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Onasander

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Everything posted by Onasander

  1. I have a theory..... either the site administrator is dead or homeless, and paid for the site a year in advance. I like to think Hobo. He's riding the rails, crazy dirty beard, howling against the hail to the sight of a untouched winter valley below the shaking railbridge, in a state of liberating, frenzied serendipity having cut his last bonds to this world. I copied and pasted the error message, and looked at the most recent examples of it. There is a degree of variability to it, but in general, it results in partial to full shutdowns of forums due to a unknown quota of messages being breached. Everyone resolves it by calling the database serves, listen to their gripping about it, then begging everyone to delete the messages. Then site resumes. I thought about sending this info to a mod, who could in theory tell the admin, but that PM is just outside of the scope of my willpower today. Instead, I take my turkey baster and bucket of hot soapy water, and will go tree to tree looking for hibernating squirrels. It has as good a chance of fixing this as any other. P.S. people..... quit emailing me, if it is a overload of the PM quota, we are just making worst. Short of finding the Admins house and clicking stuff on his computer, I can't do squat. Talk to the admin or mods. I'm just some guy. Cynics can answer many of lives hard questions most are incapable of tackling, but database errors are not a natural strong point of ours. Seems simple enough, but I can't do squat about it anymore than you.
  2. http://www.wbur.org/npr/168010065/dig-finds-evidence-of-pre-jesus-bethlehem Okay, so we may have gotten the birthplace of Jesus wrong.... as in the wrong Bethlehem. Opps.
  3. Global Warming is at it again..... The best ritual the practitioners of Scientism have developed to keep solar winds from messing with our cell phone towers is for everyone to recycle. I think, in order to repair global warming damage to the forum, is to develop a new responsive ritual ourselves. I suggest, we ask ourselves why the software of the site is still otherwise functioning, such as private messages, and blog entries, and ask ourselves at a software level what the real difference between posting in these are from the forum. It doesn't look like much. Furthermore, the forum seems to of retained its memory, so it's not a memory corruption. It's the capacity of the website to direct us to individual threads. Now.... the pragmatic rational thing would be to rename the directories in the forums. Or at least add a new section that functions while the rest frets. However, that makes too much sense. I recommend, we use narrow minded group think and floppy rationalization and encourage everyone to douche female squirrels to make the global warming forum glitch go away, and tell anyone who is skeptical of capturing wild squirrels and douching them are uneducated, superstitious riftraft. We can compare them to the Heavens Gate cult, evolution deniers, or the Welsh. If we ostracize enough of these skeptics, these pragmatic seekers of the truth, maybe the internet directory will become pleased, and fix itself as a goodwill measure...... maybe? Or we can just fix the directory. Hey look..... I just posted this. Means it's possible to fix it..... the fundamentals of the website isn't broke, just the index links.
  4. A treat and bribe.... I can accept that. I never was big on pompeii gluttony, I know the satyricon was a farce, but there is archeology to support the ideas of culture represented in the text could occur there well within reason. None the less, I think the need for it was much less than other parts of italy. Just not that crucial live or die need for meats provided. How large could the non-slave lower classes be? Its like Marin County, California.
