Body Armor on a Coin

How cool is that? A bronze "dupondius" issued by the Roman warrior emperor Trajan (98-117) dating to between 103 and 111 C.E. Trajan led his Roman armies into battle himself. The body armor here depicted is referred to as a cuirass. The Roman dominions were taken to their greatest geographical extent by Trajan and remained relatively stable for about 50 years. The philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius died of old age in 180 C.E. defending Trajan's conquests in Germany after fighting Parthians and Germans for most of his career.

A Vision of Good Government

Listening to the radio tonight on the way home from work I heard Hillary Clinton (I guess she was somewhere in Indiana) stumping for the highest office in the land. In a brief radio-clip sound-bite I heard her shouting this applause line, "We need a president who will take care of you, a president who will take care of your family" followed by--the applause. A few hours later, just a few minutes ago, in fact, I came across this coin, an ancient bronze medallion, while doing a little numismatic research. Medallions, then as now, were commemorative pieces, issued to celebrate important events. This particular medallion, struck and issued in 350 A.D. was distributed to his close associates by Constantius II, a son and the successor of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who ruled from 307 to 337. Constantius consolidated the power accrued by his father and furthered his new phase of Roman governance, now referred to by historians as the "Dominate", as opposed to the "Principate", which was the form of goverment established by the emperor Augustus, some 380 years earlier. The Dominate threw aside all pretense of republican or democratic forms. Instead the emperor consolidated to his person virtually all power; he was the commander-in-chief of the army, he directed the administration of the government bureaus, he issued laws as the chief legislator, and sat in trials as judge and jury. In short, he was AVTOCRATOR: the govenment personified, and holder of all power. For tax purposes, his subjects across the vast Roman empire, which streched from Britain to Syria, were bound under penalty of death to the land they were born on and bound to the craft or profession of their father, regardless of their hopes and aspirations. The social contract was simple: the land holders, farmers and merchants paid their taxes into the Emperor's purse and the Emperor's indigent urban clientele were paid off for their support and acquiescence. You see it here in this coin. The inscriptions read:

DN CONSTAN-TIVS PF AVG: Draped and cuirassed profile of the emperor, wearing a laurel and rosette diadem. On the coin's reverse it reads: LARGI-TIO: The emperor, diademed, in ceremonial robes, enthroned facing, wearing a large belt decorated with jewels, his feet on a footstool, holding a mappa (an attribute of legislative authority) in his left hand; with his right hand he drops coins into the folds of a robe extended to him by Res Publica, who stands turreted and bowed; to his right, Roma stands facing, helmeted, wearing a tunica, her head turned towards the emperor around whose shoulders she puts her right arm, in her left hand she holds a spear.

This, of course, is like the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler. In this coin we see the image of an all powerful, benevolent government designed to take all, in order order to bestow all; the utopian bringer of constant peace and and eternal satisfaction. A steady-state concept of governance, in fact, not unlike modern liberalism, wherein each citizen is to play his or her fixed role in the wheel of life, where all the errant affairs of men must be restored by law to a preconceived notion of balance and perfection and the even the climate of the earth itself must be measured, fixed and constrained to the purposes of government.

D(ominvs) N(oster) CONSTANTIVS P(ius)F(elix) AVG(vstvs): Our Lord Constantius, Dutiful and Good Augustus

LARGITIO: Generous rewards from the government, freely given (largesse or bounty), Res Publica are the the people. Roma signifies the condign authority of the state.

Is Obama Running a Stealth 3rd Party Campaign?

Paul Krugman beats around the bush, perhaps unable to commit the heresy, but you have to ask yourself, why can't the Democrats commit? Instead, he wonders about the Democatic Party's message, as he contemplates the recent Obama deflation:

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election? That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover. But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties. (My italics).

