Red card for Trump?

 

So Belgium defeated the US in that soccer game. The "Trump card" didn´t work. That was that, I suppose. On to the next occasion for scandal...

Århundradets match

 

Belgien slog ut USA i fotbolls-VM. Trumps personliga ingripande för att ändra ett tidigare domslut hjälpte alltså inte. 

Vad synd, LOL.

Baloguns första ord efter VM-kontroversen

Moralisk kollaps framför våra ögon

The Trump card

 

So it´s official now. And the biggest news item on the evening news in Sweden (many Swedes love soccer and nobody here likes Trump). 

Trump himself admitted at a cringey presser that he *did* ask FIFA to cancel a red card against a certain US soccer player. Which FIFA also did. Like a crazy dictator in Turkmenistan, The Trump is meddling in...everything. Except...I don´t know...defending the Western alliance or something. 

Is this the Rubicon? After a fashion. 

Red cards and green lines

 

LOL. Trump actually interfered in the ongoing soccer world championship, demanding that FIFA should review a red card against a US soccer player. Cuz of course he did. This is the same Trump who got a "peace prize" from FIFA last year, as compensation for not getting a certain other prize in the same category...

At this point, I just laugh at this. Yes, I know. It´s not really funny. But there you go. 

Trump asked FIFA to review red card suspension

Uppdrag i Katanga

 

Credit: Aftonbladet

En närmast surrealistisk rubrik. Men det är faktiskt sant. OK, men hur var det med den där flygkraschen då? Ni vet, Dag Hammarskjöld...

The real fate of the Waterloo fallen

 

So I´ve read "The real fate of the Waterloo fallen" (2023) by Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer and Tony Pollard. This is some really, really sick shit. But then, people 200 years ago lived like dogs. And died like dogs. And if you died with your boots on, chances are somebody stole the boots...and then turned your dead body into fertilizer! For a profit, obviously.

During the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, bones from both dead soldiers and horses were stolen from mass graves all over Europe and shipped to Britain, where they were turned into fertilizer for the expanding agricultural industry. I´m not even sure if "stolen" is the right word, since almost everyone must have been in on it. And the quantities involved were enormous: we´re talking ship loads here. 

Wilkin, Schäfer and Pollard believed that an even more exotic fate befell the dead at Waterloo. Archeological excavations around the town have so far not been able to find the mass graves which simply *must* have been there, and which were documented even by British painters visiting the site just a few years after the famed battle of 1815. So what happened to the dead bodies? The authors believe that the bones were dug up and turned into bone char, which is used to decolorize brown sugar and turn it white.

Yes, you read that right. The fate of the Waterloo fallen was to end up in the Belgian sugar refining industry. The number of dead at Waterloo isn´t precisely known, but the authors use a low range estimate of 10,000. Add to that perhaps 10,000 dead horses and you have a considerable resource just waiting to be exploited. 

Many of the people digging for human bones at recent  battlefields were poor. In Belgium, the presumably low-income farmhands worked for local farmers in the Waterloo area. I assume the bone merchants or sugar refinery owners were of the more affluent classes. 

Of course, things like this are still going on. See Scott Carney´s book "The Red Market" for more details about the Indian trade in human bones stolen from cemeteries, the Chinese trade in organs for transplants coercively taken from unwilling donors in prison, trafficking of children for adoption all over the so-called Third World, and so on. Just don´t say I didn´t warn you!    

The real fate of the Waterloo fallen

Det falska Waterloo

 

Okej, det här var faktiskt intressant...

Britter blev lurade i souvenirbutiken: Det falska Waterloo

Christmas at Robinson´s

 

Swedish TV just showed the recent meeting between Keir Starmer and the Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever. The flag of Belgium was clearly visible behind the Belgian PM. But behind Starmer, there was an *English* flag rather than a British one. That is, the flag of Saint George rather than the Union Jack. 

Why? 

I´m sure there is a perfectly natural, reasonable explanation for this. Right? 

Lucrative

 

Is Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever compromised? X thread.

X thread on Bart De Wever 

A ghost laid to rest?

 

Are the claims about a full-scale genocide in King Leopold´s so-called Congo Free State really Woke-revisionist history? 