  5. Why would I consider the romans waffles? They admittedly did some stupid stuff both you and I could equally recoil from as ignorant and superstitious. We had that age of reason in the middle ages that viewed such practices critically. I am discussing Irena Metzler's medieval history of disabilities with a friend, her blog here, father down, examines some of what we thought were medieval prejudices and superstitions were actually later inventions of what we assume to be a more enlightened age. Rome would be a disgusting, revolting quagmire if it wasnt for the scrubbing and sterilization the middle ages gave to the romans in their idealization. No matter how good our archeology is, how strict we hold to primary sources, we in the end must acknowledge we have to see Rome through a prism of a few different eras and civilizations. Its part of our view, its the only way we know how to see them. You can reject rome Caldrail, dismiss them as waffles and jump in the sea and let your air out, but it doesnt change history or human nature. We are a very superstitious lot, indeed, but the romans did reason too. Cant really say we inherited everything either, that we are a culture Romans would recognize as their legitimate heirs. We like to say the US is the new Rome, but can we say Rome was the USA of its time and keep a straight face? Alot of stuff happened between the fall of Rome and modern times. You claim to of read the new Dune Books. What mythical creature did Baron Harkonnen keep a statue of in the cabinet of the restored Atreides Castle where Ominous and Erasmus kept them? He kept the best marker of time.... a chimera. A sphinx... no matter how perfectly preserved and authentic a preservation, it lost its vitality and purpose. It ceased being what it once was..... the fortifications of a military house of a feudal empire, and at best could hope to be now a symbol to a simularcum daydream of a society that has nothing to do with an older era they no longer really relate to. Nothing quite look the same, details were off. Baron took humor in this, and accepted the absurdity exactly for what it was. We dont study rome here, we study a sphinx. Dont ever forget that. One stacked like a russian doll one in another. The belief we can do otherwise is childish pretend. A pretend to holding to a truth, when its just holding to one of the cultures of thought that seperate us further. But the scraps and misconceptions are worth exploring. And you do realize that psuedo-intellectual bunk I used was Roman era reasoning, right? I have a preference to using philosophies that fit the thinkers of the era I focus on. Had this been a Chinese History forum, I would of used Taoist, Legalists, Mohists and Confucian reasoning..... you just attacked roman skepticism and reasoning the best we preserved it, thinking it was just me.
  6. How many animals were slained in Pompeii arena to feed the poor? The place was practically a resort town. I know they found evidence of gladiators there, but really, how big could the poor population be there? And were the poor 'really poor'? Seems like its perfect terrain for year round foraging expeditions by the ladies. Not discounting the idea, just putting the norm under special clarification given location and low population in relation to wealth and foraging capacity of the outlying lands. Seems the one spot to me to go if you were skin and bones, you could fatten up quick off the land without begging.
  7. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25633629 And instead the US is rushing toys for mech infantry in..... The UAVs are infantry toys..... to support their operations, but arent exactly that useful for city warfare.... you can hear them putter around in the air and shoot at them. Better than nothing. Think they are contemplating some deep scouting ops in the countryside.
  8. I never discount pedagogy, I mock it in its fraternal mandated forms (such as you must go to college to become a writer or politician) but I take a lot of effort to study it. Most of the superstitions I attack are academic superstitions. Why? Because they (the professors) should be self aware and know better. However, everyone is prone to this. I struggle with it in my daily life. The best approach to rational thinking is to be aware that the meanings attached to intuitive understanding has a root impulse/impulses covered up by a lot of learned response. Our feral nature is full of learned superstition, but also accepts alot of raw data for what it is.... something strange, something scary, something beautiful. Once we get in the habit of knowing in a glance, of laughing at someone's conclusion, we've become superstitious. Doesn't mean science can't be productive under such circumstance, it doesn't have much choice if fact..... the scientific method is impossible without it, just we should