Sunday Reads: Divinely Inspired 

Good afternoon…

I may have used Divine as a theme in my previous blog post pictures, but I thought we all needed some “Divine Inspiration” lately so…what the hell.

I don’t know about you, but I have felt that it is been impossible for me to look and read the news. I find that staying in bed with the covers over my head suits me just fine.  Even now the thought of looking up links for you is just too much for me this morning.

So, being as it is no longer, the morning…I am just going to give you a bunch of various stories and other crap to look at the rest of your day whenever you have a chance.

Yes, it is going to be a link dump with the keyword being dump, as fitting as that would be considering Divine is our focus on the images for today’s post.

And away we go……

Nevada lawmaker posts Christmas card showing family armed with guns | TheHill

Michele Fiore / Facebook

A Republican assemblywoman in Nevada this week shared her 2015 Christmas card on Facebook — which shows family members outfitted with a gun, including her young grandson.

“It’s up to Americans to protect America,” Michele Fiore wrote on her Facebook page Monday. “We’re just your ordinary American family.”

Ugh…Ordinary?

Media Storms Apartment Of San Bernardino Shooting Suspects, An ‘Active Crime Scene’ | ThinkProgress

The bizarre turn of events raises a number of legal and ethical issues for the media and the landlord.

If, as the sheriff’s department says, the apartment is still an active crime scene, the reporters rummaging through apartment could be tampering or compromising evidence. Although the main suspects have died, evidence in the apartment could potentially implicate others.

There is also the ethical question of showing the personal effects of a child and personally identifying information like passports, drivers licenses, and social security cards. Particularly amid a recent surge in harassment, threats, and violence against Muslim Americans, some media outlets have been criticized for broadcasting what is apparently the driver’s license of the suspected shooter’s mother.

[…]

There is also the question of whether the landlord had the authority to let reporters into the apartment. California law only allows the landlord to enter the apartment under very limited circumstances. The tenants in this case are deceased, so it’s unclear if those limitations apply. According to CNN, the landlord was escorted from the scene by law enforcement…

An NBC reporter claimed Inside Edition paid the landlord $1,000 to get access to the apartment first.

Pandemonium as media mob ransacks shooters’ home on live TV without FBI permission

And to counter that….

Muslims mock media frenzy in San Bernardino with snarky tweets

Cats, Christmas trees, Chicago Bears jerseys: just a few of the items in Muslims Americans’ apartments.

Within hours of the live broadcast that showed dozens of reporters from MSNBC, CNN and other outlets rifling through belongings in the apartment where San Bernardino shooting suspects Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik lived, zeroing in on so-called Muslim items in the home, Muslim Americans took to Twitter in response Friday.

In an attempt to call out the media’s Islamaphobia—with a heavy dose of sarcasm— people tweeted photos of their #MuslimApartments, which included items such as “sinister books,” “seasonings of mass destruction,” and “Disney-inspired infidel characters.”

Just a few of those…now on to other crap things of interest.

In Translation – The New Yorker

relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.

I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.

I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language.

In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to write it, or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I’ve always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

As for Italian, the exile has a different aspect. Almost as soon as we met, Italian and I were separated. My yearning seems foolish. And yet I feel it.

A bit out of the park for you there…

Before we get back to the serious stuff:

Breaking: Female Suspect in San Bernardino Shooting Reportedly Pledged Allegiance to ISIS | Mother Jones

Nation Confronts a New Menace After San Bernardino Shooting – WSJ

Another Black Man Told Police ‘I Can’t Breathe.’ One Replied ‘Who Gives A F**k?’

Interactive – Enemy of Enemies: The Rise of ISIL

Ghost Boats Mystery Grips Japan | Al Jazeera America

‘Self-Radicalized,’ ‘Terrorism,’ ‘Lone Wolf’: What do these terms mean & should we use them? | Informed Comment

Critics denounce ‘Muslim’ label on California shooters – Al Jazeera English

A Former Planned Parenthood Employee Tweeted This List of “Acts of Terrorism” She Survived

Syrian refugees arrive in Georgia, despite Gov. Deal’s opposition | www.myajc.com

Another Syrian refugee family has arrived in the Atlanta area, becoming the first to relocate to Georgia from their war-torn nationsince Gov. Nathan Deal joined more than two dozen of his counterparts in vowing to halt their resettlement.

