Warsaw has denounced Lviv Oblast authorities' plans to honor the World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its military leader, Roman Shukhevych.

The move signals a fresh rift in the already strained Kyiv-Warsaw ties just days after President Volodymyr Zelensky said the relations had finally improved.

The council

Britain's history has been trashed by ideologues with an agenda, undermining the nation’s patriotism and cohesion. It's time to tell a better story about Britain, say Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs.

The post It’s Time to Tell a Better Story About Britain appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

A trove of ancient coins has been unearthed at a construction site in Germany — after remaining hidden for more than 2,000 years.

The discovery, made at Singer Berg in the central German state of Thuringia, was announced recently by the Thuringian State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (TLDA). 

In a translated news release, officials said excavation director Ronny Krause discovered the coins while archaeologists were investigating a former sports field ahead of the construction of a new fire station.

7,000-YEAR-OLD BONES UNCOVERED AT CONSTRUCTION SITE IN STARTLING FIND

Archaeologists conducted follow-up excavations at the site in August 2026 — and confirmed that the 11 coins dated back to the first century B.C.

The hoard represented the largest known Celtic coin hoard from that period ever found in Thuringia.

The 11 coins, dating back to the first century B.C., were identified as a type of ancient Celtic currency known as Prague-type quinarii.

"Until now, only about 80 examples of these quinarii had been identified throughout Thuringia, underscoring the significance of the Singen hoard," the translated statement said.

WORKERS RENOVATING MAJOR CITY STREET STUMBLE ON ANCIENT DISCOVERY BURIED 20 FEET BELOW

"The mint responsible for producing the coins is believed to have been located in the Gotha region, to the northwest."

The Celts were groups of ancient people who lived across much of Europe during the Iron Age, with Celtic languages and traditions surviving today in places such as Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The coins were originally buried together in a container made of organic material that has since decomposed, archaeologists believe. The coins were found scattered across an area measuring roughly 19 feet by 5 feet — likely a result of plowing.

Officials described the discovery as a "closed find," suggesting that all the coins originally buried together were recovered.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER

While just 11 coins may seem like a modest haul to some, archaeologists consider the discovery a treasure trove of information about the ancient world.

"Through the ongoing mapping of discoveries from the same period and cultural background, researchers can draw conclusions about ancient trade routes and production centers," the translated statement added.

"The Singen treasure hoard has significantly expanded our existing knowledge in this area."

Archaeologists also found an ancient Roman coin and a medieval glass bead — as well as a knife fragment, another silver coin and a Prussian uniform button from the 19th or 20th century.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE LIFESTYLE NEWS

Officials also emphasized the broader significance of the discovery and the importance of proper archaeological practices.

"This once again demonstrates the importance of preserving the archaeological context of discoveries, in contrast to isolated metal finds recovered, for example, through improper or illegal metal detecting without documentation of their original locations," the statement concluded.

TEST YOURSELF WITH OUR LATEST LIFESTYLE QUIZ

Metal detectorists have made headlines for uncovering other ancient treasures across Europe.

Recently, a man using a metal detector in a German field discovered 934 ancient Roman silver coins dating back nearly 2,000 years.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

In Finland, a metal detectorist recently uncovered a massive Viking Age silver hoard containing an estimated 4,000 coins, along with jewelry and other artifacts.

10/21/1919: Abrams v. United States argued.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: October 21, 1919 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Darwin wasn’t an agnostic by conviction – he was an atheist who rejected Christianity as immoral.

Join us on Telegram, X, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Friends were surprised when I described Darwin as the only major scientist who was unequivocally an atheist, given that he considered himself an agnostic. I confess that I tend to erase this label in my memory, because the formal distinction presumed by it—to wit, the idea that an agnostic does not know whether God exists, while an atheist knows that God does not—does not correspond to reality. I am not aware of a single prominent atheist who claims to be able to prove the non-existence of the divine. Even Dawkins, the most stereotypical atheist in the media, does not suggest that this is possible. In The God Delusion (Chapter 2), he describes himself as a de facto atheist, defined by the following stance: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” Thus, if we apply the traditional distinction, the world’s most famous atheist is not an atheist, but an agnostic.

