Monday, June 09, 2008

Alexander Nevsky - The Battle on the Ice



Alexander Nevsky

The Immortal Yi Soon Shin - Battle of Hansan Island (2/2)

The Immortal Yi Soon Shin - Battle of Hansan Island (1/2)



Yi Sun-sin

1600 Battle of Sekigahara 関ヶ原の戦い 4 of 4

1600 Battle of Sekigahara 関ヶ原の戦い 3 of 4

1600 Battle of Sekigahara 関ヶ原の戦い 2 of 4

1600 Battle of Sekigahara

Rob Roy Swordfight

THE VOODOO SCIENCES


A CHAOS MANOR SPECIAL REPORT

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

THE VOODOO SCIENCES

This report is in two parts. Part one discusses the subject in a general way. Part Two began as the C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture in Ithaca, NY and was later revised for publication. Both discuss the subject as so are included here, but of the two, the second is the better known. I consider both important. (JEP, 2007).....[more]


Saturday, June 07, 2008

Henry V Agincourt II

Henry V Agincourt I

Henry V- Speech

Monty Python - Spam

monty python stoning clip

Gladiator - Battle Romans v. Germans

Braveheart - Freedom

Macbeth - The Fight Scene

The Roman Polanski Version

Antietam - Glory

Mongol III

Mongol II

Mongol I

Hanson Brothers

Bloody Peasant

Just a Flesh Wound

Putting on the foil

Friday, June 06, 2008

1st Century AD History and the New Testament

A PBS discussion of the 1st century backdrop in the New Testament mostly from Josephus.

[Josephus' two books] are two of our prime sources for the history of this period. And Josephus gives a kind of catalog for what the major groups are within first century Judaism.... He talks about the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes. He also mentions another group, [for whom] my label is Insurrectionists..........

The Pharisees are known to everybody from the New Testament where they enjoy a very negative press. They clearly are seen as the opponents of Jesus and "the bad guys." Who the Pharisees really were is a different question entirely, once we get past the Jewish polemic, the anti-Pharisee polemic of the gospels. And we realize the Pharisees were a conspicuous Jewish group. They seem to have been a scholarly group or a group of Jews who, as Josephus the historian says, had a reputation as the most meticulous observers of the ancestral laws. So here is a group which claim expertise [in] understanding the Torah of Moses and claimed expertise in the observance of the laws. And apparently most Jews were prepared to accept that claim.... Their opponents, of course, were the Sadducees, who were no less pious than the Pharisees, but the Sadducees did not believe in the authoritative nature of the ancestral laws. What did the Sadducees do then, exactly, we don't really know. Except the Sadducees apparently had a great deal of following among the well-to-do, among the priestly classes, and seem to have been characterized primarily by two things. One, they opposed the Pharisees and two, they denied belief in the resurrection of the dead, a belief that the Pharisees espoused and the Sadducees denied. And this, of course, made the Sadducees famous as we see very clearly in the New Testament passages where the only thing in the gospels you know about the Sadducees is basically that they deny the belief in the resurrection...........