann hypothesis, he could not have known the name of Gauss without some exposure to the education.
Mark Twain is in his way an example. He himself was a Shakespeare-skeptic, even though he himself was a literary genius without much formal education. And the reason is because Mark Twain knew all the inside baseball about Mississippi riverboat piloting and he dropped that information into his own work. Only a few hundred people would have been qualified to catch him using it wrong. Even Mark Twain’s pen name was inside baseball, in two ways: a superficial way, because “mark twain” is what the leadsmen would say in two fathoms of water, but in a deeper way because he once satirized an ancient and venerable steamboat captain using that name long before Mark Twain ever published a line, and only a few hundred people would ever have even known that story before Twain published it in 1883 (even supposing the story to be false, which even fewer people would be in a position to know).
Mark Twain on that ground decided that Shakespeare could not be what people said he was, because of Shakespeare’s correct usage of obscure legal terms was like Twain’s correct usage of obscure piloting terms.
I don’t say that Twain or any of these other people are right, I’m saying that their argument is not as simple as “uneducated people can’t write great literature”.
From the Wikipedia article about the Bard, which I have also read about in biographies:
His father was an alderman and his mother a daughter of a local landowner, not the profile of an unlettered rustic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
There is a headline today that China is not only below replacement value birthrate, it has dropped below 1 child per adult woman. https://nypost.com/2026/01/25/opinion/how-a-shrinking-china-could-handcuff-beijings-ambitions/
As has been discussed here, most all 1st world nations are below replacement rate (Israel? Hungary?).
The China news reminded me of Physicist Michael Faraday’s famous reply to a questioner who asked, “Mr. Faraday, the behavior of the magnet and the coil of wire was interesting, but of what possible use can it be?”
Faraday’s reply is recorded as, “Madam, of what use is a newborn baby?”
The quote has been handed down through the centuries because we humans universally understood the juxtaposition; human babies require a lot of care but develop into very useful things, and are therefore worthwhile.
Would modern westerners even understand the context of Faraday’s answer? Now we are so enlightened that we no longer find the result of value. To use another idiom often stated regarding scientific experimentation; we are throwing the literal baby out with the bathwater.
NIketas,
You completely missed my point. Is it possible Shakespeare’s best buddy was a barrister and they spent many a fortnight in the local public house discussing law over a pint? Is it possible he had an uncle who worked on a boat and had been to every major port on the coasts of Europe, Asia and Africa? Is it possible he had a wealthy Aunt who had an extensive library and let young William read from it?
How is it possible Abraham Lincoln was one of the most brilliant lawyers and legal minds this country has seen? He didn’t attend a top tier law school, or any law school for that matter.
Humans communicate verbally. I know a lot about MOPAR automobiles from the late 60s to early 70s. I’ve never owned one. My wife and children do not know this about me. Noone I’ve met in the past 35 years knows this about me and it will not likely end up on my tombstone. But from the ages of 16 to 20 I spent a lot of time with some guys who were obsessed with these cars; bought, repaired, sold and drove them, and I was an extra set of hands and muscle many long hours, in their parents’ garages.
Humans pick up all kinds of interesting words, ideas, phrases, knowledge… by hanging around with other humans. Someone was intelligent and creative enough to write the plays of William Shakespeare. Why can it not be possible that person was, actually, William Shakespeare*?
Look at the different areas of science and math Newton forged new ideas and theories in. Einstein and his annus mirabilis. No human had ever done either before or since. Does that, therefore mean a single human did not accomplish what both men accomplished?*
*And, of course Shakespeare borrowed from others, maybe even incorporated other’s works into his own. There isn’t a work of art extant where the artist did not borrow from others.
**And, sadly, I have read postulates by men obsessed with antisemitism who insist Einstein’s work was not, in fact, his own. Even one theory, similar to this Shakespeare theory, that it was a woman, his first wife, who had the insights and he stole from her. Although I always found that one odd because his first wife was also Jewish. But, I guess the antisemitic liars will cross that bridge after they knock Albert off his pedestal.
Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime! What’s the average number a professional author typically writes? 10? 20?
Stephen King has written about 70 books. Amazing!
If we didn’t live contemporaneously with Mr. Asimov it would seem impossible that he wrote 500 books. One of our most prolific authors, Stephen King only wrote 70 (so far). How could someone surpass that total 7 fold? Impossible.
But there really was an Isaac Asimov and he really did that.
Google Gemini:
What speculation might emerge about Asimov 200 years after he is dead?
Credentialism is just one refuge of scoundrels.
@Rufus: I didn’t miss your point at all, but I think you missed mine. FWIW I think Shakespeare wrote his own works.