be more aware. The anatomy of every fact is operational. A thing is its operator and operand. It can be both static and dynamic, far and near, big or small. Facts cover by default more than we consider. It's why relying too much on statistics can fuck you in the end. I study them Nome the less. Because I like facts.... they interact and flank our best conclusions, leaving us knowing nothing in the end. In the end, we are just a superstitious lot. We proclaim ideologies and grand thinking, but despite our better beliefs of ourselves, really don't do it. We do something else.... a lot of bad habits, very human habits, and then afterwards refer to the better visualization of selfhood and good traditions, part ourselves on the back and hope no one notices the defects too much. Those defects are larger than we can imagine, and they build up like a cancer in larger groups. Do you know the most beautiful thing in this world? The office gagglefuck. Everyone is attracted to it, and they all slink towards it, mooing as they go to get a look. The office cuties always manage to find her way from the outside to the center of it, instinctively competing for the attention..... the boss comes walking out..... sees what is going on (but doesn't see it the same way) and yells "What the Fuck is going on here"...... indeed. That fact everyone was focusing on..... a part of its Anatomy was the Fuck Phenomena. You try getting a rational explanation out of everyone as to what they were doing. Everyone knew what they were doing, in reference to everyone else. They all have a rational explanation as to what happened, why they acted as they did... makes sense to them, but all the parts put together doesn't equal the whole of the explanation..... what is gagglefuck? What triggers that social behavior over any other? So much of our acts are instinct based on superstition. There usually isn't a grownup around to tell us we are active very strange, or doing strange things. Impulse after impulse fitting into acceptable behavior, acceptable conclusions, acceptable culture, acceptable self. How do you think a Theodorian, or a Cynic, or a Pyrrhonist would react to a definition of what science is, or education, and then let loose in CERN Labs or Harvard University? How quickly would their penetrating eyes focus in on the lies and absurdities we blanket ourselves with? How many lead scientists and professors would be shown to be hypocritical idiots doing the exact opposite of what they preach? In the end, we are all human. I mock the academics, but it's for their benefit. If I thought nothing of them, I wouldn't bother. It's a human enterprise, and as I am human, it's worthwhile to investigate our highest valued endeavors. I'm currently even working in collaboration with a assistant professor (tenure farming unfortunately, but she's starting to see the scope of her own ideas). Just we gotta stop and pause sometimes and question ourselves and our assumptions. We have to admit our biases. Doesn't mean get rid of them, but facts are expansive. Sometimes they contradict otherwise very good ideas we can't do without sincerely. But I note them and throw them on the table when I feel the contradiction, or if it seems a wrong bias to have with someone is a discussion. Example, when I told Gilius I was indeed a Catholic. That was my bias, but I never the less pressed him to, encouraged him and recommended a few methods to better assert his ideas competently. We should seek to do this more. With more aspects of ourselves, from introspective inquiry as to who we are, and comparing it to society. You'll find hugh gaps in our knowledge and actions once you do so. We live in the most superstitious age in history. Does it differ from other ages? Hopefully..... I certainly hope so, if not it's all been a farce for nothing, but I don't think we ever quite escape the old orders, however clever we stamp them out. The gap is left in the dialectic, and nature abhors such a vacuum. It gets sucked back in. You mentioned horoscopes..... it was Carl Jung who noted the age of Horoscopes wasn't the ancient past, but today. They have never been so well read and explored by the average individual. In the medieval era, only once in a while would someone's horoscope be made up, it was a rarity. Now it happens all the time. Why? A prelude to the gagglefuck, the most irrational yet beautiful thing in the universe. We just can't get enough. Now excuse me, Global Warming just got frostbite, I gotta treat and bandage it's wound.... don't want it to die. Stuff to do..... Stuff to do....
  9. http://www.tehrantimes.com/politics/113231-iran-ready-to-provide-military-aid-to-iraq-to-deal-with-terrorists- Even iran is noting what I noted..... I dont give this war in Syria much long term hope, the fall of Falluja was the best thing to happen for the Syrian government.
