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https://reclaimthenet.org/tsa-private-airport-security-biometrics-digital-id-expansion

Posted by Ken Macon

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227579

Close-up of a woman's face with digital biometric and facial recognition graphics overlaid, featuring data points, a wireframe head model, and a futuristic blue interface in the background.

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The Transportation Security Administration is advancing plans that could place private companies at the center of airport security operations, raising fresh concerns about the privacy implications of deeply integrated biometric and digital ID systems.

Through a newly issued Request for Information (RFI), the agency is soliciting proposals from vendors capable of delivering screening solutions that combine staffing with AI-driven threat detection and biometric identity tools.

These technologies carry wide implications for how personal data is collected, stored, and used in public spaces.

This expansion effort is part of TSA’s Screening Partnership Program. What was once a behind-the-scenes option for a relatively small number of airports is now being positioned as a possible template for the future of airport screening across the country, with a focus on highly automated, surveillance-heavy systems.

Request for Information (RFI) for TSA Screening Partnership Program (SPP) to create TSA Checkpoint of the Future Integrated Turnkey Solutions, marked active by Homeland Security department, with details on contract opportunity type as special notice, updated and original published and response dates, inactive policy, and updated inactive date in 2025.

According to the RFI, TSA is seeking private firms that can build and manage all aspects of the screening environment, from personnel to high-tech equipment, in a unified offering.

The agency is requesting “fully integrated, turnkey biometrics and digital ID screening solutions,” a shift that points to increased data collection and the normalization of identity verification practices that rely on facial recognition, mobile phone data, and centralized digital credentials.

This new model would be supported by a 10-year, $5.5 billion indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract expected to replace current five-year SPP contracts set to expire in 2026.

The agency says the larger contract ceiling reflects expectations of broader adoption, but privacy advocates are concerned that this could lead to a rapid expansion of biometric surveillance infrastructure across airports with limited public debate or regulatory safeguards.

The RFI outlines TSA’s interest in a wide array of technologies, including facial and fingerprint biometrics, AI-powered scanners, and data integration tools designed to link screening devices and identity systems into cohesive platforms.

The TSA wants these systems to be compatible with PreCheck, digital IDs, and mobile applications. These tools are increasingly built on tracking and profiling capabilities.

In the agency’s view, these systems should minimize the need for human screeners while boosting efficiency. However, doing so involves automating judgment processes and increasing reliance on opaque algorithms, which have raised concerns about bias, misuse, and data protection. As TSA noted, these systems should “reduce the need for human intervention, allow for rapid screening, and improve the ability to detect prohibited items or anomalous behavior.”

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The post TSA Pursues $5.5B Privatized Airport Security Overhaul with Biometric and AI Surveillance Expansion appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

https://reclaimthenet.org/tsa-private-airport-security-biometrics-digital-id-expansion

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227579

https://reclaimthenet.org/delta-rolls-out-ai-based-personalized-airfare-pricing

Posted by Ken Macon

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227569

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Delta Air Lines is experimenting with a new AI-powered pricing model that adjusts fares based on profiling individual customer data, rather than traditional factors like seat availability or time of booking.

This system, developed in partnership with Israeli tech company Fetcherr, is already being used on a small percentage of domestic flights, with plans to expand to one-fifth of all domestic bookings by the end of the year.

Instead of offering uniform prices for the same flight, the AI tool tailors fares by analyzing each traveler’s digital profile. This could include their purchase history, browsing behavior, and potentially even financial background.

While Delta has framed this as an innovation designed to maximize efficiency and revenue, it could reshape airfare pricing in troubling ways.

Delta President Glen Hauenstein acknowledged that about 3 percent of domestic flight sales have been made using this new AI model over the last six months.

The goal, he said during a recent earnings call, is to increase that to 20 percent. Hauenstein expressed strong support for the strategy.

The airline has suggested it may eventually abandon static pricing entirely if early trends continue. But the lack of public insight into how the system functions is fueling concerns about fairness, privacy, and legality.

Without transparency, there’s no way to determine whether the algorithm complies with federal anti-discrimination laws.

Delta has not said whether it will publicly release data from its pilot program, nor has it committed to disclosing how price variations occur.

Still, the airline could face challenges as it pushes this system further. The Federal Trade Commission is already evaluating whether personalized pricing practices violate existing consumer protection laws.

Lawmakers are also starting to examine how pricing algorithms affect competition and consumer choice.

Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona has publicly pledged to block Delta’s AI pricing rollout, signaling growing political resistance to the practice. If other airlines follow Delta’s lead, the issue could quickly become a broader flashpoint for both privacy and economic fairness.

Screenshot of a tweet by Ruben Gallego with a verified checkmark, posted on July 15, 2025, at 11:09 AM, stating that Delta's CEO was caught bragging about using AI to identify customers' pain points to extract more money, condemning this as predatory pricing and vowing not to let it continue.

As a short-term safeguard, travelers could use VPNs when shopping for flights in order to conceal some personal information that may influence pricing.

With companies like Fetcherr looking to expand into other sectors of the travel industry, the arrival of AI-driven pricing may not stop at airfare. For travelers, the growing influence of algorithmic decision-making raises urgent questions about transparency, equity, and the role of personal data in determining what you pay.

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The post Data Mining Takes Off: Delta Rolls Out AI-Based Personalized Airfare Pricing appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

https://reclaimthenet.org/delta-rolls-out-ai-based-personalized-airfare-pricing

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227569

george_rooke_lj_feed

https://george-rooke.livejournal.com/1174390.html

Совершенно внезапно в 1827 году греки выбрали на место правителя графа Иоанна Каподистрию, который уже ушел с русской службы в 1822 году, и проживал в Женеве, занимаясь поддержкой греческой революции.
Надо сказать, что это был удачный выбор, поскольку Каподистрия с 25 лет был на дипломатической службе, имел опыт управления в Республике Семи Островов (Ионические острова в период м 1799 по 1808 годы), был буквально трудоголиком и аскетом.
Проблема была в том, что он всех этих Маврокодатосов, Миаулисов и прочих Одиссеев на дух не переносил. «[Каподистрия] называл примасов турками, маскирующимися под христианскими именами; военачальников — разбойниками; фанариотов — сосудами сатаны; а интеллигенцию — глупцами. Только крестьян и ремесленников он считал достойными своей любви и защиты и открыто заявлял, что его правление осуществляется исключительно для их блага».
Каподистрия не доверял людям, которые вели войну за независимость, считая их всех корыстными, мелкими людьми, чья единственная забота заключалась в собственной власти. Каподистрия считал себя защитником простого народа, долгое время угнетаемого османами, но также считал, что греческий народ еще не готов к демократии, говоря, что дать грекам демократию сейчас — все равно что дать мальчику бритву; мальчику не нужна бритва, и он может легко убить себя, так как не знает, как ею правильно пользоваться. Каподистрия утверждал, что греческому народу в настоящее время нужна просвещенная автократия, которая выведет нацию из отсталости и нищеты, вызванных османами, и что демократия может быть установлена через одно или два поколения, когда греки получат образование и будут владеть частной собственностью.
Идеалом правителя для Каподистрии был Александр I, который работал медленно и потихоньку над преобразованием своего государства.
Единственно, с кем Каподистрия смог подружиться – это капитаны Теодор Колокотронис и Яннис Макрияннис, которые и предоставили свои контингенты для защиты правительства и военную силу для проведения в жизнь своих решений.
Колокотронис описал Каподистрия как единственного человека, способного быть президентом, поскольку он не был связан ни с одной из греческих фракций, восхищался им за его заботу о простых людях, которые так много пострадали на войне, и ему нравился интерес Каподистрии к тому, чтобы все было сделано, независимо от юридических тонкостей. Поскольку у Греции на тот момент собрать какие-то значительные налоги не представлялось возможным (хотя бы даже потому, что из 2.5 миллионов населения на 1821 год, к 1827 году осталось 800 тысяч человек), денег всегда не хватало, и Каподистрия постоянно писал письма своему другу, швейцарскому банкиру Жану-Габриэлю Эйнару, прося об очередном займе.
Каподистрия смог реорганизовать регулярную армию, и пользуясь русско-турецкой войной 1828-1829 годов отвоевать немало территории у осман. Каподистрия создал Законодательный совет, греческую военную академию, Сенат, начал внедрение новых методов в сельском хозяйстве (в частности при нем в Греции ввели вторую культуру – картофель), начал постройку сети больниц и школ. В 1830 году он уровнял евреев в правах с греками. Он также ввел первую современную систему карантина в Греции, которая впервые с начала Войны за независимость взяла под контроль такие эпидемии, как брюшной тиф, холера и дизентерия.
Однако подобные действия сильно не понравились капитанам и примасам. Особенно его ненавидели сторонники Английской партии (в Греции на тот момент было три партии – Русская, Французская и Английская). Их лидеры сидели на островах Гидра, Псары и Спецес.
Миаулис и Маврокордатос решили сделать рейд к Паросу и захватить там весь греческий флот (тот самый, который построил для греков Кокрейн). И самое смешное, что Миаулису это удалось.
Каподистрия призвал британский и французский корпуса поддержать его в подавлении восстания, но они отказались это сделать, и только русский адмирал Петр Иванович Рикорд повел свои корабли на север, в Порос. Полковник (впоследствии генерал) Каллергис взял с собой полуобученный отряд регулярных войск Греческой армии и отряд нерегулярных войск для поддержки. С менее чем 200 людьми Миаулис не смог оказать особого сопротивления; форт Хайдек на острове Бурдзи был захвачен регулярными войсками, а корвет « Спецес» (бывший « Агамемнон» Ласкарины Бубулины ) был потоплен силами Рикорда. Окруженный русскими в гавани и войсками Каллергиса на суше, Порос сдался. Миаулис был вынужден заложить заряды на флагманском корабле «Эллас» и корвете «Гидра», взорвав их, когда он и его горстка последователей вернулись на Гидру. Люди Каллергиса были в ярости из-за потери кораблей и разграбили Порос, увезя награбленное в Нафплион.
Надо сказать, что «Эллас», это фрегат типа «Конститьюшн», заказанный Кокрейном в США в 1825 году. Он обошелся греческой казне в дикие 600 тыс. долларов кредитных денег, и это был самый сильный корабль греческого флота.
Ну а 27 сентября Каподистрия был убит на ступенях церкви Святого Спиридона в Нафплии. Чуть ранее он арестовал очередного капитана – Петробея Мавромихалиса. Естественно за набеги и грабежи. Семья Мавромихалисов посчитала это смертельным оскорблением, и сыновая его – Константин и Георгий как раз и пошли на убийство.
Георгиос вонзил кинжал в грудь Каподистрии, а Константин выстрелил ему в голову. Константина застрелил генерал Фотомарас, который наблюдал за сценой убийства из своего окна. Георгиосу удалось бежать и спрятаться во французском посольстве; через несколько дней он сдался греческим властям. Он был приговорен к смертной казни военным трибуналом и расстрелян.
Власть пытался поднять Августин Каподистрия, однако страну понесло, и там в очередной раз началась гражданская война «всех против всех».
Если же вспомнить весь мой цикл про независимость Греции – можно понять, сколько бед и ужасов могут принести прекраснодушные мечтатели, которые почему-то решили, что надо воссоздать Древнюю Грецию, ибо все эти Плутархи и Сократы писали неплохие книжки, которые нам нравятся.

