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MAYONNAISE MAMBA

Lord Bragg & BBC In Our Time - The Millenary Edition

In Our Time is a weekly BBC R4 conversation hosted by Melvyn Bragg with usually three top scholars or academics in their field of study. I've been wanting to complete this since the 1000th episode I drafted, and so it's now or never. 

We must press on.

 I've been listening to IoT from the early episodes if not just a wee bit later than 1998. The information we're allowed to overhear, the quality of conversation, is valuable and often precious, but not just for what we learn. It continually adds more context to what we already know. I can't say school was a good experience for me but IoT has contributed to my ongoing education more than any other source in my life.

A thousand episodes is an extraordinary achievement. IoT is now an online resource that will always encapsulate the life and times of Lord Bragg, with a range and depth of subjects that are now steadily topping up ours.

Now, on that subject when I was an adolescent before Melvyn Bragg was ennobled, he had a Television production called The South Bank Show. He was always comfortable around authentic, inquiring minds and a wide range of interesting people. To top it off he was handsome on the Telly and a public intellectual you'd want to hang around with, and he still is. Do you know how hard it is to be all those things in British culture and still be well regarded?

Tough call. There are many pretenders but fewer successors and regrettably impostors are everywhere, lisping their way though the third act. Jonathan Myles-Lee perhaps came closest. Now there was a man who likewise had an enormous appetite for, the true, the beautiful and the good.

It's impossible for me to hold back on a few theories I've picked up, like lucky pennies and tuppences over the years from listening to IoT. 

This may come as a surprise to many listeners but Lord Bragg is awake, and red-pilled. Maybe even initiated, and possibly not as well. The questions asked of his guests are seldom easy to answer. It's not doctrinaire responses we're looking for it's the differences in the views of the guests as well when they're all singing from the same spreadsheet. It's all informative.

From time to time questions are answered with a little hesitation that is not expected from our best and brightest. One of the best questions regularly asked by Baron Bragg is 'How do we know that?' and the answer is we don't. We're relying on accounts often written centuries later.

I invite you to revisit the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - March 2017. I can't emphasise enough to listen over and again till a familiarity with the material emerges. This may then fuel your own questions about the official version of human evolution with respect to the climate, weather and atmosphere that initiated our launch from primordial soup to sentient biped. Be sceptical and if you have the ability, be cynical.

Got that?

That's the warm up although there are more absolute gems in that episode, but the objective here is to be limbered up for the kind of detached and cool headed analysis from the Climate Change episode produced much earlier on 6 January 2000

It takes a sort of cobbled-stone stubbornness, and refreshing use of reason, logic and curiosity to listen properly to In Our Time. Kissinger said only academics fight over tiny details, as the stakes are so low.

Don't get me wrong. In our Time is invariably warm, authentic and collegial, it's edited but not in a way that seems anything less than generous. Though rare, I've noticed over the decades that a guest or two appear to be scoring points. It's out of order. They diminish themselves while blaming the victim for the very qualities of restraint they are lacking in. I only mention it because Melvyn Bragg doesn't engage in tit for tat and also leaves it in the episode for us overhear. That's aristocratic integrity. You can't buy that, especially from a working class background.

Over the years I have learned more about great women in history (often the first notable writers in the United Sates and Europe) from Lord Bragg than anywhere else. I  was a prolific book reader who tried as many genres as possible up to my 30s. I've said it before in the Hildegaard of Bingen post but its worth a reminder. If feminism means emancipating women with opportunities they are ordinarily excluded from, Lord Bragg is the greatest living feminist I know. It's unmissable that he enjoys and appreciates women as well respecting them. 

One more playful observation. Again, over the years so it doesn't happen every time but I've noticed that Melvyn (if I may) has the ability to make people laugh at the drop of a hat. Now he may deny that, but it's a quality suppressed through self control, because his work isn't as an entertainer. Funny, charming and erudite are all qualities he has but Lord Bragg is a serious contributor to understanding the nature, as well as the times that our lives are living in.

I shall be adding episodes below that I feel have been most important to me over the years. There's no rush to list them all immediately, and so I'll start with Strabo who like Jesus, nobody had bothered to document until centuries later.

Strabo's Geographica

States of Matter

Edward Gibbon

Parasitism

The Upanishads

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen is credited with writing the first plainchant music that excels in the acoustic environment of a purposefully designed church or cathedral. You may not know her but it's unlikely you haven't heard the liturgical style of music that invites a talented singer to check out the acoustics of old religious architecture on their first visit, such as this young lady who is hearing her voice for the first time, just like you and I were with her.

I was introduced to Hildegard by Lord Bragg conversing with Miri Rubin, William Flynn and Almut Suerbaum. I will drill down into the difference between scholars and academics later as they're all largely bought and sold as indeed am I and you - I will say that the official account for Hildegard has potholes. How would a fifteen year old, bricked in to a prison cell at a convent where the acoustics match that of Julian Assange's prison cell in Belmash, invent a genre and practise, experiment and enjoy her work that Cathedrals are designed for (among other qualities)?

