Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Dionysus’ Invasion of India

 From The Greek Reporter:

According to ancient myths, Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, invaded India long before Alexander the Great was born. Dionysus is an Ancient Greek god and also part of the Roman pantheon. He was known as Bacchus to the Romans and was connected with the Italian god of fertility and wine, Liber Pater. Interestingly, he is also associated with India and is often mentioned in references of classical antiquity. According to myth, Dionysus, the wine god, arrived in India and conquered the lands, founded cities, and established laws. (Read more.)

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Sunday, August 4, 2024

Trump vs Black Journalists, with Charlie Kirk, Deace, and Squires

 

What is Kamala like to work for? From American Wire News:

In the November 2019 op-ed titled “Another side to Kamala Harris,” McAteer tried to warn America about the darker side of Harris.

“Gregory had an eye-opening experience in Kamala Harris’ office that none of us expected. For his sake, the month could not pass quickly enough. Needless to say, he was delighted to work in Feinstein’s office for the rest of the summer,” he wrote, referring to the now-deceased Senator Dianne Feinstein. "Senator Harris vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity constantly in her berating of staff and others. The staff is in complete fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day,” McAteer alleged. He also wrote that as attorney general, Harris’s entire staff was instructed to stand each morning when she arrived at the office and say, “Good Morning General.”

McAteer added that his son was given “instructions to never address Harris nor look her in the eye as that privilege was only allowed to senior staff members.”

“I don’t know about you but this is not the workplace of someone who respects her staff. For a woman of color to have employees stand when she enters the room smacks of a bygone era that we, as Americans, deplore and find demeaning,” McAteer said in his op-ed.

Harris would later become a rising national star for Democrats who, after a cup of coffee in the Senate, ran for president but soon dropped out after it became apparent early on that nobody liked her. Despite having all but openly accused Joe Biden of being a racist during a 2019 debate, she was later tabbed as his running mate after the Democrat nominee was pressured by South Carolina kingfish Rep. James Clyburn to pick a black woman for the bottom half of his ticket. (Read more.)

 

Kamala Harris and Planned Parenthood. From A Sign of Hope:

Intact D & E is the most brutal form of partial-birth abortion – which is also banned by federal law after six months of gestation. It actually goes beyond partial birth abortion. In an intact D & E, the abortionist does not kill the baby while it is partially born, but uses the forceps to carefully remove the baby fully intact. This guarantees the freshness of the organs. De-Lin notes that the baby is not given feticidal chemicals to kill it before it is born in their clinics. (That, too, could diminish the value of the organs vivisected from it.) What you have is a living baby fully born. It can only die in one of three ways: 1) It dies from exposure and neglect; 2) Its spinal cord is cut; or 3) It dies when it is taken to procurement, where a technician begins cutting up the living baby.

There was a situation in depositions from the cases involved in the successful effort by then California Attorney General Kamala Harris and San Francisco Federal Judge William Orrick’s to cover up these videos through another permutation of lawfare. The technician being deposed explained that, yes, sometimes babies are born alive. When asked how they then die, she euphemistically said they are taken to procurement. Pressed for specifics on how they died, she started trembling and said they die when the technician cuts the heart out of their chest. That’s the reality here. 

I had to go talk with a Priest after this, for I was having trouble sleeping. The savagery of killing living, born babies and treating it as all in a day’s work got to me badly, even though I have long managed to compartmentalize the horrors of abortion. (You have to if you are going to be able to press on with this work.) I weep not only for the babies, but for the badly mutilated humanity of people who do this as a matter of course for their livelihoods.

This video is no different in quality to the videos that were not banned. What is different is the level of intensity and the revelation that PP is routinely violating federal law with impunity and raw savagery. An honorable society would recoil in horror – and then go to work putting Planned Parenthood and its affiliates out of business before sending many of them to prison for atrocities. But we live in an evil age. That is why this video – and others like it – had to be ruthlessly suppressed.

A couple of weeks after meeting privately with California PP officials, Kamala Harris sprang into action. On April 5, 2016, she ordered an armed raid of Daleiden’s home to seize all video and computers that might contain videos. As I recall, there were 11 armed agents, but my memory might be exaggerating. I know it was at least seven. Of course, Daleiden is no fool. He had copies offsite from his home. Those Democrats sure do love ordering armed raids on their ideological opponents, though! What Harris refused to do is ever investigate PP, despite the criminality the videos revealed. Why would she? She was planning to run for the Senate and wanted their help. Her successor in the Attorney General’s office held his victory party at PP headquarters when he won the office in his own right. That would be Xavier Becerra – now the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden-Harris administration. (Read more.)

