Home » Open thread 12/23/23

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Open thread 12/23/23 — 32 Comments

  1. I see the Left is criticizing Speaker Johnson for taking his 13 yr old Daughter to a “Purity” dance. What kind of dance do they think he should have taken her too?

    MERRY CHRISTMAS

  2. An observation. Most Muslim nations are Muslim because their ancestors lost a war to Muslims.

    Western media is focused on Gaza and mostly ignores violent Islamic military advances that are going on in Africa today.

  3. I’m with Skip; fascinating!

    I know nothing about ballet but a fair amount about classical music. It was pretty common for composers to take familiar tunes, often folk songs, and turn them into magnificent music. I have no problem with writers or choreographers doing the same with stories, provided they acknowledge the source, as Alexander Dumas did.
    Kudos to Alexander Dumas!

  4. even in a musical survey class, they only skimmed over tchaikovsky,

    yes once upon a time, North Africa was Christian, till the Saracen takeover same with the Levant until the Ottomans came along, the Balkans were Moslem until the 19th Century,

  5. Open Thread Sunday on Saturday! Defense stuff India:


    Indian Defence Strategy – Forces, Potential and Procurement Disasters – Perun

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvhEN_kHaA4

    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 — Indian Defence Strategy
    00:01:20 — What Am I Talking About?
    00:04:14 — History
    00:07:59 — Strategic Situation
    00:21:22 — Indian Armed Forces
    00:27:29 — The Nuclear Program
    00:36:21 — Strengths & Challenges
    00:46:37 — Defence Industry & Procurement
    00:50:14 — Why Procurement Goes Wrong?
    01:10:15 — Conclusion
    01:11:03 — Channel Update

  6. om, I find comfort in the rise of India vis a vis China as the US declines. It’s good to have some competition to tamp down overweening arrogance.

    And India’s space program has been a particularly shining star.

  7. Here’s the important podcast listening I’m sharing with friends this Christmas weekend. And it’s almost entirely ugly out there, friends.

    In case you don’t watch Fox News (and I don’t), spend 5 minutes with Newt Gingrich on the Colorado Kangaroo Court decision, knocking the leading R candidate from the ballot, like 10 slave driving states did to Honest Abe Lincoln in 1860 for his abolitionist apostasy. Newt ends up calling “Democrats” the party of fascism and tyranny.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOFAKZEEnE8

    From mid-December comes this powerful, knock out interview and discussion on the landmark Rasmussen/Heartland Institute poll, finding some 20% of 2020 mail-in voters admitting ballot fraud. Jim Lakely from Heartland, JJ Sefton and CBD of Ace of Spades — a must listen to the end podcast. The rightside Cadre speaks real Truth to the Tyrannical, Banana Republic times we’ve found ourselves in. Towards a new Civil War, or redemption and reinvention?
    https://cutjibnewsletter.com/podcast/cutjibnewsletter-speaks-season-6-episode-3/

    “At High School debates, Debate is not allowed.” The corrupt youd’s speak and prove their Masters are indoctrinators.
    Peter Boghossian’s new interview with James Fishback on forensic debate’s PC culture (if you can call it that). More reasons to give up! It’s hopeless.
    “In 2019, James launched ‘Incubate Debate,’ a nonprofit organization bringing no-cost, free-speech debate tournaments, workshops, and camps to students across Florida.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIH0MxJDweU&t=1246

    Jordan Peterson interviews Michael Malice, upholding the AnCap side, on The History of Communism through the first hour. Then on to individualism, Ayn Rand and political philosophy in the second. FRESH and bracing:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cVr2Qp_ic8

  8. Under Trump, India had been given some due recognition vis a vis Pakistan, maybe the shunning made it more amenable to accepting Russian oil, which we buy at discount. for complicated reasons it had been a Soviet client for most of the Cold War, largely vis a vis China, and we trusted the Pakistanis and the deobandis represented by Mawdudi that seems to have been a poor choice,

  9. Merry Christmas to neo & the Gang!

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1shIcYFlntCa44g5SelRdGNCi-0Z9Fv57/view

    I wanted to do an AI Christmas card but ChatGPT/DALL-E won’t do religious images nor copyright/trademark characters which leaves out nativity scenes and Santa Claus.

    So I asked for a “magical, moonlit, winter night” then swiped a Santa Claus & His Reindeer silhouette off the net, then tied it all together with LibreOffice and GIMP.