Bertrand Russell held a similar position, as illustrated by his famous “celestial teapot” analogy. Can we prove that there is a teapot orbiting the planet? No. But we have no reason to believe that such a teapot exists. God is like that teapot: while it is impossible to prove that he does not exist, it is not reasonable to believe that he does. For this reason, Russell considered himself an agnostic in theory and an atheist in practice.

Darwin

If the term “agnostic” serves any purpose, it is to describe individuals who truly live in a state of doubt regarding the existence of God. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was born to a deist father and a Unitarian mother. Deism entails the rejection of all institutionalized religion and the assertion that God exists, but takes no interest in humanity. As an 18th-century Englishman, Darwin’s father most likely believed in the Great Architect of Newton and the Freemasons. Unitarianism is a new flavor of Arianism, as it denies the divinity of Jesus, viewing him instead as a great moral reformer—comparable to Socrates. Unitarians took control of Harvard in the 19th century, and Newton was, in fact, a secret Arian. We might say, then, that Darwin did not grow up in a strictly Christian home; yet, he seriously considered becoming an Anglican priest and married a devout Christian woman. Undoubtedly, Darwin experienced crises of faith, which rendered him an agnostic, in the sense that the term describes a psychological state.

As far as we know, the first time he described himself as an agnostic was in 1879, at the age of 70, in a private letter to John Fordyce. According to some accounts, in 1881 he told a group of freethinkers that he had not abandoned Christianity until he was forty (which would have been in 1849). Did he abandon Christianity, adopt his father’s beliefs, and then eventually abandon those as well? I do not know the answer, but it is a vital question for Darwin’s scientific trajectory, since, by today’s labels, Newton would be a creationist or an intelligent design advocate.

The most illuminating account is found in his autobiography, written between 1876 and 1881 for his family. I quote James Moore from “Myth 16: That Evolution Destroyed Darwin’s Faith in Christianity—until He Reconverted on His Deathbed”: “Unwilling to give up Christianity, he had tried to ‘invent evidence’ to confirm the Gospels, which prolonged his indecision. Just as his clerical career had died a slow ‘natural death,’ so his faith withered gradually. But there was no turning back once the deathblow struck. His dithering crystallized into a moral conviction so strict that he could not see how anyone—even [his wife] Emma—‘ought to wish Christianity to be true.’ For if it were, ‘the plain language’ of the New Testament ‘seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.’ In later years, the residual theism evident in the Origin of Species became worn down, and now with ‘no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward,’ Darwin felt he must be ‘content to remain an Agnostic.’” Darwin’s father, a pivotal figure in his crisis of faith, died in 1848, a year before Darwin himself turned forty.

Darwin did not die in a state of indecision; he died firmly convinced that Christianity was immoral because it would condemn his loved ones to hell. If the term “agnosticism” applies here, it denotes a state of unknowing that follows the rejection of God as understood within the Abrahamic religions. Darwin knows that the Bible is wrong and that its God does not exist. But as for what God actually is, or what the truth may be—that, he does not know. Certainly, determining Darwin’s final state of mind is not enough to uncover the impact that his shifting religious convictions had on his thinking, given that the writing of On the Origin of Species (1859) spanned two decades.

The origin of the term “agnosticism”

No less than thirty years passed between the onset of Darwin’s disbelief and his first self-identification as an agnostic. A simple reason why he did not use this term earlier is that it had not yet been invented. It is rarely mentioned, but “agnosticism” is a term with a specific inventor and date of origin: in 1869, when Darwin was already 60 years old, Thomas Henry Huxley (known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” and grandfather to both Aldous, the writer who advocated for opening the mind through drugs, and Julian, the eugenicist who founded the WWF and served as the first head of UNESCO) coined the term during a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, a somewhat secretive group open only to invited members. Darwin was not a member. The aforementioned Bertrand Russell had a deist relative who was a member: Lord Arthur Russell, nephew of Earl John Russell (Bertrand’s grandfather). Arthur Balfour, of the Balfour Declaration, was also a member. I could not have been there because I had not yet been born, but the Encyclopædia Britannica states that the term was coined under these circumstances, so I take believe it.

A public definition of agnosticism by the grandpa Huxley was first presented to the public in 1889, in the magazine Popular Science (or Pop Science), which still exists today. It reads as follows: “Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, ‘Try all things, hold fast by that which is good’ [1 Thess. 5:21]; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.”