https://george-rooke.livejournal.com/1174390.html

https://reclaimthenet.org/mexico-mandates-biometric-digital-id-by-2026

Posted by Ken Macon

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227561

Digital fingerprint visualization in neon colors on a blue circuit board background with glowing red and turquoise points representing data connections.

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Mexico has formally mandated the use of a new biometric-based digital ID system, making compulsory a previously voluntary identification mechanism known as the Unique Population Registry Code, or CURP.

Under the new law, CURP IDs will now incorporate detailed personal biometric records, including fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs embedded within a QR code.

The government plans a phased rollout, expecting full nationwide adoption by February 2026.

Historically, CURP codes facilitated everyday interactions such as filing taxes, registering companies, school enrollments, and applying for passports.

Accompanying this shift is a broader initiative to consolidate multiple government databases into a single Unified Identity Platform. Within 90 days, the Ministry of the Interior and the Digital Transformation Agency must launch the unified platform, which will be integrated into various public and private institutions’ databases.

Additionally, a separate program aimed at systematically collecting biometric data from minors is slated to commence within 120 days.

Despite the obvious privacy concerns, Mexican authorities argue that existing privacy legislation already sufficiently guards against unauthorized surveillance or misuse of sensitive data.

President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to privacy concerns earlier this month, clarifying, “A wiretap can only be approved by a judge, according to the Constitution and the law,” though that doesn’t placate concerns about data breaches and the wider introduction of a checkpoint society.

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https://reclaimthenet.org/mexico-mandates-biometric-digital-id-by-2026

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227561

https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-wants-to-see-your-papers-before-you-press-play

Posted by Christina Maas

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227553

Digital Australian flag with white stars made of binary code on a dark blue background, overlaid by a large red YouTube play button in the center

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It started as a plan to keep kids off Snapchat. Then it crept into TikTok. Now it’s knocking on YouTube’s front door with a clipboard, a demand for identification, and a wet government stamp of approval. In Australia, the age-old solution of “parent your child” is being swapped out for a bold new model: “scan your face to watch cat videos.”

The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has had her sights set on sanitizing the internet. And like any modern bureaucrat on a mission, she’s discovered that nothing fuels a safety crusade quite like a child protection panic wrapped in a policy initiative. Her latest move is to push YouTube into the same regulatory sandbox as Snapchat and Instagram by revoking its exemption from an under-16 social media ban.

This shift wouldn’t just affect kids. It could mean that everyone who wants to watch YouTube; yes, even that 45-year-old watching how-to videos on fixing a leaking faucet, might soon have to verify (and reveal) their age or identity just to press play.

Grant unveiled her rationale with a round of internal research dropped late on a Thursday like an off-brand Netflix show, hoping to avoid bad reviews.

The study showed that 76% of kids aged 10 to 15 use YouTube and that 37% of those who encountered “harmful” content said it happened there. For the younger subset, 10 to 12 years old, the number jumps to 46%.

But inconveniently for the crackdown crowd, the more severe online offenses, grooming, harassment, and image-based abuse, were overwhelmingly reported on Snapchat. This didn’t stop the Commissioner from dragging YouTube onto the regulatory altar anyway.

YouTube’s not exactly letting the house burn down, either. In messages to creators last week, the platform made it clear: this move is more than policy tweaking; it’s a wrecking ball. It “could impact you, your channel, your audience, and the broader creator community,” and “send a message that YouTube isn’t safe for younger Australians.”

Of course, if the point is to make the internet so safe that it no longer functions, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

YouTube, for its part, has long insisted it isn’t “social media” in the sense politicians pretend to understand. According to Rachel Lord, YouTube’s Public Policy and Government Relations lead for Australia and New Zealand, it’s “a video streaming platform with a library of free, high-quality content.”

She went further: “The eSafety Commissioner’s advice for younger people to use YouTube in a ‘logged out’ state deprives them of the age-appropriate experiences and additional safety guardrails we specifically designed for younger people.”

This isn’t stopping pro-censorship figurehead Grant, who has hinted that real-time age verification, meaning digital ID systems, could soon be standard protocol.

And it means that accessing YouTube, a site most Australians think of as a library of how-to videos and talking heads, could soon require the same security clearance as boarding a domestic flight.

The eSafety office wants teens “logged out” by default, but in practice, that just means no algorithmic safeguards, no parental controls, and no user-specific filters. Because, of course, the way to protect children is to remove the very tools that allow their parents to supervise them. Genius.

It’s not lost on anyone that this crusade against YouTube has deeper roots. Julie Inman Grant isn’t exactly a newcomer to the “content moderation at scale” game.

She’s made waves before, demanding the removal of videos, pressuring platforms over posts, and being the focus of international ridicule for her lack of tech prowess.

The line between “safety regulation” and state-sanctioned content policing is getting blurrier by the week.

The digital ID proposal is not being rolled out in a vacuum. It follows a familiar script: start with a noble cause (protecting children), find a problem with broad emotional appeal (bad content online), and push for sweeping regulatory infrastructure (age checks, identity gates, access logs). Suddenly, the same government that can’t figure out how to digitize healthcare records is determining which videos a 15-year-old can watch about sea turtles.

It doesn’t matter that children under 13 aren’t even allowed YouTube accounts. Most kids watch using family logins, with curated settings, under adult supervision. But the government plan even punishes that model by treating every user like a potential threat, unless they pass the digital ID check.

Google’s next big Canberra event on July 30 will feature creators making the case to lawmakers directly. Expect mentions of “choice,” “parental oversight,” and “not treating every viewer like a criminal.”

The reality, though, is darker. Privacy advocates see a scenario where the digital ID measures become infrastructure: permanent, embedded, and normalized. Today it’s about under-16s. Tomorrow, it’s about misinformation. Then it’s terrorism. Then it’s “public health.”

What this proposal really asks is: should the internet remain a place where users browse freely, or become a gated network of licensed viewers, segmented by age and identity, supervised by bureaucrats who can’t tell Twitch from Reddit?

The idea that every Australian might soon need to verify their identity to watch DIY, music, or kids’ programming isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a step down, a concrete one. With Grant’s proposals, a country that used to pride itself on rugged independence is pioneering a future where surfing the web requires a permission slip.

And not the kind your mom signs.

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The post Australia Wants To See Your Papers Before You Press Play appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-wants-to-see-your-papers-before-you-press-play

https://reclaimthenet.org/?p=227553

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2458316.html

Чё Происходит #282 | Угрозы Трампа не сработали, штрафы за поиск в интернете, Москва утонула.

