tingilinde

concentration camps

This piece by Isaac Chatiner in The New Yorker.  If you don't read the full piece this paragraph is important:

 

Oh, I know what I wanted to tell you. This is important. So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.

 

Remember that Anne Frank didn't die in the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen. She died from sickness due to unsanitary conditions, specifically typhus — a disease spread by lice.

 

 

on kim jong un

An account from a new book on Kim Jong Un..  (via The Washington Post)

 

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

norwegian stave church

a tip of the hat to Jeri

 

coney island

It's had its ups and downs..  with the Summer season approaching The New York Times ran a piece with a lot of images.

 

 

 

clean air and a remarkable view

What more could you want?

 

on those in power who claim to have the truth

From Jakob Bronowski's Ascent of Man in 1973 .. 

 

where are the republicans who believe in the constitution?

Not in the House or Senate...

snip

...

When William S. Cohen, a young Republican House member from Maine, broke with his party over Watergate and joined Democrats in demanding the Nixon White House tapes in 1973, he figured his fledgling political career was dead.

“I had come to the conclusion based on all of the hate mail I had gotten, all of the flak I had gotten, that I wasn’t coming back,” recalled Mr. Cohen, who had been elected less than a year earlier. “I was O.K. with that.”

Mr. Cohen, of course, did come back — and he went on to a distinguished career in the House, three terms in the Senate and a stint in the Clinton administration as secretary of defense after disclosures contained in the tapes led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.

As he watches events unfold today in Washington, Mr. Cohen believes congressional Republicans are wrongly putting party first by steadfastly backing President Trump’s refusal to cooperate with Congress and trying to shut down further investigation into whether the president obstructed justice.

...

 

 

bollywood in the soviet union

An entertaining 99 Percent Invisible episode.  Note that a transcript and videos are on the site.

a reference is made to Elmar Hashimov's video van piece in The Atlantic.

 

 

 

those menacing medievalists

John V Fleming on a variety of things including the odd impact of medieval illiteracy.  His writing is always fun.

snip

...

One of the madder aspects of current political polemic is a free-for-all iconographic frenzy—a kind of Rorschach test in which the inkblots are linked by trip-wires to contemporary cultural anxieties—that fosters alarming interpretations of strange signs and symbols like Pepe the Frog or the circling of the index finger and thumb of the human hand. That some racist marchers in Charlottesville carried emblems similar to that on the shield of the Knights Templar, which actually says absolutely nothing about the opinions or methods of medieval historians, is cited in the Times’s bill of particulars. A fair amount of my own scholarly energy was spent in iconographic analysis. It ought not be a casual pastime.

One might recall another such episode of cultural illiteracy. Rudyard Kipling, who died in 1936, had in the 1880s, some years before the birth of Adolph Hitler, adopted as his personal icon of good luck an ancient Indo-European emblem popular with Indian Hindus, among many other groups. In medieval European heraldry the sign is called the croix gammée or cramponnée. We all know it as the swastika. Many early editions of Kipling’s works are decorated with this ornament. Kipling was fanatically “anti-Hun”. He practically moved heaven and earth to get his son into the Great War, in which he perished. In his last years his attitude toward Chancellor Hitler was no more friendly than that toward Kaiser Wilhelm had been. Nonetheless there is a fairly copious left-wing literature of the Thirties indicting Kipling for Nazism. The iconography of his good luck charm was said to confirm his imperialism and jingoism.

...

 

 

getting eight rafters from a single tree

Fixing an old church roof using old techniques.  A tip of the hat to Greg