There's a shame.
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Bangkok grenade attacks wound 'Iranian' suspect and four others

Thai police say male suspect, initially identified as Iranian, accidentally blew his own legs off in a series of blasts in the capital

I was at least half-fortunate in falling in with a Trotskyist outfit when I went through the mandatory youthful left-wing radical phase so I never held a torch for Stalin. He was always the enemy.

I'm very happy to forgive people who made a similar but less fortunate mistake when young, people who found themselves accidentally associated with the Communist Party. It's when they're older and still yearn for the lands of the Stasi, the Trabant, the famines, the purges and the Gulag…then I have absolutely no time for them at all. No time for their willful arrested adolescence, their Che posters and crazy anti-Americanism. Idiots, the lot of them.

Interesting fact: the Soviet Union didn't increase total factor productivity at all during its entire existence. All its economic growth came from the consumption of more resources. By contrast, over the same period, a whopping 80% of the West's growth came from productivity improvements and only 20% from increased resource consumption.

Another reason why, if you're Green, you should embrace Western capitalism and run a mile from planned, non-market economies.

Also, I notice the Philospher's Zone podcast is on Michael Dummet, a philosopher I've only recently discovered…an expert on Frege who was terribly shocked and disappointed when he found out about Frege's virulent antisemitism. The host, Alan Saunders, is extremely knowledgeable (I think he has a PhD in Philosophy himself) and makes a very helpful host. Recommended.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/

iTunes – Podcasts – Russian Rulers History Podcast by Mark Schauss

Download past episodes or subscribe to future episodes for free from Russian Rulers History Podcast by Mark Schauss on the iTunes Store.

The Reconquista had finished and the Moors expelled from Al-Andalus, but they'd been there for centuries almost up to de Machaut's time. The crusades had been going on for the previous few centuries, with consequent traffic between the Holy Land and the West. And of course Arab seafarers, merchants and pirates were always sailing around the Mediterranean (Lepanto was another couple of hundred years in the future). Byzantium had another century left before it fell to the Ottomans and it too must have been a fruitful source of Arabic musical influences.

Many of the old troubadour songs have a distinct feel of the Muezzin's call to prayer. I don't know enough about music to pinpoint exactly what it is that's been borrowed, but there's very definitely a connection.

This is rather good, isn't it.
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Guillaume de Machaut: Douce dame jolie

L'amour courtois
Guillaume de Machaut : Douce Dame Jolie, virelai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi

Make my bed soon
For I'm sick to my heart
And I fain would lie down.

Traditional English Lute Songs – Lord Randall

Traditional English Lute Lord Randall
Watch In High Quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UooMssj

Because I'm running the @cdarwin Twitter stream I know when it's his birthday; but I was surprised when I discovered that Abraham Lincoln was born the same day in 1809 as Darwin.

In 2006 I visited Hodgenville, Kentucky, where Lincoln was born, and the slightly odd Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, which sports a replica Greek Temple inside which is a replica log cabin. That same year I was in DC and visited the Lincoln Memorial, where King stood to make that speech and where the Gettysburg Address is inscribed on a wall in the portico housing the huge seated statue.

Though I admire Thomas Jefferson, I was a little uneasy on my visit to Monticello, his home in Virginia, because of the slavery issue; even then the guides skirted around it a little. it's confusing the recall that the man who wrote the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

was a slave owner ( and don't get me started on the Sally Hemmings story, and the Monticello Association).

Lincoln is a less ambiguous figure. Critics have tried to suggest that Lincoln wasn't primarily concerned with freeing slaves, arguing that as a politician he had mixed motives and that he'd have settled for an agreement that left slavery in the South. But it was Lincoln who abolished slavery and so when he made speeches with fine, stirring sentiments we can be happy that he really did include everyone in his vision of the US.

The Gettysburg Address, a short speech apparently dashed off quickly, is a fine example of his oratory.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…

…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

and just for Europeans who might have slightly confused notions of US political history, I might point out that Lincoln was a Republican.

I've never heard of an academic by the name of Philip Schofield but I'm imagining it's not the same Philip Schofield who used to hang out on Saturday morning TV with Gordon the Gopher.

It's over 20 years since I was there last, the first time Helen and I flew together on holiday. Foster's Reichstag hadn't been started, it was my first encounter with the German Poo Shelf, and we had an excellent couple of days. A place so redolent with history you expect it to deliver profundities at every street corner, which of course it doesn't do. But here you'll find the Brandenburg Gate; Unter den Linden; a Le Corbusier tower block; the Bebelplatz, formerly Opernplatz, where the Nazis burned books in 1933 and where today Heine's terribly prophetic words are engraved: That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also

And the Bauhaus museum; and the '36 Olympics Stadium where Jesse Owens's name is carved into the wall many times ; and the bust of Nefertiti in the Pergamon; and maybe a photo of Helen sitting on the knee of Karl Marx Karl-Marx-Platz, if it's still there.

A fascinating town.