Mohammad, Ebtesam and their four-year-old son’s arrival in Georgia highlights how, despite the political rhetoric, states are powerless to stop that resettlement process, which is overseen by the federal government. And Deal — who has cited security concerns in the wake of last month’s Paris attacks — indicated he wasn’t even aware the family had arrived in Georgia.

Their arrival also raises the possibility of a legal showdown. The Deal administration has ordered state employees not to process applications for benefits — including food stamps — for new Syrian refugees coming to Georgia. That has triggered a sharp warning from the Obama administration, which told Georgia it must rescind its order to comply with federal law.

Mohammad and Ebtesam, who asked that their full names not be published to protect relatives still living in Syria, applied to the state Thursday for food stamps and Medicaid. As of late Thursday afternoon, there was no word whether the state would process their applications.

In other related Georgia news:  Elderly couple recovering after squirrel attack | www.wsbtv.com

What Emily Yoffe Left Out of Her Polemic on The Hunting Ground –

In June, Slate columnist Emily Yoffe published a bombshell: an article titled “How The Hunting Ground Blurs the Truth,” in which she claimed that the campus rape documentary, which premiered earlier this year, had presented a misleading picture of one of its central stories. Yoffe wrote that the case perfectly illustrated the biases at work in the film; as she put it, “how deeply the filmmakers’ politics colored their presentation of the facts—and how deeply flawed their influential film is as a result.”

The story is that of a former law student named Kamilah Willingham, who alleges that she and a friend, who Yoffe calls KF, were sexually assaulted while they were incapacitated one night in January 2011. The alleged assailant was a fellow law student named Brandon Winston, formerly a close friend of Willingham’s.

Willingham’s credibility, Yoffe wrote, is called “seriously into question” by the facts of the case. She called the alleged assault a typically “spontaneous, drunken encounter,” as well as “ambiguous sexual encounter among young adults that almost destroyed the life of the accused, a young black man with no previous record of criminal behavior.” (Willingham and Winston are both black. KF is white.)

In a criminal trial earlier this year, a grand jury declined to indict Winston on any charges against Willingham. The trial jury convicted him of a lesser included offense, a non-sexual misdemeanor assault against KF, for which he was sentenced only to a brief probation period.

Winston has since returned to Harvard Law after a four-year absence; in the meantime, Willingham graduated. On November 11, a group of 19 Harvard Law professors issued an open letter in support of Winston, saying he’d been vindicated by both Harvard and the criminal justice system, but was being unfairly attacked by TheHunting Ground, which they called “a purported documentary” that paints “a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities” and of Winston himself, who is not referred to by name in the film. (Yoffe, who recently announced she will leave Slate for the Atlantic, was the first person to identify him in connection with the film.)

“We believe that Brandon Winston was subjected to a long, harmful ordeal for no good reason,” the professors wrote. They cite Yoffe’s work as an “investigative journalist’s in-depth story demonstrating the biased, one-sided nature of the film.”

In finance news: RushCard’s Attempt To Throw Out Or Delay Investigation Into Mass Outage | ThinkProgress

Nicki Minaj Posted Bail for Brother Charged With Raping a Child

San Bernardino, Guns, Republicans and the NRA | DarylCagle.com

Scalia gets schooled by Reagan-appointed judge who perfectly points out his theocratic hypocrisy

7-year-old girl killed at MI soccer practice after ‘paranoid’ man with concealed carry license opens fire

George Zimmerman Gets The Boot From Twitter After He Posted Revenge Porn | ThinkProgress

Whoa….we need a break after all that shit.

The 15 Coolest Bookstores From Around the World | TIME

Yadid Levy / AlamyEl Ateneo Grand bookshop in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Scribbling in the margins: Women’s Rights in Early Medieval Rus

he Ruirikid Dynasty ruled Rus lands during the eleventh century. This marks the early part of a Golden Age for the ruling cities Kyiv/ Kiev and Novgorod. These princes replaced many diverse local customs and created a Rus State that stretched from the Black Sea north of  Moscow and St Petersburg, which, if they existed at all then, were tiny hamlets. The ruling Ruirikid princes over the period of two centuries established a series of law codes known collectively as The Russkaia Pravda. These laws united various clans under the cultural and religious umbrella of the Byzantine influenced Russian Orthodox Church and established a common written language, Old Church Slavonic.