00:00:00 Начало
00:01:50 В России начнут штрафовать за поиск и рекламу VPN
00:04:53 Мизулина и Симоньян расстроены
00:06:54 Зачем принимают этот закон?
00:11:38 Потоп в Москве: ливневка опять не справилась
00:15:12 В Благовещенске и Елабуге полностью запретили электросамокаты
00:19:09 В России предложили вернуться к системе 8- и 10-летнего школьного обучения, чтобы молодежь раньше заводила детей
00:21:52 Интерпол донес в российскую полицию на 14-летнего подростка за оскорбления в игровом чате
00:23:19 В Якутии началась первая смена в лагере для «пионеров-пенсионеров»
00:25:08 Генпрокуратура Украины отчиталась о задержаниях и обысках в мошеннических колл-центрах. Там нашли кабинеты с портретами Путина и грамотами ФСБ
00:29:25 Мои путеводители
00:30:19 Илья про парковку
00:31:11 Соседи против чернокожей россиянки
00:34:14 Угрозы Трампа в адрес России оказались малоубедительными
00:37:04 Илья про подворотни
00:37:52 Лавров заявил, что Россия и ее торговые партнеры не опасаются пошлин, которыми пригрозил Трамп за продолжение войны
00:39:28 Трамп хочет поменять рецепт Кока-колы в США
00:41:26 Золото в Овальном кабинете
00:42:58 Трамп «украл» не только медаль Клубного чемпионата мира, но и кубок
00:45:01 Мой мерч
00:46:32 Илья про автобусы в Корее
00:47:34 Израиль ударил по Дамаску на фоне столкновений сирийских силовиков с друзами
00:50:13 В Испании мигранты спровоцировали массовые беспорядки
00:52:13 В Британии задержали десятки сторонников запрещенной пропалестинской организации 00:54:37 Константин из Лондона о снижении возраста для голосования на выборах
00:58:07 Путеводитель по Лондону
00:58:19 В РПЦ возмутились критикой священников, разъезжающих на люксовых «Гелендвагенах» 00:59:56 Российский военный суд вынес заочный приговор Борису Акунину. Ему дали 14 лет строгого режима
01:01:58 Московский суд оштрафовал главного редактора издания Sport24 Самвела Авакяна по обвинению в «пропаганде»
01:04:58 Во Франции освободившийся из тюрьмы заключенный вынес в сумке своего сокамерника 01:06:22 Предварительный отчет показал, что в самолете Air India отключилась подача топлива 01:08:51 Власти Колумбии пожаловались на подводные дроны, которые перевозят *** через океан 01:10:17 В Новосибирске грузовик аварийной службы провалился в яму с водой
01:11:00 В Гренландии огромный айсберг угрожает прибрежной деревне
01:12:38 Казахстан так и не дождался обещанной во время визита Путина помощи со строительством трех ТЭЦ
01:13:51 Азербайджан планирует обратиться к международной системе правосудия
01:16:40 В России на рынке автомобилей происходит катастрофа: продажи только за полгода рухнули на 27%
01:18:43 Худшей авиакомпанией Европы неожиданно признали Finnair
01:21:10 Старейший президент в мире, 92-летний Поль Бийя решил в восьмой раз переизбраться в президенты Камеруна
01:22:12 Арсен из Японии о том, кто решил испортить веселье туристам
01:25:51 Путеводитель по Японии
01:26:17 В Ростовской области полицейским начали выплачивать компенсации за взятки, от которых они отказались
01:28:22 Кашин о *** полковника СБУ
01:32:50 Конфуз на концерте группы Coldplay
01:34:37 Глава Astronomer ушел в отставку
01:37:22 На фестивале Tomorrowland сгорела главная сцена
01:39:09 Жители Липецкой области попросили отремонтировать памятник Ленину, на который у коммунистов и властей нет денег
01:40:46 Омские казаки попросили Путина отменить решение об установке памятника Дзержинскому в городе
01:42:11 В китайском метро стали ездить роботы-доставщики
01:43:27 В Тбилиси девушку пытались похитить чеченские родственники
01:45:34 Из Германии в Афганистан выслали преступников
01:47:01 В реке Пьяна утонули пьяные силовики
01:47:45 Пропагандисты начали анонсировать блокировку WhatsApp
01:51:05 Заключение.

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2458316.html

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2458055.html

💥ASLANYAN: Finally! PUTIN LOSES MOSCOW. Trump gave a SIGNAL OF UKRAINE'S VICTORY. A new turning point...

00:00 Will the war end if it is transferred to Russian territory?
14:49 Trump's conversation with Zelensky
25:33 Europe is preparing for a world war

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2458055.html

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=memes-typos-and-vernacular-english-in-a-12th-century-latin-homily

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110

Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting. Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix. This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism. Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde. That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact. Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.

900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery
The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)

What's all the fuss about "The Tale of Wade"*? It seems that two Cambridge scholars at Girton College, Seb Falk and James Wade, after spending three intensive years of research, have solved a thorny textual problem that has bewitched scholars for centuries.

*This Wikipedia article on "Wade (folklore)" contains a rich assemblage of myth and lore stretching back to Old Norse and Old English that reveals the close association of Wade and his boat, with water, sexuality, and fertility.

N.B.: It is only by coincidence that one of the Cambridge researchers, James Wade, has the same surname as the name of the hero of "The Tale of Wade" dating to a millennium earlier.

Here's a translation of the passage on Wade's boat from Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale":

And bet than old boef is the tendre veel…And eek thise old wydwes, God it woot,They konne so muchel craft on Wades boot, So muchel broken harm, whan that hem leste, That with hem sholde I nevere lyve in reste…

—1.209-14

And better than old beef is tender veal…and also these old widows, God knows it,They can play so much craft on Wade's boat,So much harm, when they like it,That with them should I never live in rest….

It is clear that here Wade's boat is being used as a sexual euphemism.

(from the above cited Wikipedia article)

As presented in the NYT article, the abstruse argumentation and dense documentation of the Falk & Wade paper are difficult for the non-specialist to follow, so I will supplement Castle's account with other materials, starting with the official Cambridge announcement of the seminal Falk-Wade discovery. A simple version of the announcement may be found here:

Lost English legend decoded, solving Chaucerian mystery and revealing a medieval preacher's meme
Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin, Phys.org, Science X (2025-07)

Here is the elaborate treatment of the announcement prepared by Tom Almeroth-Williams:

The Song of Wade: Decoding a lost English legend, solving a Chaucerian mystery, and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme

By Tom Almeroth-Williams, University of Cambridge (7/16/25)

This is a virtuoso demonstration of the achievement of Falk-Wade. For those who do not have a lot of time to spend on medieval English philology and are not acquainted with its aims and usages, I strongly recommend that you skip to the 4:00 film at the end of Almeroth-Williams' essay. Here you will hear Seb Falk and James Wade explain lucidly in layman's terms what they have achieved in their technical paper.

Prior to the excellent film, Almeroth-Williams gently guides his reader through the Falk-Wade paper by other means as well, including this introductory summary:

A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved.

Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic.

The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer's writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.

The breakthrough, detailed in The Review of English Studies, involved working out that the manuscript refers to ‘wolves’ not ‘elves’ [VHM: this is the "typo" referred to in the title of this post], as scholars previously assumed.

Dr James Wade and Dr Seb Falk, colleagues at Girton College, Cambridge, argue that the precious literary fragment, first discovered by M.R. James at Cambridge in 1896, has been “radically misunderstood” for the last 130 years.

Some choice quotations:

“Here we have a late-12^th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk says. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

“Many church leaders worried about the themes of chivalric romances – adultery, bloodshed, and other scandalous topics – so it’s surprising to see a preacher dropping such 'adult content' into a sermon,” Wade explains.

…

“Lots of very smart people have torn their hair out over the spelling, punctuation, literal translation, meaning, and context of a few lines of text,” says James Wade.

A very attractive feature of Almeroth-Williams' presentation are crystal clear photographs that you can enlarge by gliding over them with your mouse, and then having him (A-W) deftly encircle the critical features of the text with highlighted boxes. For example, by such means, the names "Wade" and "Hildebrand" (Wade's father) leap off the page. In another place, we get to see the precise place where the letters "w" and "y" are muddled, so that a word that has been interpreted as "elves" for nearly a thousand years actually was "wolves".

In the next section, "Chaucer and Wade", Almeroth-Williams describes how the authors of the paper on the homily in Peterhouse MS 255 clarify the great medieval poet's invocation of the Song of Wade:

The Song of Wade was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages. For several centuries, its central character remained a major romance hero, among other famous knights such as Lancelot and Gawain. Chaucer twice evoked Wade in the middle of this period, in the late 1300s, but these references have baffled generations of Chaucer scholars.

At a crucial moment in Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus tells the ‘tale of Wade’ to Criseyde after supper. Today’s study argues that the Wade legend served Pandarus because he not only needed to keep Criseyde around late, but also to stir her passions. By showing that Wade was a chivalric romance, Chaucer’s reference makes much more sense.

In ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, Chaucer’s main character, January, a 60-year-old knight, refers to Wade’s boat when arguing that it is better to marry young women than old. The fact that his audience would have understood the reference in the context of chivalric romance, rather than folk tales or epics, is significant, the researchers argue.

