You don’t realize how true this is until you have kids, especially boys. Save the money on Disney world and let them throw rocks in a river. No tantrums, no “I’m bored”, just pure laser focus on liquidating the shoreline of as many rocks as possible.
"The pope's brother attended the gladiatorial combat held to commemorate the empire's 250th anniversary" is the kind of fun fact you'd hear in a history podcast and go "huh, wild"
The reason is that American team sports are all basically war games. Our basic nature is, as Jim Webb wrote: "Born Fighting." All our native sports sublimate effective approaches to mass violence.
Football is group strike and run tactics - in armor. Baseball is applied ballistics. Basketball is small squad dynamic coordination tactics with ballistic components. Hockey - say no more - like a football/basketball hybrid on meth, with personal combat sidelights.
I don't know what soccer is, but it isn't any of that.
I recommend Christopher Tyerman's How to Plan a Crusade to everyone interested in Crusade history.
It gives you an overview of how the Crusades were organized, explaining medieval logistics, propaganda, and administration among other matters.
Highly entertaining.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
#OTD May 28, 1008:
(probable date)
Death of Saint Bernard of Menthon, also known as Bernard of Savoy. He faithfully evangelized the people of the Alps and founded monasteries high in the mountains to provide shelter and aid for travelers. These communities became famous for sending out monks accompanied by large dogs to search for and rescue those lost or trapped in winter snowstorms.
The Catholic Church was the first Western institution to condemn slavery in Sicut Didum which condemned the enslavement of Canary Islanders in 1435, Sublimus Deus in 1537 which condemned the enslavement of Native Americans, finally In Supremo in 1837 which condemned all slavery
before you waste a lot of time in therapy trying to understand men, consider that Napoleon got volunteers to man a battery position with an almost 100% casualty rate by simply renaming it "the battery of not being a little bitch"
My go to example of this is still that when we all read Where The Red Fern Grows in the 80s and 90s that the little boy walks 20 miles by himself to buy his puppies and the first thought was "that's a long walk" and not "they'd never let a kid do that."