Even mathematical computation has its limits for preserving sanity

When the mind pursues the idea of infinity, it uses the ideas and repetition of numbers, which are so many distinct ideas, kept best by number from running into a confused heap, wherein the mind loses itself.

-- John Locke

Archaeology confirms that Spanish conquerors of Mexico had told the truth about the enormity of Aztec inhumanity

But no one wants to say so because it's politically incorrect to suggest that the Christian invaders told the truth and justly put an end to the incredibly barbaric Aztecs.

Here's the story, where the reference to "previously thought" refers only to thinking sanitized of contamination by Christian prejudice, which now turns out to have been unprejudiced, and correct:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5893933/The-horror-Aztec-tower-skulls-revealed.html

The full horror of the Aztec 'skull tower' revealed: Archaeologists say THOUSANDS of human sacrifices had their still-beating hearts cut out before their heads were severed and added to a monument the size of a basketball court

• Archaeologists previously found 650 skulls in Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City
• New research shows find was just a small part of massive array of what was once thousands of skulls
• New details of the gory rituals have also been revealed, which include turning skulls into masks

Aztec human sacrifices were far more widespread and grisly that [sic] previously thought, archaeologists have revealed. ... Some Spanish conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. The skull edifices were mentioned by Andres de Tapia, a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortes in the 1521 conquest of Mexico. In his account of the campaign, de Tapia said he counted tens of thousands of skulls at what became known as the Huey Tzompantli.

Jesus was no "internationalist": His affirmation of neighbor love conformed to the narrow scope imagined in Leviticus

Leviticus explicitly defines the neighbor as one of "the children of thy people", thus excluding outsiders (who are enslaveable in perpetuity):

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. -- Leviticus 19:18

Jesus believed similarly, including about Samaritans (contra Luke 10:36):

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. -- Matthew 10:5f.

This is in keeping also with the narrow scope of Jesus' conception of enemy love:

For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; And a man's enemies will be those of his own household. -- Matthew 10:35f.

For son dishonors father,
Daughter rises against her mother,
Daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
A man's enemies are the men of his own household. -- Micah 7:6

It takes a real genius to make poetry of a sow's pool

How ill mean neighbourhood your genius suits?

To live like Adam 'midst an herd of brutes!

-- Walter Harte

They always seem to die in threes

Charles Krauthammer, Koko the Gorilla, and my brother in law's dog Coal.

😢😢😢

The rich troubler of the world's repose

George Soros, major funder of efforts to stop Brexit

 

 

He knowing well that nation must decline,

Whose chief support and sinews are of coin,

Our nation's solid virtue did oppose

To the rich troublers of the world's repose.

-- Edmund Waller

I'm not a hermit . . .

I've just been sheltering in place for the last decade.

Hillary Clinton, recipient of Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award in 2009, lectures us about children

She can't even quote Jesus accurately.

Shun excess, now and in the life to come

 

 

And a man must take with him to the house of death an adamantine faith in this, that even there he may be undazzled by riches and similar trumpery, and may not precipitate himself into tyrannies and similar doings and so work many evils past cure and suffer still greater himself, but may know how always to choose in such things the life that is seated in the mean and shun the excess in either direction, both in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come; for this is the greatest happiness for man.

-- Plato, Republic, 10.619a, b

The inconvenience of perpetual slavery: Only some parts of Leviticus are useful to instructors at Columbia University

And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

-- Leviticus 25:46

And they shall see the flying spaghetti monster coming on a great wave of tomato sauce

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

The progressive's law

A progressive is unreliable, treacherous, useless, hostile, rude, inconsiderate, rebellious, sad, extravagant, cowardly, filthy and impious.

Of course not everyone measures up in every respect all the time, try as they may.

June used to be the traditional month for weddings

Yet thou hast greater cause to be

Asham'd of them, than they of thee;

Degenerate from their ancient brood,

Since first the court allow'd them food.

-- Jonathan Swift

Aristotle's worst of all animals spotted in Manchester, rutting on a gravestone in broad daylight

Tyranny is coming, because men will not rule themselves.

Why we bear the fardels along

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

The Gates of Vienna: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz shuts 7 mosques, expels 40 imams

From the story here:

'Political Islam's parallel societies and radicalising tendencies have no place in our country,' Kurz told a news conference outlining the government's decisions, which were based on that law. ... 

'This is just the beginning,' far-right Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache told the news conference held by four cabinet members. The Freedom Party's leader said Friday's measures are 'a first significant and necessary step in the right direction. 'He added: 'If these measures aren't enough, we will if necessary evaluate the legal situation here or there.' The ministers said up to 60 imams belonging to ATIB, a Muslim group close to the Turkish government, could be expelled from the country or have visas denied on grounds of receiving foreign funding. A government handout put the number at 40, of whom 11 were under review and two had already received a negative ruling. Austria, a country of 8.8 million people, has roughly 600,000 Muslim inhabitants, most of whom are Turkish or have families of Turkish origin.

Message on church sign once easily understood now requires explanation to thoroughly pornified public mind

The fruits presented to old age

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not from grey hairs authority doth flow,

Nor from bald heads, nor from a wrinkled brow;

But our past life, when virtuously spent,

Must to our age those happy fruits present.

-- John Denham

On the origin of Samantha Bee, of "feckless c*nt" fame

Hence the surface of the ground with mud

And slime besmear'd, the feces of the flood

Receiv'd the rays of heav'n; and sucking in

The seeds of heat new creatures did begin.

-- John Dryden