    But aside from the tech humble brag, you are part of what keeps me going and I do wish you all:
    ____________________

    Let your hearts be light…

    –Frank Sinatra, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvA7-EjaSPI

  10. OMG! Here is PROOF that members of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and the NEA (National Education Association) have no clue as to what they have been doing for the past 40 years! Here is an article from the communist led Missoulian Newspaper. https://missoulian.com/eedition/page-a6/page_c6180089-80bf-56b0-9480-8a508366a19f.html The woman who wrote this article taught school for all of her career and is now one of the very few people allowed to post regularly in this newspaper. Ain’t she sweet? She loves you all so much. She just doesn’t know what damage she has done or what condition this country is in today.
    I don’t know, perhaps it was my bad inner angel that encouraged me to post this under The Nutcracker piece 😉

  11. Jon Baker

    Having been a former Africa Analyst in one of the armed forces I find it interesting when someone posts about the West not covering something in Africa. They never do unless it illustrates African violence or backwardness or both. That’s it largely. The West doesn’t care about Africa. Not even a little bit.

  12. Second try at this post. Here is a link to our local newspaper. Scroll down below the cartoon to the article titled “This is us”.
    https://missoulian.com/eedition/page-a6/page_c6180089-80bf-56b0-9480-8a508366a19f.html

    This article was written by a woman who spent her professional career as an elementary school teacher. She is now one of the elite few who are treated as a columnist in our only newspaper. Her column today is testimony to the fact that the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) as well as the NEA (National Education Association) are both completely unaware of the damage they have done to this country. That woman dreams about something that existed before her and her type took over the school system.
    I think it might have been my dark angel that encouraged me to post this under The Nutcracker piece! 😉

  13. Whoops!

    Just found the original post–sorry for the duplicate! My machine is running off kilter today!

  14. Anne:

    That is an annoying and disappointing piece. Though typical.

    My cousin is an ex-hippie turned conservative. His daughter is a prog schoolteacher. She is a truly wonderful person, but she buys into all the woke nonsense.

    Politics is the third rail for them. They can’t discuss politics.

    The author seems to be a similarly good-hearted person, yet thoroughly unaware of how intolerant, divisive and destructive her side has been.

    Woe unto us! The Charter School movement allows parents not to place their children into public school indoctrination.

  15. RE: “All the tea in China”

    From what I understand about the process, when picked tea leaves are sorted, they are divided into descending orders of quality–from whole, best quality tea lives, to lesser quality whole tea leaves, to broken tea leaves, to the parts of leaves which fall on to the processing floor, called the “fannings,” and, finally, there is the “tea dust” which is left on that processing floor.

    I have read that that tea in the teabags we here in the U.S. usually use is usually composed of “fannings” and tea dust, which do have the virtue of allowing tea to be brewed very quickly, but are hardly of first quality.

    Recently, for me, Youtube has been throwing up lots of videos about the place of tea in China, and it’s amazing just how big an industry and a part of Chinese culture tea is.

    There are videos exploring major tea centers, consisting of block after block of tea and teaware stores packed into buildings three or four stories high—one such center containing a supposed 10,000 shops–and shops selling hand made tea pots, which sometimes cost thousands of dollars.

    The intricacies of Chinese tea ceremonies. Six different types of tea, and tea plantations in long standing traditional areas—which use ancient, intensive hand processing.

    Pu-erh tea, for instance, which improves as it ages, can sell for thousands of dollars for a compressed cake of tea which only weighs five or ten ounces.

    I’d like to try some of these Chinese Pu’erh teas but, given the frequent stories about all sorts of environmental pollution in China, their disregard for any health standards (did they spray the tea plants or ground with insecticides and a whole host of other chemicals, and in safe amounts and, if they did, would they tell customers?), the very common Chinese practice of producing fake and counterfeit products, the multiplicity of different kinds of Pu’erh tea—similar to wines with their multitude of different vinyards, terroirs, good years and bad years, the need for correct storage, aging, and transport, and tastes—finding the genuine, good quality article at a reasonable price seems like a very daunting task, and that’s just one type of tea from China.

  16. RE: Firearms–After 200 years there, Remington Arms begins closing up shop, preparatory to pulling out of Ilion, New York.

    And the town fathers seem fairly reluctant to place the blame squarely on New York state’s responsibility for creating a generally hostile business climate, their particular hostility to firearms, and to those companies which manufacture them.*

    * See https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/small-new-york-town-devastated-as-gun-plant-shuts-down-5550782?src_src=Goodevening&src_cmp=gv-2023-12-23&est=%2FbyfbJ5wPrfLvGm%2BCzMcoBYeA7PaGs%2BFltuGAJRN4c0Y1CJz7ywGYxSGsntSwQA%3D

  17. Snow, when my Wife and I visited China years ago we went to a Tea Plantation (I am sure it was a tourist setup). We picked Tea, had our picture taken in the fields and had a Tea Ceremony. Yes, it was fun. And the Tea Ceremony was interesting.
    Basically, all Tea is from the same bush. Depends on when it is harvested.

  18. I read part of a book about an Englishman who posed as a Chinese, to take part in the Chinese tea trade in its early days.

