- Martin Luther on sex and women
- On Feminism
- Three feet on the floor
- Galen: Woman is a Mutilated Male
- North, South, and Slavs
- Inventing the Flat Earth
- Parapsychology in the Cold War
13.09.2014 Martin Luther on sex and women
Quotes from Luther on Women: A Sourcebook
“Now, alas, it is so hideous and frightful a pleasure that physicians compare it with epilepsy or falling sickness. Thus an actual disease is linked with the very activity of procreation. We are in the state of sin and death; therefore we also undergo this punishment, that we cannot make use of woman without the horrible passion of lust, and, so to speak, without epilepsy.”
“So this is the meaning: if you feel that you are looking at a woman with evil lust (which is against God’s Commandment), rip your eye or glance out of your heart, not out of your body, for the desire and lust come out of your heart. Then you have understood this properly. For when evil lust is gone from the heart, the eye will not trouble you. And if you see the same woman with the same bodily eyes without lust, it is just if you had not seen her at all.”
30.12.2013 On Feminism
A quote from David Gelernter, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)
p. 145 “In Summer 2006, at an academic meeting, Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers wondered whether the far larger number of male than female scientists might not reflect some built-in property of most men versus most women. He didn’t endorse the idea; he simply wondered. His comments, according to the Boston Globe, ‘sparked international outrage’. Accordingly Summers abased himself, apologized profusely and acknowledged that he had acted like a dangerous crackpot lunatic, betraying the revolution and disgracing the university and himself. But he was sentenced to the maximum anyway: he was forced to resign the presidency as was sent away from Harvard, for a full year. At that point, Summers (no doubt) only wished that his feminist opponents had demanded the death sentence.”
02.12.2013 Three feet on the floor
A quote from David Gelernter, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)
“Before the cultural revolution, there were no coed college dormitories with young men and women living in bedrooms on the same flour. Before the cultural revolution, visiting between men and women students on campus was regulated by ‘parietals,’ which limited male visiting in female dormitories to certain times, and usually required girls to return to their dormitories to certain by set hours and to sign out before leaving for the evening, listing their destinations or plans. When men visited women in their rooms or vice versa, the ‘three on the floor’ rule came into play: the door must always be open and there must be three feet on the floor the whole time.”
16.11.2013 Galen: Woman is a Mutilated Male
A quote from Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World (Hinges of History)
p. 21-22 “The female body, on the other hand, was very deficient. In her mother’s womb, the female had received insufficient heat, so she was softer, more liquid, underdone. Periodic menstruation proved that she as not fiery enough to burn up her excess liquids, which would nonetheless come in time to supply the nurturing wetland for the hot male seed must be implanted within her. Were it not for this providential usefulness of her excess, we would have to conclude that she was simply a mutilated male, wrote Galen, the Greek physician of the second century whose pronouncements would exercise unparalleled influence over natural philosophy and medical practice well into modern times.”
16.11.2013 North, South, and Slavs
Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages
p. 190 “But there was a division even then between Europe north and Europe south. The south – Italy south of Lombardy, the parts of France that spoke Provencal, Spain, Portugal, and (to some extent) Ireland, a sort of Mediterranean island misplaced in the Atlantic – was sensuous and sexual. As one went north toward the Germanic tribes, the Saxons, the Franks, the Prussians, the Scandinavians, many pleasures lost their evident appeal, and one encountered more silence, less show, a more rigorous sense of order, both personal and social, and people who had probably never since adulthood taken all their clothes off – and who, if stripped naked, looked like plucked chickens, rather than like the sinuous, sun-loving, copper-colored humans of the south. (Think of the embarrassed white limbs of Adam and Eve in the painting of Dutch and Flemish masters, as opposed to the expansively easeful biblical nudes given us by Michelangelo and his fellow Italians.)”
p. 190-191 “The land of the Slavs, the snowmen, the toughest people of all, lay beyond such distinctions. For in Eastern Europe, whether Catholicism or Orthodoxy prevailed, there flourished a Christianity of inhuman fasts, unending winters, and interminable liturgies, as well as a personal hygiene that included boiling oneself in steam, then rolling in ice. Whether one was naked or clothed, the point was never sensuality but survival.”
