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Spartan citizens lived in luxury. Spartan armies were not invincible. Spartan politics had quite a bit in common with Athenian democracy. Classical Sparta, in short, was very different from the austere hyper-militarized society of popular myth…Why the Sparta you know Never Existed | April 8, 2022 | toldinstone

"According to a story in Herodotus, the nature of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and the advantages and inconveniences of each, were as well understood at the time of the neighing of the horse of Darius, as they are at this hour." John Adams: A DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. [3.80] ... Otanes recommended that the management of public affairs should be entrusted to the whole nation. [democracy] "To me," he said, "it seems advisable, that we should no longer have a single man to rule over us - the rule of one is...

President Joe Biden nominated Geoffrey Pyatt – a participant in a controversial leaked phone call with State Department official Victoria Nuland about Ukraine – to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources.The nomination of Pyatt, who currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, was announced on April 22nd and, if confirmed, would make him the president’s leading official on energy security.Pyatt previously served in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2016 as its Ambassador to Ukraine, and during his tenure, was embroiled in a leaked phone call controversy with then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian...

'Life, Liberty & Levin' host Mark Levin breaks down what it means for someone to believe in 'America First.'

WASHINGTON (AP) — Western weaponry pouring into Ukraine helped blunt Russia’s initial offensive and seems certain to play a central role in the approaching, potentially decisive, battle for Ukraine’s contested Donbas region. Yet the Russian military is making little headway halting what has become a historic arms express. The U.S. numbers alone are mounting: more than 12,000 weapons designed to defeat armored vehicles, some 1,400 shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to shoot down aircraft and more than 50 million rounds of ammunition, among many other things. Dozens of other nations are adding to the totals. The Biden administration is preparing yet...

Athens (AFP) – Greece's government said Thursday it plans to double production of lignite, or brown coal, in the coming two years despite the pollution it causes as Athens aims to reduce its dependence upon Russian gas. Greece depends upon Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas and since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February it has been searching for alternatives to ensure normal supplies. "Lignite is polluting and in normal circumstances, natural gas is cheaper," government spokesman Giannis Ekonomou said. But given the conflict in Ukraine and the needed to diversify energy supplies, Ekonomou said increased brown coal production...

Athens (AFP) – Thousands of Greeks demonstrated in Athens against soaring prices Wednesday as a general strike shut down public services. Greeks have been hit by rising electricity and heating bills as well as housing costs. Prices rose 6.2 percent in January compared with a year earlier -- a record for Greece since it adopted the European Union's single currency in 2001. It bumped up to 7.2 percent in February. "Everything is more expensive, we can no longer cope," said Evangelia, who works for a social collective and declined to give her surname. The country's biggest civil service and private...

From the revolution’s first engagement in the small Danubian port of Galati, the Greeks made a habit of massacring not just enemy combatants but also Muslim civilians. “There was a widespread sense that it was time for their former masters to learn their place,” Mazower writes. When they took the stronghold of Tripolitsa, “the robbery, butchery and looting went on for three days.” Similar fates awaited Kalavryta, Navarino, Corinth, and Athens. “I became disgusted with the Greek cause,” one of its own leaders wrote, “because we were a lot of cannibals.” The Ottomans were no better. “The furious sultan …...

If you are not convinced - listen at the 10:50 mark. There are moments like this throughout. And the Gibson Guitar sounds great

Archeologists have found an ancient underground town in Kyparissia in Greece during a local construction work. According to Katerina Nikolas, a columnist for helium.com, recently some local road works were being carried out near a swimming pool in the city and something unusual caused them to stop their work immediately. It appeared that an ancient underground town had been discovered on the site, which archeologists are now excavating. Interestingly some parts of the ancient town are higher than the depths of the swimming pool nearby, meaning that when the land was purchased and the swimming pool built, the owner must...