Based on this definition, there is no obvious connection to a stance regarding the question of divine existence; however, the text as a whole implies a negative position: throughout, Huxley distinguishes himself from Comte, and agnosticism from the Comtian “Religion of Humanity.” He finds it necessary to differentiate himself because they share a disbelief in an Abrahamic God, an adherence to scientism, and a triumphalism akin to the “End of History.” The differences are that Comte and the positivists were mediocre scientists who created a church with a structure inspired by Catholicism, whereas the 19th-century English agnostics were brilliant and had no intention of founding a church.

It is worth noting the Unitarian flavor of this rhetoric, which seeks to trace a rationalist and contrarian lineage—beginning with Socrates, running through the Bible, and reaching its pinnacle in the present day—stripped of any supernatural elements. Another significant 19th-century English figure who adopted this approach was John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty. His wife and collaborator was a Unitarian.

And, of course, we see here an opposition—perhaps historically unprecedented—between possessing a scientific spirit and believing in God. We can say that Darwin’s Bulldog, during Darwin’s lifetime, ostracized Deism from science, since Evolution was presented as a refutation the Newtonian Architect’s existence.

A Matter of Terminology

Ultimately, Thomas Huxley was what we would today call an atheist—as was likely Darwin, given that he chose the term coined by his friend to describe his own position. Curiously, even Comte did not call himself an atheist. It seems that the spirit of atheism and scientism was widespread among the 19th-century intelligentsia, yet the willingness to embrace the label was confined to radicals such as Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx (whose 1841 dissertation focused on Democritus and Epicurus, the fathers of materialism), and Mikhail Bakunin. In that era, the distinction between the terms “atheist” and “agnostic” likely amounted to little more than one’s willingness to shock society. Neither the French positivists nor the English evolutionists sought to shock; the communists and anarchists, however, did.

Over time, by the 21st century, being an atheist no longer shocks anyone; in more intellectual circles, it is the norm. Hence the tendency to discard the term “agnostic,” or to reserve it exclusively for those who are in a state of genuine doubt. Another semantic issue concerns what we mean by “God.” Some people say things like, “For me, God is energy”—which leads one to wonder: does it make sense to claim that God is the very same thing that makes my electric fan spin and subsequently shows up on my utility bill? In the United States, one of the few Western nations where declaring oneself an atheist can still cause a stir, it is common for people to label themselves “spiritual, but not religious.” Such individuals often gravitate toward esoteric practices—crystals, horoscopes, Zen meditation, gurus who are as ugly as they are hungry for sex, and so on—without committing to any specific religion. This is likely a legacy of deism; after all, Freemasonry played a significant role in the nation’s founding and is rooted in deism. It is no coincidence that this 21st-century deism can, much like its Renaissance precedents, the libertins, become blurred with atheism. Sam Harris himself, for instance, is an atheist who embraces New Age ideas.

It is a historical irony, then, that one of the coiners of the term “psychedelia” (Greek for “revelation of the mind”) happens to be the grandson of the man who coined the term “agnosticism.” It seems that a segment of humanity cannot relinquish the pursuit of ecstatic experiences and revelations, even after abandoning the notion of divine transcendence—leading them, instead, to seek such experiences within the material realm. The distinction between a “sober” atheist and a New Age atheist appears to be more a matter of temperament than of philosophy—much like the distinction between an atheist and an agnostic in the 19th century.

While the West persists in describing Africa as a continent without memory, its own museums are overflowing with artifacts, religious relics, and human remains confiscated from African rulers to mask the barbarity of a predatory colonization. For decades, as consciousness has been evolving in Africa, European intellectual arrogance has crumbled in the face of the […]

Convoluted hybrid arrangement between local government and Jewish community created tension when images of water damage to complex spread online, led to municipal director quitting

A diferença entre um ateu sóbrio e um ateu New Age parece ser mais uma questão de temperamento do que de filosofia, assim como a diferença entre ateu e agnóstico no século XIX.

Junte-se a nós no Telegram , X e VK.