The first link goes to an interesting article in "The American Conservative" which argues that the real threat in the Congo at the time were the Arab slave-raiders and various local warlords (many of them cannibals). The essay is a scathing criticism of the book "King Leopold´s Ghost", which claims that 10 million people were killed in the Congo Free State during Leopold´s rule of the area. 

The second link goes to my old review of a book published in 1897 dealing with precisely this issue.   

King Hochshild´s Hoax

The rise of the Congo cannibals

Exorcists on TikTok

 

Here we go again. 20 years ago, there was an unconfirmed claim on the internets that Christian fundamentalists opposed the Smurfs (for all kinds of unrelated reasons). Not sure if that was even true, or some kind of anti-Xian satire, but these days the memes make themselves.

A new toy line known as Labubus (and the rip-off version Lafufus) has created pandemonium on TikTok, with misguided believers claiming that the adorable critters are demon-possesed, specifically by the Sumerian demon Pazuzu. Which would have been completely unknown to the layperson...had it not been for "The Exorcist".

Guys, I´m sure there is real evil out there (I don´t know, Epstein or something) so stop obsessing about some Chinese collectible elves, please!   

Low hanging fruit salad

 

YouTube videos of skeptics going after some really low hanging fruit. 

The first clip tells us what happens if a fairly well-educated skeptic (in a black mask) decides to seriously comment a confused spouter of quasi-quantum woo-woo. It´s funny, after a fashion. 

Next, that South Korean guy who pretends to have the world´s highest IQ is apparently still at it. Just wait until the more serious Christians realize that he´s a "heretic". But sure, maybe flat earthers will still take him at face value? 

And then there´s some fake "time traveler" who claims he´s the next emperor of North America or something to that effect. LOL. He´s also afraid of catching diabetes because he drinks too much soda?! 

The ride never ends. And I want a tastier fruit salad!  

The forbidden country

 

Is this the Dalai Lama reading "Tintin in Tibet"?

Rendez-vous

 

Ha ha ha. Classic! I´m old enough to remember this "scandal". Many of my friends actually liked the song. So did I. Only the other day did I realize that the "lyrics" (such as they are) are in Flemish, not French. Wiki has the story. And no, I haven´t double-checked...

Belgium in the Eurovision Song Contest 1983: Controversy 

  

Every man an aristocrat

 

Johannes Bureus 

“Alla är vi valloner” (We are all Walloons) is a 2023 book by Peter Sjölund, a Swedish expert on genealogical research. Apparently, he managed to solve a crime case using DNA-based genealogies. In this somewhat eclectic book, Sjölund takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through “true and false genealogies in Sweden”. I rather naïvely assumed that Swedish genealogical research must be at least relatively easy, due to the large amount of preserved church documents detailing every birth, marriage and death in the parish. Especially today, when the stuff is usually digitalized and available on the web. While that´s true, many databases apparently contain fake genealogies, invariably ones going back centuries – even millennia – to ancient kings or heroic knights. This has led to the emergence of a kind of cult genealogy, with Internet-based communities of true believers hotly defending unproven family lineages, even to the point of uploading the “information” into genealogical databases. If this sounds a lot like, say, the 17^th century…bingo. It´s absolutely that kind of thing. Indeed, some of the fake genealogies quite literally hail from that century!

A large portion of the book deals with Johan Bure (Johannes Bureus), the 17^th century Swedish polymath, whose omnivorous interests ranged from documenting runic inscriptions to literal mysticism. Bureus did carry out extensive and quite serious genealogical research (perhaps uniquely for his time), interviewing his relatives and comparing oral traditions from different branches of the family, visiting several different Swedish provinces in the process. In this way, he managed to trace his ancestry back about 300 years. That Bureus wasn´t confabulating is proven by the fact that most of his ancestors were ordinary peasants, and that he also included stories about criminal family members (including some who were executed). The Bure family (Bureätten) in *this* sense has been mostly proven by modern DNA research.

However, as a child of the nobility-obsessed 17^th century, Bureus simply couldn´t stop there. He went further and eventually created a fantasy genealogy for himself, centered on a 12^th century knight named Fale Bure, very loosely based on a real person whose name is found on a tomb in the church at Skön in Medelpad. Bureus improved the local tall tales surrounding this supposed medieval hero (whose original name was Fartegn unge or Fale hin unge) and claimed descent from him – since this would give Bureus aristocratic ancestry. Three of Johannes Bureus´ cousins would later improve upon his “research”, inventing further lineages, much to their benefit (all three cousins were ennobled by king Gustavus Adolphus). And so it went, with distant relations of Bureus making up their own family lines. And apparently some people still today believe it!