In the following section, Almeroth-Williams shows how the Cambridge researchers pay more attention to the entirety of the Humiliamini sermon and its usages than previous scholars have. This is where they identify Alexander Neckam, or one of his acolytes, as the probable author of this homily on humility.

Almeroth-Williams concludes his essay with an extract from the new translation of the sermon referring to Wade:

‘Dear [brothers], as to the fact that he says, ‘humble yourselves’, etc. – it could be considered that humility which is against the mighty hand of God is of a particular kind. For there are three kinds of humility: the humility of guilt; the humility of punishment; and the humility of penance.

Now, by the humility of guilt our first parent [Adam] was so humbled that, although he was made master of the whole world before his sins and ruled over everything that was in the world, after his sin, on the other hand, he could not even defend himself from a worthless worm, that is, from a flea or louse. He who was similar to God before sin, was made dissimilar through sin; since ‘by this poison a rose is sometimes turned into spikenard.’

Thus Adam was, from a human, made as if he was non-human; not only Adam, but almost everyone becomes as if non-humans. Thus they can say, with Wade:

‘Some are wolves and some are adders; Some are sea-snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand.’

Similarly, today some are wolves, such as powerful tyrants, who if they can justly take the things of those subject to them, take them; but if not, [do so] by any means. Some imitate serpents, of which there are three kinds. Others become lions, like the proud ones whom God opposes; enough has been said of pride in the art of preaching. Others are foxes, such as cunning detractors and flatterers who speak with a double heart, who have honey in their mouth but bile in their heart. Others are gluttons like pigs, of whom the prophet says ‘their throats are open graves’; and thus each is judged similarly. Indeed, this humility is bad and perverse.’

Here's the original Latin text, with the tantalizing snippets of Middle English intermixed (in the penultimate paragraph quoted here( :

K[arissimi], hoc quod dicit ‘hu[miliamini] sub po[tenti]’ etc.—potest perpendi quod alia est humilitas que est contra potentem manum Dei. Triplex enim est humilitas: humilitas scilicet culpe; hu[militas] pene; hu[militas] penitentie.

Humilitate autem culpe, in tantum humiliatus est primus parens noster,¹⁰⁶ quod cum dominus tocius mundi efficeretur ante peccata et in omnibus que in mundo erant dominaretur, post peccatum uero, a uili uermiculo, scilicet, a pulice siue pediculo se minime potuit defendere. Qui similis fuit Deo ante peccatum per peccatum factus est dissimilis; quia ‘hac [lue] rosa [non]numquam uertitur in saliuncam’.¹⁰⁷

Adam itaque de homine factus est quasi non homo; nec tantum Adam, sed omnes fere fiunt quasi non homines. Itaque dicere possunt cum Wade: ‘Summe sende [ƿ]lues & summe sende nadderes; sum[m]e sende nikeres the bi den ƿater [ƿ]unien. Nister man nenne bute ildebrand onne.

Similiter, hodie aliqui sunt lupi, utpote potentes tiranni, qui [176va]¹⁰⁸ sibi subditorum res si iuste accipere possunt accipiunt; sin autem quocunque modo. Alii imitantur serpentes, quorum triplex est genus. Alii efficiuntur leones, utpote superbi quibus resistit Deus;¹⁰⁹ satis de superbia dictum est in arte predicandi. Alii sunt wlpes, sicut dolosi detractores adulatores qui loquntur in corde et corde,¹¹⁰ qui habent mel in ore fel autem in corde.¹¹¹ Alii sunt gulosi ut sues, de quibus dicit propheta ‘sepulcrum patens est g[uttur]’;¹¹² et sic de singulis simile habetur iudicium. Hec siquidem humilitas mala est & peruersa.

Now let us turn briefly to the original paper of Falk and Wade:

"The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited"
Seb Falk, James Wade, The Review of English Studies (16 July 2025)

Abstract

Short verses from the Song of Wade survive in an early-thirteenth-century sermon collection found in Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 255. They constitute the only known surviving fragment of a legendary romance that was widely known in medieval and renaissance England but now entirely lost. The fragment was first discovered [VHM: in 1896] by M. R. James and Israel Gollancz, and since then several scholars have considered the sermon’s English quotation to parse its meaning and speculate on what it says about the ‘Legend of Wade’. Despite such attention, there has been no sustained attempt to situate this fragment in the context of the sermon in which it appears. In this essay we return to Peterhouse MS 255 to re-consider them in light of the sermon in which they are quoted. We offer a new plain-sense meaning of the English fragment and suggest the most likely arrangement of its verse form, both of which animate a fundamental re-thinking of what glimpse these verses can give us into the world of a romance otherwise unknown, and into a lost legend as it was understood by readers and audiences in later medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer among them. We provide an edition and translation of the full sermon, and analyse the sermon’s contents and composition, suggesting identifications for its sources, origins, and audiences. We also provide fresh analysis of the ways that preachers constructed their sermons, drawing from up-to-date natural philosophy and deploying memes from the world of romance and real-life chivalry.

Conclusion

This essay proposes a new text and translation of the Wade fragment, with all its implications for how we might imagine the world of the lost Song of Wade. It also postulates that the author of this sermon may be none other than Alexander Neckam [1157=1217] himself, and gestures towards an intellectual milieu of creative, even playful experimentation where even English romance, like the flea or the worm, can play a natural role in moral instruction and edification. The richly visual, dramatic descriptions of serpents, lions and wolves, self-abasing knights, and kings in sackcloth, are set in a virtuoso rhetorical performance. It all makes for a captivating effect in an era when sermons served to generate the same depth of emotional response as mass media today.⁹⁹ And in this genre of medieval media broadcast, we find the Wade legend, like the ‘viral’ account of Hugh of Gournay, deployed as a meme, a compact unit of transmission that freights cultural memory, such as tunes or catch-phrases or clothing fashions.¹⁰⁰ If Alexander Neckam, or the Neckam-inspired sermonizer, invokes the Wade legend as a meme, then he is only the first known writer to do so, for it is precisely as a meme that Wade is used in Middle English, from the Bevis-author through Chaucer to Malory.

This new reading of the Wade legend as a chivalric meme has been spurred by an appreciation of its situation in the Humiliamini sermon. By providing an edition and translation of the sermon here, we hope that its intellectual and emotional energy might resonate with other readers in ways that we have not had the time to explore or capacity to understand. (It is, after all, a lesson in humility.) We also hope that this essay goes some way towards illuminating what Jack Bennett considered the best-known crux in Chaucer’s writings. The preferred reading of ‘wolves’ for ‘elves’ dramatically shifts the ground, and invites us to re-imagine the known world of Wade from c.1200 on, from one less germane to Germanic epic than congruent with courtly romance, less invested in the mythological sphere of giants and monsters than in the warring of human chivalric adversaries. Such a shift turns the crux into a crutch of literary memory; it helps make sense of Chaucer’s evocation of Wade at instances of courtly intrigue, in moments of high tension in the world of fin amour. It may be one of Chaucer’s most brazen anachronisms, to have a performance of a Middle English romance resound within the ancient walls of Bronze-Age Troy, but to see the Wade allusion in the Troilus as a pointedly chivalric allusion is to understand it as part and parcel of a broader ‘medievalizing’ project. When the courtiers of Chaucer’s Troy listened to romance to model their own chivalry and steer their own passions, whose romance did they hear? It was Wade’s.

Here is how Stephen Castle of the NYT nicely explicates some of the key points in the Falk-Wade paper:

The fragment seemed to refer to a man alone among elves and other eerie creatures — something from the story of a mythological giant, or of a heroic character like Beowulf who battled supernatural monsters.

That would make it a surprising tale for a romantic go-between to read to a maiden, as happens in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” or to appear as an allusion in one of his “Canterbury Tales” about a wealthy man marrying a younger woman.

The new research, published on Wednesday in Britain in “The Review of English Studies,” suggests that the “elves” sprang from a linguistic error by a scribe, who miscopied a word that should have meant “wolves,” and that Wade in fact belonged to a chivalric world of knights and courtly love — much more relevant to Chaucerian verse.

…

The new study concludes that the sermon’s scribe confused a runic letter that was still found in Middle English, and pronounced ‘w,’ with the letter ‘y.’ That, it says, turned “wlves” into “ylves.”

…

“Here were three lines apparently talking about elves and sea monsters which exactly puts you in this world of Beowulf and other Teutonic legends,” said Dr. Wade. “What we realized is that there are no elves in this passage, there are no sea monsters and, in the study of the handwriting, everyone has gotten it wrong until now.”

The research took three years, he said, adding that he believed the error occurred because the scribe was chosen for familiarity with Latin.

“One’s suspicion, although we can’t prove this, is that the reason he messes up the Middle English is because he’s never written English before,” said Dr. Wade. [VHM: N.B. !!!!]

The mentions of Wade, the two academics argue, show both the sermon’s author and Chaucer deploying contemporary popular culture to appeal to a wider audience in the way that politicians, artists or preachers still do today.

“The way the poem is quoted in the sermon as a meme — something which was widely understood — tells us something about how ubiquitous it was,” said Dr. Falk.

