Great Fire

 September 4, 1666 — the Great Fire of London.

Perhaps ironically, when we look at it from our own precisely contemporary perspective, this enormous conflagration was the prime instigator of the modern practice of home insurance. (Prior to 1666 only the concept really existed.)

Samuel Pepys famously saved his wine, some important documents and his Parmesan cheese from the ‘infinite fury’ of the fire by digging a big pit in the ground outside, prior to evacuation.

I wonder how many people in LA were aware of this option?

 

 

Foreign Filibusterer

Outside the US Capitol, Filibustering has been a (mainly 19th century) pastime for wealthy Americans inclined to meddle abroad, and it has rarely ended well.

Meanwhile, Signore Guido Fawkes discovered in 1605 that England was already one of the earliest modern states with an apparatus to protect itself from foreign riff-raff inclined towards plotting and insurrection.

Since then, many other nations have acquired similar self-defence mechanisms. I would argue that today, the UK, the USA, Russia, China and Israel are the stand-out five which possess a professional service dedicated to watching over their interests, internal and external, that anyone from outside would generally not want to fuck with, on principle...except perhaps someone who works for one of the others.

Musk is steadily moving onto the thinner ice.

 

 

"God loves a cheerful giver"

The Middle Ages need, in the first instance, to be understood on their own terms, not ours.

The other day someone waylaid me on the interwebs rather like that anachronistic anarcho-syndicalist peasant played by Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“…because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”), suggesting that the Tithe (Diezmo, in Spanish), introduced to by King Edgar in the 10th century, was a uniquely British form of oppression, whereby the Church extracted its one tenth share of the crop just so that it could indulge in ‘bling’.

A satisfying double riposte ensued, for not only could I refer to the ancient near-eastern history of the Tithe, I could simultaneously torch some of this person’s ‘Jesus was Palestinian’ presumptions: the word derives from Hebrew and the procedure was a key part of Jewish religious teachings, recommended in the New Testament by the Big J himself as an important part of spiritual discipline, and there are other Old Testament biblical descriptions of how it is supposed to work, binding the Israelite community together, funding festivals and supporting the Levites.

Edgar became King at precisely the moment when the monarchy was seeking some spiritual and symbolic fairy dust in order to move on definitively from the era when the man on the throne had been little more than a barbarian war-band boss.

The Church did not use the quota it gathered in order to indulge themselves in luxuries, instead most of it went into Mission-support, including the care for the sick and the needy, and the already very needy rarely had to pay the full 10% of this tax, which was nowhere near as regressive as later medieval poll taxes.

So in a sense, a precursor to National Insurance, which means that in some ways the early medieval English enjoyed better social care than modern Americans!

(If there were abuses to speak of, they tended to occur over on the Continent, where the Bishops sometimes ‘leased’ the Tithe rights to secular lords.)

This book will be going straight into our loo. One can either read it cover to cover, or dip in all over, rather like Rayuela.

In the A section, I learned that Abad (Abbot) is an Aramaic word for Father (Jesus referred to his viejo as 'Abba') and also that the Abbey of Fontevrault was at one stage run by an Abadesa.

Imagine, a woman in charge of all those repressed males.

Deuteronomy 14:22-29

"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year"

De-Platforming

With Gringolandia seemingly on the cusp of adiosing Tiktok, not far south of the border they have been approaching the problem from the other end, removing influencers one by one.

Two that have lately closed their accounts, so to speak, are Justin Paul, 'El Pinky' and 'El Gordo Peruci'.

And now flyers like this one are being dropped by small plane over the Culiacán area, inviting users to terminate their relationship with a range of content creators, kind of literally.

The issue seems to be that many of these prominent public figures have acted as 'prestanombres' e.g. collaborated via DM with Los Chapitos, a spin-off cartel run by the offspring of El Chapo remaining in Sinaloa.

 

'Relaxed' Hate Speech Rules

There's a bit more to this, I believe, than tech bros realigning out of self-interest with the incoming Orange Blob.

The Wokies themselves have some of the blame to share.

The protections that they offer have been exposed as partisan. They have an in group and an out group for their fact checking and sometimes the facts involved are evidently not even facts.

Significant sections of society have been left high and dry, exposed to constant abuse, most notably a subset of Jews and feminists.

Once it became clear that these checks were as partial and political as they were moral and essential, an outcome like this became that much more likely.

When you become complacent about allowing others to be openly slurred in a supposedly tolerant society, do not be all that surprised when you are suddenly surrounded by trolls yourself.