Furthermore why would a 15 year old girl who devotes her life to God through abstention and isolation step out one day and ostensibly run the monastry as it were, before moving on to set up her own vision in Rupertsberg which most certainly is not Bingen.

Or let's put it another way. If a fanatical devotion to God through a life of mental flagellation and service changes such that one day the bricks are torn down as there's no door to exit, just a slot for passing food in and waste out. Why isn't that explained by anyone? Why would the elevator pitch for the story, the hook as it were, be left out?

I'll tell you why. It's because her story isn't one leveraged by just the forces of love, patience and protection, but one that demonstrates amply an early life hijacked by compression, suffering, prayer and abstinence.

Where is the good?

Might it be true?

Is beauty indistinguishable from the eye of the beholder?

Cloistered away from prying eyes and whatever it takes to emancipate a 15 year old anchorite from their anchoress dungeon.

History is written by the prevailing forces In Our Time. This is a fact seemingly everyone knows when pressed for an answer, but only a handful will provide examples of.

Lord Bragg nails it when he asks where did she get the books from?

Melvyn doesn't just fight British womens corner he defends women full stop. He's your champion.

Prove me wrong.

Some churches have Cathedral like audio quality built into the internal architecture. In fact, many churches are designed with acoustics in mind to enhance the sound of choirs and plainchant. The acoustics of historical churches have been extensively studied. Orthodox churches in the old world typically have reverberation times around 1.5 seconds for a small village church, 2.5 seconds for a larger urban or monastic church, ranging up to 6 seconds for a cathedral-sized church². 

Acoustical Considerations in Orthodox Church Design. https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/acoustical-considerations-in-orthodox-church-design/

Reverberation and church acoustics | Musitechnic. https://www.musitechnic.com/en/reverberation-and-church-acoustics/

Acoustics for Community Halls and Places of Worship | SRS. https://www.soundreduction.co.uk/advice/soundproofing-your-property-type/acoustics-for-community-halls-and-places-of-worship/

Church Acoustics For Liturgical Participation - Resonics. https://resonics.co.uk/church-acoustics

Church Acoustics: Four Must-Know Basic Concepts. https://www.churchproduction.com/education/church-acoustics-four-must-know-basic-concepts/

Church Acoustics: 5 Biggest Challenges and How to Fix Them
https://www.greatchurchsound.com/blog/church-acoustics-5-biggest-challenges-and-how-to-fix-them.

Yassaui Mergalyev

You may recall that I was recently floored by a dancer with the Kyiv City Ballet Gala at Southampton Mayflower theatre, and that I couldn't locate his name or the extraordinary music he danced to.

Well, I received a lovely email from the artistic director who corrected a few errors I'd made (now updated) and shared with me the dancers name and the music that was driving me nuts trying to locate. When I looked down the concert program the first name I picked out was Yassaui Mergalyev because of the Asiatic name, and my brief experiences of former Soviet Union states, yet still I managed to get the music wrong or clicked on a different rendition of the classical piece called November by Max Richter. If you haven't heard it, I hope you find a few minutes to listen at some point.

Now then, as soon as I had Mr Mergalyev's name I did a search and saw a bunch of videos but two of them appealed to me because they were so grainy and posted well over a decade ago. The location, Kazakhstan I believe, might not be The Bolshoi but on that stage, you and I can view those minute and a half clips, from a (distant galaxy) or generation ago as if we are talent spotters trawling the planet for the new and the best, and it's among the most extraordinary footage you or I could have ever expected. You can see for yourself how exceptionally talented a dancer Yassui Mergalyev is.

Those unbelievable pirouettes that I've seen world class ballet dancers misstep when drawing to a halt, because everybody is vulnerable to dizziness, no amount of training takes it all away, a lot yes, but not all, yet Mr Mergaliev delivers easily the most unprecedented number of turns for a male dancer that I've yet witnessed. 

Finally in the first clip, the dances' denouement ends in a what looks like for a microsecond, a stumble or fall, but no. The music is surgically severed exactly on-point and we apprehend all of a sudden that it's a choreographed collapse and thus takes us somewhere I've not seen outside of Nureyev or any of the biggest names. It's a large claim but you can see for yourself.

It's a real treat even to the untrained eye.

First Draft. I'll clean up later as I must crack on.

Image Provenance

If anyone has any information on these, can you get in touch please?

I've done my own digging and the only facts I have; are they were first published this year. They might be AI generated (the resolution is too high in my opinion) or the last option is they were sequestered and have now been leaked.

Update: I've changed my mind about AI

Brand New Interview - Graham Hancock - Mauro Biglino & The Elohim

All of the topics in the title have been discussed here over the years so use the search engine box or the tags at the end of the post if additional contexts are desired.

