chaitanya

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

Wow, this is the view on the Himalayas from Jainagar (India). The mountain chain is 150 km away and still beautifully visible - I’m sure this was a particularly clear day but it’s a truly wonderful sight. Source: buff.ly/aTj63aD

Antiquity-ass headline

Autonomy presumes one person’s freedom not to understand another. Richard Sennett remarks: “Rather than an equality of understanding, autonomy means accepting in the other what you do not understand, an opaque equality.”

Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society

A dhow built by the inhabitants of Grande Comore
ca. 1855

#archivesxt

“I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep.”

A publisher rejecting Proust.

Every academic - “Can you really do that properly in a mere 30 pages?”

Fun fact: the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great (539 BCE) pretty much marks the halfway point of recorded history so far. Everything since—the Persian Empire, Alexander, Romans, Middle Ages of course—is closer to us than to the first invention of writing.

The association between the black rat and bubonic plague is as old as the plague itself. When he was still in Oran, Camus received what he jokingly called his "pestiferous books" — a package of scientific works that a friend, Lucette Maeurer, had sent him from Algiers." Among these works was one by Proust - not that Proust, but instead Marcel's father Adrien Proust, a well-known epidemiologist who in 1897 published La défense de l'Europe contre la peste. In his wide-ranging survey of plague epidemics, Proust noted an "interesting fact": pestilences were often announced by invasions of dying rats. In Canton, for ex-ample, neighborhoods counted as many as 20,000 dead rats, the advance sign of what was in store for the unhappy residents.

Interesting connection between Camus and Proust - not that one! It’s wild that French literature only took one generation to go from Proust (that one) to Camus. I love them both but they could hardly be more different. (Quote from Robert Zaretsky’s ‘Victories Never Last’)

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Boy and Moon — Edward Hopper, 1906
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Photography is really perception. As with all art, the objective of photography is not the duplication of visual reality, but an investigation of the outer world and its influence on the inner world.... All of my photographs are photographs of myself.

- Ansel Adams

Skull of Zurbaran

Skull of Zurbaran
https://botfrens.com/collections/63/contents/20997

The thousand-year story of how the fork crossed Europe, and onto your plate today In today's world, we barely think about picking up a fork. It is part of a standard cutlery set, as essential as the plate itself. But not that long ago, this now-ordinary utensil was viewed with susp...

“In 1004, the Byzantine Maria Argyropoulina (985–1007), sister of Emperor Romanos III Argyros, married the son of the Doge of Venice and scandalized the city by refusing to eat with her fingers.”

A millennia ago Venetians ate how Indians largely eat today. phys.org/news/2025-09...

you can say what you want in footnotes, no-one is gonna read it

outside of Asia Room restaurant in Paris looking into window, with this in neon in chinese and english.

Mandarin sentence of the day:

你今天真好看。
nǐ jīn tiān zhēn hǎo kàn

you to-day really good-looking

power plyons, reflected in water and off into the distance

William Connell, California, 1935

In Those Years Adrienne Rich In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

I am here to remind BBC athletics commentators that people from Botswana are called Motswana (singular) or Batswana (plural).

Israel is committing genocide. Why is it still welcome in global sports? The sports world claims to stand for peace and unity yet turns a blind eye as Israel kills athletes, journalists and civilians in Gaza.

More than 774 athletes have been killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7, 2023, including at least 355 footballers. Their are also 119 missing athletes & 288 destroyed sports facilities.

How is Israel still allowed to compete in global sports?

www.sportspolitika.news/p/israel-spo...

The elephant in the room....🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘

Bodleian Library Arch. G b.6; Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina in fiorentina per Christophoro Landino; 1476 CE; Italy (Venice); f.93v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

person and offering in front of a huge stone head

Monument 3 (locally known as El Dios del Mundo, the God of the Earth), El Baúl, the south coast of Guatemala, 1958.

From “Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán” by John Stephens.

Chamber of Commerce in Vercelli, designed by Enrico Villani (1966-72)

Chamber of Commerce in Vercelli, designed by Enrico Villani (1966-72), Italy

If you thought there were a lot of obasans in Japan, woman 65 and older make up 32.4% of the female population. So you were right.

Some of the standing stones that forms the Stones of Stenness on Orkney. The Neolithic monument dates to around 3100 – 2900 BC, and is part of the ‘Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site’. 📸 My own. #StandingStoneSunday #Prehistory #Stenness #Orkney

The image is an illustration of a Buddhist priest in profile, placed within an oval frame. The priest is facing left, exhibiting a calm, contemplative expression. He has a shaved head and wears traditional robes. The lithograph illustration is rendered in shades of brown and beige, with textured shadows providing depth. The background is softly textured, enhancing the sense of focus on the figure. The overall tone is serene and detailed. Sort available posts on Bluesky using #Buddhasinthewest | All posts archived here: tinyurl.com/4kmcwp87 🔍 🗃️ 📜

The earliest surviving photographs of Japan were shot by Eliphalet Brown as part of the Perry Expedition in 1853/54.

Among many landscapes, Brown also took a few portraits, including this anonymous Buddhist priest at Shimoda – likely the earliest surviving photo of a Buddhist cleric.🧵
🗃️ 📜 #Japan

Nobody means by a word precisely what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought …a divergence.

—Wilhelm von Humboldt

“The human race is a strange mixture of the divine and the diabolic, both equally real, making both good and evil inevitable. Complete despair is no more rational than blind optimism.”

On keeping a wide horizon - Bertrand Russell (1979)

mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljourn...

Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.
Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.
Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.
Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.
Tonight I will read for pleasure and not for work.