Reflections From a Murky Pond

Dad Jokes, I’m pretty sure they’ve been in existence since Man developed language and there were family structures with fathers in evidence.

I have a joke about Jason and his Argonauts, but it’s kind of long

I have a joke about Hector, but the punchline’s a drag

I have a joke about Boreas, but it’s a bit long-winded

I have a Medusa joke; it’s pretty rock solid

I have a joke about Hephaestus, but it’s pretty lame

I have a joke about Procrustes, but it’s a bit of a stretch

I have a joke about Galatea, but it stats out a bit stiff

— Eldrtich Crow

Αστεία του αρχαίου μπαμπά
(Ancient Dad Jokes)

Now sure; these are only ones from the Hellenistic period and are specific the Mediterranean region where the ancient Greek city-states dominated the culture. That’s a necessary focus because written language is needed in order to record these bits of humor… and I’m so not going to fight my way through hieratic, cuneiform, or hanzi! 😆

And, for the pendants among us, you could say that aren’t ancient dad jokes; they’re Classical dad jokes.

Tags: Ancient Greece | Dad Jokes | Greece | History | Humor | Jokes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2021 at 8:52 am and is filed under Humor. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

μολὼν λαβέ, pronounced moˈLON laˈVE, and sometimes written in the modern age as ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ or Molon Labe is a truly classical and laconic expression of defiance reportedly spoken by Sparta’s King Leonidas I in response to to Xerxes I of Persia’s demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. It means simply, “Come and take them!”

Molon Labe – ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ – μολὼν λαβέ – Come And Take Them

No matter the orthography, the sentiment is clear and is as true, right, and applicable in the America of 2013 as it was in the Greece of 480 BC. 2493 years don’t change anything of meaning.

The same “offer” is being made to Americans today. Our lives in exchange for our ability to defend both those lives and the liberties that make those lives the lives of free men and women. And the same response must be given to our modern day Xerxes, Obama and to his coterie of Liberal and Progressive gun-grabbers.

Come And Take Them…If You Can

We, the People, the true-born sons and daughters of America, have not rendered offerings of earth and water to our domestic enemies and we are not subject to- or subservient to them.

Tags: 2nd Amendment | America | Assassination | Civil War | Freedom | Greece | Gun Control | Gun Rights | History | Insurrection | Language & Idiom | Liberty | Molon Labe | The Constitution | Tyranny

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2013 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

What do you get when you put someone better suited to serving drinks in the dining car in control of a railway train? Obama’s Handbasket Express, that’s what.

Non-Stop To Greece And Financial Ruin

Of course, if you ask Obama or his cultists, it’s a very popular train ride. Everyone in America has already bought tickets, whether they wanted to or not, and boarded the train. So now it’s just a swift ride to ruin and it’s downhill the whole way.

Tags: Economy | Fail | Greece | Humor | Obama | Politics | Trains

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Humor, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

All cultures and peoples have their myths and myth cycles. These myths are actually one of the identifying foundations of those separate cultures and peoples and, by and large, they are both good and necessary. Only upon rare occasions do these myths become damaging.

Sadly, in America, one of our myths has become damaging. It might even be lethal to our nation.

Greek Mythology – It Couldn’t Happen In America

“It can’t happen here,” is a pernicious belief based on a self-serving and self-deluding perversion of American Exceptionalism. It’s a potentially lethally harmful myth.

Not only can what is happening in Greece and Europe happen in America, it is already happening. We just haven’t hit the bottom … yet.

California and many other of the several States are, essentially, as bankrupt as Greece and are being propped up by the federal government, a government that is so deep in debt that it boggles the mind – and they want to keep borrowing more and fight against any reining in of their profligate spending!

What is the scariest is that one thing really can’t happen here in America. The European Union is predicted to collapse very soon but that can’t happen in America; we have laws against secession and breaking the union. As no federal government that I could imagine would reduce itself, any attempt by the states to break the union for their own survival would lead to civil war.

The upcoming 2102 elections may not be the watershed moment but, if we don’t move swiftly, strongly, and sternly towards fiscal responsibility in this election, we will bring that moment closer – assuming it’s not here or already past – and make correcting the problems that much harder.

Tags: 2012 Elections | America | Debt | Debt Ceiling | Deficit | Economics | Economy | Euro | Europe | Greece | Myths | Politics

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2012 at 8:55 am and is filed under 2012 Election, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

I’m not one to pay overly much attention to the various things that spew from the maw of Paul Krugman. The pontifications, ramblings, and rants of a rabidly fanatical Keynesian neo-Socialist who makes his rent working for the filthy rag known as the New York Times aren’t the sorts of things that I, or any other American, normally pay much heed to – except to keep an eye on what our nation’s enemies are thinking or emoting.

Krugman is willfully dead wrong more often than not on causation and dead wrong, again willfully, every time when it comes to remediation

All that being said, Krugman is not an idiot and he is skilled enough to make solidly plausible predictions of future events, especially relatively near-term ones.

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.

Of course this isn’t exactly rocket science or even one of the more arcane examples of the semi-mystical art form known today as the study of Economics. Both hyperinflation and the end of the Euro in the near future are easy predictions to make in the wake of Greece’s Keynesian meltdown and financial collapse.

NOTE: Krugman’s prediction of a European financial meltdown matches my own and naturally feeds into whatever level of Confirmation Bias that I’m saddled with.

Of course these events will happen and happen soon. They were foreordained from the moment of Greece’s financial implosion under the weight of their Socialist economic policies.

I’ll add though that these event will, in turn, most likely lead to the breaking of the European Union by 2015. They can’t hold together as a government – or meta-government, or whatever they are – without a common currency.

Tags: Debt | Depression | Economics | Economy | EU | Euro | Europe | Finance | Germany | Greece | Keynes | Keynesian Economics | Krugman | New York Times | Recession | Socialism | Spain

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.