Escreva para nós: info@strategic-culture.su

Amigos estranharam a minha qualificação de Darwin como único grande cientista inequivocamente ateu, pois ele se considerava agnóstico. Eu confesso que tendo a apagar esse rótulo da minha cabeça, porque a distinção formal entre ateísmo e agnosticismo presumida por ele – a saber, que o agnóstico não sabe se Deus existe, enquanto o ateu sabe que Deus não existe – não tem correspondência na realidade, pois não tenho notícias de um único ateu famoso que pretenda provar a inexistência divina. Nem Dawkins, o ateu mais caricato da mídia, diz que isso é possível. Em Deus, um delírio, cap. 2, ele se consideram um ateu de facto, definido pelo mote: “Eu não tenho como saber com certeza, mas acho que Deus é muito improvável, e vivo segundo a premissa de que ele não existe.” Assim, se levarmos em conta a distinção tradicional, o ateu mais famoso do mundo não é ateu, mas agnóstico.

Outra figura com postura similar é a de Bertrand Russell, com sua famosa analogia do bule voador. Podemos provar que não há um bule em órbita dando voltas ao redor do planeta? Não. Mas não temos nenhum motivo para acreditar que tal bule exista. Deus é como esse bule: não dá para provar que ele não existe, mas não é razoável acreditar que exista. Por isso, Russell se considerava agnóstico na teoria e ateu na prática.

Darwin

Se o termo “agnóstico” tem serventia, é para descrever as pessoas que de fato vivem em estado de dúvida quanto à existência de Deus. Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) era filho de pai deísta e de uma unitarista. O deísmo consiste em negar toda religião institucionalizada e afirmar que Deus existe, porém não se importa com a humanidade. Sendo um inglês do século XVIII, o pai de Darwin muito provavelmente acreditava no Grande Arquiteto de Newton e dos maçons. O unitarismo é um novo sabor do arianismo, pois nega a divindade de Jesus e tem-no como um grande reformador moral, equiparável a Sócrates. Os unitaristas tomaram Harvard no século XIX, e Newton era secretamente arianista. Podemos então dizer que Darwin não teve um lar propriamente cristão; ainda assim, ele pensou muito em ser pastor anglicano e se casou com uma cristã fervorosa. Sem dúvida, Darwin passou por crises de fé, o que fez dele um agnóstico nesse sentido que descreve o estado psicológico.

Até onde se sabe, primeira vez em que ele se descreve como agnóstico é em 1879, aos 70 anos, numa carta privada a John Fordyce. Segundo relatos, em 1881 ele afirmou a um grupo de livres pensadores que nunca abandonou o cristianismo até os quarenta anos de idade (o que seria o ano de 1849). Teria ele abandonado o cristianismo e adotado as crenças do pai e depois abandonado até mesmo ela? Não conheço a resposta, mas é uma questão vital para a trajetória científica de Darwin, pois pelos rótulos de hoje Newton seria um criacionista ou defensor do design inteligente pelos rótulos de hoje.

O depoimento mais iluminador é o da sua autobiografia, redigida entre 1876 e 1881 para a sua família. Cito James Moore em “Mito 16: Que a evolução destruiu a fé de Darwin – até que ele se converteu novamente no leito de morte”: “Não disposto a abrir mão do cristianismo, ele havia tentado ‘inventar evidências’ para confirmar os Evangelhos, o que prolongou sua indecisão. Assim como sua carreira como ministro religioso havia sofrido uma lenta ‘morte natural’, sua fé também foi mirrando gradualmente. Mas não houve retorno após o golpe de morte. Sua hesitação se cristalizou em uma convicção moral tão forte que ele não via como alguém – nem mesmo [a esposa] Emma – ‘pudesse desejar que o cristianismo fosse verdade’. Pois se fosse, ‘a linguagem pura e simples’ do Novo Testamento ‘parece mostrar que os homens que não creem, e isto incluiria meu pai, irmão e quase todos os meus amigos, serão punidos por toda a eternidade. E esta é uma doutrina maldita.’ Em anos posteriores o teísmo original evidente em As Origem das Espécies se desgastou, e agora, ‘sem crença segura e persistente na existência de um Deus pessoal ou na existência futura como retribuição e prêmio’, Darwin sentia que deveria ‘se contentar em permanecer agnóstico’.” O pai de Darwin, marco para a crise de fé, morreu em 1848, um ano antes dos quarenta anos.

