From the Papers of One Still Learning

Rapier

Dated: circa 1600

Culture: Italian

Measurements: overall length 112 cm

The sword features a straight, double-edged blade of hexagonal section with a grooved base featuring the inscription “IN TE DOMINE SPERAVI”. The tang has a mark outlined at the borders. The iron hilt has lower side ring with loops decorated with micro-grooved knots and quillon-block and pommel decorated en suite. The wooden grip features iron wire binding and moor’s heads, probably from a later period.

I mean, as a theology student I’m inclined to say a really good treatment of this would require some good understanding of source criticism, ANE mythology, and non-canonical mythos built up by Talmudic and Christian sources.  So you can like, really work all the rich source material in to rewrite.  The same way a good retelling of any mythos would (I say, as I fail to read like 80% of Arthuriana material hahaha shhhhh).

I might suggest picking up Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. Bloom is always excellent, and this gets at the stories as well as the language piece.

RE: stories though: You definitely don’t need to re-write (or read) the whole thing - there’s plenty in there that’s redundant, boring, unnecessary, etc. (and I say that as a practicing Christian). For example, you can understand Dryden’s “Absolom and Achitophel” by reading just a few chapters of 2 Samuel (14-16) and being aware of English politics of the late 17th century. Something like Milton’s “Paradise Lost” would require a pretty decent understanding of a larger swath of text, but you’ll almost never need about half of the “history” books (1 and 2 Chronicles are a retelling of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings from a differently biased source) and the minor prophets run together a bit (as do the major prophets, but there are definitely themes and things you’d want to be able to know or differentiate between). If you wanted to re-write, definitely include Judges (Jael driving a tent spike through a dude’s ear and Ehud getting away with stabbing a fat smelly king because he’s a lefty shouldn’t be missed), 1-2 Samuel (where you get Elisha calling on she-bears to maul teenagers for making fun of him for being bald and King David being an ANE version of Michael Corleone/The Godfather), Genesis (half is boring, but there are brief mentions of half-giants, two separate creation myths and flood narratives, and a bunch of tricksters), the Gospels (but really just see Christopher Moore’s Lamb) and DEFINITELY DO EZEKIEL AND REVELATION (which is not “Revelations” - it’s one long, single revelation) because those prophets were tripping BALLS.

Katar Dagger with Sheath

Dated: 18th century

Culture: Indian

Medium: Steel, silk, wood

Measurements: L. with sheath 17 ¾ in. (45.1 cm); L. without sheath 16 11/16 in. (42.4 cm); W. 3 5/16 in. (8.4 cm); Wt. 1 lb. 1.4 oz. (493.3 g); Wt. of sheath 1.6 oz. (45.4 g)

I love the work that LSE Cities (London School of Economics) is doing with Urban Age. If you haven’t yet checked out their site, you should do that now. If you’re a city geek, it’s the kind of site you can get lost in for hours. Especially if you’re a sucker for great diagrams like I am.

Here’s one I found today that shows where cities are growing in the world:

Each circle represents a city (well, metropolitan area). The dark green dot is the city’s population in 1950. The lighter green dot is the city’s population in 1990. And the yellow dot is the city’s projected population by 2025. Click here for a larger version of the map.

What’s fascinating about this diagram is that you can so clearly see how the most significant population growth has shifted away from the West to the rest of the world and in particular Asia. That is, those dots have more yellow than green.

What does half the US population have in common with the richest 20 Americans? They hold the same amount of wealth.

By Martin Hart-Landsberg, PhD

We all know that wealth is unequally distributed in the US. But, the results of anew study by the Institute for Policy Studies, authored by Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, are still eye popping.

Collins and Hoxie find that the wealthiest 0.1 percent of US households, an estimated 115,000 households with a net worth starting at $20 million, own more than 20 percent of total US household wealth. That is up from 7 percent in the 1970s. This group owns approximately the same total wealth as the bottom 90 percent of US households.

Moving up the wealth ladder, they calculate that the top 400 people—yes, people not households, each with a net worth starting at $1.7 billion, have more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the US population, an estimated 70 million households or 194 million people.

Finally, we get to the top 20 people, those sitting at the pinnacle of the US wealth distribution. As the authors explain:

The wealthiest 20 individuals in the United States today hold more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population combined. These 20 super wealthy — a group small enough to fly together on one Gulfstream G650 private jet — have as much wealth as the 152 million people who live in the 57 million households that make up the bottom half of the U.S. population.

Although obvious, it is still worth emphasizing, as Collins and Hoxie do, that great wealth translates into great power, the power to shape economic policies. And, in a self-reinforcing cycle, the resulting policies, by design, create new opportunities for the wealthy to capture more wealth. Think: free trade agreements, privatization policies, tax policy, and labor and environmental laws and regulations.

Oh yes, also think presidential politics. As a New York Times study points out:

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male… Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns… Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found (emphasis added).

And yet, one still hears some people say that class analysis has no role to play in explaining the dynamics of the US political economy. Makes you wonder who pays their salary.

Originally posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Homeless People Read Mean Tweets About Themselves To End Stereotypes

When celebrities read mean tweets about themselves, it’s funny. When homeless people do it, it’s heartbreaking.

In a powerful PSA by Canadian advocacy group Raising the Roof, people who are dealing with homelessness read actual tweets written about those living without stable shelter. See all of the emotional reactions here. 

Because “that doesn’t happen to guys” *IS* a feminist issue. Male victims of abuse being dismissed, blamed or ridiculed because they weren’t “manly” enough is a part of patriarchy. And you can raise awareness of that without dismissing other feminist issues or bringing it up as a “counter argument” to problems women face.