The people who think Shakespeare was a lawyer, don’t think that merely because he dropped legal terms. They think that his use of them indicates a knowledge much more complete and intimate than hanging around drinking with a lawyer would indicate.
Lots of people hung around drinking with Dick Feynman and it didn’t make them physicists or able to convincingly talk like one to a physicist. There have been lawyers who said Shakespeare must have been a lawyer.
I don’t think those Shakespeare-skeptics have made their case, but the case they are trying to make is considerably different from what you caricature them as making.
Isaac Asimov’s output is not a singular as it looks, incidentally. REALLY prolific writers often write under more than one name. There have been enough writers who have written hundreds of books that there’s no need to be skeptical about Asimov.
On the other hand, there are fictitious writers of hundreds of books such as “Franklin W. Dixon”. The evidence that “Dixon” is fictitious is not purely based on internal evidence from “his” books, of course (as well as its not being a secret). And in fact I’ve heard of a real writer whose real name is unfortunately Franklin W. Dixon and so has to write under a pen name. But the evidence for Asimov being real doesn’t make “Franklin W. Dixon” real, and the evidence for “Franklin W. Dixon” being fictitious doesn’t make Asimov fictitious.
Re: “Franklin W. Dixon”
For those who spent their childhoods more profitably than I, “Franklin W. Dixon” is the collective pseudonym of a stable of authors who wrote the Hardy Boys mysteries.
“They think that his use of them indicates a knowledge much more complete and intimate than hanging around drinking with a lawyer would indicate.”
I guess you are right that I do not get your point because I have no idea what that statement means. I’m pretty sure when humans get to Mars they’ll find Andy Weir’s account of what a mission is like to be fairly accurate. Andy Weir is not a Martian nor has he been to space. He’s not trained as an astronaut. Never worked for NASA.
This sounds like attorneys having much too high an opinion of what it takes to “think” like an attorney and understand English law.
Remarkable people do remarkable things.
I remember the Beatles “Paul is dead” controversy. There was some back-and-forth debate, but no one as I recall played the winning card. The McCartney replacement not only had to look like Paul, he had to be a genius songwriter like Paul.
QED. Paul was not dead.
As for Shakespeare I submit:
_________________________________
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
–William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29”
_________________________________
Whoever could write this, could IMO do many other things well as well.
@Rufus T. Firefly:I guess you are right that I do not get your point because I have no idea what that statement means.
It means that it’s hard to fake expert-level knowledge. Depending of course on what kind of expertise it is. Mark Twain’s expertise as a riverboat pilot is a good example, and so is Dick Feynman’s expertise in physics.
A short while ago our gracious hostess posted an AI-generated “Feynman lecture” which a few of us instantly spotted as faked, with the “tell” being the anachronism of the subject matter. Plenty of the people who left comments at YouTube were fooled. It wasn’t that Feynman wasn’t real, it wasn’t that recordings of him don’t exist, it wasn’t that the Casimir effect isn’t real, it was more subtle than that.
This sounds like attorneys having much too high an opinion of what it takes to “think” like an attorney and understand English law.
It could be. Or it could be the same kind of thing that trips up people who try to pass themselves off as combat veterans, they can fool people who don’t know anything about the military but can’t fool people who are professional military. I’m not an attorney and wouldn’t know, and there’s been a lot of new law since Shakespeare’s day anyway and I don’t think any modern attorney would have a good way to know unless they made a special study of law at that time.
honestly these sophistic exercises, like that one about thermodynamics, in the other thread, other that dick the butcher in henry v111, did Shakespeare really speak of many legal cases, thar was the source Thomas Bolt used right if memory served, had Hamlet led to a legal proceeding, there would have been something of an insanity plea, the Norsemen suggestes what a Danish court of that era, would really be like, one might imagine the haniwork of the quirky Sokal and his paper denying Gravity,
asimov used observation and imagination often extrapolation, to conjure up the Foundation, blending Toynbee and Gibbon’s Roman Chronicle, long before there was anything resembling AI, he conjured up the three laws of robotics, that was in the era of vaccuum tubes, wells who was more scientifically trained followed the likes percival lowell and schiaperelli for his Martian adventures and Burroughs went even further, in his John Carter tales,
his vision of Mars is more real to many than the actual Martian landscape
Due credit to AI for helping me find this Shakespeare essay that I remember from 2005 by Theodore Dalrymple. There is also another much longer one if anyone is interested.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/truth-vs-theory
Niketas,
We both have stated we believe Shakespeare wrote the collected works of Shakespeare.
Ipso facto, we both believe the arguments calling his authorship into speculation are unconvincing.
