This is an extraordinary read. Please take the time.

[ The Road to War and Dictatorship ]

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? — David Ben Gurion

It just keeps getting more absurd. Following the same line as my first two posts in this series (I and II), here’s another sign of just how stupid our society has become. The DVD releases of the original Sesame Street have strong warnings on them. They indicate that the content should not be viewed by children.

From the warning:

These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.

We’re nerfing our kids, and life isn’t nerfed. We are not helping anyone by treating our children this way.:

[ New York Times Article on Sesame Street ]

My post titled That Was Then, This is Now has received quite a reaction. I can’t really take any credit, however, as all I did was post an anonymous email forward. Still, it’s interesting that the post stirred so many emotions.

The concept is essentially that things have changed drastically in the last 40 years, and that many of these changes have been for the worse. Just today I received the worst comment in the whole thread from an Italian teacher, and it speaks to the point quite poignantly:

I am a (male) high school teacher and I have a daughter. If I see a child or (worse) a pre-teen crying on the beach I change my direction and put as much distance as possible between us. It’s too dangerous even to take a picture, imagine TOUCHING them!

The sad thing is that I’m not joking; I never touch my students and I couldn’t even imagine touching one of my daughter’s little friends.

Sad. To think that one of his daughters’ friends could skin a knee in the back yard playing and that it would be a bad idea for him to clean the wound and put a bandaid on it. It’s just insane.

The people commonly called “gypsies” are the Romani people. They’re originally from India.

This should keep you busy for a few minutes.

Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric make up the trivium.:

My friend Steven Harms has just put up an excellent reference for those interested in philosophy. It attempts to chart the relationship context between the various books mentioned in my Episteme post from a while back. Steven writes:

Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations. The former is not singled out and the latter didn’t make the list ( cogito ergo sum doesn’t rate? ). I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF. So I took an attempt at producing a PDF that gives context for these books.

Head over to Steven’s site to see the full post as well as the mind-map.

[ A Mind-Map to Western Philosophy ]

Here’s an interesting security tidbit from the world of flags.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to fly the Union Jack, but only people who are intimately familiar with the symbol will even notice.

The flag does not have reflectional symmetry, due to the slight pinwheeling of St. Patrick’s cross, which is technically called the counterchange of saltires. Thus, it has a right side and a wrong side up. To fly the flag the correct way up, the broad portion of the white cross of St Andrew should be above the red band of St Patrick (and the thin white portion below) in the upper hoist canton (the corner at the top nearest to the flag-pole), giving the Scottish symbol precedence over the Irish symbol. This is expressed by the phrases wide white top and broad side up. Traditionally, flying a flag upside down is understood as a distress signal. In the case of the Union Flag, the difference is so subtle as to be easily missed by many. In the past this has been taken advantage of by the British Army. On one occasion, a British stronghold had been captured. The captured Britons were ordered to keep flying the flag so that it was not obvious that the stronghold had fallen. However, they flew it upside-down, thus alerting some sharp-eyed British reinforcements. — Wikipedia