The Science Behind Baking Your Ideal Chocolate Chip Cookie : The Salt : NPR

I love this: Doctor becomes Question Time hero for refusing to pronounce Jeremy Hunt’s surname

A doctor has become something of a hero online for coming very close to deliberately mispronouncing health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s name on BBC1’s Question Time.

The unnamed man had the final word on last night’s show in Birmingham, when he questioned the health secretary’s repeated claim that higher death rates at hospitals during weekends was due to poor levels of staffing.

The doctor said his own experience was patients not wanting to have lifesaving operations at weekends as a result:

I work in liver transplant. My patients do not want to come in on weekends for an emergency transplant because they believe Jeremy, I’m not going to pronounce his surname because I might mispronounce it deliberately, because they think that by having a lifesaving transplant operation they will die and that liver goes to someone else.

Now, given his profound incompetence at this junior doctors contract issue, as well as previous health secretaries, is it not time for a cross-party healthcare commission to save our NHS?

You have to give it up to the Brits…go to the link to see the tweets the doctor got for his non “cunt” reference.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey Perfectly Spoof All the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Hype | The Mary Sue

This One Poster Gathers the World’s 140 Metro Maps – CityLab – Can you guess what the cities are?

Go to link and find out.

Big Ass Lizard.

Imagine coming home to that!

Bless this man from Sydney, Australia, Eric Holland, who first spotted this five-foot goanna on the ground in his backyard while working in his shed earlier this week. Holland seemed to still be in shock, rightfully, recalling the incident on Friday in an interview with Sydney radio station 2UE.

“A bloody big shock mate,” said Holland. “I nearly trod on the bloody thing.” He’s used to seeing “blue tongues and lizards,” he added, “but never anything quite like this.”

Back to the Link Dump Divine Extraordinaire:

The left’s absurd Hillary hate: Why this ridiculous anti-Clinton crusade needs to stop – Salon.com

The 12 Worst Habits for Your Mental Health | TIME

A girl-power playlist in honor of “Waitress”—a musical that’s about to make Broadway history | The Feed | Hillary for America

Ohio community lives in fear as rifle-toting white man stalks black neighborhoods with impunity

Jimmy Carter reveals he’s cancer-free: Latest scans showed ‘cancer was gone’

Manuscript fragments bear ‘striking resemblance to The Book of Kells’ – Medievalists.net

Medieval Music Manuscripts: Treasures of Sight and Sound – Medievalists.net

WATCH: Trump tells black online hosts endorsing him, ‘Do a little routine’

Senate Passes Bill Repealing Key Parts of Obamacare, Stripping Planned Parenthood Funds – NBC News

Republican faces recall after saying the ‘real culprit’ in Colorado mass shooting is Planned Parenthood

Newborn Loses Faith In Humanity After Record 6 Days – The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

 

SCHAUMBURG, IL—In a turn of events that has stunned the worldwide medical community, local infant Nathan Jameson, born just six days ago, has become the youngest person ever to permanently and irrevocably lose all faith in humanity.

“This shatters all previous records,” University of Chicago psychologist Douglas McAllister said Monday. “In all of documented medical history, there is no case of a newborn taking less than four months to develop the mental faculties required to grasp the full extent of this existential nightmare we call life on earth.”

“Considering he already comprehends harsh realities that many people spend their entire fleeting, shallow existences attempting to deny, Baby Nathan is quite the little miracle!” he added.

Though he has not yet developed the capacity for speech, extensive cognitive testing has definitively shown that the shockingly perceptive 6-day-old fully understands and accepts that human beings cannot be trusted, that they remain far too ignorant for their opinions to be reliable, that a lack of self-awareness about their own destructive tendencies pervades the species as a whole, and that most are too ineffectual to successfully pursue even the shallow self-interested agendas that rule their lives.

Sources said the early-blooming newborn was putting two and two together about the real nature of humanity even before leaving the hospital, where his first sensory experiences included the shouts of sick people arguing to get treatment they urgently needed, visitors staring vacantly at smartphones as they sat next to bedridden loved ones, televisions blaring the empty rhetoric and emotionally manipulative appeals of political advertisements, and dozens upon dozens of pained, desperate cries, including his own.

Local reports confirmed the baby’s disillusionment was only compounded by the fact that he spent his first days in the bleak and soulless suburban conformity of Schaumburg, IL, its empty consumerist non-culture allowing him to realize in record time that all human pursuits are cold, joyless, and devoid of any substantive purpose or integrity.