Darwin não morreu indeciso; ele morreu decidido de que o cristianismo era imoral porque mandaria seus entes queridos para o inferno. Se o termo “agnosticismo” se aplica, é para estabelecer um estado de ignorância após a negação de Deus tal como as religiões abraâmicas o reconhecem. Darwin sabe que a Bíblia está errada e que seu Deus não existe. Mas o que é Deus ou qual a verdade, ele não sabe.

Por certo, o descobrir o estado final de Darwin não é suficiente para descobrir o impacto de suas cambiantes convicções religiosas sobre seu pensamento, já que a redação de A origem das espécies (1859) durou duas décadas.

A origem do termo “agnosticismo”

Entre o início da descrença de Darwin e sua primeira autodeclaração como agnóstico, passaram-se nada menos que trinta anos. Uma razão simples para ele não ter usado esse termo cedo é que ele não tinha sido inventado. Pouco se menciona isso, mas “agnosticismo” é um termo com inventor e data de nascimento: em 1869, quando Darwin tinha já 60 anos, Thomas Henry Huxley (vulgo “Buldogue de Darwin”, avô de Aldous, o escritor apologista de abertura da mente via drogas, e de Julian, o eugenista fundador do WWF e primeiro UNESCO), inventou o termo numa reunião da Sociedade Metafísica, uma sociedade algo secreta da qual só participavam membros convidados. Darwin não era membro. O supracitado Bertrand Russell tinha um parente deísta que era membro: Lord Arthur Russell, sobrinho do Conde John Russell, avô de Bertrand. Arthur Balfour, da Declaração Balfour, também era membro. Eu não podia estar lá porque eu não era nascida, mas a Enciclopédia Britânica diz que a invenção ocorreu em tais circunstâncias, então eu acredito.

Uma definição pública do agnosticismo pelo vovô Huxley foi oferecida ao público pela primeira vez em 1889, na revista Popular Science (ou Pop Science), que existe até hoje. Ei-la: “O agnosticismo, de fato, não é um credo, mas um método, cuja essência reside na rigorosa aplicação de um único princípio. Esse princípio é de grande antiguidade; é tão velho quanto Sócrates; tão velho quanto o escritor que disse ‘Examinai tudo, retende o que é bom’ [1 Tess. 5,21]; é a fundação da Reforma, que simplesmente ilustrou o axioma de que a todo homem deveria ser dada uma razão para a fé que está nele; é o grande princípio de Descartes; é o axioma fundamental da ciência moderna. Positivamente, o princípio pode ser expresso assim: Em questões intelectuais, siga a razão até onde ela lhe levar, sem se preocupar com nenhuma outra consideração. E negativamente, assim: Em questões intelectuais, não ter a pretensão de que as conclusões que não são demonstradas ou demonstráveis são certas. Isto eu tenho por fé agnóstica, que, se o homem mantiver íntegra e incorrupta, não há de se envergonhar em olhar o universo face a face, independente do que o futuro lhe reserve.”

Por essa definição, não há nenhuma relação óbvia com uma postura perante à questão da existência divina, mas o conjunto do texto deixa implícita da negativa: de cabo a rabo, Huxley diferenciar a si próprio de Comte, e o agnosticismo da Religião da Humanidade comteana. Ele precisa se diferenciar porque são iguais a descrença em um Deus abrâmico, o cientificismo e o triunfalismo à la Fim da História. As diferenças, que Comte e os positivistas eram cientistas medíocres e criaram uma igreja de estrutura inspirada no catolicismo, ao passo que os agnósticos ingleses do XIX eram brilhantes e não tinham nenhuma intenção de fundar uma igreja.

Cabe apontar o sabor unitarista da retórica, que visa a traçar uma linhagem racionalista e contestadora que surge em Sócrates, atravessa a Bíblia e chega ao seu pináculo na atualidade, destituída de sobrenaturalidade. Outra figura importante do XIX inglês que a adotava era John Stuart Mill, em Sobre a liberdade. A esposa e colaboradora dele era unitarista.

