andros_rex

It’s comforting to me as a reminder that money is entirely made up, and that my poverty is not a marker of my value. Elon Musk has had every opportunity available to him - the fact that he can’t run a company, has zero fucking knowledge of physics despite pretending to be a super genius despite the fact that he’s never had to chose between skipping a class and taking a shift for rent money - it’s comforting that wealth has zero correlation with capability.

Empress Theodora.

For what it’s worth, Procopius Secret History is pretty problematic as a historic source. A lot of it is probably entirely made up because he didn’t like her. (For some reason, a lot of powerful women in history get this kind of treatment - in Ming China, we have this lurid account of Tang Dynasty Empress Wu Zetian’s rule for example. Or the rumors about Catherine the Great/horses.)

Jumping back a few centuries, and a wee bit west: lots of erotic art was preserved at Pompeii. (be warned - first image is man on goat sex.)

There are also these weird coins, which mayyyyybe were used at brothels?

Byzantine historians:

She was the kind of comedienne who delights the audience by letting herself be cuffed and slapped on the cheeks, and makes them guffaw by raising her skirts to reveal to the spectators those feminine secrets here and there which custom veils from the eyes of the opposite sex. With pretended laziness she mocked her lovers, and coquettishly adopting ever new ways of embracing, was able to keep in a constant turmoil the hearts of the sophisticated. And she did not wait to be asked by anyone she met, but on the contrary, with inviting jests and a comic flaunting of her skirts herself tempted all men who passed by, especially those who were adolescent.

On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries.

Frequently, she conceived, but as she employed every artifice immediately, a miscarriage was straightway effected. Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat. When she rose, it was not with a blush, but she seemed rather to glory in the performance. For she was not only impudent herself, but endeavored to make everybody else as audacious. Often when she was alone with other actors, she would undress in their midst and arch her back provocatively, advertising like a peacock both to those who had experience of her and to those who had not yet had that privilege her trained suppleness.

The “Carry on” at the end - like he’s stopped you in the street to share this nugget of wisdom, and is giving you a firm pat on the shoulder before sending me on your way.

Making rockets wasn’t his department either.

The US wouldn’t let Von Braun go testify at Dachau. To this day there’s a lot of whitewashing. But he knew how those rockets were made.

Arthur Rudolph’s crimes were so egregious, that after letting him build the Saturn 5, we decided to ask him firmly to leave the country. In 1984.

The goal is to cause civil unrest, to declare martial law and violently put down the unrest. To fragment the US into micro nations, tech cities governed by oligarchs, as well as Christofascist Gileads.

It’s accelerationism, it’s been accelerationism, the weirdos on /pol/ and Mencius Moldbug have been pretty clear on that.

The thing with ancient civilizations “mysteriously [dying] out” is often less spectacular - it’s not a singular event, but more that maybe crops fail for a couple years, while some sort of pandemic devastates cities and collapses more centralized economies, so people gradually spread out.

Like, it’s almost a process with multiple factors. Not usually just “whoops! time to officially end Mayan Civilization™”

How do you ensure that things get clean though?

My current apartment doesn’t have a dishwasher, and I can’t stand it. I can hand wash but I’m not content that the germs all got washed away, and it still feels like I can scrub the whole thing and still have spots left that only show up when the dish dries.

Geonosians didn’t make the clones, the Kamino did. Geonosians are the bug-like species that the empire xenocided after the war, once they stopped needing the labor to produce droids.

Then it turned out to be a standard issue American white guy, with blurry motivations beyond being generally pissy about the government for some incomprehensible reason.

He had a copy of The Turner Diaries and connection to a cult compound called Elohim City which is operating to this day in Oklahoma. He clearly viewed himself as part of some sort of Aryan resistance movement. (Don’t forget the involvement of Nichols - who got the death penalty as well - and the Fourier couple, who our tax dollars put into witness protection to insure that no one would face any consequences.)

There’s more than a few in OKCPD who were sympathetic to his cause. Unfortunately, Terrence Yeakey was so disturbed by whatever was on the missing VHS tape that he slit his wrists and shot himself from behind…

He was also specifically pissed about Waco and Ruby Ridge. Tucker Carlson has been suggesting that people go Ruby Ridge themselves of late..

Wendy William’s bank has her in a conservatorship.

How does anyone see what he did to his house and think, that man is able to take care of himself?

I’ve heard that some of it is probably NO2 abuse under the care of one of his doctors. I think he started going off the rails after his mother died.