A new discovery off the coast of Bahrain is estimated to contain at least 80 billion barrels of tight oil, the kingdom's biggest ever find, its oil minister said on Wednesday. Independent appraisals by U.S.-based oil consultants DeGolyer and MacNaughton and oilfield services company Halliburton had confirmed Bahrain's find of "highly significant quantities of oil in place ... with tight oil amounting to at least 80 billion barrels, and deep gas reserves in the region of 10-20 trillion cubic feet," Oil Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa al-Khalifa said. Russia's entire oil reserve is 80 billion barrels. Tight oil is a...

"It's as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party. They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation... "The spiders will have their party and will soon die."

Andrey Kozyrev laid out reasons why Putin may have misjudged his invasion of Ukraine. He says Putin overestimated Russia's military, not realizing its budget had been embezzled. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has stalled amid tough Ukrainian resistance. A former Russian foreign minister claimed that widespread corruption is among the reasons for the Russian military's apparently poor performance in the invasion of Ukraine. Andrey Kozyrev, who served as foreign minister under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, put forward what he said were misjudgments made by President Vladimir Putin in ordering the invasion. In the thread, he claims Putin overestimated the...

Turkey, a NATO member with close ties to Russia, initially denied the request, citing international law. When the situation in Ukraine escalated to war, however, Turkey affirmed that provided legal grounds to block the waterway.

Migrants Desecrate More Than 2,000 Churches Just in Greece"As a deeply religious society, these attacks on churches are shocking to the Greek people and calls to question whether these illegal immigrants seeking a new life in Europe are willing to integrate and conform to the norms and values of their new countries." — Greek City Times, May 16, 2020.While the report most likely has the 1453 sack of Constantinople (today Istanbul) in mind — when countless Greek churches, including Hagia Sophia, were desecrated, destroyed, or turned into mosques — that pattern is a century older.Before Christmas, in the North Rhine-Westphalia...

Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk says the lesson from the war between Russia and Ukraine is that the period of American dominance is over. “One lesson of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that the era of US unipolar domination has ended. The US was not in a position to declare war on Russia because it is not the sole decision maker in international politics,” he claimed in a post on Twitter. He then added, “Here we can talk about the future of the Zionist entity,” meaning the future of the State of Israel. In a separate tweet, Abu Marzouk wrote,...

Despite a request from the Biden administration to back a UN Security Council resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel refrained from doing so, two diplomats familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel. Eighty-one countries signed on to the resolution as co-sponsors, though the effort was ultimately vetoed by Russia. Israel is one of the few countries that maintains relatively warm relations with both Ukraine, a fellow Western democracym as well as Russia which controls the airspace over Syria.

An ancient Greek Corinthian helmet was found in a fifth century BC grave in the Taman Peninsula, southwest Russia. Made of bronze, ancient Greek Corinthian helmets covered the entire head and neck, with slits for the eyes and mouth, protruding cheek covers (paragnathides) and a curved protrusion in the back to protect the nape of the neck. The helmet has a padded interior made of fabric or leather to protect the warrior’s skull. These helmets were essential for the Greek hoplites, the famous foot soldiers of the phalanxes.

The Biden administration debacle in Afghanistan has convinced America’s enemies of the administration’s weakness and vulnerability. The timing of Vladimir Putin’s march on Ukraine is undoubtedly connected to the perception in Moscow of Washington’s lack of will to engage in a confrontation. Communist China is astutely waiting for the right time to seize Taiwan. Should Moscow achieve its objectives, Xi Jinping, China’s dictator would follow Putin’s example and act, knowing full well that the Biden administration would pay lip service to the violation of Taiwanese sovereignty, and perhaps demand UN sanctions, but ultimately, Washington would live with the new...

In 2019, the Society for Classical Studies, a non-profit North American scholarly organization devoted to all aspects of Greek and Roman civilization, held a rather memorable conference in San Diego. Titled “The Future of Classics,” panelists were asked for their opinions on “the diminution of our future role” in society. One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton who researches and teaches the Roman Republic and early Empire, wasted no time in making his point, calling for all Classics to die “as swiftly as possible.” Peralta, a black academic, criticized Classics for their failure...