Who Remembers the Roots of Things

I been having many a thought upon hist'ry.

• It is interesting, as I said in a comment over at Bad Catholic, that the Germanic auxiliaries who assumed command of the western Roman provinces, all adopted the Celticized Latin of their subjects. With, however, one exception: Britain. There, though the populace was still largely Romano-Briton (a populace cannot be displaced by invaders unless the invaders have drastic technological superiority, and even then disease usually has to get involved), the Angles and Saxons continued to speak German, and they forced their subjects to do the same. Any who wouldn't, were driven into the barren hills of the southwest.
  
  Remember that next time some Protestant or Romantic Nationalist tries to talk bullshit about Latin's status in Medieval European culture. The only place where the language of the nobility was imposed on the people was England occupied Northeast Wales.


• The apparent gap in IQ between the various demographic categories, simplistically termed "races", is a source of endless controversy—because it appears that white people have the highest average. I don't know why that's a problem, since the "intelligence" IQ measures is a very narrow band even of the purely intellectual powers (it doesn't, for instance, measure the ability to synthesize all one's information together). But if it bothers you, I might have an explanation for why whites might be highest (if in fact they are, but the evidence for it hasn't been refuted yet, and not for want of trying).
  
  The explanation? Druids.
  
  Consider. For Indo-European speaking peoples, membership of the priestly caste was determined by the ability to memorize prayers, and then recite them perfectly from memory (yeah, for "druids" you may, if you choose, also read "brahmins"). There were actually taboos on writing things down, mainly because writing things down weakens your memory.
  
  The priestly caste was just as wealthy as the warrior caste—who were the kings—so their kids had a good chance of surviving to adulthood...and they didn't fight in wars, and were often spared when their people were defeated. So each successive generation of Indo-European speakers got more and more priestly. And also remember, the priesthood was not hereditary, or at least not purely, up through Vedic times (!)—which means that for, at least, more than 3000 years, the people with the best memory had the most influence on the gene pool.


• There's this manga called, simply, "Sengoku", about how the samurai were primarily horse archers. Apparently in Japan most people think that samurai would ride up to each other and fight on horseback, with their swords. Seems that's the image of samurai warfare people had in the Edo period.
  
  Only, seriously? How can anyone not know that samurai were light cavalry? They made successive archery sweeps, to thin their enemies' footmen (supposedly 80% of Warring States Era casualties were from arrows). Then, and only then, would the samurai fight each other, and that on foot—they were, again, light cavalry but heavy infantry. And they still, remember, conceived of fights (among samurai) as a duel—all their warfare was handled as a series of single combats, right up to the Mongol invasion.
  
  Also, no horseman fights with a sword if he can help it. Heavy cavalry's spathae, and the arming swords descended from them, were sidearms, as were the light-cavalry scimitars that katana ultimately derive from. The main weapon of heavy cavalry was the lance, and of light, the bow.


• On a related note RE: Latin in Medieval Europe, Latin was just the archaic form of the language everyone in France, Italy, and Spain spoke, just like liturgical Greek was to Byzantine Greek.
  
  All those languages remained in their ancient form while the language around them changed because, durhey, they were written down, and the liturgy was said the same way every time. You can observe the precise same thing in the Book of Common Prayer, used till just recently by Anglicans: it already sounds quite old-fashioned, and it was only 300 or so years old.
  
  Considering everyone else prays in dead languages—Buddhists and Hindus in Sanskrit (sometimes Pali), Jews in Biblical Hebrew, China's various religions in Classical Chinese, Shinto in Classical Japanese, and Muslims in Quranic Arabic—it's the people who want their liturgies in living languages who are odd. Sorry.


• Not strictly RE: history but, have you ever seen "American Dad"? In which Seth MacFarlane reveals he has absolutely no right to criticize Palin's geopolitical knowledge—and by Palin, I mean Trig.
  
  CIA agents are not, they are indeed the opposite of, flag-waving uber-patriots. In many ways they are like the Jesuits: everyone thinks they're the hyper-loyal elite ninja death squad, but most of them are actually of, at best, questionable loyalty and highly debatable competence. If they are a Praetorian guard, it's Caligula's. And that's not a new thing, either—their men attached to the embassy in Cuba in the 1950s, for instance, openly supported Castro's coup. The only anti-Castro guy in the entire American mission was the ambassador himself.


• Apparently huge swaths of the government of San Francisco was in the pocket of Jim Jones, as in Jonestown, and in a manner that would be considered unseemly if it were any mainstream religion (I don't even know if the "black church" loophole exists, in San Francisco—are there even enough black people in that city for them to have a church?). Harvey Milk was apparently one of the more vocal in his endorsements of Jim Jones and the People's Temple. I don't even mind whitewashing Milk's record, since he got murdered and all, but I draw the line at holding him up as a hero.
  
  Seriously, RE: Jonestown, I know they had a gold mine and you use cyanide to refine the ore, but shouldn't "wacky cult leader ordering large amounts of cyanide" have raised a red flag somewhere? Maybe it's hindsight—I imagine wacky cults didn't have the association with poisonings that they do now.