mc203t

Never knew I was Confucian.

@eigenrobot The Avignon Papacy? Is Trump going to offer the Pope a seat at Mar-a-Lago? A cunning Sicilian plot indeed.

emperor and pope, guelph and ghibelline, everything old is new again

@dotcoug @SecretFire79 I like your idea.

@mc203t @SecretFire79 The movie starts with Joan's death but then follows her mother's journey to exonerate her daughter for over 25 years...every interview and evidence she collects is a flashback to Joan's life. It would be a great movie of perseverance, unwavering faith, and triumph. Let's do it!

She watched her daughter burn. Then she spent twenty-five years making sure it was the judges who would be remembered as criminals. Her name was Isabelle Romée, & she never stopped🇻🇦 On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. She was nineteen years old. The charge was heresy. The trial that condemned her had been conducted by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a man with political reasons to want her dead, before a court packed with his allies. Joan had asked repeatedly to appeal to the Pope. The request was denied. She was given no proper legal defense. The verdict was never in doubt. Isabelle Romée was a farmer's wife from a small village in Lorraine. She had taught her daughter to spin, to pray, to run a household. She had five children. When Joan began hearing voices as a teenager & announced she intended to lead the armies of France, Isabelle had tried to stop her, even arranging a marriage to keep her home. It did not work. Joan went anyway. What Isabelle thought as she watched events unfold over the following years is not fully recorded. What is recorded is what she did afterward. Joan's father, Jacques, is said to have died of grief in the months following the execution. Isabelle did not die of grief. She moved to Orléans in 1440, where the city granted her a pension in recognition of what her daughter had done in lifting the English siege eleven years earlier & she began working. Quietly at first, then with increasing urgency, she started gathering evidence. She collected statements from priests, neighbors, childhood friends, soldiers, & anyone who had known Joan or witnessed her trial. She traveled. She wrote letters. She petitioned Rome. The Church that had burned her daughter was the only institution with the authority to clear her name. Isabelle knew that & pursued it anyway. She petitioned Pope Nicholas V. When he did not act, she continued. When Pope Calixtus III took office, she petitioned again. This time, with the support of the chief inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, who had been building his own legal case for years, the wheels began to move. She was advised by powerful men not to proceed. One senior churchman told her in 1455 to abandon the claim. She ignored him. On November 7, 1455, Isabelle Romée traveled to Paris. She was somewhere between sixty-five & seventy years old. She walked into Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was packed with hundreds of people who had heard that a mother was attempting to plead a case for a daughter dead for twenty-four years. She walked up the aisle to where the papal commissioners were seated. She threw herself at their feet, held up the papal rescript granting the inquiry, wept, & then she delivered her speech. She had prepared it carefully. It began with the words she had lived with for two & a half decades: "I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock, whom I had furnished worthily with the sacraments of baptism & confirmation & had reared in the fear of God & respect for the tradition of the Church. She never thought, spoke, or did anything against the faith. Certain enemies had her arraigned in a religious trial. Despite her disclaimers & appeals, both tacit & expressed, & without any help given to her defense, she was put through a perfidious, violent, iniquitous, & sinful trial. The judges condemned her falsely, damnably, & criminally, & put her to death in a cruel manner by fire." She ended with four words: I demand her rehabilitation. The court was visibly moved. The accounts say that so many of those present joined aloud in the petition that it seemed one great cry for justice broke from the entire crowd. The trial that followed took months. More than a hundred witnesses were called.

@eigenrobot Lovecraft vibes

my daughter now distinguishes between "ladybugs" and "asian beetles," but she calls the latter "Ancient Beetles" and regards them with horror

@JoshPhillipsPhD Richard Adam's Watership Down is widely known but I also have soft spot for his work- The Plague Dogs.

The hashtag #BookRecommendation is on my trending page. What are some of your "lesser known" recommendations? So, let's goooooooooooooooooo!!! What you got? Post below ⬇️

@Aristos_Revenge 10 minutes after? Guess they didn't want to be beaten to the punch.

@SandyofCthulhu I read many years ago in the book below Falklanders at the time were not entitled to move to the UK. The British Nationality (Falkland Islands) Act 1983 was passed in response to the war granting full British citizenship to residents of the islands. Now at least they can move.

1) the Falklands were originally illegally seized from Argentina in 1833. BUT they have been British ever since. 2) throughout the 1960s and 70s, Argentina negotiated in good faith to trade ownership. They offered concessions, such as “Falklanders won’t have to serve in rhe army.” The British teams all recommended the transfer. Each UK government punted it to the next. Was Argentina right to invade? Of course not. The Falklanders’ opinion should be taken into account! Plus the major reason for the attack was because the junta was looking for distractions. But I can’t help but think that it would be cheapest for Argentina to pay each Falklander a million dollars (costing about 3.5 billion) to move away.