It seems to me, the last time a major candidate for the presidency of the U.S. was doing by saying what Mr. Krugman observes in Obama's political statements, that candidate was 3rd party candidate Ross Perot. The Democrats are surely ripping themselves to shreds this season, but are they perhaps finally sundering the great coalition of Roosevelt and Johnson? Are we witnessing the death of the Dems as we have known them as they give birth to a new party from within their ranks? I think there's a good chance that we are. Coalescing around the leftist anti-U.S. imperialism fantasies, the global warmist hysteria and their dreams of America as a parlimentary democracy centered in a stronger U.N., Obama's youthquake of intellectuals may be "totally" about to spin away into its own political orbit. If so, they will certainly be well financed. Yet, should this occur it will still remain to be seen what happens to the old Clinton "New Democrats", as they will certainly not be re-inhabiting the White House.

Obsessed with history vs. obsessed with current events

As usual, the American media gets it 180 degrees wrong. The bombers and gunslingers of islam continue to run interference for "moderate islam" (like CAIR and the MAS) while running circles around our guys. Our guys in the media are oblivious to it all, of course, harping instead about trivialities and accidentals. The children of islam; in palestine, in Jordan, in Iran, In Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, (and all the other arabias, as well) in Egypt, in Indonesia, etc., etc., are taught their transcendent islamic history while our children are being taught "current events". Journalists love this, thrive on it, in fact, because it is, seemingly, all they know as well. They bring up the Beirut barracks bombing, as history, but to Osama and Nasrallah and Mahmoud, that's just current events. Michael Hirsch, in Newsweek, for instance:

"Once again timorous Democratic advisers behind the scenes are hoping they can run mainly on the ailing economy. While their candidates are urging an end to George W. Bush's war in Iraq, they are terrified of questioning the larger premises of his "war on terror" or John McCain's redefinition of it as the "transcendent challenge of the 21st century." Today's Dems are, in other words, proving unequal to the task of reclaiming the party's mostly honorable heritage on national security. This view is sadly out of touch, today more than ever. To little notice, Obama's tough, clearly stated position on Bush's war—that it was disastrously misdirected toward Iraq when Afghanistan was always the real front—is becoming conventional wisdom, even among the Bush administration's top security officials, like Defense Secretary Bob Gates andAdm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During two days of nearly impenetrable testimony on Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador RyanCrocker last week, one answer rang out as clearly as an alarm bell. Under questioning from Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Crocker admitted that Al Qaeda poses a greater threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan than it does in Iraq. No one knows more about this than the ambassador, an Arabic-speaking diplomat who previously served as envoy to Pakistan and whose career practically tells the story of America and the age of terror going back to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut."

As long as they continue to think about it as "Bush's War" we lose. Just for starters, Iraq is not a war, but merely a battle. Islam's generations are running a relay race into eternity, while our leaders are focused on petulant benchmarks for the Iraqis and cultivating the narcissism of our own electorate. Tragically, the real power is ours, if we only could just seize it and exercise it. We must start by owning our own cultural history and then by standing, unabashedly, on the shoulders of those who have come before us in this fight.

Arab Cat, American Mouse

Hugh Fitzgerald in his most recent Iconoclast post notes:

"It is not good that the Americans, from Crocker on down and up, appear to be constantly surprised, constantly disappointed, by Arab and Muslim attitudes, inside and outside Iraq, when there is nothing to be surprised or disappointed about. The Sunni regimes have a different interest from that of the Americans: they wish to keep the Americans in Iraq as long as possible, whatever the toll it takes on those Americans, and for several reasons.

First, as long as the Americans are there, the Shi'a cannot completely solidify their hold on Baghdad, historically the first city of Islam. Things remain, or seem to remain, still up in the air, as long as the foreign Infidels are present.

Second, once the Americans leave, the Sunnis of western and northwestern Iraq will be confronted with the Shi'a ascendancy in Baghdad, and realize that the Shi'a have no intention of honoring any promises made about their treatment, their equitable sharing in oil revenues for example, that may have been made, as part of Maliki's miching mallecho, to the ever-trusting Americans.

Third, it will now be the direct responsiblity of the Arab Sunni regimes to help their co-religionists in Iraq, and that costs money, and men, and war materiel. It was so much more pleasant to see the Americans stuck in Iraq, trying to stick up for the Sunnis, trying to modify the behavior of the new Shi'a rulers, in an attempt to "unify" the country. "

The Country. But is there really a "country" there, and I mean in the Western sense--(and Fitzgerald has made this very point in other contexts)--or is Iraq simply the "land of the two rivers"-- part of the formless, ubiquitous, globe-aggrandizing ummah? If it is axiomatic that Departments of State are designed to deal with states, then who in the government deals with nations, in the classical sense, other than the B.I.A.?