E, é claro, vemos aí a oposição – talvez, sem precedentes históricos – entre ter espírito científico e crer em Deus. Podemos dizer que o Buldogue de Darwin, durante a vida de Darwin, ostracizou o deísmo da ciência, já que a Evolução era apresentada como refutação da existência do Arquiteto newtoniano.

Questão de termos

No frigir dos ovos, Thomas Huxley era o que hoje entendemos por ateu – e provavelmente também Darwin, já que ele escolheu o termo criado pelo amigo para designar a própria posição. O engraçado é que nem mesmo Comte se dizia ateu. Ao que parece, o espírito do ateísmo e do cientificismo eram generalizados na intelectualidade do XIX, mas a disposição a assumir o rótulo se limitava a radicais como Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx (cuja dissertação, de 1841, foi sobre Demócrito e Epicuro, pais do materialismo) e Mikhail Bakunin. Provavelmente, a diferença entre os termos “ateu” e “agnóstico” naquela época se limitava à disposição de chocar a sociedade. Nem os positivistas franceses, nem os evolucionistas ingleses, queriam chocar. Já os comunistas e anarquistas queriam.

Com o tempo, no XXI, ser ateu não choca mais ninguém; nos círculos mais estudados, é a norma. Daí a disposição a enterrar o termo “agnóstico”, ou reservá-lo às pessoas que estejam num real estado de dúvida.

Outra questão semântica é o que entendemos por Deus. Há quem diga coisas como “para mim, Deus é energia” – daí a gente se pergunta se faz sentido dizer que Deus é isso que faz o meu ventilador girar e depois aparece na conta de luz. Nos Estados Unidos, um dos poucos países ocidentais no qual ainda é possível chocar dizendo-se ateu, é comum as pessoas se rotularem como “spiritual, but not religious” (espiritual, mas não religiosa), e tipicamente essas pessoas vão atrás de esoterismos – cristais, horóscopo, meditação zen, gurus tão feios quanto tarados etc. – sem aderir a nenhuma religião particular. Isso só pode ser herança do deísmo, até porque a maçonaria tem uma grande importância na formação do país e é deísta. Não à toa, esse deísmo do século XXI pode se confundir com o ateísmo, como os seus predecessores renascentistas, os libertinos. Sam Harris mesmo é um ateu adepto do New Age.

Agora, não deixa de ser uma ironia histórica que um dos inventores do termo “psicodelia” (do grego, “revelação mental”) seja neto do inventor do termo “agnosticismo”. Parece que uma parcela da humanidade não desiste de experiências extáticas e de revelações mesmo quando abandona a transcendência divina e, assim passa a procurá-la na matéria. A diferença entre um ateu sóbrio e um ateu New Age parece ser mais uma questão de temperamento do que de filosofia, assim como a diferença entre ateu e agnóstico no século XIX.

• France is experiencing some of its worst civil unrest in years.
• So, what came before it?
• Here are 10 of France's biggest protests and riots over the past 100 years.

France is experiencing one of its largest riots and protests in years.

What began as peaceful demonstrations over school conditions culminated in nationwide cost-of-living protests and, subsequently, riots.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Tuesday that curfews imposed on Monday contributed to a calm night, though more protests are planned, according to Reuters.

The riots and protests echo many in France's long history of mass demonstrations. From nationwide strikes to student demonstrations, several have brought the country to a standstill, in some cases prompting France's leaders to announce a state of emergency.

Take a look at some of France's biggest and most impactful protests and riots over the past 100 years.

10/20/1973: The Saturday Night Massacre occurs.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: October 20, 1973 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Why do modern architects insist on designing such ugly, soul-crushing buildings, asks Joanna Gray. Because they win awards for doing so. And worst of all is the generic hollow-eyed modern window.

The post Why Have Modern Architects Forgotten How to Design Windows? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In 19th-century Munich, a woman with no formal banking experience began promising ordinary people extraordinary returns on their savings. Workers, servants, craftsmen and farmers flocked to her door, carrying the money they had spent years accumulating. Some mortgaged their homes or sold their land to take advantage of her generosity. For a time, the money flowed so freely that her business appeared almost invincible.

The woman was Adele Spitzeder, a former actress who became one of the most notorious financial swindlers in 19th-century Germany. Her private banking enterprise, popularly known as the Dachauer Bank, promised returns of as much as 10 per cent a month. But behind the apparent prosperity lay a simple deception: much of the money paid to earlier investors came not from profitable investments, but from the deposits of newcomers.