24.10.2013 Inventing the Flat Earth
Quotes from Nancy Marie Brown, The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages
p. 129 ‘The error begins with the Italian poet Petrarch, who is known for two things: developing the sonnet, and coining the therm “the Dark Ages”. Sometimes called the first humanist, Petrarch divided history into ancient (before Rome became Christian in the fourth century) and modern (his own time, the fourteenth century). Everything in between was dark.’
p. 129 ‘This intellectual attitude made it easy for Washington Irving, in The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, to write a revisionist version of the discovery of the New World in 1492.’
p. 129-130 ‘Finding the truth a little dry, he decided to embroider a bit on the historical Council of Salamanca, which had been conveyed to judge whether Columbus’s proposed voyage to discover a western route to India was a good risk of the king’s money.’
p. 130 ‘They threw the heretic Lactantius at him, Irving claims, as well as Saint Augustin’s view of the Antipodes. “To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of Scripture”, Irving writes: The Psalms and Saint Paul describe the heavens as being like a tent, ipso facto the earth was flat like the floor of a tent.’
p. 130-131 “Why does the Flat Earth Error remain so popular? Americans like to think that before we were discovered, all the world was sunk in darkness.”
p. 131 ‘His [William Whewell, 1850] History of the Inductive Sciences, which became a standard textbook, portrayed religion as inimical to science. He introduced two sources as proof that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat: the heretical Lactantius and the unread Cosmos Indicopleustes.’
p. 131 ‘Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, put two and two together in 1896 in his History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. “A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church,” White conceded, thought the earth was round, “but the majority of them took fright at once.” ‘
p. 131 ‘Over a hundred years later, the idea that medieval Christians like Gerbert thought the world was flat has not disappeared. It remains a weapon in the war between science and religion that defines modern America.’
04.03.18. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, Essay 4, The Late Birth of a Flat Earth.
28.09.2013 Parapsychology in the Cold War
Quotes from David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
p. 90 “The CIA, like other branches of the defense establishment, had begun to harbor fears of ‘psi gap’ vis-a-vis the Soviets, the consequences of of which could prove as devastating (according to some) as the missile gap and the manpower gap. (Never mind that neither of those previous ‘gaps’ had been real.) In July 1972, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency completed a lengthy classified report, entitled Controlled Offensive Behavior: USSR, detailing what was known about parapsychological research behind the Iron Curtain. ‘The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and applications of parapsychology research,’ declared the report’s opening summary. ‘Many scientists, US and Soviet, feel that parapsychology can be harnessed to create conditions where one can alter or manipulate the minds of others. The major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB.’ And they were already off to a strong start: ‘Today, it is reported that the USSR has twenty or more centers for the study of parapsyhological phenomena, with an annual budget estimated at 21 million dollars.’ With such a robust institutional base, the conclusion seemed inescapable: ‘Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the US.’ Might the Soviet military and KGB be leaping ahead with the new breakthrough in telepathy, mind control, and psychokinesis?”
p. 92-93 “Only decades later, after many of the early contracts and technical reports from the SRI remote-viewing work were declassified in the 1990s, did a fuller picture begin to emerge. The documents revealed an expensive and long-lived program, clandestinely funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, and related national-security bureaus, to develop what some advocates jokingly called ‘ESPionage’: the use of extrasensory perception (ESP) to peer into secret military establishments within the Soviet Union and elsewhere.”
p. 99 “Despite the thoroughgoing criticism and the overheated rhetoric, research on remove viewing continued unabated for more than twenty years, paid for with more than $20 million of taxpayers money (in 2010 dollars).”