Mickelson update - the year of light & dark
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I was glad to read about Mickelson’s success in Europe - Czech Republic in particular. Always felt that he got a bad deal.
http://kuhoops.com/ku-basketball-news/173790131/
That was the year of light and dark side division but I must say, if there hadn’t been as much personal attacks - this site had the best analysis discussions ever. I learned more about basketball - how to watch it and analyze it than ever before. Learned about advanced stats and philosophy of play and player development.
Frankly, I miss that.
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Nice, good for Hunter. Thanks for posting, first I had read of this.
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Grandma jaybate was from Prague!!!
Hunter, you are at the last center of civilized western culture before the pirates of the age of discovery took over. Look beneath the scars of the last few centuries of vicious subjugation of it. Enjoy the deep beauty of it. Kafka focused on what had become of it at the hands of the barbarians, and as David Foster Wallace realized, home boy Franz Kafka was a black comic misunderstood in the west. But underneath they are a marvelous people. They left it all on the floor for ceramics and glass. Truly beautiful stuff. Everything since just cheap imitations. And when you come home, go to the Bohemian festivals in Kansas and Nebraska. A beautiful people crushed yet again in America. But even the merciless railroads and combinations couldn’t destroy their spirit. Polka till you drop!
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Hitler ordered Prague to be untouched during his campaigns … warped rationale, which we don’t need to get into, but I understand Prague is like no other European city.
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Budapest Hungary is apparently stupendous also (haven’t visited either yet, but by family and reading have learned a lot) , but most Americans have only heard of it from the Gabor sisters. In part, we have distorted views of much of central/Eastern Europe, because USA immigrants from Brit Isles, Northern Europe and Vatican Catholic French Orders like Jesuits and Saints-Sulpicians, plus Russian Jews from Germany of late were who have canonized the bulk of our “history.” Prague descended Bohemians have never dominated our history academy that I know of. If someone knows otherwise, please share. Willa Cather and Madeline Albright are two influential American Hunkies I recall off hand, but Willa focused on America lit and Madeline on diplomacy. I don’t recall any great American Hunkie historians on the oligarchy-approved order of Sam Morrison, Schlesinger, etc. No conspiracy here; rather just who wrote it and from which Ivy (big or little) academy, and so canonized USA history in its first 150 formative sovereign years. Canonized history is a sticky institution that recedes only glacially, and so informs and distorts our perception (or lack thereof) of foreign places long after. Our Anglo-Protestant-French Catholic-JudeoBritish cultural heritage was IMHO born of a rebellion not so much from the Holy See, as from the Holy Roman (Habsburgian) Empire’s central and South American metals interests that cramped our style. The Habsburgs were built on global precious metals trade spanning many centuries. Metternich late administrated it as a flexibly strung together band of kingdoms spanning central, eastern and Balkan Europe in alliance with certain German kingdoms and at times with the Ottoman Empire, which itself mirrored Metternich’s Holy Roman polyglot composition of kingdoms in the Turkish Middle East. Supposedly empire managers learned quite a bit from Metternich’s some what flexible approach to empire administration, and from his disgust with the tendency of much of private oligarchy to indulgence, decadence and selfishness leaving administrators an unecessary need to resort to harshness to hold things together. Metternich apparently thought empires fell as much because of private oligarchy losing its cohesion and morals as other things. But of course he was a manager and blaming them was perhaps a bias. Still, looking at the behavior of our private oligarchy today, his remarks bear remembering.
Prague was cosmopolitan much of its existence. It was one of several key nodes of commerce and overland and river trade in the Holy Roman Empire. It was on the Trans European and TransEurasian overland trade routes. It was vital to control in Eastern and Southern Europe in the same way Bologna was pivotal to control on the Italian peninsula. It was on the way and so a pinch point. It made itself indispensable, or at least highly desirable with glass and ceramics excellence at a time when these were prized industries. Remoteness from maritime pirates of Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean-based pirate cultures and slavers became a virtue over time. They were on the overland trade route between both northern and southern pirate cultures but not so close to fall under their full hegemony before mass armies and then rail wore them down and finally crushed them. Napoleonic France was arguably the beginning of the End. WWI was the nail in the coffin. The Nazis invaded for coal, grain, and a path south to Balkan Oil and west to contain Stalin, and prized the German speaking minority and Prague’s legacy of high culture. People forget the Nazis studied British American PR/Advertizing’s pioneering development and mastery of propaganda through appropriation and repurposing of cultural symbols and activities (arts, literature, media, music) to be used for re-programming nations in the analog phase of mass media. Nazis sought to collect, repurpose and promote media and cultural centers, same as Britain and USA had done. Nazis thought they lost WWI, because they had not done this as well as the Allies of WW1 had. Thus the high culture of Prague was worth taking and preserving, same as Paris was. It might be appropriated for propaganda and mind control purposes and its always good to be seen as preserving high culture legacies.
But back to the Prague and Budapest of Metternich’s era and before. Prague was a partner of the Vatican but again not totally under thumb. For Paris and London to eclipse Viena and Budapest and Prague, i.e., to flower and become the cultural paramounts of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, and then its surviving Habsburg elements had to be subjugated. Prague and Budapest and Vienna accurately looked down on northwest Europe as coarse and vulgar cultures greased by and grown on the piracy of the Age of Discovery that shifted much global trade from overland to maritime routes. Their own Habsburgs and the Holy See selling them out jointly to launch the Age of Discovery from Habsburg controlled Castilian Spain and Vatican controlled Portugal (launch pads 1and 2 of a kind of Cape Canveral of exploration of western maritime trade routes efunded in the 1400s by Holy See and the Habsburgs) no doubt galled Pragueians the way today’s Western private oligarchy’s outsourcing of USAs economy to East Asia galls us. They were/are stealing what we built to create something much bigger that will eclipse and marginalized us over time. The Praguians probably weren’t sure why they were being sold out, or by whom, until it was too late. Such are the recurring dynamics of empire restructuring throughout history. They can’t be stopped when compelled by superior economies of scale. They can only be fought for control of running the odious process. American strategist for western private oligarchy George Kennan admired Metternich greatly for administrating an empire in an unstable region in a structural eclipse from outsourcing and trade Re-routing. He probably did so, because he understood the USA Empire, despite its seeming omnipotence in the last half of 20th Century, was destined for some very difficult sailing as outsourcing took its inevitable toll leading to a possibly much more transEurasian centric new world order being enabled by his team.
Anyway, Americans need to bone up on and enjoy Budapest and Prague, when they can. Lots more there than goulash and kolatchies! I’m planning a trip already!
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@jaybate-1.0 From your signature: “Global Catastrophe is predicted for 9/23…”
I am fairly sure we are mostly still here, although a good argument could be made that we are sliding toward Hell in the proverbial handbasket.
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Yes, I left it up for fun. I have a little rule.
Catastrophe is preceded by many warnings and prophecies, but only coincidentally coincides with one.