To me, this is all very familiar, because the same sorts of things were happening in medieval Dunhuang as scribes were trying to forge means to record vernacular with characters that theretofore had only been used for writing Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic. Typos aplenty!

Afterword

In the film, Falk and Wade show pages of the manuscript they studied. It has drawings, some of them colored, of animals that illustrate attributes of human beings / behavior. One of these drawings is a quite realistic colored rendition of a bovine munching on a bunch of green grass and, at the other end, emitting a huge balloon of green methane gas. These drawings of animals remind me very much of the Voynich manuscript, which must have been modeled on medieval bestiaries, that we have discussed numerous times on Language Log

Selected readings

"Five old, white men" (6/24/23)
"Old, Middle, and Modern English" (9/2/23)
Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751
Victor H. Mair, "Lay Students and the Making of Written Vernacular Narrative: An Inventory of Tun-huang Manuscripts", Chinoperl Papers 10 (1981), 5–96.
Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
"Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
"The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
"The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
"Once again the Voynich manuscript" (4/21/24)
"Yet again the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/24)
"Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript: Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)

[Thanks to John J. Tkacik]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=memes-typos-and-vernacular-english-in-a-12th-century-latin-homily

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110

https://freebeacon.com/politics/with-opponents-like-these-who-needs-elections/

Posted by Andrew Stiles

https://freebeacon.com/?p=2051005

The most recent book about last year's election—2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf—depicts a Veep-like carnival of incompetence starring an erratic and vindictive egomaniac whose worst impulses were enabled by a cadre of fiercely loyal dolts and lackeys who grew increasingly detached from reality, not to mention an entire political party and partisan media apparatus that dared not question the mercurial madman lest they be exiled, humiliated, branded as traitors to the cause.

It also covers the Trump campaign.

2024 is light on juicy new details about the attempted cover-up of Joe Biden's decline. Weirdly enough, the most explosive revelations are about Iran's efforts to murder Donald Trump and his associates. The authors briefly note how U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran had "multiple kill teams" inside the country and was unable to rule out an Iranian role in the assassination attempts in Pennsylvania and Florida. (Don't tell Tucker Carlson.) Several pages later, they devote three sentences to the breaking news that former secretary of state Mike Pompeo "narrowly escaped" after Iranian operatives "tried to capture him" at a Paris hotel in 2022. Um, what?

In any event, the book is no less damning an indictment of the Democratic Party compared with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin or other counterparts in the genre. It is in many ways more devastating, more grimly amusing, and deeply ironic thanks to the authors' deadpan portrayal of a bumbling president, preposterously running for reelection at age 81, who exhibits every major character flaw Democrats have ever ascribed to Donald Trump. They describe a campaign that deserved to lose—even, or perhaps especially, after Biden's rickety ass was finally booted from the ticket to make way for Kamala Harris.

The entire election can be summed up by how each of the key players chose to cooperate for the book. Trump agreed to be interviewed. Harris declined, obviously. Biden's aides refused on his behalf, citing a conflict with his upcoming memoir. Then one of the authors reached Biden on his cell phone as he was about to board an Amtrak train, and they spoke for several minutes. His aides went ballistic and blocked the reporter's number on Biden's phone, which was subsequently disconnected.

The book is packed with small moments like these that exquisitely capture the essence of the Biden, Harris, and Trump campaigns, and their respective vibes. Biden and his team were determined to run again because they believed he "governed well, and they cared that historians agreed, ranking Biden among the most successful modern presidents." They found a token minority, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, to serve as campaign manager, but gave her essentially no power. Biden got expert advice from Hollywood producers who proposed "an aggressive media campaign to restore voters' confidence," but no one had a clue what he should say.

After Trump was almost killed, and the entire world saw him bloodied and triumphant, looking more badass than any politician has ever looked, Biden's cadre of "uniformly subservient" advisers thought Biden would benefit because it presented an opportunity to "appear presidential" by "speaking loftily about the values and virtues of American democracy." Alas, no one cared. Even after dropping out, Biden continued to insist he was a "political asset" and "complained that Harris's campaign wasn't deploying him enough." Biden's right-hand man, Tom Donilon, told the authors he still thinks the Democratic freakout after the infamous debate was "an act of insanity."

Harris, meanwhile, is revealed as a breathtakingly inept politician incapable of taking action in a timely manner. The new campaign obsessed over the most irrelevant details. Her philandering husband, Doug Emhoff, received multiple scoldings during the convention for laughing too much and, alternatively, for not smiling enough. They "spent weeks agonizing" over just about every decision, including how to respond to a Washington Free Beacon report casting doubt on her alleged employment at McDonald's, which remains very much in doubt to this day.

The authors recount this episode as if to imply that the Free Beacon was onto something. Making the candidate's sister (and alleged McDonald's coworker) Maya Harris available for a softball interview in a lifestyle magazine was deemed "too risky." News that a more respectable media outlet than the Free Beacon was investigating the matter caused "alarm" within the campaign, so they did nothing and let Trump steal the spotlight once again with an amazing photo op. "When Harris saw the video of Trump working the deep fryer, she told aides he was doing it wrong," the authors write. "An aide suggested she could point that out in an interview, but she never did."

The former VP is at her most impressive in the 24 hours after Biden delivered the news that he was dropping out and planned to endorse her, working the phones with ruthless proficiency to lock up the nomination and advance her career. Once tasked with actually running a campaign, it became clear she had no business running a McDonald's, let alone the United States government. Her political instincts were almost as bad as her ability to speak unscripted. At one point, before the switchover, Harris earnestly proposed showcasing Biden's accomplishments at the convention with "an original song by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda." It was rejected in part because Miranda was viewed as too closely associated with Barack Obama, whom many in Biden's circle regarded as a "prick."

The Trump campaign, by comparison, was a juggernaut of wisdom, discipline, and professionalism. They understood the electorate and devised a clear strategy to target the voters most likely to help them win. They spoke the language of the common man. As one Trump adviser said of primary challenger Ron DeSantis: "Nobody wants to vote for the guy who is a weird nerd loser." The Harris campaign, by contrast, spent weeks devising a Trump attack that came to be known as "the three 'Uns': Unhinged. Unchecked. Unstable." Riveting stuff.

The Harris campaign had a "chief analytics officer." Trump had a 22-year-old known as "TikTok Jack" and advisers who understood the brilliance of having Trump hold a press conference in the passenger seat of a campaign-branded garbage truck. Harris aides built a replica debate set and wore bronzer to impersonate Trump during prep sessions like exuberant theater dorks. Trump aides pelted reporters with snowballs like normal Americans.

Republicans had their own erratic candidate, as well as plenty of clownish toadies jockeying for influence and generally behaving like a bunch of middle school girls, but ultimately Trump proved easier to manage than his opponents. This was thanks in no small part to campaign boss Susie Wiles, who ruled with an iron fist and frequently talked the candidate out of shooting himself in the foot. There's no doubt that Wiles, the first female White House chief of staff in history, would be a national celebrity if she were a Democrat.

Wiles helped Trump navigate an episode in the book that highlights the differences between the parties. Throughout the campaign, Trump refused to bow to the demands of anti-abortion activists who favored a national ban after the demise of Roe v. Wade. He thought it would be political suicide, and he wanted to win the election. "I have to find a way out of this issue," Trump told a pro-life activist. "It's killing us." The Democratic position on transgender issues polls even worse than a national abortion ban, yet the party appears determined to die on that hill.

There's another moment toward the end that underscores the problem Democrats have created for themselves. Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, the embodiment of the Democratic establishment, runs into Trump adviser Chris LaCivita at a New Year's Eve party. They took a selfie together as McAuliffe congratulated his rival. "What a campaign you guys ran," he said. McAuliffe wasn't wrong, but Democrats spent the last several years telling their voters that Trump would end democracy and revive the Third Reich. Now they're dismayed to learn their constituents are telling them "there needs to be" Democrats "willing to get shot" fighting fascism.

Who's excited for 2028?

2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America
by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf
Penguin Press, 416 pp., $32

The post With Opponents Like These, Who Needs Elections? appeared first on .

https://freebeacon.com/politics/with-opponents-like-these-who-needs-elections/

https://freebeacon.com/?p=2051005

https://freebeacon.com/culture/did-we-give-peace-a-chance-in-1861/

Posted by Allen C. Guelzo

https://freebeacon.com/?p=2050174

Jay Winik made his first big splash in Civil War history-writing in 2001 with April 1865: The Month That Saved America, a fast-paced account of the closing weeks of the war. It was also his first book-length adventure after a career in the diplomatic service that took him to the sites of a number of modern-day civil wars, and it successfully landed him on bestseller and recommended-reading lists across the country. Thereafter, Winik zigzagged, first to the 18th century with The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800 in 2007, and then to the 20th with 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History in 2015. The needle has now returned to its original Civil War position, this time with a fresh account of the coming of the war in 1861: The Lost Peace.

