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Posts Tagged ‘History’

Saturday Lecture Series: The Fall of Byzantium

by coldwarrior ( 96 Comments › )
Filed under Academia, Christianity, History, Islam, Judaism, Open thread, Religion, saturday lecture series at November 6th, 2010 - 8:30 am

Today we return to Prof Eugen Weber’s course, ‘The Western Tradition’.  Today he discusses: The Fall of Byzantium
Nearly a thousand years after Rome’s fall, Constantinople was conquered by the forces of Islam.

Please follow this link out to the video lecture.

Prof Webber also goes into the divide of the nature of Christ and the differences between Rome and Constantinople in the church and politics and the ex-communications of the late 11th century. The divisiveness between Rome and Constantinople prevented the Christian World from being united and allowed the easy expansion if islam. Infighting cost the West dearly.

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On The Eve of Samhain, Feralia & Hallowmas

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 271 Comments › )
Filed under Elections, Elections 2010, History, Humor, Open thread, Religion at October 30th, 2010 - 11:00 pm

Found some nice Halloween history trivia here:

Halloween, celebrated each year on October 31, is a mix of ancient Celtic practices, Catholic  and Roman religious rituals and European folk traditions that blended together over time to create the holiday we know today. Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity and life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. Halloween has long been thought of as a day when the dead can return to the earth, and ancient Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off these roaming ghosts. The Celtic holiday of Samhain, the Catholic Hallowmas period of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day and the Roman festival of Feralia all influenced the modern holiday of Halloween. In the 19th century, Halloween began to lose its religious connotation, becoming a more secular community-based children’s holiday.
…
But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday–with luck, by next Halloween!–be married.

In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night, she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.

Now before anyone accuses me of ignoring El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), that’s November 2nd. It’s especially appropriate for this election year, as that’s the day we’ll observe the passing of the politically dead from the world of governance into the hallowed realm of the private sector.

Guess which ska-leton above is a liberal.

And while everyone is pondering ancient Celtic/Roman/Catholic rituals, are you pondering what I’m pondering? I’m pondering an Overnight Open Thread.

Looks like we’re in for more massive dumocrap vote fraud attempts in the next week

by Bob in Breckenridge ( 179 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2010, Elections 2012, History, Liberal Fascism, Patriotism, Politics, Progressives at October 28th, 2010 - 11:30 am

We’re less than a week away from the mid-term elections, which will be the most important in decades, if we want to return America to its proper place, which is the most powerful nation on Earth, both economically and militarily.

And already numerous reports of vote fraud or “irregularities” are being reported, all over the country, and to no one’s surprise, all of them favoring the dumocraps.

Every time we read about voting irregularities, it ALWAYS favors the dumocraps. Every time. Michelle Malkin has a good column about Dumocrap vote fraud here.

Whether it’s people being paid or given a pack of cigarettes to vote, or people voting more than once, or SEIU union swine attempting to rig elections, or teachers’ unions giving gift cards and free food to people who vote for Harry Reid in Nevada, or uncounted ballots, almost all of them for the dumocrap candidate, miraculously being found in the strangest of places, or thousands of King County (which is Seattle and the surrounding area) “residents” registered to vote using non-residential addresses, such as police stations and even the county administration building, it’s always the dumocraps who are involved, and it always favors them. Always.

The only reason dumocrap Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington and Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota (and God only knows how many other dumocraps on the state and local level) are in office today is due to the dumocrap’s theft of these elections from the candidates who received the most votes, Republicans Dino Rossi and Norm Coleman, by demanding recount after recount, allowed by liberal judges and liberal election officials, until the results favored them.

Here’s something most of you probably didn’t know. Did you ever hear of “The Secretary of State Project”? Probably not.

In most states, it’s the Secretary of State who certifies elections, and decides if recounts are necessary.

Which brings us to that POS America-hating traitor George Soros-

-A Jew who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

-Who came close to single-handedly bringing down the British economy in 1992 by manipulating the currency markets that cost British taxpayers almost $9 billion (in U.S. dollars) back then and almost brought down the Royal Bank of England.

-Was convicted in France of insider trading after an attempted takeover of the French bank Societe Generale and fined a paltry 2.3 million Francs.

“The Secretary of State Project” is wholly funded by Soros with the goal of getting as many dumocraps elected Secretaries of State so that they can do the dirty work of NOT certifying close elections won by Republicans, and allowing numerous recounts until the Dumocrap wins.

Al Gore and his band of liberal ambulance-chasing commie lawyers, with help from Florida’s liberal supreme court, tried to steal the 2000 election from not only President Bush, but more importantly, from the American people, by getting as many GOP votes and military absentee ballots as possible thrown out on the flimsiest of technicalities. We all remember the hanging chads bullshit.

It took Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris to finally end Gore’s attempted “cherry-picking” of which counties’ votes would be recounted. Of course, Gore only wanted recounts in the dumocrapic counties.

I’m certain our racist Attorney General, Eric Holder, will not do anything to try to put a stop to this criminal activity. However, you can be certain he would if it was Republicans doing it.

I was in San Diego from December, 2000 to February, 2001, and we decided that we weren’t going to just sit by and let this happen by Gore without voicing our displeasure at this attempted theft, and that’s exactly what it was, a brazen attempt to steal the election from the majority of the American people.

We organized a protest and met at the San Diego County Courthouse on Broadway, and marched to the San Diego County Administration building on Pacific Highway, about two miles away.

Thousands of us showed up, as did all the local media, TV, radio, and print, and we got our point across, which was to warn the dumocraps that we weren’t going to take this attempted theft from these leftist crooks anymore without a fight.

This has got to be stopped, and I’ll do all I can to legally stop it, and I hope you will to. We can’t just sit back and let it happen again. If we do, they’ll keep doing it since they’ll think there will be no consequences to their illegal actions.

If all that’s not bad enough, I just came across this little nugget in the Washington Examiner: “Nevada voting machines automatically checking Harry Reid’s name; voting machine technicians are SEIU members”.

Yep, you read it right. In Nevada, there have been numerous complaints from people wanting to vote for Republican Sharron Angle that their ballots were “accidentally” marked as votes for Harry Reid!

Must be some kind of an innocent computer glitch, right? And it has nothing to do with the fact that the technicians who service these electronic voting machines are SEIU members, the same thug union that’s been at the forefront of vote fraud allegations across the USA for years and beat up a black republican in St. Louis in 2008 because he said he was voting for McCain. Nah, just a coincidence.

From President Reagan’s “It’s Morning Again in America” to Obungler’s “Mourning in America”

by Bob in Breckenridge ( 112 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Elections 2010, Elections 2012, History, Misery Index, Politics, Progressives at September 24th, 2010 - 8:30 am

Then…

And now…

H/T to Denny