The universe is vast, I only have quantum-grasp of infinity from what was taught to me during my extended (15 minutes) Dimethyltryptamine experience that Clif High describes as hyperspace and is a much better word than the usual descriptions of entheogenic adjectives. There are no words to describe it, it's more real than this reality and the ability to convey the experience in Materium is difficult and inevitably misleading if not impossible - Though I have tried.

It is my view that the human experience for thousands of years has been manipulated not just by largely oblvious humans but by relatively small groups of non-human entities. A milder and more pedestrian explanation of this might be something like the Sons of Cain version of history whereby their genetics are superior to ours due to some hybrid experimentations and so forth.

I can only comment that a faction of this theoretical or prospective group are creative in ways that are inspirational. They do more with less and that's something humans should clutch to our souls as close as possible.

Other than that, Mauro Biglino has provided us with updated information with respect to this fresh-off-the cloud video interview that was much more surprising than I ever thought imaginable. 

I try to operate on the basis that I can only learn, when I recognise I'm wrong and that looks to be the case in this instance, but paradoxically it may well be a more tightly harnessed argument for the unsettling crypto-terrestrial explanations such as Mac Tonnies expanded on before his premature demise from myocarditis in his 30s. Mauro suggests in this fascinating discourse, they may never have left but instead gone underground.

Mauro Biglino used to be the Vatican's highest authority on bible translation till he proved there were no translations for words such as Elohim or the Shaddai but did demonstrate they weren't spiritual, and so apart from the context we can only speculate on the exact meaning of unworldly small mouth noises, but we can safely say the Elohim are plural not singular. The Vatican fired him, airbrushed his name out of the catalogue of 150 books bearing his name on them and he now gets death threats for presenting his work to the people.

Historians invariably kowtow to the Archaeologist who slur their words to be a science. I pay most attention to scholarly research that is edgy not banal or self-serving. 

I study rock, I don't suck it.

TBC

The Peloponnesian Wars - Thucydides - VoxDay

My father has never acknowledged that I've ever been correct apart from one frivolous occasion a few days after decades of silence I mentioned it to him with a grin on my face. He has many fine and admirable qualities not least of which is his Übermensch quality to work harder and longer than most people, including myself, would consider 'decent not inappropriate' (sic).

He's getting on now (aren't we all) so I look on his curmudgeonly traits warm-heartedly and with humorous thoughts I keep to myself, though I'm careful not to convey that I'm mocking him, despite dropping harsh red pills from time to time and the occasional black pill when cornered.

He freely shares with me that he knows Egyptology is a pack of well-crafted but to the sceptical observer - dissonant lies, fabrications and watered down, milquetoast official history. Parsing that information with other quackademic histories is where I back off. I guess he knows I can talk too much about them so it's probably more discouragement than denying for example that Sasquatch, Yeti and other super-bipedal stories are hard to dismiss when facing endless testimonies on the subject from all around the world.

Last Thursday I dropped by his woodturning business and instead of talking, I suggested he study VoxDay on Jordan Peterson and tapped the url into his laptop. He took one look at Theodore and said to me in pursuit of refutation of my claims that he 'could tell by looking at his face 'that he's a 'bastard'.

Bingo. I had him by the balls.

I learn a lot from VoxDay and am not without internalised critiques, but VoxDay is not a person I would cross. I said 'you're right, he is a bastard'. More accurately he is a Dark Lord. He's also a polymath with a wide-ranging history of professional pursuits and accomplishments. You may recall his cartoon publishing biz, Arktoons, included this globally viral memetic which is the most famous and impossible to find using any search engine. You'll find other Dark Lord cartoon strip images similar to the one below, but not this one and it's also reduced resolution now it's incarcerated in internet gaol.

It took me 45 minutes to find the image above so I'm weary of blogging, this is your lot for the time being.

Link to original image.

Professor Ronald Hutton - Gresham College - Early Roman Paganism

It's an exceptional presentation and sometimes hallucinogenic in its Damascene honesty. 

Unforgettable. 

What was the name of the college again?

Compelling Diocletian Arguments

A lot of history is biased, which is why Diocletian requires more attention. A lowly born Roman emperor. Did some amazing things, made some cruel sectarian decisions.

Most importantly he diluted his power with The Tetrarchy ;its unprecedent and he retired to Split in Croatia. He grew vegetables and felt more proud of that than any of his power endeavours.

This narrative is completely counter cultural to orthodox history. Guys who do the right thing in the end, are easily airbrushed from the past or branded as traditores.

Lord Bragg on Early Christian Martyr's intersects with the topic.

Beaver Wars (So Much Beaver)

Tom the Vivisectionist of Versailles (alongside my trusty stalwart Dominic Twinkle Eye) has a much more prosaic explanation for my money changers outburst and so I'm obliged to defer to his deeper research.

The first rule of history club is never be outraged when presented with more history.

Otherwise we never learn anything do we?