That fatal year has attracted more than the usual share of historians’ attention. The terrible season that extended from the election of 1860 to the firing on Fort Sumter five months later has been the subject of great work by David Potter, Shearer Bowman, William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, William Cooper, and Russell McClintock, among many others. Even the Sumter crisis has generated wonderful writing by W.A. Swanberg, Eric Larsen, and David Detzer. What separates Winik from this crowded field is that almost every other historian writes about the year 1861 as an inevitable countdown to an inevitable war; Winik’s story is about the lost opportunities for peace. This is why the real centerpiece of the book is not Lincoln or even Fort Sumter, but the much-neglected national Peace Conference that assembled at the Willard Hotel in Washington in February 1861 to consider the ambitious compromises crafted by Kentucky’s senior senator, John J. Crittenden.

If there is a hero in this story for Winik, it is Crittenden, "one of history’s unsung figures," who against every expectation came within an ace of persuading the conference and Congress to amend the Constitution and head off the rush to war. The conference has generally been dismissed by historians as too-little-too-late, and even by Horace Greeley in 1861 as "The Old Gentlemen’s Convention." Winik is more cautious in his estimate. Crittenden, the heir of Henry Clay’s Union-saving mantle, was "humble, patriotic, dignified," all the while "carefully monitoring the pulse of the American public in the North as well as the South." The compromise proposals—chiefly, a federal commitment to protect slavery, but only in the states where it was legal—read to modern eyes as amoral deals with the devil. But as Winik notices, the Southern delegates who accepted those compromises were quietly recognizing congressional authority to limit the spread of slavery to the West, something they had been swearing since 1857 and Dred Scott that they would never do.

In the end, it all came to naught. "Both sides," Winik writes, "were seduced by their own illusions," and especially the illusion that the other side would cave first and obviate the need for compromise. Remembering Southern threats of civil war as early as 1850, the Republican stalwart Carl Schurz assured nervous Northerners that the threats of 1861 would end the same way. In 1850, "the South … went out, took a drink, and then came back." Now, they would try to leave the Union again, "and this time would take two drinks but come back again." The Chicago Tribune snorted at secession as "a confidence game" which, "when the real meaning and scope of this secession business is understood," will be dismissed by "the capitalists and business men" and end with "a hearty laugh all around." Abraham Lincoln, whose election sent South Carolina racing toward secession in the first place, was certain, even after South Carolina’s secession convention declared its ties to the Union dissolved, that "things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future."

They could not have been more horribly wrong. "What was begun," Winik writes, "to quell an insurrection would consume more than 600,000 lives" and would turn the South into "charred and lonely reminders of once thriving cities." True, it gave us "the genius of Abraham Lincoln," and for African Americans it provided "their own struggle for true freedom." But there is still the hint of resignation in Winik’s conclusion. Even "the exhilaration of emancipation" would be tempered by "its unfulfilled promise."

This is an ambitious, even daring, reconstruction of the issues and personalities that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. The question, of course, is whether Winik has quite pulled-off his dare. Judged purely by Winik’s considerable narrative skills, 1861: The Lost Peace is fast-paced, swift and colorful in its strokes, generous in its compassion. But there are a number of oddities about 1861 which burden even the most well-earned praise. First, there is the peculiar fact that, in a book of only 268 pages of text, Winik doesn’t actually reach the year of his title until after page 140. It’s also odd that, despite Winik’s claim to have "extensively woven primary sources with secondary sources," there are no footnotes or endnotes, no bibliography, and no way to know what those sources are. It does not help, either, that the copyeditors allowed a number of embarrassing misprints to slip past: diffused rather than defused, broadsides rather than broadswords, Ward Hill Lehman rather than Lamon, Thurgood Marshall rather than John Marshall.

The are other questions, too. It is somewhat wide of the mark to say that there was "no record" of Lincoln’s "lost" Bloomington speech of 1856 (there was no transcript, but the Alton Weekly Courier, the Belleville Advocate, and the Bloomington Weekly Pantagraph all reported on the speech). Likewise, Francis Preston Blair was many things, but not a "renowned diplomat." John Crittenden did not gaze "from the windows of his Senate office" because there were no Senate offices in 1860. Robert E. Lee did not attend the hanging of John Brown, nor was he descended from "two signers of the Declaration of Independence." Edwin Stanton did not become Lincoln’s secretary of war until 1862. Above all, Fort Sumter does not "face the sea" but instead overlooks the principal ship channel just inside the Charleston harbor mouth, and its gorge wall had no resemblance whatsoever to "the doomed picket fence manned by the Tennesseans at the Alamo." Tossing and goring in this manner is not pleasant, so let this much suffice.

There is, of course, no such thing as an error-proof historical narrative; the cloud of doubt arises when slip-ups accumulate to the degree they do in 1861. But the most debate-ready doubts hover around 1861’s basic implication: that the Civil War should have somehow been an avoidable war. Is this too optimistic, or at least too hopeful? Slavery was a system of injustice; but it was more than that. To protect it, one section of the country had invented a hideous structure of oligarchy, Romantic racial blather, and outright treason that marched in exactly the opposite direction from the Founders of the republic. We had become two incommensurable cultures, and it would have taken more than the combined talents of even Lincoln and Crittenden to avoid a collision. That the collision ended on the side of truth and right is something Winik, rightly and to his credit, acknowledges when he concludes that "the lost peace was the necessary war." Let us pray that we do not have a similar regret to utter about our own times.

1861: The Lost Peace
by Jay Winik
Grand Central Publishing, 304 pp., $35

Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University and a Non-Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

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https://freebeacon.com/culture/name-one-genius-that-aint-crazy/

Posted by Adrian Nguyen

https://freebeacon.com/?p=2050180

I’d like to begin this with Kanye West. There are many words to describe him. He’s a lunatic, an anti-Semite, whose attention-grabbing persona has no limits. He’s also a visionary and a genius—at least there was a time people thought he qualified as one. West has repeatedly released albums that have shaped the landscape of pop and hip-hop music, and his fashion design is immensely popular with the public. The rapper recently launched a regrettable ode to Adolf Hitler, yet some of his defenders interpreted it as a sign that he’s breaking establishment norms of what can be acceptable. For someone who is a fan of his music, how do you reconcile his positive contributions to pop culture with his intellectually indefensible positions and conclude that he’s a genius?

I’ve been thinking of him while reading The Genius Myth, written by Helen Lewis, a staff writer at the Atlantic. While Lewis gives a passing mention to him, he is someone who could be a solid (if not on-the-nose) example worth mentioning of how we often overestimate the term. This book asks how the concept of genius and its positive connotations have been oversaturated in modern society. Anyone big in entrepreneurship, sciences, and the arts could qualify for the title. It’s a new type of celebrity, distinguished only by the application of their intellect. Lewis shows how the narrative of the genius heavily combines the stories of "great men" and a fixation on IQ, as well as numerous fields, using those stories to market themselves.

While Lewis is quite skeptical of the concept, viewing it as something that could be easily corrupted, she’s not willing to dismiss the idea. But halfway through the book, she then asks for these narratives "to be resisted, challenged, their contents deliberately returned to complexity from an appealing state of simplicity." "Otherwise," she continues, "we end up living in a world of myths that does not reflect reality—a world where every iconoclast is right, a world where power is abused, and where everyone is told that they are getting what they deserve." The passage is sensible, if not agreeable. You should not reduce your heroes to infallible beings, and The Genius Myth attempts to soberly argue this. But she intends to strip them down as villains masking their newfound powers as a guise for their intellect.

The depictions of individuals being hyped as geniuses are quite compelling. Among them is Chris Goode, a British avant-garde playwright, whose theater work was transgressive (to the point that it veered on child pornography), before he faced allegations of sexual abuse of the actors (he died in 2021). Her biggest one, however, which begins and ends The Genius Myth, is Elon Musk. The entrepreneur needs no introduction, except that he has popularized electric cars and private space travel and lifted constraints on what people could say on social media after buying Twitter. Such endeavors increased his reputation among right-wingers, and less with the left-wingers, who like the idea of electric vehicles. He has also used that platform to air petty grievances with others who criticize him, and when he entered into Republican politics, he displayed inconsistencies in his newfound belief in reining in government spending. All of this is regurgitated by the author, and his achievements and flaws are elaborately laid out.

According to Lewis, there are two critical parts of the genius narrative: the hagiography of big-brained individuals and a fixation on IQ, singling out unique human beings with higher intelligence. She points to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a series of salacious biographies called Lives that centered on the careers of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance artists. He wrote that the young Leonardo was "marvellous and divine," and "would have made great profit in learning had he not been so capricious and fickle, for he began to learn many things and then gave them up." With regard to IQ, she traces that back to Lewis Terman and Francis Galton, proponents of eugenics. But this certainly has its limits—she points to Cyril Burt, a geneticist who performed twin studies to understand genetic inheritance, and describes his career as "a story of status, hierarchy and privilege." Following his death in 1971, the results of Burt’s studies have been alleged by some to have been falsified.

Such scientific misconduct led to the publication of Genius by Hans Eysenck, well known for his research on cancer and personality, which projects egotism and strength onto the concept of the genius. In terms of prose, The Genius Myth is sometimes littered with snarky interruptions. Among them, she quotes Eysenck’s thesis as "genius is only found in males (for whatever reason!)."