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Wednesday, May 1, 2024

4 Sisters Kabob and Curry

 


From The Easton Gazette:

Now in Easton we are blessed to be able to taste the flavors of the Indian subcontinent in two places, The Bombay Tadka and more recently the 4 Sisters Kabob and Curry. 4 Sisters is a food truck with delicious traditional Pakistani and Indian cuisine, with the most fresh ingredients. I discovered it when my daughter won eight chickens, including three roosters, in a raffle. Since we wanted eggs that we could eat we had to look for homes for the roosters. I put "Free Roosters" messages all over Facebook and one of the ladies from the food truck responded, so we dropped them off there. I loved to see the words "American Dream" painted on the side of the truck. I had to know the story behind the family, and here it is:

The family’s story is one worthy of a novel and begins in Kashmir when owner and chief cook Shahida Perveen was a child, preparing food for her seven uncles. The family’s journey to the Eastern Shore began in 2001 when they left their native Kashmir, Pakistan to come to the United States. Like many immigrants seeking better opportunities, Shahida worked various jobs, including a 7-Eleven on Kent Island, while learning a new language and how to drive a car, and did some catering on the side. Ann created a contact list and every Thursday night they would text the menu for Friday pickup. Soon their list grew to over ninety customers and the family started looking for restaurant space in Easton but found nothing to suit their needs.

The women opened 4 Sisters Halal Meat & Groceries on Park Street in Easton selling spices and frozen foods. Realizing that most people couldn’t cook authentic Indian and Pakistani food, even with the seasonings, the daughters encouraged their mom to follow her passion of cooking her own food and started exploring the idea of a food truck affiliated with the store.

(Read more.)

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Monday, October 4, 2021

How Liberals Made the British Empire

 From UnHerd:

As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys, endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.

The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the African continent took place in three very different stages. In the first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers, paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.

It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.

By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where  abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.” (Read more.)


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Sunday, September 20, 2020

How Climate Change Led to the Fall of an Ancient Civilization

 The climate has been changing for millions of years, due to forces beyond human control. From SciTech Daily:

A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that tell us about past climates using indirect observations. For example, by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years. But as Malik notes, studying paleoclimate time series poses several problems that make it challenging to analyze them with mathematical tools typically used to understand climate.

“Usually the data we get when analyzing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it,” said Malik. “As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems. But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them.” (Read more.)

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Monday, September 7, 2020

The Embassy of Tipu Sultan at Versailles


 From Scroll.in:

Another established protocol was broken when Tipu’s gifts of cotton muslin robes and pearl and diamond jewellery were never exhibited because they were taken to be far below what was expected (by the contemporaneous European mind dwelling on abstract imagined notions of oriental luxury). There had been an expectation of gifts “worth millions” and it was feared that the reality will encourage “innumerable jokes in the foreign journals, particularly in the English press”. As importantly, no formal report was released elucidating the details of the king’s audience to the ambassadors and their negotiations. The embassy was, in the end, sent off with some of the artisans Tipu had requested, a few of whom would later help build the reputed Tipu’s tiger.

Elaborate portraits of the first two ambassadors were painted, however, thanks to Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842). Of them, the first still exists. She later reminisced, “In 1788, ambassadors were sent to Paris by Emperor Tippoo-Saëb. I saw these Indians at the Opera, and they seemed to me so extraordinarily picturesque that I wanted to paint their portraits. Having communicated my desire to their interpreter, I knew that they would never consent to be painted if the request did not come from the King, hence, I obtained this favour from His Majesty.” While the ambassadors were sailing back to Mysore, without the Franco-Mysorean alliance that Tipu had so desperately hoped for, their portraits were chosen to be exhibited at the prestigious 1789 Salon of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. (Read more.)
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Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Madame du Barry and Zamor

Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, seemed to be under the impression that Zamor was African when he was Indian. From Scroll.in:
The Comtesse du Barry herself wrote in her memoirs: “Initially, I took him to be a puppet or a plaything, but…I became passionate about my little page, besides, he was quick to perceive the ascendancy that he had gained over me, and, in the end… achieved an incredible degree of insolence and effrontery.” Zamor would have hardly agreed. After all, du Barry “brought and raised him merely for him to be made her toy; she allowed people to humiliate him at her home…he was incessantly ridiculed and insulted by the castle household”. Zamor’s effrontery, however, helped him when he chose to educate himself, especially in the ideas of the philosophers and more particularly those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. (Read more.)