  10. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/05/22187316-only-getting-colder-blast-of-frigid-air-set-to-smash-records?lite Global Warming is at it again! Yes, clearly something else we can wisecrack and refute. I even found a site in Swedish talking about it. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article18124326.ab It just seems colder when seen in swedish. I think we should send a caravan of Global Warming Zealots to the cold front and sacrifice some aluminum cans and a Burkin in sacrifice, and tell the cold front the US is now a socialist country, and to go away back to Canada. We can conduct a abortion infront of it to prove our sincerity. If that doesnt work, we can set up a second line of defence where old hippies professors can sit, pointing threateningly at the storm, telling it back down, because they denounced the government back when they were students, andgot teargased, and we can have angry feminists shouting they are now the majority of the work force, the primary bread winners, but also paid less and not hired in preference to males..... these two forces can be reinforced by Jesse Jackson who can lead a protest march against the cold, accusing the cold of being a racist bigamist, and he can have greenpeace accuse the cold of killing the dolphins in its ice cicle nets. If that doesnt work..... we can use the nuclear option..... Chris Mathews can just start screaming non stop at the cold, telling it that it is secretly using warm coldwords, and has a hidden warm agenda, and Nancy Pelosi can ban cold fronts because they are fattening fir the diet. If that doesnt work, we'll have to fall back to guys like Virgil to refute the existence of the cold as it smothers us, and do a South Park Terrance and Phillips act, thoughly disproving it was ever cold to begin with. Im rubbing motor oil under the windows..... I hear its bad for the enviroment, so it might keep the global warming freeze over from targeting my house. Kinda like the blood over the door at passover.... Global Warming, Please dont hurt me. I am not brain washed. I dont believe in political parties, and am thoroughly disgusted by both sides propaganda. I know the icecaps havent melted. I know the oldfarts over 35 years old claiming magic has occured by some very low level athmospheric carbon emissions are full of hubris, among otherthings, and know you are freezing us at record temperatures to prove a pount. Just dont target me. Yes, the left is incredibly stupid and infantile, and the right is not that much smarter. They are so stupid they blame each other for your actions. The next logical step, after we just admit we are bullshiting ourselves with fake science and tangential political deadlock is to apply our skills weve used on each other against you, O mighty Global Warming Cold Front. Yes, its true, you lack sentience, and its pountless to talk to you, but its even more pointless how we talk and debate and counterattack each other. It actually makes more sence to pretebd yoy not only exist, but you can hear us. That you can comprehend our ludricious, incomprehensible hysteria as we all run about, whipping ourselves into a frenzy, swearing up and down you exist, zealotly attacking the skeptics as idiots. Only you, Global Warming, knows the truth. Which is ironic, as you dont exist. Its some crap people made up, and it resulted in a political monopoly. Science is founded on half skepticism, and half on verifiable methods. Not karma, cultural or ideological correctness, a priori statistics, or liberalism or progressive attitudes. The methods failed. Icecaps didnt melt. They were supposed to be gone. Gone. GONE! Instead, we have record breaking cold weather. What the hell are you bullshitting yourself for? Is this some sort of sporting game, your side still has a chance to kick the game winning goal in the last second? Your fooling yourself. You lost the game.... proof is all around. The world has frozen over. The world doesnt care about your carbon, or your carbon taxes, your recycling or your waste. The world is way to big to notice. Massively huge, and you are really small. Inconsequential. Even all of us put together..... very small compared to the sun lighting up the athmosphere and oceans iver the south pacific every morning. A shoe factory cant compete against that expanse, not even all them put together. Refute it all you want, nature shall refute you in return. Its cold outside. If you have a viable plan to make global warming actually happen, tell me. It has to be something real though, not this fake stuff every con artist looking to fear monger their way into political office has used. I want to make it summer year round.
  11. University of Cincinnati? Italy actually lets people from Cincinnati dig in Pompeii of all places? I Dunno about this.
  12. I looked over the rules for identifying a noun in the singular, the M O S T rule. It came back the instant I saw it. Weird, I spent all that time in Iraq trying to memorize those charts..... was completely defeated by it, then it pops back in quickly. Middle English has alot of Latin words in it, but it respects word order for the most part, I can translate it with little difficulty. I can sorta do it with old English, I found some books in the San Francisco Library and did part of a poem.... but lost interest in it. Wasn't a whole lot of material there. I found with middle english and early modern English, if you just sound it out, words tend to pop up that you recognize. I saw a documentary of a guy speaking old English...... I have zero chance of ever pronouncing that. Latin for dummies has words phonetically spelled out so I can learn somewhat to pronounce it. I've always been very nervous saying Latin and French words in philosophy debates..... I might know the concept better than anyone, but it's from silent book reading..... I can get it very, very wrong to say it out loud. Take Bastogne for example..... silent G...... who the hell makes a silent G? It should be Bastone. Or Foucault..... it should be Fouco. I don't think the French ever learned how to speak proper English, despite being little more than a break away province of England from the hundred years war. They should just give up on speaking French and speak English like real people do if they want to pretend to be educated. There is no reason for all this silliness.