Downplaying the impact of hereditary IQ is also reductive, as it is a deeply complex science that is unfairly dismissed by progressives as a pipeline to racism and sexism. While Lewis doesn’t resort to this, she falls into the typical trap many progressive journalists have already presumed about the field. One of these is minimizing the usefulness of IQ tests because some of the questions being provided—Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy?—were "arguable" rather than settled for both. But standardized tests are accurate predictors of employee performance and the likelihood of a major accomplishment before middle age. It is otherwise a scientific tool that can be applied and misapplied.

While this isn’t a major component of the book, Lewis mentions the Great Men of History approach as an extension of her problem with the genius myth. She acknowledges that Thomas Carlyle wrote the famous essay about Great Men of History as a defense of public figures and their innate ability to accomplish things that change the world. But she falls into the widespread misinterpretation that Carlyle’s essay was ultimately hero worship, to demonstrate how "Francis Galton’s belief that greatness is innate and inherited" was its major influence. But Galton himself believed that these gifts were highly correlated with insanity.

Lewis writes that "a genius therefore becomes the human embodiment of a political argument—and smashing the genius’s reputation is a more compelling way of demolishing that argument than a tedious, footnoted appeal to the facts." She demonstrates this in her remarks on Galileo Galilei, where she writes that "if you have ninety-nine insane ideas and the other one is gravity, congratulations. History will remember gravity." She suggests that this "distorts our idea of achievement." Why would this be a problem? If that can influence the world for the better, this should be a net positive.

The criticism of one man’s overestimation of his abilities is to be expected, especially when it’s clear that he can only be good at one thing. But the myth of the genius expands his possibilities, and as long as the public still has the desire to disrupt the status quo, it’s here to stay. Which brings us back to Kanye. Did his contradictions tamper with his legacy of influential music? Absolutely. Is he still a genius? Considering the absurd, yet barren cultural landscape that we’re experiencing now, he might as well be.

The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
by Helen Lewis
Thesis, 320 pp., $30

Adrian Nguyen is a freelance critic based in Sydney, Australia.

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Реестровые казаки Хмельницкого, 1648-1651 годы.jpg

Финальная битва за Украину ! Сентябрь станет роковым.

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В последний год XIX века, в 1900 году увидела свет книжка с длинным названием «Удивительный волшебник из страны Оз».

Это было самое успешное предприятие человека по имени Лаймен Фрэнк Баум - американца, который очень хотел добиться успеха и добился его.

Чем он только не занимался в своей жизни! Еще будучи школьником, издавал детский журнал, рекламу в котором продавал за недетские деньги; играл в театре и содержал театральные труппы, гастролировавшие "по деревням"; держал универсальный магазин (разорился); редактировал газету «Абердинский субботний пионер», где призывал к геноциду индейцев; разводил гамбургских петухов.

Не надо смеяться - когда Доцент в камере обзывал Алибабаевича "петухом гамбургским", он демонстрировал не креативность, а образованность.

Петух гамбургский - это реальная порода кур, выведенная немцами угадайте где. Очень известная, надо сказать, порода, литературоведы даже утверждают, что знаменитый петух Шантеклер Джеффри Чосера и Эдмонда Ростана был "гамбургским золотистым".

Разведением этих самых гамбургских кур Баум очень активно занимался, всячески популяризировал породу и первая написанная им книга носит название «Книга о гамбургских курах: краткий трактат о спаривании, выращивании и содержании различных разновидностей гамбургских кур».

Но на курах наш животновод не разбогател.

Разбогател он на детских книгах - написав и издав сказку «Удивительный волшебник из страны Оз».

Когда книга вышла, автору было изрядно за сорок.

Книга, что называется, "выстрелила". Сказка Фрэнка Баума вышла 10-тысячным тиражом, который разлетелся так быстро, что в том же 1900-м году книгу переиздали еще два раза, тиражами 25 и 30 тыс. экз. А вообще история про волшебника с коротким именем удерживала первое место в списке бестселлеров детских книг два года подряд (хотя вообще-то по паспорту Оз - Оскар Зороастр Фадриг Исаак Норман Хенкель Эммануэль Амбройз Диггс).

Но гораздо большие деньги принес автору мюзикл, который Фрэнк Баум и его официальный соавтор художник Уильям Денслоу сочинили вместе с молодым композитором Полом Тьетьенсом.

Понимая, что железо надо ковать, пока горячо, мюзикл сочинялся в пожарном порядке и уже через год после выхода книги либретто и песни были написаны, начались репетиции, а премьера состоялась 16 июня 1902 года в чикагском оперном театре.

Мюзикл был идеально скроен - для детей там были необычные сказочные герои, для взрослых - множество красивых танцовщиц с голыми ногами

В итоге - непревзойденный успех!

Популярность мюзикла "Волшебник из страны Оз" была столь велика, что он девять лет (!) колесил по Штатам и Канаде двумя составами - основным и дублирующим, аки "Ласковый май" какой. Шоу стало одним из самых ярких театральных хитов Америки начала XX века и породило массу подражателей.

Доходы мюзикл приносил огромные и совладельцы, как это часто бывает, насмерть переругались из-за вечного вопроса: "Остап Ибрагимович, как мы будем делить наши деньги?". Именно тогда Баум навсегда расстался с художником Денслоу.

Но, кстати сказать, художник в накладе не остался. На деньги, заработанные на мюзикле, иллюстратор купил себе остров в составе Бермудского архипелага, объявил его королевством, а себя требовал называть королем Денслоу Первым.

А писатель...

Писатель сел писать второй том.

Баум никогда не собирался делать из этой книги сериал, сюжет "Волшебника из страны Оз" казался ему вполне законченным.

Но ему нужна была база для нового мюзикла, который он собирался поставить уже в одиночку, чтобы не делиться со всеми этими жадными и корыстными людьми.

Святая цель стимулировала процесс и продолжение написалось быстро.

Оно называлось "Чудесная страна Оз".

А картинки к ней нарисовал молодой талантливый художник Джон Нил, который был тогда в зените славы и Баум еле уговорил его заняться еще и проектом про страну Оз...

Знал бы товарищ художник, что за следующие 40 лет он проиллюстрирует более сорока книг о стране Оз, причем три из них напишет сам...

Читателям книга зашла, а вот зрителям...

Мюзикл по второй части "Страны Оз" с треском провалился, не продержавшись на сцене и месяца.

Мрачный Баум, чтобы хотя бы немного компенсировать свои финансовые потери, сел писать третью книгу и к восторгу издателя наконец-то подписал договор на серию из шести книг.

Закончив шестую книгу - «Изумрудный город страны Оз» освободившийся автор предпринял попытку побега. Он решил наконец-то закончить историю про страну Оз, от которой он невероятно устал - закончить раз и навсегда! Поэтому «Изумрудный город страны Оз» завершается тем, что добрая волшебница Глинда читает заклинание, которое делает страну Оз невидимой и недоступной для всех, кроме ее обитателей.

Свободен! Наконец-то свободен! - ликовал Баум и принялся писать давно задуманную и детально разработанную серию книг про приключения в морской пучине и в поднебесье.

Вскоре на прилавках появились две новые книги: «Морские феи» и «Небесный Остров». "Что-то я не понял, а про страну Оз здесь где?" - разочарованно интересовались читатели и новый проект не продавался от слова совсем.

А финансовые проблемы у Баума нарастали и множились. Автор вздохнул, и понял, что страна Оз - это его галеры, на которых он будет грести до конца жизни.

Так оно и случилось.

До конца жизни автор написал еще девять книг, последняя из которых, недописанная "Глинда из страны Оз", вышла через год после смерти Баума.

Но издательство вовсе не собиралось прекращать разработку этого еще весьма богатого месторождения.

К станку поставили детскую писательницу Рут Пламли Томпсон. По договору с издательством она ежегодно должна была писать новую книгу про страну Оз, чем и занималась с 1921 по 1939 год. Сбежать с этих галер она не могла, поскольку так и не вышла замуж, а на руках у нее оставались старая мать и сестра-инвалид. В итоге Томсон написала 21 книгу про страну Оз.

После нее выпавшее знамя подхватил художник Джон Нил, решивший сам писать книги, которые он продолжал иллюстрировать и после смерти Баума. Успел написать три, четвертую не дописал - умер.

После этого дело пошло вразнос.

Продолжения писали все, кто еще не забыл алфавит - включая потомков Баума, Филипа Хосе Фармера, Джоан Виндж и других известных американских фантастов.

Особняком, конечно, стоит творчество Александра Мелентьевича Волкова.

Александр Волков не собирался писать сериал.

Он вообще не собирался писать книгу. Он собирался изучать английский язык.

В 1936 году 45-летний преподаватель высшей математики в Московском институте цветных металлов и золота решил выучить к немецкому и французскому еще и английский язык – благо, для сотрудников Минцветмета открылись бесплатные курсы. Вот на них-то ему и выдали для внеклассного чтения оригинальное издание сказки Лаймена Фрэнка Баума «Wonderful Wizard of Oz».