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Thursday, July 16, 2020

Ancient Cross Found in Northern Pakistan

I doubt that it is a Buddhist symbol. From Ancient Origins:
Researchers have unearthed a massive ancient cross in a remote mountain area of northern Pakistan. The evidence suggests it is a Christian object from the Middle Ages , but there is also the possibility that it is a Buddhist symbol . It is believed that the cross comes from a time of great religious change in the region in and around what is now Pakistan.

The remarkable discovery was made by researchers from the University of Baltistan in the northeast of Pakistan. Prof. Dr Muhammad Naeem Khan and two of his colleagues were exploring the mountains of Skardu accompanied by local villagers when they made the discovery. They came across a massive ancient cross of similar form to that which has been a symbol of Christianity for centuries. But definitively ascertaining its origin and symbolism is not simple.

 The huge cross is carved out of marble and weighs between 3-4 tons (2,722-3,629 kg). It is 7 feet high (2.1 meters) and 6 feet (1.8 meters) in width. It was discovered about 1.12 miles (2 km) from the team’s base camp in a spectacular setting that overlooks the Indus River . The team leader is quoted by Herald Malaysia Online as stating that the cross seemed to have descended ‘directly from the heavens.’ The researchers were amazed by their discovery as there are no Christians in this part of Pakistan. Prof Khan is quoted by The Telegraph as saying that ‘villagers told researchers from the university they had always known about the cross, but had never bothered with it and left it where it was because it could not be moved.’ (Read more.)
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Saturday, November 23, 2019

"Irma"

From The Omaha World-Herald:
Irma is a short form of Germanic names starting with “ermen,” meaning “whole” or “all.” Emma was originally a Norman French form of the same name. Several medieval saints in England and Germany had “ermen” names. Sixth-century forest hermit St. Ermelinde (“whole-soft”) is venerated in Belgium. St. Irmgard (“whole-enclosure”) of Chiemsee (830-866) was a great-granddaughter of Charlemagne who became an abbess. St. Ermenburga (“whole-fortress”) was a Queen of Mercia in England who founded a nunnery.
Unlike Emma, Irma wasn’t used as a name in its own right until around 1700. Though this began in Germany, Irma’s first big success came in France. In 1799, French author Élisabeth Guénard published “Irma, or The Misfortunes of a Young Orphan.” Though in the novel Irma is a princess of India, she was obviously based on Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, beheaded in the Revolution six years before. The novel was wildly popular in France, going through 10 editions by 1816. Many girls were named after Guénard’s heroine. In the 1850 United States census, 136 of the 174 Irmas were born either in French-speaking Louisiana or France itself. (Read more.)
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Friday, August 30, 2019

A Good King of Gujarat

An article about the great maharajah who gave refuge to almost a thousand Polish children, many of whom had been orphaned, all of whom had been displaced by the Soviets. From Hindustan Times:
It is mid-afternoon in Jamnagar and a bus is taking a round of one of its squares. The archway of a once-magnificent fort is in sight. Beside it, shops selling juice, spices and visiting cards, inhale and exhale customers from and onto the street. Roman Gutowski, 83, a retired Polish civil engineer, pulls back the grey curtain on one of the bus windows, and peers out. Naturally, the Jamnagar he sees 71 years after he left it is not what he remembers of the place. His son, Tomek, a businessman, who has brought along the third-generation Gutowski, his son Maciej, is shooting with his camera to ensure that this time he does.

Photographs cannot stand on their own without memories. “I know about Jamnagar and Balachadi from my father’s stories,” says Tomek. “Maciej must see where his grandfather comes from. Had I just shown him pictures….” Roman Gutowski grew up alongside almost a thousand Polish children in a camp at Balachadi, 25 km off Jamnagar – the capital of the erstwhile princely state of Nawanagar in present-day Gujarat – in the British India of the ’40s. These were children of mainly Polish soldiers and they were trying to somehow survive the horrors of World War II.

The German occupation of Poland (September 1, 1939) led to the eventual extermination of six million Polish citizens. Lists were drawn up of teachers, clergymen, the intelligentsia and army officers for public execution; more than two million Jews died in concentration camps. (Read more.)

Via One Star Away. Share