“For a baby, he sure is an insightful little guy,” Nathan’s mother, Melanie Jameson, told reporters. “My husband and I are a loveless, narcissistic couple whose weird, freaked-out neediness and anxieties—which we sublimate under a mask of facile self-regard—would normally be introjected into our child’s forming psyche over the course of years. But this talented fella just took it all in at once!”

“We’re awfully proud to have such a precocious son,” she added, her face displaying no genuine emotion.

According to household sources, Baby Nathan has already noticed that his father, Michael Jameson, resents the infant’s 3 a.m. crying, feels more trapped than ever in his sham-marriage now that he’s a father, and is inwardly building an ever-growing wall against the reality of his own life one mid-afternoon cocktail at a time.

“The kid’s not even a week old, and he has the thousand-yard stare of a middle-aged man,” said psychologist Helen James, one of the cognitive scientists who verified that by his third day of life, Nathan had already begun to sense the overwhelming air of desperation surrounding other people. “That look that says, ‘I’ve finally given up on the reassuring fictions that prop up humanity’s delusional self-image as dignified, intelligent, or decent in any way.’ He knows the truth.”

“At this point, he shouldn’t even be able to distinguish between himself and the rest of humanity, let alone have the capacity to lose faith in it,” James continued. “Evidently, the human condition has gotten even more depressing than it already was, and we’re going to need to reformulate our entire theory of childhood development.”

Jon Stewart lambastes senators ‘hiding in their offices’ while denying health care to 9/11 responders

Noam Chomsky: The GOP is ‘no longer a normal political party’ — it’s a ‘radical insurgency’

My abortion almost killed me — but not for the reason you think – Salon.com

I walked into my local Planned Parenthood, received the most amazing and professional care by some of the most supportive, understanding and genuinely warm women I’ve ever met. I was asked repeatedly if I was there of my own volition. I was given a hand to hold throughout the procedure, a nurse giving me permission to squeeze when the cramping became uncomfortable. I was given information and the contacts of numerous support groups and as much time as I needed to recover before leaving. In other words, I was given a safe and comfortable environment to do what I knew was best for myself, best for then-boyfriend, and best for our impending — and soon-to-be separate — futures.

And then I walked outside.

In the bubble of a calm and understanding environment, in which the decisions I make with my body were respected and facilitated, I felt at ease with a choice I knew was right. But once I left that bubble, a society that forces women to feel shame and humiliation about an otherwise common procedure took its toll.

Friends would share memes and photos and hate-filled posts online, oblivious to my personal situation, claiming women who had abortions were everything I knew I wasn’t. Debates would rage on Facebook between acquaintances who felt powerful and courageous behind the protection of a computer screen, unaware of the particulars of their friends’ lives. While all of these debates were regurgitated, manufactured propaganda used to push a specific agenda, they still had a powerful effect on me. I started to believe what unknowing friends and family were saying or sharing.

I was a murderer.

I was a whore.

I was a selfish, sex-crazed monster who didn’t deserve to continue living.

I was in need of constant repentance if I was to be worthy of worthwhile life.

And in almost no time at all, I was lost.

I had broken under the immense pressure. I had seen enough pro-life friends call women who had abortions murderers, oblivious to the fact that I had just had one. I had read enough stories of regret and guilt that I started to feel defective for not feeling the same. Enough of my friends who were privy to my medical information told me they’d pray for me and admitted that they had cried for me, solidifying my feeling of brokenness and darkness because now, I was someone who needed to be prayed and cried for.

I had a friend share her mother’s decision to keep her unwanted and unplanned pregnancy, and the result was a thriving and successful individual. I remember her tipping her head slightly to the side, raising her eyebrows and telling me that she knew I could have done it if I had only had the courage. With each word she spoke, each expression of disappointment, my peace of mind crumbled. I started to demean myself in the same way others were demeaning me, comparing my decision to the decisions made by others, completely circumventing my very real and very valid circumstances.

I had bought into the idea that if I was to continue to claim to be a “good woman,” I had to hate myself for the decision I had made.

Read the rest at the link.

Ending this post with a few off the wall links…well not really off the wall, but not disturbing as hell. (Maybe.)