“As a child, I thought of the burrito as something predictable, filling, and reliable. It would be years before I saw it as a source of political conviction; something that once split my family’s loyalty between their hungry children and a revolutionary cause.” In this essay at Orion, Victoria Blanco writes about her Abuelita, whose family had owned a burrería in downtown Juárez during the Mexican Revolution, and how she worked hard there through childhood, making burritos for Pancho Villa’s troops—an army fighting for a better life for the next generation. “The food we ate was built for movement,” she writes, “the same way we were.” Blanco reflects on the burrito as a symbol resistance, the borderland, and belonging.

I found the unspoken parts of Abuelita’s childhood when I was working in a university archive as a student, examining photographs no one in my family had ever seen. One image stopped me completely: a rooftop terrace at the Paso del Norte hotel, where well-dressed Americans held cocktails and binoculars, watching the war across the river as though it were a form of entertainment. On the other side of that same river—a river with two names, Río Bravo on one bank, Rio Grande on the other—men were falling from gunfire while children went without food so that revolutionaries could have the sustenance they needed to keep fighting. I sat with that photograph for a long time, thinking about my abuelita, a girl somewhere in that city while Americans sipped cocktails and watched her world from a hotel roof.

The richest countries climbed to prosperity by methods they now forbid everyone else to use. Hamilton, List, Carey and Polanyi, four economists explained why those methods work and why abandoning them ends badly. There is a story the world’s wealthiest capitals love to tell about themselves. Prosperity, it goes, is the reward for opening your […]

10/19/1789: Chief Justice John Jay takes oath.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: October 19, 1789 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Named for a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hero, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai embodies Jewish resistance. From 1948 to Oct 7, 2023, it rebuilds anew, a testament to resilience, hope, and renewal.

10/18/1960: Gomillion v. Lightfoot argued.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: October 18, 1960 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

By Patrick LAWRENCE

Join us on Telegram, X, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

In her revelatory work The Cultural Cold War, the late British author was the first to shine so unblinking a light on the sprawl of the C.I.A.’s cultural interventions.

Frances Stonor Saunders was fond of epigraphs (as am I). At the front of The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 1999), the British journalist, documentarian and author quotes some lines from Dante’s Inferno, the last of which is, “Before my age was full, I went astray.”

I had not lived half my life when I succumbed to complacency and moral blindness: This is my reading of the line from Canto XV. And how fitting it is at the start of Saunders’ exhaustively researched account of how the Central Intelligence Agency, its tentacles reaching into every corner of American culture, did so much to lead our republic into what the Italian poet would call its selva oscura, its dark wood —the state of lostness America has never since escaped.

Frances Stonor Saunders died on the last day of August, having suffered from a virulent strain of brain cancer. She was a mere 60. We had a few acquaintances in common, but I never met her. It was nonetheless something like losing a friend when, just this past week, I heard of her death. And so this brief appreciation.

The Cultural Cold War made Stonor Saunders’ reputation. It took a prominent place on my shelf of Cold War books as soon as it was published. At last the curtain parted on the insidious use the C.I.A. made, or attempted to make, of painters, poets, playwrights, novelists, editors, jazz musicians, singers, dancers, actors, scholars and other cultural figures in its long-running operation to promote the appeal of American life as against the Soviet Union and altogether the postwar socialist alternative.

This was an immense “soft power” operation avant la lettre — before we had the term. One could also call it an early variant of the “cognitive warfare” to which we are now incessantly subjected, the primary object of which was to keep postwar Europe from swinging leftward, as the French, the Italians and others were poised to do.

From Saunders’s Introduction:

“Drawing on an extensive, highly influential network of intelligence personnel, political strategists, the corporate establishment, and the old school Ivy League universities, the incipient CIA started, from 1947, to build a ‘consortium’ whose double task was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy abroad. The result was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the Agency… Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise.”

Who Was Who & Who Stood Where

Jackson Pollock and others among the Abstract Expressionists, Leonard Bernstein and others among the American composers then prominent, Robert Lowell, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy and other writers of their generation, Duke Ellington and other jazz stars — if they weren’t sent abroad on the C.I.A.’s nickel, their work was.

