The Consequence of Matters

  Julius Caesar was stabbed to death today, on the Ides of March. You'd think calendars would be simple things but apparently not. The Roman calendar originally had only ten months. You can see a relic of this in the names of the last four months of the year, derived from the Latin words for 7, 8, 9 and 10. There were four 31 day months and the rest were 30 days. These were referred to as "full" and "hollow" respectively. The system left the remaining 50 odd days of the year as an unorganized "winter", although Licinius Macer's lost history apparently stated the earliest Roman calendar employed intercalation instead, and Macrobius claims the 10 month calendar was allowed to shift until the summer and winter months were completely misplaced, at which time additional days belonging to no month were simply inserted into the calendar until it seemed things were restored to their proper place. If this sounds disturbingly casual, it is. When the kingdom ...

  Europe is suspending use of the AstraZeneca vaccine left and right, in fear of blood clots. As Jethro Bodine would say, let's cipher. There are reportedly about 40 cases of blood clots in the vaccinated population of about 17 million. Already, you can see we are in Are You Serious? territory. That is a rate of about 0.0002%. The overall hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is about 100 per million per week, which means that of the 17 million who have received the AZ vaccine since January, something on the order of 17,000 would have been hospitalized if they hadn't been vaccinated. But COVID itself causes blood clots to form. According to a recent paper, it does so in about 20% of patients hospitalized. 20% of 17,000 is 3400. So let's see . . . 40 with the vaccine, 3400 without. According to the NIH, deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism occur at a rate of about 1 in 1000 people -- 0.1%, or 500 times higher than the reported rate among the vaccinated. That sort of looks...

  To avoid the destruction of Jerusalem, King Jehoiakim of Judah, in his third year, changed his allegiance from Egypt to Babylon. He paid tribute from the treasury in Jerusalem, some temple artifacts and some of the royal family and nobility as hostages. In 601 BC, during the fourth year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar unsuccessfully attempted to invade Egypt and was repulsed with heavy losses. The failure led to numerous rebellions among the states of the Levant which owed allegiance to Babylon, including Judah, where King Jehoiakim stopped paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar and took a pro-Egyptian position. There are a large number of stories about Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible, notably the book of Daniel, where Daniel interprets his dreams, and the king recognizes the power of Yahweh and has a period of madness. Scholars regard Daniel as historical fiction. For instance, the period of madness appears to be a conflation of something that happened to the last king of the Neo-Babylonian ...