@SandyofCthulhu The "Hannibal Principle"

When I visited Alcatraz the park ranger told us that the number one rule at Alcatraz was if you were taken hostage by prisoners there would be absolutely zero negotiations for your release. The prisoners could not be allowed to derive any value from taking you. It made total sense, and since then every time I've seen hostage-taking in a movie I thought the authorities were morons for negotiating.

@Ethosrevival They took the kibbutzim seriously in Mandatory Palestine. Children were the responsibility of the community, lived in designated children's houses, seeing parents for two or three hours a day.

Reading communist writings offer a sobering reminder of just how different their worldview is. In this piece written for Komunistka, No. 2 (1920), it is made clear that they believed the family to be an outdated relationship and that children (necessary to create more labor) could just be passed off to collective responsibility. They asserted this arrangement to surpass that of traditional family units.

@RobertClark62 The Senate hasn't confirmed support for Trumps military strikes but by exercising no restraint they are tacitly endorsing his actions.

If true, this is operationally significant and, IMO, the correct moral stance for a nation that's both a democracy and subject to the rule of law. Both the B-1s and B-52s can rain 1000 lb and 2000 lb JDAMs & hit multiple aim points. And no, I'm not *rooting* for Iran; I just don't want to see America commit wanton war crimes. The British aren't stabbing us in the back; friends don't let friends drive drunk.

@shortseasonjon It's possible the Josephus may have know someone who witnessed or knew first hand those who presided over Jesus’s interrogation before his execution. x.com/Peter_Nimitz/s…

Josephus was a 1st-century Jewish historian who survived the Roman siege of Jerusalem — and he wasn’t trying to prove anything about the Bible. But what he recorded in 70 AD reads like the book of Revelation came to life. 🧵

@HomericFuturist Can't expand into Syria unless Turkey is humbled.

You’ll know it’s real when you start seeing movies portraying Turks in a negative light. They’ll be making Armenian genocide films, movies about the fall of Constantinople etc

@eigenrobot Proving the adage that "Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan"

do you understand anon

@CityBureaucrat I saw this elsewhere. Its claimed the Iroquois were a matriarchal society but that's true only in a very limited sense. When the Delawares later became unhappy with the treaty they told the Iroquois emissaries to go away or they would turn them into women.

I don't like book posting but I encountered this interesting passage in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers. Cooper relays a Delaware Indian folk tale about their subordinate relationship to the Iroqouis. The Iroqouis, so the story goes, used subterfuge to convince the Delaware into surrender without fighting and then referred to the Delaware as "women", because the new relationship transferred all martial rights and duties to the Iroquois.

@ill_Scholar Very early on the Catholic Church called non-christians gentiles and proclaimed the Church was Israel.

Jesus being a Jew, even until his death, means that his teachings (ultimately Christianity) are the unbroken manifestation of Old Testament Judaism Making Christians, in all but name, Jews This does not mean that Jesus was a Jew in the sense of modern Jews, but that Modern Christians are as much Jews in the ancient sense as Modern Jews are

@Peter_Nimitz Lets use Sortition (a lottery) to select the 5500 legislators. Limit individuals to single two year term. Populous populism to frustrate the deep state and self interested elites.

One of the reasons it would be worthwhile to expand the House to 5,500 members (1 for every 60,000 people, same ratio as in the early republic) is that it would make strengthen the electoral filtration mechanism while weakening the media & FBI filtration mechanisms.

@MillennialWoes The Catholic Church, is one of the most reactionary organizations on the planet, and it forces Bishops to retire at 75. Our entire leadership class should be retired at 75. Age limits & term limits

America has now had two presidents in a row who went gaga while in office. Some people believe Reagan did, too. Obama and Clinton were famously young, so avoided this fate. It really seems like a bad idea to have such old men in charge.

@AdinHaykin1 For 16-17 of the 30 centuries since the time of King David 3000 years ago , Christians, ethnically Jewish Christians, have out numbered Jews in the holy land. When the second temple was destroyed most Jews were already outsiders, living in Mesopotamia, North Africa or Cyprus.

Jesus was a Jew from Judea, The Palestinian Christians are Ghassanids from Yemen, the Hauran in Syria and Karak in Jordan Happy Easter.

@MichaelRosenYes For 16-17 of the 30 centuries since the time of King David 3000 years ago , Christians, ethnically Jewish Christians have out numbered Jews in the holy land.

Palestinian Christians pose one of Israel's greatest problems. If the basis of your state is that you're the sole inheritors of the land, claiming that Muslims are late arrivals, the Christians look dangerously like descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity 2000 yrs ago.

@ILoveToTalkFilm Great film

I lost my faith many years ago. I never feel closer to God than when I watch this moment in BEN-HUR. One of the greatest scenes ever filmed.