Sharing initials hardly makes a reasonable argument. There's a better argument for a good deal of Christ's iconography being lifted from the cult of Alexander the Great, which was very big throughout the whole Greco-Roman world at the time. I don't realy see any connection between Jesus and Julius Caesar at all.
You'd better learn the secret handshake, then. Otherwise they'll think your a New World Order mole preparing to sell them out to the United Nations and the Illuminati.
Yup. They act like Anderson Cooper is some sort of Doc Savage-ess superhero. It's nauseating, tiresome and profoundly uninformative. CNN sucks, and about the only thing it has going for it is that most network news in the US sucks, so it's more like a competitive contestant on the race to the bottom.
The closest the Papacy ever came to recreating Rome was apparently the idea being thrown around of the Pope becoming a temporal head of a renewed Roman empire, since the bulk of Western and Central Europe had been Christianized by the 8th century. In the end, Charlemagne came along, and it seemed more supportable to make him the King of the Romans.
I'm not sure I even buy that. The Republic had always been an unstable form of government, and I'd argue the real collapse of the Republic came about because of the expansion of Rome (remember here, Rome as a major imperial power began with the Punic Wars, over a century before Caesar's death). As Rome absorbed the Carthaginian empire, it grew very rapidly and the political structure of the Republic was never very good and dealing with this. Caesar was ultimately the symptom of the disease that had plagued the Republic for decades. If he hadn't tried to seize power, someone else would have, and let us remember that his attempt ultimately failed, but did pave the way for his nephew Octavius to push the whole way.
Technically, Augustus founded the Empire, though he used his status as a Julian to pull it off; that and the fact that he was smarter and better connected than the other members of the Second Triumvirate.
Roman civilization persists to this day. The Romance languages, the civil code that is dominant in Europe, Latin America, Quebec and New Orleans, even the European Union itself, I would argue is the latest attempt by the Europeans to restore the Pax Romana.
I don't think it's inappropriate at all. First of all, the first steps towards a proper empire occurred during the Republic. And in the East, while Byzantium slowly became heavily Hellenized, there was no sharp dividing line. Byzantinium was the Eastern Roman Empire.
Indeed. Haven't read the article, but if the premise is that Julius Caesar began having a bit too regally and that lead to Rome's fall, then it was a pretty odd collapse, that had this whole three century middle period where Rome reigned supreme in most of Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa. Rome didn't even reach its greatest extent, geographically, until two centuries after Caesar's death.
There are as many theories as to why Rome fell as there are as to why WWI started. At the end of the day, it was a combination of economic collapse (in particular, the debasement of coinage), bad government, poor succession rules that meant the military played too much of a role in an Emperor's rise and fall, climactic changes in Eurasia that meant lots of angry hoards of people from the Asian Steppe began their first major incursions over the Urals, and finally, in a last ditch effort, the later Emperors cutting the empire to pieces and hiring a bunch of unreliable and upwardly mobile German mercenaries to fill out their dwindling legions.
It should also be reminded that Rome did persist for a thousand years after Romulus Augustulus was deposed in the West; in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
I didn't even think Zahn's Star Wars books were all that good. It's been years since I read them. I've read other stuff by Zahn that is a lot better. Some of the plotlines and characters were interesting, but the writing was atrocious.
I would think it has more to do with the fact that most of the writing and plotlines in the expanded universe are absolutely shit. I've struggled my way here and there through a few, and they're just terrible, most of it on the level of amateur fan fiction.
If we judge by all the posters during BP's Gulf of Mexico spill, apparently puking vast quantities of oil into the sea is not only not bad, but is in fact very good.
I gave my iPhone 4 to my daughter and bought a Nexus 5 in no small part performance went south after I installed iOS 7. Safari, in particular, was just plain awful.
I'm going to start this post by saying I think they're all crap; $cientology, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, any and all brands of Neo-Paganism; the whole lot of them.
But there are some pretty clear cultural differences between, say Hinduism and Christianity on one side, and Scientologists on the other. While the former religions may have started out something like the latter ones (though I suspect it was far more complex than some guy sitting down and writing a religion purely out of his imagination), there are literally thousands of years of cultural and theological development behind them. They have had significant a longstanding influences on the civilizations in which they evolved (or were adopted).
Scientology can be traced no further back than L Ron Hubbard telling some of his far more talented peers he planned to create a religion to prove how easy and profitable it was. Unlike, say, Hinduism, which is a historical evolution of the Proto-Indo-European religion, Scientology has no real antecdent, unless you count the self help movement and Hubbard's fetishistic dislike of psychiatry.
Even the early Christians took the Jewish Bible, plopped a second part on it and mixed in some Hellenic philosophy into it, and thus has antecedents dating back centuries.
Because lawmaking isn't a skill magically bequeathed upon people merely because they won an election. Would you think this scheme a good idea for lawyers, doctors, welders, accountants or plumbers?
And you will replace "careerism" with incompetence. Can you imagine having a House of Representatives where no one has more than one term's experience? In the end you would literally hand over all power to bureaucrats, lobbiests and staffers, who would be the only ones with any long term experience. You would, in the end, make things worse, not better.
I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.
I once had a Server 2003 install go bananas and completely fuck up an Exchange message store. "Never again!" I cried, and within a few hours was installing from a day old backup.
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Sharing initials hardly makes a reasonable argument. There's a better argument for a good deal of Christ's iconography being lifted from the cult of Alexander the Great, which was very big throughout the whole Greco-Roman world at the time. I don't realy see any connection between Jesus and Julius Caesar at all.