Certainly the ummah considers itself a nation, yet not a state. For the ummah to be a state would require a caliph, Allah's vicegerent on earth, and that is not at hand. Perhaps the Department of State would prefer, or would be better equiped to deal with a caliph, so as to better formalize our status with respect to the muslim world. Now there would be a road map and a road they could follow, trudging along in the footsteps of the ancients on their way to an ancient destination. Then we might see the old battles replayed all over again, to the same scripts as of old. Do you suppose the State Department would get it then?

You can read all of Mr. Fitzgerald's piece here.

Red Skelton's Pledge of Allegiance

This is a touching and warm-hearted piece. I used to watch Red Skelton when I was a kid. He was a gentle man, and funny without being crass or vulgar. What Hollywood was like before the likes of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and their ilk.

Flying penguins! Dear Al, Can the polar bears be far behind?

Video exclusive: First-ever images of the world's only flying penguins - Mirror.co.uk

This has something to do do with Global Warming--as well as plate tectonics, of course. Am I surprised? Well, yeah. Shocked? Not in the least. Politics vs. nature--and how does nature fight back? Well, not at all. Nature ignores politics, always and forever. That's one of the beauties of nature I find so compelling.

I am continually dismayed by the rigid dogmatism of the narcissistic environmental community. They have a pathologically rigid view of life and and of history. No room for mystery, no room for miracles and no place for the chances that life takes to survive and to persist. Life, life that has flourished and changed for eons without their help. How sad and pathethic they are compared to this colony of penguins!

Update: my wife wonders if this was an April Fools day gag...

A duty to instruct and protect?

The Iconoclast wonders about the "Great Inhibition", which I take to mean the culture of political correctness, in the context of the recent dissembling injunction of the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith against Dutchman Geert Wilders' groundbreaking production of Fitna-the Movie.

Modern political-correctness was born of the Womyn's Movement; a forced scrubbing-out of the "patriarchal" and "racist" nomenclature of our common cultural inheritance--the inauguration of police officers, firefighters, councilmembers, congresspersons and mail carriers whilst ushering out all of the policemen, firemen, councilmen, congressmen and mailmen. The end of history and the birth of herstory, the end of negroes and the beginning of the endless parade of neologisms designed to replace an inherited vocabulary, however imperfect, that had been developed over historical time to discuss and to cope with common problems and problems in-common. Built essentially upon pretense and wishful thinking, political correctness has, by-and-large enervated our political vocabulary, debilitated our culture's ability to think straight, inhibited reasoned analysis of political problems with historic roots and has cut us off from our intellectual patrimony. Now, against the onslaught of a profoundly not-understood ideology, the "profundity" of which may be lain entirely at the feet of the political correctness movement, The Iconoclast wonders:

"What do the Western scholars of Islam say about the history of Islamic conquest, what prompted it, and what happened to the non-Muslims in the lands that were conquered, over the past 1350 years? Does he know that for a very long period, and especially in that century between roughly 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition, all kinds of Western scholars, German and Dutch and Italian and Russian and English and American and Spanish, studied Islam and the history of Islamic conquest, and their works are not to be ignored nor denied, in the intolerable rush to embrace the assorted espositos and armstrongs, who have nothing like the learning of Schacht, Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Zwemer, Lammens, Dufourcq, and hundreds of others.
This kind of thing cannot be endured..."

I wonder, too. Read it all.

Update: a quote from the British psychiatrist and commentator Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) on the corrosive effects of political correctness upon societies:

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small…the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Da'wa: Are you persuaded?

I'm not. It just doesn't seem to resonate with me for some reason.
(Rightclick, "save picture as... " & print to 8 1/2 x 11).

Free Speech Solidarity

With the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard on the occasion of the arrest of his would-be Muslim assassins.

Compliments to Jyllands-Posten.