    The book stated that English customers preferred green tea with a bright green color, and the Chinese treated the tea with a mildly poisonous substance, to achieve that color. The author said they weren’t trying to poison the tea drinkers, but were simply indifferent to their fate.

  19. Anne, thanks for trying to provide a corrected link, but it did not survive my ad blocker. Funny just how capitalistic the communists can be when they can’t get money from the government directly.

    I was not able to read it, but you can feel justified in posting on this Open Thread because it sounds like she is a nut that should be cracked (or is cracked).

  20. RE: Fake Pu’erh tea

    Apparently Pu’erh tea has become trendy and more and more popular.

    As I suspected, there is quite a lot of fake Pu’erh tea out there.

    There is a very large price differential between Pu’erh tea made from younger tea bushes ( according to a video I just viewed 97% of all Pu’erh teas) and the 3 % which is made from ancient tea trees.

    Just viewed a video by a westerner who sells Pu’erh tea, as he discusses several tricks to make you think you are getting real or very expensive Pu-erh tea from ancient tea trees when you aren’t.

  21. Neo… thank you so much for this little history lesson.. I have no doubt that the version we saw a few nights ago was exactly as the narrator suggests – the Balanchine version ! But, I had no idea he did the choreography in 1954… I thought the dance was from the 1892 version that Tchaikovsky wrote the music for… the music was just beautiful and wonderfully played… now I can’t wait for Swan Lake.

  22. Shirehome–Several decades ago, when I was working on my master’s Degree in East Asian Studies, I ran across a book by Belgian Sociologist Simon Leys titled “Chinese Shadows,” containing some very uncomfortable assertions about China, one of which was that the Chinese government had managed to conceal the actual conditions in China from westerners by, first, forbidding westerners from entering most of the rural provinces of China, and, second, by setting up what might be called a circuit of Potemkin villages, so that westerners who visited China were taken to exactly the same locations, where they interacted–unbeknownst to them–with exactly the same people, Party functionaries, all chosen by the Communist party, to feed these westerners a line of “happy talk,” a good impression of China, and the efforts of the CCP.

    Moreover, Leys said that western scholars studying China knew that this sham was taking place, as did reporters, but that they said nothing, because they knew that if they revealed this deception, they would loose their access to China, upon which their jobs and their academic careers depended.

    I wonder if today’s western tourists to China are given the same kind of Potemkin village treatment?

    If I remember correctly, at about this time there was also the case of a U.S. graduate student studying China who was married to a Chinese woman, and who drove into some of the rural provinces of China he was not supposed to enter, interviewed the locals, and found some very unflattering things about conditions there, which he revealed.

    In this case, the Chinese government protested, and put enough pressure on the university–I can’t find the story now, or which Ivy league? university it was–where this grad. student was finishing up his studies for his Ph.d, but his university buckled, and refused to let him graduate and get his PH.d, I believe on the BS basis that his actions were somehow contrary to good scholarship or something.

  23. Merry Christmas to all celebrating!

    I hope Americans at least won’t have to be guarded with machine guns like worshippers in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, or worry about terrorist attacks like the Cathedral in Cologne. Or will we? Pro-Hamas crowds have been interfering with Christmas shopping in several US cities.

    To add to the season, there were bomb threats at two synagogues in NYC today, while Jews in Israel fight for their existence.

    Maranatha!

  24. Speaking of tea…in clipper ship days, the captains were very eager to be the first to the US with cargo from the new tea crop. Is tea quality really that time-dependent, or was it just about being first to market?

  25. Blessed Christmas Y’all

    It’s Christmas morning in my part of the world & I hear a pretty fair shower of rain at the moment. It happens…all those new bicycles out there in the neighbourhood will have to wait a while for a test ride.

    Thanks again Boss…you give so much to so many.
    In so many ways a tougher than usual year…nonetheless… Hold on to that great announcement…
    “Don’t be afraid! I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David!” When I long for “peace on earth,” I look no further.

  26. David Foster–From what I understand, so far, you can prolong the life of tea by correct packaging and storage. and, of course, given good quality Pu’erh tea, in particular, it gets better with age, if stored under the proper conditions of light, heat, and humidity.

    How long other kinds of tea last I have no idea.

    Back in the back of one of our kitchen cabinets I discovered a large air tight container of relatively expensive Might Leaf brand loose leaf tea I bought several years ago on sale.

    Will try some tomorrow and report.

  27. It’s officially Christmas here, and I must go to bed so as not to risk collapsing the Santa Claus Wave Function (h/t Powerline).
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/12/IMG_1094.jpeg

    For our Literary Studies majors.https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-19-at-8.51.21%E2%80%AFAM-768×1144.png

    Bonus, because Peanuts is a Christmas tradition.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-19-at-9.00.17%E2%80%AFAM.png

    Merry Christmas to all, and God bless us every one!

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