With whom are you debating?
huxley,
Precisely.
Look at the collected works of Mozart, George Gershwin?!?!
They both accomplished more in their short lives than peers who lived twice as long. BECAUSE THEY WERE MOZART AND GERSHWIN.
@Rufus T. Firefly:With whom are you debating?
I don’t agree with them, but I don’t think it’s fair to misrepresent them either.
Well, she is certainly entertaining…gobsmackingly, rollickingly, head-shakingly so.
(Pretty sure, though, that all she really wants is her 15 or so seconds of fame.)
And so…essentially “much ado about not so much”…
Or perhaps…just a case of “O brave new world that has such critters innit”….
(To be fair, she could have at least mentioned whether said Jewess was Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Italian or Yemenite…. Talk about sloppy research…but I, for one, am on tender hooks, which, Marissa, was actually a very painful if not terribly well-known “tool” in the Spanish Inquisition’s rather impressive repertoire.)
I do love my animal videos.
Here’s a YouTube channel which is a just a woman filming the squirrels at her window. So she calls her channel:
—“Squirrels at the window”
https://www.youtube.com/@Squirrels_at_the_window
She puts nuts and food and water out for the squirrels. Now she has a first-name relationship with many of them.
Some squirrels will take nuts from her fingers. Some will catch a whole walnut thrown from a few feet away. Some just scamper up, hesitate, look around, back away, then come back.
The lady loves God and squirrels. Obviously she’s crazy. But I can’t stop watching. 🙂
–“Squirrels’ reactions to a squirrel statue (in memory of Cutie)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txu-dj0Opg4
Perhaps this late developing story miss our host…but for tomorrow?
Why did Trump chat with Minn. Gov Walz today? And why is the Governor suddenly so conciliatory? What’s changed!
My guess is that THIS is the reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejj2P7rgoBQ
The Feds have cracked the Anti-ICE protesters organizations and communications. It reveals that foreign funders are involved (a half million dollars cited), and that Walz’ Lt Gov “Flan” (mentioned on Signal group chats) or Flanagan is involved.
Hence, Matt Morse 20m video with Chat logs and X.com citizen investigations, and his title (roughly saying) the rats are escaping the ship…to Cuba perhaps in one case!
A world of criminal conspiracy and RICO hurt is coming.
Even FBI Director Kash Patel interviewed this morning implies this.
In other words, our side has gained major leverage over this passive aggressive campaign to block Federal Officers from carrying out their duty.
A veteran Green Beret with close military experience in dealing with insurgencies in the Middle East concludes that if this is allowed to metastasise, then “distributed resistance” will wear down stronger authorities. And spread widely in rebel “sanctuary” locales.
News this week will likely confirm tjis outline and we’ll see the rolling up of these advanced insurrections disguised as protests.
The hammer is coming down.
Get ready! This could be a beautiful victory?
Asking the same questions, arriving at the same answers as me is YouTuber Nick Soeder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGCFQgCrWLA
He mentions “Signal-gate” as the cause for Walz change. Text messages implicate, for instance, Amanda Koehler’s involvement, Walz very own campaign strategist. At 6m, Nick says that’s “just the cliff notes version.” He’s very concise. Much more is yet to come out.
He says that not only is the Walz Administration involved in organizing obstruction of Federal Officers in their duty, but so are local police and city and county officials.
A new demand by women in academia.https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/scholarly-harassment-and-the-sisterhood?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=225618&post_id=185792076&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=5009i&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Question: when are Ameican men going to get as organized as American women. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone decided to stand up for academic integrity and scholarly excellence?
Or, maybe they are just trying to divert attention from Minneapolis?
“SignalGate” on Sunday was launched by citizen-investigator Cam Higby on X.com
Monday afternoon, Zerohedge posted a useful and revealing and extensive set of X.com posts, Signal screen caps, and a video clip of FBI Director Kash Patel.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/minneapolis-signal-gate-alleged-anti-ice-low-level-insurgency-command-exposed-messaging
A Minneapolis City Council woman is implicated in organizing this cabal. Domestic terrorism Is alleged. And Amanda Koehler’s web presence has gone dark. And FNC get’s a telling quote from an expert on NGOs.
For those wanting written and detailed account, this is it for tonight.
X.com poster 0HOUR1 sums it up this way:
“What do we have on these signal chats
“-Government officials
-Anarchists
-Antifa
-Gang members
-Journalists
“Coordinating and attacking ICE AGENTS across the country.
“This my friends is Organized Crime not Protesting.
“RICO”
Arctic Inuit (?) video can’t have been filmed that long ago because the family has a smartphone.