  13. I had a Ukrainian girlfriend for years, my English got worst from it. Too much of me sitting on a mountain side hearing 'Aloot, Alllloooooottt' coming from each direction while they berry picked, wishing I had brought a snickers.
  14. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/1914-again-Todays-world-bears-number-of-striking-similarities-with-the-build-up-to-World-War-I/articleshow/28443262.cms This article was made on the basis of assuming history repeats itself, modeled off WW2. I honestly doubt you can compare it, the Sunni insurgency just stuck against itself a fatal blow by taking Falluja. What the idiots didnt consider is that while the city is indeed fortified, its not fortified to keep people out, but rather, to keep people in while a modern mech infantry army retakes it by sections. The Iraqi government still holds the walls, and even if they loose them, can easily retake them. Now, Iraq has a excuse to penetrate into Syria whenever it feels like it to knock out Sunni Strongholds as foreign rebel encampments threatening their sovereignty. Before, all they had to worry about was a russian weaponize Syrian Army, that had limited movement, now they have a Shiite Iraqi Army American equipped popping up on occasion in their rear. Bad strategy you stupid idiots. The republic of Georgia and Turkey can pretty much guarantee no large troop move movements out of Iran, so it will just be small infantry groups riding on pickup trucks as usual. I dont see a big obvious tinderbox here, the region is set up for attrition, not tinderboxes. If anything, iys been too perfectly balanced for the last 1000 years. China has been taking massive amounts of territory in Indias north. They learned ways to get away with it by intimidation without firing a shot, and so applied its indian strategy to the japanese-philippine front. It hasnt been working, and Ironically, the country of india has the final card to play ending this by forcing a embargo of chinese goods skirting its waters to africa and europe. US wont, but India eventually will. Besides, this is mostly fought over energy rights. We just learned to double the energy abdorbed by solar cells last year..... I dont see the fossil fuel mania lasting 20 years.
  15. Dropped a Hobo off in Pittsburg last night, stopped by half price books on the way back, got Latin for Dummies for 6 bucks. Im looking over chapter 15, "Translating and Reading Latin..... it said to look for the verb first, but the verb could be anywhere..... How true is this? Can a latin sentence be completely jumbled? They would have to read the whole sentence to understand what is being said. My method was just to translate everything word by word, with examples of use, and also define any root's original meaning stripped of all its clauses, then stare at the mess for hours on the verge of crying, juxtapositioning everything till it makes sense. If it ever makes sense. Or I avoid it, and just work on doing research on parts I sorta understand. Its become nasty, entrenched, inhumane, demoralizing push after push into the text. I know know to look for the verb first. Unless the dictionary tells me it is a verb, I wont know it. Something to do with the prefix or suffix..... dunno. Sharpening my bayonet for another pointless, brutal trust out of my trench into the latin no mans land in the middle tonight.....
  16. The rate of superstition between the ancients and moderns are at the very least equal to, if not greater for in modern times. There is a cognitive constancy for humans as there are for starfish who live at a much slower speed. The way we process the imput data relies less on on our education and more on hardwire personality features. Tribal groups show a cognitive preference over a big city which knows how to balance a larger assortment of types. Korea favors the left frontal lobes, the US Army infantry the inverse. Doesnt change the constancy though, just the processing preference. Our superstitions are judgments. Thats it at root. I can seperate them further, but we will keep returning to the judgmental root. We havent become any more perceptive individually, but the range of judgments on matters has increased. We exist in the most superstitious era of world history..... its so bad we attack skepticism in science these days..... we do absurd acts, crazy things to ourselves. That is education too.