Книжка математику понравилась, и он решил ее перевести - благо, несколько лет назад вышло Постановление Оргбюро ЦК ВКП(б) от 9 сентября 1933 года "О детской литературе", призывавшее печатать больше хороших книг для пионеров и школьников.

Оргбюро ЦК не обмануло - в 1939 году пионеры смогли открыть книгу, начинавшуюся словами: «Волшебник Изумрудного города. Переработка сказки американского писателя Франка Баума «Мудрец из страны Оз». Пересказал Александр Мелентьевич Волков».

Когда книга вышла, автору было изрядно за сорок.

Это была первая изданная книга начинающего 48-летнего переводчика. Точнее - пересказчика, поскольку перевод с самого начала был довольно вольный.

Книгу проиллюстрировал известный художник Николай Радлов, но в отличие от "Волшебника из страны Оз" бестселлером она не стала.

А потом началась великая война, и в военные годы многое забылось - в том числе и проходная довоенная сказка.

Камбэк "Волшебника Изумрудного города" произошел через много лет, фактически уже в другую историческую эпоху, в 1957 году.

И едва ли не главную роль в возрождении этого проекта сыграл художник. Художники в этой истории вообще часто выступают в редкой для них роли двигателя сюжета.

Художника звали Леонид Владимирский, он только что прогремел на всю страну иллюстрациями к сказке "Приключения Буратино" и искал - какую бы хорошую сказку еще отрисовать.

В библиотеке ему попалось довоенное издание "Волшебника Изумрудного города" - давно и прочно забытой книги. Со дня последнего издания прошло больше 17 лет, читатели первого издания сказки давно выросли, воспитывали собственных детей и смутно помнили про жевунов и мигунов, читанных еще до войны.

Сказка Владимирскому очень понравилась, и он загорелся сделать к ней иллюстрации. Нарисовав парочку картинок авансом, ему не составило никакого труда продавить в издательстве переиздание.

Осталось заручиться согласием автора, и художник пошел искать писателя.

Александра Волкова Леонид Владимирский нашел на даче в Кратово. Тому было уже под 70, он давно уже вышел на пенсию, занимался дачей и внучкой и, честно говоря, почти не вспоминал свою первую и единственную на тот момент сказку.

Но на переиздание, разумеется, согласился.

И даже сделал новую редакцию книги, отойдя от первоосновы Баума еще дальше.

"Волшебник Изумрудного города" с иллюстрациями Владимирского вышел, когда Александру Волкову было 69 лет

Он стал бомбой.

Мегабомбой.

Это была одна из самых издаваемых и продаваемых книг советского книгоиздания - не детской литературы, а вообще всего.

Разумеется, Александра Мелентьевича Волкова издатели начали охмурять, как ксендзы Козлевича - план-то выполнять надо. "У этого Баума же много-много книг про волшебную страну. Может быть, вы переведете еще одну?".

Немолодой уже писатель вздохнул и отправился в Библиотеку иностранной литературы. Там он прочитал продолжения и был немного ошарашен.

И я его понимаю.

На мой личный взгляд, который я никому не навязываю, сказки Баума про страну Оз (кроме первой) идеально характеризуются словосочетанием "лютая дичь".

Волков, похоже, был со мной согласен.

Судя по этой записи в дневнике:

"Вчера и сегодня занимался в Библиотеке иностранных языков, читал книгу Фр. Баума «Озма из Оза» из его озовской серии, в которой, как оказывается, около полутора десятка книг. Но какие это книги!

Мне кажется, ему удалась только первая из них «The Wizard of Oz» — это та, которую я обработал под названием «Волшебник Изумрудного города». Это милая, остроумная книга, в которой найдены прекрасные типы. Но дальше писатель решил черпать все из того же источника, а фантазии у него уже не хватило, и он занялся самым посредственным эпигонством. Все эти желтые курицы, механические Тик-Токи, Люди-Колеса, продовольственные пакеты и ведра с обедами, растущие на деревьях, сменные головы у принцессы Лангвидер - все это выглядит очень безвкусно.

Боюсь, что мой замысел - написать еще одну сказку по мотивам Фр. Баума - придется оставить, нет в этих многочисленных пухлых книгах того хорошего, что стоило бы пересказать советским детям. Страшила, Железный Дровосек и Трусливый Лев (кстати, почему он снова стал трусливым, когда выпил храбрость?) пока еще не действуют в этой книге (а я за 2 дня прочитал и законспектировал 140 стр.), а только повторяют все те же рассуждения о мозгах, сердце и храбрости, которые уже достаточно известны по первой книге.

Удивительная страсть у американских писателей к длиннейшим сериям, таким как у Берроуза к тарзановской и марсианской. Это их литературный бизнес... Конечно, эта сказка неизмеримо слабее «Мудреца из Оза». Автор совершенно непоследователен: Озма у него наследница правителя Изумрудного города, а ведь в первой книге ясно сказано, что Изумрудный город построил Оз - выходец из Канзаса. У Жевунов и Мигунов откуда-то тоже появляются короли - вассалы верховного правителя Оза.

Дороти уничтожает последних злых волшебниц в стране Оз, а в последующих книгах этих волшебниц и волшебников и всякой чертовщины появляется превеликое множество...

Начинает обрисовываться сюжет второй книги «Волшебника», но совсем не в таком плане, как у Баума...".

В общем, Волков решил не переводить, а самостоятельно написать продолжение "Волшебника Изумрудного города", взяв от Баума только идею оживляющего порошка.

Книга "Урфин Джус и его деревянные солдаты" вышла, когда автору пошел восьмой десяток.

Дальше вы сами все знаете - после Урфина Джуса последовали "Семь подземных королей", за ними - "Огненный бог марранов"... Обычная история с удачной серией, удивление вызывает разве что возраст автора замечательных сказок.

Справедливости ради - Волкову хватило мужества признаться, что его инфицировало переходящее проклятие сериальности. Когда ему было 82 и он писал «Тайну заброшенного замка», в один из дней Александр Мелентьевич открыл свой дневник 1958 года и над фразой «Удивительная страсть у амер. писателей к длиннейшим сериям», надписал покаянное примечание: «Сам я потом вдался в тот же грех!».

Замечу, что Волкова, как и Баума, эта серия книг сделала очень богатым (а по советским меркам - даже невероятно богатым) человеком. И не только его. Художник Владимирский, например, вскоре после "изумрудной" серии практически перестал иллюстрировать книги – получаемых с переизданий «Волшебника» потиражных с избытком хватало на то, чтобы вести жизнь рантье.

Над седьмой книгой серии «Тайна заброшенного замка» сказочник Волков перестал работать в 85 лет - сил уже не было. Авторство Волкова в этом случае уже весьма условное - недописанный им черновик на свой вкус дописали в издательстве после его смерти.

Все было в точности, как с "Глиндой из страны Оз" Баума.

А после смерти Александра Волкова все желающие принялись строчить продолжения про Изумрудный город, как когда-то на другом конце Земного шара все штамповали сиквелы про страну Оз.

Александр Шпагин написал прямое продолжение "Тайны заброшенного замка" - "Лазурная фея Волшебной страны". Юрий Николаевич Кузнецов - еще пять книг, от "Изумрудного дождя" до "Возвращения Арахны".

Под фамилией Николая Бахнова вышло еще восемь книг про Изумрудный город и Волшебную страну. Умерший в прошлом году Сергей Сухинов написал 11 книг - от "Дочери Гингемы" до "Зари над Изумрудным городом" - и он был, пожалуй, наиболее талантливым из продолжателей Волкова.

Как и положено в сюжете про переходящее проклятие сериальности, постоянный художник серии Леонид Владимирский тоже не устоял и написал собственное продолжение — книгу «Буратино в Изумрудном городе».

Разумеется, изданием бумажных книг история не закончилась. По данным на 19 июля 2025 года, на сайте fanfics.me в фандоме «Изумрудный город» 294 фанфика.

Икота, икота, сойди на Федота, с Федота на Якова, с Якова на всякого...

https://vad-nes.livejournal.com/846730.html

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2457387.html

Вахтанг (Буба) Кикабидзе (груз. ვახტანგ კონსტანტინეს ძე (ბუბა) კიკაბიძე; 19 июля 1938, Тбилиси, Грузинская ССР, СССР — 15 января 2023, Тбилиси, Грузия)

См. также:

Проводили в последний путь Вахтанга Кикабидзе

Ушел из жизни красивый и достойный грузин

Вахтанг Кикабидзе. Фильм

Вахтанг Кикабидзе - Виноградная косточка (музыкальный фестиваль ЖАРА, 2017)

Мои года - мое богатство

Причина смерти Вахтанга Кикабидзе

Вахтанг Кикабидзе в клинике. Последние кадры.

Вахтанг Кикабидзе: «Путин – политик черной силы. И пока он со своими амбициями будет жить, он все время будет угрожать каким-то странам, системам. Он – захватчик! Его заклинило на одном: он думает, что вечно будет командовать своей страной. А люди не вечны, и все в жизни кончается. И даже его правнукам будет стыдно называть его фамилию».

https://procol-harum.livejournal.com/2457387.html