You'd better learn the secret handshake, then. Otherwise they'll think your a New World Order mole preparing to sell them out to the United Nations and the Illuminati.
Yup. They act like Anderson Cooper is some sort of Doc Savage-ess superhero. It's nauseating, tiresome and profoundly uninformative. CNN sucks, and about the only thing it has going for it is that most network news in the US sucks, so it's more like a competitive contestant on the race to the bottom.
The closest the Papacy ever came to recreating Rome was apparently the idea being thrown around of the Pope becoming a temporal head of a renewed Roman empire, since the bulk of Western and Central Europe had been Christianized by the 8th century. In the end, Charlemagne came along, and it seemed more supportable to make him the King of the Romans.
I'm not sure I even buy that. The Republic had always been an unstable form of government, and I'd argue the real collapse of the Republic came about because of the expansion of Rome (remember here, Rome as a major imperial power began with the Punic Wars, over a century before Caesar's death). As Rome absorbed the Carthaginian empire, it grew very rapidly and the political structure of the Republic was never very good and dealing with this. Caesar was ultimately the symptom of the disease that had plagued the Republic for decades. If he hadn't tried to seize power, someone else would have, and let us remember that his attempt ultimately failed, but did pave the way for his nephew Octavius to push the whole way.
Technically, Augustus founded the Empire, though he used his status as a Julian to pull it off; that and the fact that he was smarter and better connected than the other members of the Second Triumvirate.
Roman civilization persists to this day. The Romance languages, the civil code that is dominant in Europe, Latin America, Quebec and New Orleans, even the European Union itself, I would argue is the latest attempt by the Europeans to restore the Pax Romana.
I don't think it's inappropriate at all. First of all, the first steps towards a proper empire occurred during the Republic. And in the East, while Byzantium slowly became heavily Hellenized, there was no sharp dividing line. Byzantinium was the Eastern Roman Empire.
Indeed. Haven't read the article, but if the premise is that Julius Caesar began having a bit too regally and that lead to Rome's fall, then it was a pretty odd collapse, that had this whole three century middle period where Rome reigned supreme in most of Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa. Rome didn't even reach its greatest extent, geographically, until two centuries after Caesar's death.
There are as many theories as to why Rome fell as there are as to why WWI started. At the end of the day, it was a combination of economic collapse (in particular, the debasement of coinage), bad government, poor succession rules that meant the military played too much of a role in an Emperor's rise and fall, climactic changes in Eurasia that meant lots of angry hoards of people from the Asian Steppe began their first major incursions over the Urals, and finally, in a last ditch effort, the later Emperors cutting the empire to pieces and hiring a bunch of unreliable and upwardly mobile German mercenaries to fill out their dwindling legions.
It should also be reminded that Rome did persist for a thousand years after Romulus Augustulus was deposed in the West; in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
I didn't even think Zahn's Star Wars books were all that good. It's been years since I read them. I've read other stuff by Zahn that is a lot better. Some of the plotlines and characters were interesting, but the writing was atrocious.
I would think it has more to do with the fact that most of the writing and plotlines in the expanded universe are absolutely shit. I've struggled my way here and there through a few, and they're just terrible, most of it on the level of amateur fan fiction.
Shut up and drink some oil, you commie greentard. The fossil fuel extraction industry is a fucking god, so bow down and take what they give you!
I'd rather have a free pizza.
If we judge by all the posters during BP's Gulf of Mexico spill, apparently puking vast quantities of oil into the sea is not only not bad, but is in fact very good.
I gave my iPhone 4 to my daughter and bought a Nexus 5 in no small part performance went south after I installed iOS 7. Safari, in particular, was just plain awful.
I don't understand that at all. If you're going to just have public-facing IP addresses, why not go to IPv6?
In other words, the answer is a truly universal system with no insurance middlemen.
I'm going to start this post by saying I think they're all crap; $cientology, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, any and all brands of Neo-Paganism; the whole lot of them.
But there are some pretty clear cultural differences between, say Hinduism and Christianity on one side, and Scientologists on the other. While the former religions may have started out something like the latter ones (though I suspect it was far more complex than some guy sitting down and writing a religion purely out of his imagination), there are literally thousands of years of cultural and theological development behind them. They have had significant a longstanding influences on the civilizations in which they evolved (or were adopted).
Scientology can be traced no further back than L Ron Hubbard telling some of his far more talented peers he planned to create a religion to prove how easy and profitable it was. Unlike, say, Hinduism, which is a historical evolution of the Proto-Indo-European religion, Scientology has no real antecdent, unless you count the self help movement and Hubbard's fetishistic dislike of psychiatry.
Even the early Christians took the Jewish Bible, plopped a second part on it and mixed in some Hellenic philosophy into it, and thus has antecedents dating back centuries.
Because lawmaking isn't a skill magically bequeathed upon people merely because they won an election. Would you think this scheme a good idea for lawyers, doctors, welders, accountants or plumbers?
And yet, if you become large enough, you begin to warp the lines of power. Something somewhere has to give if democracy is to be preserved.
And you will replace "careerism" with incompetence. Can you imagine having a House of Representatives where no one has more than one term's experience? In the end you would literally hand over all power to bureaucrats, lobbiests and staffers, who would be the only ones with any long term experience. You would, in the end, make things worse, not better.
Because it's one jot different anywhere else in the Industrialised World.
Not to worry, he'd be saved by Mr. Canoe Head.
I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.
I once had a Server 2003 install go bananas and completely fuck up an Exchange message store. "Never again!" I cried, and within a few hours was installing from a day old backup.