The author tells a dramatic story from 2013 about how he and some associates managed to stop the rising of a modern statue of Fale Bure outside a large shopping mall at Birsta in Medelpad, close to Skön. The grand ceremony (which was supposed to include Viking Age-obsessed Swedish pop star E-type!) was cancelled at the last moment and the statue placed outside the Skön church instead. Not sure if policing local mythology in this way is the best way to spend your time as a skeptical genealogist, but there you go.

Another family of tall tales (pun intended) concerns the Walloons. Just like the Bure story, a grain of truth has metastasized into something else entirely. During the 17^th century, thousands of Walloons from the Spanish Netherlands and adjacent territories did immigrate to Sweden. (Present-day Wallonia is a region in southern Belgium.) The Walloons spoke a language related to French. Still today, some old Swedish families have French surnames and can trace some of their ancestry back to the Walloon immigrants. At some point during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the 17^th century Walloons – some of whom were smiths and hence highly skilled workers – became downright mythologized, both by the Swedish labor movement and by race biologists. The latter claimed that Walloon-Nordic intermarriage was one of the few examples of beneficial race mixing, a message heavily promoted through exhibitions directed at the general population. By contrast, Travelers (a Gypsy-like sub-population) were considered extremely low on the racial hierarchy. Both Walloons and Travelers were considered to be “darker” than pure bred Swedes. This probably prompted people of Traveler ancestry to claim Walloon ancestry instead. 

Gradually, the stereotypical “Walloon” acquired more and more characteristics usually considered negative and malformed, such as a big hump at the back of the neck, a constant propensity for back pain, or strange thumbs. Black hair and green or brown eyes seem to be constant. It does sound like some kind of “cope”. If you´re different in a “bad” way, at least you can claim descent from a respected (and to many people somewhat mysterious) immigrant group. (Fun fact: the only person with a Walloon surname I ever met looked almost stereotypically Nordic!)

“Alla är vi valloner” does contain some other interesting information (you´d never guess where the name “Rambo” originally comes from), but the above was what caught my eye on a first reading. As for myself, one of the names running in my family come from medieval Spanish knights claiming descent from Theoderic the Great, the famed Ostrogoth king of Italy. And since the Goths according to their mythology originated in Scandza (perhaps Scandinavia), this would make me more primordially Swedish than most Swedes. If you choose to believe the hype, that is. Another family name is Basque. And the Basque are racially pure Paleo-Europeans from Atlantis, right? Right.

When will wayward humanity come to its senses, I wonder?

A wild situation

 

Not an influencer.
And probably not a smurf, either. 

Overheard on the web: there is a new smurf in Smurf Town. Yes, he´s called INFLUENCER SMURF and is already the butt of many jokes, becoming something of a meme in his own right...

I admit I´m at least mildly amused! Or besmurfed.

The Gospel of Talpiot

 

"Jesus, the mystery of his descendents" is a documentary recently shown on SVT (Swedish public service TV). Weirdly, I can´t seem to find any information about it on the web. It seems to be French or Franco-Belgian, featuring both French-speaking and English-speaking scholars and independent researchers. The date of release is unknown to me. 

While the docu has a skeptical undertone, it is surprisingly even-handed. Both mainline scholars and mavericks are able to speak without interruption. Purely by chance, the documentary premiered on SVT the same week as another network showed "The Da Vinci Code" on prime time. OK, let me guess. Jesus is the reason for the season? 

The focus is on two controversial discoveries relating to Jesus: "The Gospel of Jesus´ Wife" and the Talpiot family tomb. Both could be interpreted as suggesting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The "gospel" is a tiny fragment in Coptic, but it could be read that Jesus had a wife and that women could be disciples. The fragment was presented to the public by professor Karen L King, but many believe that it´s a forgery. The main suspect is the fragment´s original owner, Walter Fritz. He denies it and isn´t interviewed in the documentary. 