There were the hundreds of books the Agency took a role in promoting, It paid for translations of Eliot’s Four Quartets, Luigi Barzini’s The Italians, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. It covertly supported magazines — Encounter and The Paris Review famous among them — along with radio stations and, of course, newspapers — and those who wrote and edited for them. As of 1956 the Agency owned a considerable piece of the Rome Daily American.

Saunders, who did years of interviewing and archival research for this book, lays out her findings over 427 well-written pages and was the first to shine so unblinking a light on the sprawl of the C.I.A.’s cultural interventions.

One of the things I like about Saunders’s book, among many, is her exposure of those artists and writers who knew of the Agency’s interventions and wanted nothing to do with them, those who knew and cooperated and those who served its purposes unwittingly.

Pollock had no idea of the use to which the Agency put his work, Baldwin wanted nothing to do with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (C.C.F.), infamous as a C.I.A. front. Ever true to her tough-minded politics, neither did Lillian Hellman.

Mary McCarthy knew all about the Agency’s funding of the C.C.F. and its other projects and was fine with all of it. I’ve never liked McCarthy’s novels, and Saunders gave me a good reason to distrust her. She was prominent among that group of Americans known as Cold War liberals, for whom I have long nursed an abiding contempt.

I wish Saunders had given more attention to the profligate corruptions of generations of American journalists and newspaper editors, but her definition of culture is narrower than mine; I speculate that journalism’s service to the Agency was a room so large she chose not to enter it.

The surrender of many American journalists to the Cold War cause is well-enough documented in any case. See, for example, Carl Bernstein’s celebrated “The C.I.A. and the Media,” which Rolling Stone published in October 1977, and the House hearings that Bernstein’s piece prompted a couple of months later — the Church Committee, whose hearings ran from January 1975 to April 1976, having flinched from this responsibility.

Chronicler of Secrecy

The who-was-who and the who-stood-where and the who-did-what of The Cultural Cold War give Saunders’s book an historical specificity I do not think anyone has matched, with the exception of Joel Whitney’s Finks (OR Books, 2016), which draws heavily on Saunders’s work. She did not leave those of whom she wrote any place to hide.

As I reflect back on her accomplishment now, it seems to me to lie in something she never mentions. Saunders gave us a chronicle of the U.S. culture of secrecy in its earliest days, the first decades after the 1945 victories, when America set about making itself a global imperium.

What comes through in The Cultural Cold War is how little those alive at the time were able to know about their time. Too many events, too many decisions, too many reasons for things happening as they did were hidden, rendered inaccessible.

The C.I.A.’s Cold War interventions have had many enduring consequences. The Agency systematically discredited the principle of nonalignment, which was held high among then-emergent non–Western nations. America brings the same with-us-or-against-us fallacy to the 11 members and 10 partners comprising the BRICS  — a complete failure to grasp one of the 21st century’s significant realities.

It is the same with the out-of-hand dismissal of all suggestions of moral equivalence in global affairs with those it deems adversaries: The United States is always righteous and never acts but in defense of itself or its always-democratic allies and/or clients. It is never to be accused of aggression. This is what I mean by moral blindness.

The Agency’s most disturbing legacy, at least to me, is how little of our world we are able actually to see. Daniel Patrick Monihan warned us of this just before the U.S. century turned in Secrecy: The American Experience (Yale, 1998). So, in her way, did Saunders a year later. Foolish it would be, naïve in the extreme, to think the time she described so piercingly is not the time in which we live.

It is the historians now who tell us who we are — this by telling us who we were.  This is why I honor Frances Stonor Saunders as I do. She told Americans of their past, and, so, of their present.

Original article:  consortiumnews.com

A new play revisits the story of Ireland’s 18th-century German refugees, whose experience of prejudice and exclusion resonates with today’s debates over immigration

In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade.

Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Andreas Etter

© Photograph: Andreas Etter

© Photograph: Andreas Etter

Local prosecutors said that at least 15 people have been arrested in connection with the riots that broke out in Limoges and the arson which destroyed the city's historic Town Hall.

The post France: 15 Arrested over Arson That Destroyed 143-Year-Old City Hall Building appeared first on Breitbart.