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All was not well in Europe in 1870, the year the Franco-Prussian war would lead to a united German Empire and a humiliated France; one could call it the first of three European civil wars, the other two being World Wars One and Two. This French satirical cartoon map (‘Carte drôlatique d’Europe ...
Today is - at least to my northern hemisphere readers - the winter solstice, shortest day of the year. For three months now, we've seen the sun set and the night fall progressively earlier each day. But this date marks the terminus of that trend, and though the heart of winter still lies ahead ...
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! And again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur (…) So begins one of the Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between the English romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ...
Back in March, I commented on a Beliefnet debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. In part 4 of that debate, Andrew Sullivan made what I thought was an astonishing concession: But I can say that [this experience] represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the ...
Not many people know that the epithet Windy City was bestowed on Chicago not for meteorological but political reasons – apparently, Chicago politicians at one time were known for the windiness of their speeches. Its Latin motto – Urbs in horto; the city in the garden – reflects its spaciousness ...
Madonna should love this map, having both gone all British and jewish-mystical. This map, in the style of the London Underground(*), depicts the Kaballah Tree of Life. Sephiroth (Hebrew for ‘Enumerations’) is the name for the ten attributes of God in the Kabbalah (a form of jewish esotericism ...
As the holiday season approaches, the partisans of the religious right are ramping up their annual "war on Christmas" rhetoric, which seems to grow more disproportionate with every passing year. The latest example is this absurdly ignorant column, whose author apparently has never heard of ...
Candy isn’t usually applied to make political or geographical statements, but in this case marzipan, one of the more malleable confectioneries, has been transformed into a map of the European Union (of the EU25 period, before the accession of Bulgaria and Romania). This must have been done ...
Mississippi is the poorest of all states, but fortunately also has a happier distinction: it’s the place where most of the quintessentially American music genres originated, from blues and jazz to rock ‘n roll.An amazing accomplishment for a state that has under three million inhabitants, but it’s ...
In light of the continuing, and in fact worsening, fiasco at the IIDB discussion forum, I'm creating an open thread to document the continuing misuses of power. The Internet Infidels Board of Directors is now engaged in a full-scale effort to rewrite history, shuttering feedback forums, deleting ...
The Chinese nationalist party Kuomintang that was defeated when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphantly took control of China in 1949, retreated to Taiwan, a small island off the coast of mainland China, roughly halfway between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Almost 60 years later, the Taiwanese government ...
This is interesting: these cartoons obviously are about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. But since I’m offline while writing this, I can’t find out much more of the context. So let’s see what I can extrapolate. First, the facts – as far as I know them. The by now rather obscure Russo-Japanese ...
Lost is not only the title of a popular American tv series, it also describes the exasperated feeling of those viewers looking for a semblance of a plot in the series. The broad outline goes something like this: The survivors of a crashed jumbo jet on a transpacific flight find themselves ...
I've written on several past occasions about how belief in malignant supernatural forces causes real harm to real people. There are examples of this from every region of the world, but some of the most wrenching are from Africa, where Biblical beliefs about demons and evil spirits still run rampant ...
North and South Korea have been separated at the 38th parallel ever since the Korean War (1950-1953), which has never officially ended. In the ensuing ‘ceasefire’, North Korea developed into a communist dictatorship with a centrally planned economy, while South Korea became a capitalist democracy ...