  17. No, its hardly talked out, just I havent tried to push it hard here. Not much point on a history forum. They forced fed me "Weekly Readers" in elementary school. Do you know what they put in that crap in the 90s? Constant stories of global warming and dinosaurs with green house gases, and global warming...... and how we were the future and could change things. Im 30. Thats a entire generation forcefed. We actually tricked people into dismissing what their own senses and common sense tells them. I dont care about the culture wars or foxnews vs nbcnews or cnn. I check out over a dozen international newsites, regularly. On this forum, it appears its foxnews, but thats only because they put more archeological news out. The quality of CNN has collapsed into oblivion..... earlier today they claimed the prime minister of india resigned..... I could of told them that was not the case, just check a indian website. I can find half the time more reliable science stories from Pravda or the Iranian Press TV than in American news. Needless to say..... tonight is very, very cold. We just drove a stranded homeless guy to Pittsburgh from here so he wouldnt freeze to death tonight. And yes, ice always forms rapidly around antartica. That was the purpose of that antartic research vessel, to see how things change over the last 100 years since the last explorer got trapped for a year along the same route, by similar conditions. Surprise surprise. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/12/05/global-warming-alarmist-trashes-his-own-poll-of-meteorologists-showing-no-climate-crisis/ Half of meteorologists dont accept global warming. Im not too thrilled about projections of another iceage either. Since global warming has been proved by the weather beyond a reasonable doubt to be wrong, a knee jerk reaction to assert a pragmatic opposite needs to be avoided. A reexamination of what science is needs to occur, and this culture of brain washing and fear mongering needs to stop. No more voodoo global warming witch doctors, just keep quiet and collect data. We need a few centuries worth of reliable global data, not a dozen decades. Science, not armageddon styled mystical science that evades the senses and experiences of weather the common man carries.
  18. It definitely existed before the 15th century, besides the many quotes it has in other works, the text that Ive been working on quotes it too..... and it has never been translated into a modern language.... seems rather absurd lengths to take to falsify a text. Um..... yeah, Nazis then and now are a severe pain in the butt, I have had my hands full with two of them on online philosophy forums for the last 5 years. The American Nazis Party did a sneaky 180 and went underground as a spiritualist movement, its damn near impossible to detect them from your average Nietzschean Enthusiast. They go out of their way to disavow stormfront and other obnoxious symbolism. I dont like it, think the movie Inglorious Bastards got the way to treat a Nazis right. KKK is now trying to relabel itself as a institution like the ACLU. Whatever. I destroyed all the copies of Nizam al Mulk in San Francisco I came across..... its about thr most racist text Ive ever came across..... a work of statecraft at that. These things..... I like history, like to preserve it, but certain texts I just dont like certain unbalanced groups reading. I dont know what that makes me. A hipocrit against my own idesls at times. I just really hate Nazis. It bothers me how National Socialism succeeded today in so many parts of the world, and Europe. What was the point of WW2? What, the EU dominated by Germany leads it instead of a dictator of a Reich? Same thing in the end. Hiding a manuscript readily available in print to screw over hitler is a very minor victory.... if even that. Would of been but a token representing a ideal the germans were trumpeting with or without the original manuscript. I doubt this manuscript could of reversed to poor archaeological findings of the Nazi expedition. They pretty much killed off Hitlers historic master race theory on their own without outside help. So..... manuscript stayed out of hitlers hands, but national socialism is the economic theory of Europe, in its post WW2 pacifist form, the Nazis theology taught by Heiddegar reigns supreme there... why should I care?
  19. We didnt forget the early floods and storms of the last century, fast food joints like KFC and Pizza Hut, when they remodel, contact local historical societies for old pics of the town. We have the old blizzards, but not very many of the flood, it literally came down as a freak titlewave, killed most people up creek, a person had the soundness of mind to call warning us here. 104 years ago. No time to whip out the camera. During the 1920s they were just starting to chart weather patterns modelled off of military patterning. I believe it was norway who started this approach. I dont think they were struggling to intergrate Pythagorean concepts of peras and apeiron into a odd/even complex, so they could figure out what the statistical geometry of collision and contact (via cellular autonamata) between the scalar field of the solar winds and the relatively static upper athmospher. You would have to do this it map the particle interaction.... particles that could be both wave or particle at any geometrical point of contact. Add to this the difficulties in relativity of size paradox, I severly doubt they were thinking that. Their greatest math problem back then was proving one (the number one) existed..... which it doesnt. Concept of a 'thing' provides the basis of a fact, but not its dialectic truth value. Empericism requires advance abstraction. I can guarantee you, despite having a more advanced form of mathematics in their era than ours better suited to this task, they understood it less than we know the crap we juggle now. Its precisely because we know of the absurd paradoxes in our current system we can do so much more with them. We force them to work in nuance ways. Within a few short years of the 1920s, they chucked their system aside for Einstein. Its because they could only see the faults in the old system, dand the advantages in the new. Very few paused to examine the reverse. We never do in modern scientific revolutions. Its not part of our epistemological theory. For this reason, I hold in severe suspect any fact or idea presented in ironclad proofs. Even suggestions to ideas tend to be quite shallow.... a little investigation can usually show they had no clue how to go about making the ideas work. Im in the market for solutions. Not just ideas. The romans invented science fiction...... space travel and wars with alien races. They hadnt the slighest clue how to get up there though. Should I subscribe to them the idea of space travel, if they didnt even know what space was?
  20. It's really easy to hunt birds and small game to extinction on a island. Ships and migratory routes are a boon, but none the less, I don't see the long term success of such a hunting style maintaining the population, and pelting one another as a means to warfare seems doomed to failure unless it was highly ritualized to a degree of absurdity. I want you to try to image two Slinger units trying to hash out a fued..... how long would any sort of formation last before either side just disperses to take cover, flank and ambush a equally nebulous enemy? This is light infantry who's main skill is projectile fighting, sword and shield would be secondary. It seems obvious to me this was a export trade. In order to have it, it would be mass communal training, not necessarily regimented, but a wide spread popular pastime. Hard to loose a skillbase like that, easy to maintain it. A island culture can identify with such things.
  21. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25572503 Ive kept quiet on this for the last week, but compulsion is driving me to break my silence.... A crew of global warming tourists and scientists, eager to see the southern ice sheets around antartica melting away, got frozen in place by a rapidly expanding SUMMER ice sheet forming around them. Three ice breakers have tried and failed to reach them. Yeah...... its pretty funny. Goodnews is, there are scientists on scene who were in position to record every minute of this. Bad news, they are likely explaining to the tourists how global warming made the summer ocean freeze over!
  22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bocchoris_(City) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakenranef I came across this coincidence just now. I recall seeing a reference a while back that Egypt used mercenaries from Sardinia (90% certain Sardinia, might of been Corsica) This is right smack in the middle of Carnage and Rome's territorial squabbles. I never knew why Slingers from the Baleric Islands were so prized....it's a island, they should be fishermen..... how many rabbits and birds can you get before they die off, right? Now I think it makes more sense. Egypt had gold reserves, but a limited amount of land to maintain a hereditary army caste on. Factor in shuffles between dynasties and questionable loyalty, and threats from outside the country, and you have a need to recruit over and beyond your base of local support to prevent coups and better your odds in borders wars. I still can't say why 'Slingers'.... but if everyone was uniformly trained, and lived on the same Islands.... it's exceptionally hard to loose that background. It's similar to American Samoa.... it was never conquered by the US, but was denied by the US to the Germans during colonial times, and like most islands, garrisoned by the US. The islanders learned American combat fighting, never lost that skill. They've stayed in the US ever since as a legal wobbly improbability somewhere between a territory and full independence (it's impolite to ask just what the status is, as it causes head scratching all around). They also learned football, and have the highest statistical probability of any population of becoming a professional football player. Its a small island, so expert knowledge tends to be retained and taught at a young age. I'm guessing Slingers in the Baleric Islands parallel. While it makes no more sense for a Samoan to need to play football as a Balerian to hit things with pebbles, the capacity to retain elite knowledge in the population is high. Plus, American Samoa receives a boatload of money from the US from us buying fisheries and preceded immigration and naturalization status. The name of this city in the Baleric could parallel something similar. Or I can be very wrong. Probably the latter.
  23. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/12/31/ancient-textile-may-contain-lost-biblical-dye/?intcmp=features There goes the theory they were grounding up Smurfs.
  24. No, we are not the odd man out, we are the first to come to our senses.
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