The Talpiot tomb is promoted by Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli film-maker who worked with James Cameron and James Tabor. The tomb contains ossuaries which supposedly contained the remains of Jesus, James, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, John and a son of Jesus named Judah. Among others! The whole thing is perhaps a bit too good to be true, but Jacobovici defends his hypothesis ably enough. If he is right, Jesus was both married, had children and...never resurrected (unless we re-interprete whatever that even means). 

"Jesus, the mystery of his descendents" might not be the most interesting production around, but it could work as a teaser trailer to the broader problematique surrounding these issues...

Talleyrand of the arts, Raphael of flowers

 

Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) was a Belgian painter who spent most of his life in France. He managed to survive all the changes and upheavals of the French revolution and its aftermath, and has been (unflatteringly) called "the Talleyrand of the Arts"! More flatteringly, perhaps, he is also known as the Raphael of flowers...

Redouté´s most generous patron was Napoleon´s wife, the empress Joséphine, but he was also on good terms with the courts of Louis XVI, Charles X and Louis Philippe. I recently bought a small Taschen book containing reprints of the plates from Redouté´s magnum opus "Les Roses", published in 1817-1824. Yes, it shows roses. 

While various reprints of the rose illustrations are readily available, the original water colors (bought by French king Charles X) are mostly unaccounted for and are apparently sold for crazy sums when they occasionally resurface. The earliest editions of the book itself are kept under lock and key in several European libraries, since art thieves have sometimes cut out some of the plates and sold them on the black market!

My kingdom for a rose? 

Narrative busted? LOL

 

Far right Breitbart News tries to prove that capitalism wasn´t based on slavery or colonialism. Which kind of misses the point even if true. 

Note also the following quotes:

>>>The head of Political Economy at the IEA argues that while some select elite families within Britain and other colonial powers profited immensely during the time, such gains were not felt by the public at large, who rather than benefitting were instead steeply taxed to pay the exorbitant costs in extra military and administrative spending needed to maintain and protect far-away colonial outposts. 

>>>Niemietz did acknowledge that there is evidence that places in the world that were colonised did experience long term negative effects, particularly areas which were environmentally or otherwise inhospitable to Europeans at the time as they tended to establish authoritarian and “extractivist” forms of government, which when they left served as a power structure for continued poor governance from local elites.

>>>“A history of colonial extractivism, or a period of heavy involvement in the slave trade, made the subsequent development of good institutions less likely. The implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former,” he concluded.

Indeed. Except for those rich elites, of course. 

Narrative busted: Colonialism did not make the British Empire rich

The Soviet Sasquatch

 

An interesting video about Soviet cryptids. I was struck by how unoriginal they were. Yes, it´s essentially the same kind of cryptids as reported from North America or Western Europe: hairy humanoids, lake monsters, sea serpents and extinct charismatic mega-fauna still supposedly lurking somewhere in the far corners of Siberia. In this case the Steller´s sea cow, the wolly mammoth, and the giant short-faced bear (never heard of that one). 

There are two possible explanations for this curious fact. One is that the cryptids are actually real. After all, why *would* people behind the Iron Curtain see exactly the same kind of unknown animals as in the rest of the world? Another possibility is that Soviet cryptozoology was influenced by its Western counterpart. That´s not as far-fetched as it sounds, since one prominent Soviet cryptozoologist, Boris Porshnev, was a friend of Bernard Heuvelmans! (A book by Porshnev has been translated to English: "The Soviet Sasquatch") The same transformation of older folklore into "unknown real animals" - typical of much Western cryptozoology -  may have transpired in the modernizing Soviet Union, too. 

Misidentification is another factor. The Mongolian Death Worm (which was searched for by Soviet scientists) is often depicted as the monstrous Shai-Hulud from Frank Herbert´s science fiction novel "Dune". In reality, the Death Worm is only said to be about one and a half meters long. And it took me about five minutes to find *exactly such a creature* living in Mongolia: the desert sand boa. Case closed.

The Soviet Union was one of the few nations (if that´s the word for it) that launched several scientific expeditions in search of cryptids, both on its own territory and in Mongolia. Soviet scientists also participated in Chinese expeditions to find the Yeti. The fact that these official projects had as little luck as lay cryptid hunters in the US or Scotland is perhaps suggestive. 

The creatures don´t exist. Or maybe they do exist, but since they are ghostly in nature, Communists feared reporting what they had *really* found...