Dyes, Diets and Deodorants: Venetian Beauty Secrets Revealed – Medievalists.net

Independent scholar Courtney Hess-Dragovich captivated the KZOO crowd with a fascinating paper, entitled: Deodorants, Hair Dyes and Diet Drinks: Renaissance Remedies from a 16th c. Venetian Beauty Manual where she talked about her attempts at using these recipes and what her findings were on Medieval and Renaissance beauty methods. So what was the Italian Medieval and Renaissance beauty ideal? It appears late Medieval and Renaissance Venetians prized a pale complexion, no hair except on the head, blondes, a tiny nose, grey or blue eyes, straight white teeth, and a small bust. How did they try to achieve this? Much like today’sCosmo’s, and Maire Claire’s, there were beauty manuals for keeping up with the latest trends. Beauty manuals were not uncommon during this time. Famed Persian Philosopher, Avicenna (980-1037) wrote about beauty. The 12th century Trotula, a set of medical treatises for women, was also extremely popular. So how did Hess-Dragovich go about getting her findings? As she so aptly put it: she has some VERYgood, very patient friends, who were excellent guinea pigs for her various concoctions.

Portrait of a Young Woman – Sandro Botticelli (1480-1485). Botticelli captured the prized looks of the period in his intense detail to hairstyle and colour..

Deodorants: Yes, they existed!

There is an entire section containing 4 recipes for deodorising. Hess-Dragovich stated that idea that everyone smelled in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was a myth. She decided to replicate these deodorant recipes and try them on her friends. The solid deodorant was made with white lead but since lead is quite dangerous, she replaced it with Borax. Why did the Venetians use white lead? They used it because it was anti-fungal and anti-bacterial. Borax does the same job but is much safer, and in keeping with using medieval ingredients. In the Middle Ages, Borax was scraped off the river beds in the Middle East. So how do you make medieval deodorant? In one recipe, you mix camphor, rose water and Borax and dry it on a leaf. She also made Trotula deodorant recipe #205: wine, used with a towel boiled in berries.

Did the recipes work? The end result: She tried them on approximately 100 people and half of the recipes were as accurate as modern day drugstore deodorants! The favourites from her test group were from the Trotula and the white lead recipe. The ever popular, White Wine and Nutmeg deodorant was nicknamed “Medieval Axe”, and it apparently really worked!

Argentina’s underwater town that was submerged for 30 years – BBC News

The town of Epecuen in Argentina was once a busy lakeside tourist resort.

But in November 1985, after a succession of wet winters, the lake overflowed, breaking through the lake wall and into the town.

Residents evacuated safely, but the town remained underwater for almost 30 years until the water evaporated.

Now the ruins of the town have emerged and residents can walk around their former home again.

Picture gallery at that link…

Lost Argentine town re-emerges from lake – BBC News

Video report at that link.

And since this entire post had a touch of “Divine Wisdom” from The Paris Review, January of 2014….Controversy at the Hagia Sophia

 

On May 28, 1453, the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI entered Hagia Sophia, “the church of the divine wisdom,” to pray. Constantinople was under siege, and the fate of the great basilica was unclear. The emperor prayed there before returning to the city walls, where he coordinated the defense effort against the army of Mehmed II, who would be christened conqueror by day’s end.

As the two armies struggled to outmaneuver each other, those caught inside Hagia Sophia waited anxiously, fearful of what might happen if the capital of Greek Orthodoxy fell into Muslim hands. Emperor Justinian had commissioned the church in 532 A.D.; planned by the mathematician Anthemius of Tralles and the physicist Isidore of Miletus, and built by more than ten thousand laborers, it was intended to symbolize the magnificence of Christianity and become the seat of the Orthodox patriarch. Twenty years after its completion, two major earthquakes shook Hagia Sophia and destroyed its eastern arch. After extensive renovation, it reopened in 562 A.D. to the delight of Justinian, who, three years before his death, saw his great church survive one of nature’s worst calamities.

On May 29, 1453, Mehmed II and his army entered the city, immediately marching on Hagia Sophia. In their book Strolling Through Istanbul, John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd describe how Mehmed “dismounted at the door of the church and bent down to take a handful of earth, which he then sprinkled over his turban as an act of humility before God.”

In the five centuries following that symbolic act, the greatest religious building of the Ottoman Empire continued to shine—but this time, the glory belonged to Islam. Hagia Sophia became an imperial mosque; it came to boast four minarets (these also serve an architectural purpose, protecting the building against collapsing onto itself) and additional türbes (Islamic mausoleums).

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday…