http://www.law.state.ak.us/

http://www.gov.state.ak.us/exec-column.php

Second, Governor Palin is just wrong when she says she has “won” all the ethics complaints that have been filed against her:

Sarah Palin and the Department of Law

The note is boring, but the pictures are fabulous–especially the ones of a young Sophia Loren.

Agreed. I never denied that. But the theory and the data did not originate with Muslim mathematicians. My point was that Pres Obama incorrectly credited them with devising / inventing / creating these theories and concepts, when that was not the case. But when he makes a mistake, you leap to his defense with tales of Arabs preserving the Graeco – Roman heritage which would give birth to the Renaissance.

While the Muslims / Arabs did do that, they did not do what they were credited with doing. But when Gov Palin makes a mistake, she is mentally defective, insane and even worse.

My point was made — your point was not. Gov Palin was extemporizing; Pres Obama was reading a prepared, presumably well – researched speech, and yet it contained glaring errors, which were pointed out by numerous bloggers within days of the Cairo speech. I willingly concede that 1) We owe a debt to the Muslims for preserving that heritage, just as we do to the many monks that preserved the Latin (Roman) religious and secular heritage; 2) That politicians are not necessarily historians, and that they do make errors, and even deliberately exaggerate when it is an important matter of state; and 3) If Pres Obama can be forgiven his errors, so can Gov Palin.

All very fascinating, Frank. Whether muslims invented and/or preserved much of what we use today is obviously up for debate. What is not is that we in the west owe them a debt of gratitude for their efforts in furthering intellectualism. If not for the Spanish Moors, we never would have had a Renaissance.

Pepper? You sure about that, big guy? Are you “worth your salt”?

And if they hadn’t? Very different world. Much worse world, far less aware of its classical heritage (even as little as we are aware now).

They discovered or invented next to nothing.

Sorry, that’s just flatly false.

Even La Fontaine’s Fairy Tales (including Cinderella) came from India by way of the Muslim world.

Indian culture being much older than Islamic culture, I wouldn’t find this at all surprising.

You’ve got your “chicken” and “egg” mixed up. The Silk Road became a rather expensive “Toll Road” thanks to the Muslims. To get the pepper required to preserve meat, it had now become worth the effort to go around the Cape to get to Asia, or at least the western coast of India, to trade with Chinese traders.

Yes, they were rather good capitalists to take advantage of their geography, weren’t they? However, I don’t have my eggs and chickens mixed up; the golden age did end right around when Europe found the sea route and fought their way into the Indian Ocean trading circuit, and Muslims lost the revenue that they had been getting charging for use of the silk road trade route.

It has been theorized that Columbus was not looking for a western route to Asia, but had gathered information to the effect that a land mass 3,000 miles across could be found 3,000 miles west of Europe.

That’s interesting; I hadn’t heard of that. However your passive voice has me curious, who theorized it? I’ve also read theories that Zheng He discovered S. America (and called it Fussong) and that a handful of African sailors (ancient Mali, if I recall) landed in either Mexico or the southern United States, which is close enough in climate to their home that they’d have likely thought they were still in Africa.

One of the more interesting papers was on “The Spanish Bridge” about how the Muslims preserved the great academic treasures of the Chinese and Indians that had been passed along the Silk Road, and then passed the work of the Greeks around the Mediterranean and Spain into western Europe where they influenced Galen, Dante and Fibonacci. al-Mansur borrowed the Talmudic method of teaching at his library in Baghdad, which was borrowed by Prince Henry for his Navigators’ school in Portugal, which Columbus attended. Get where I’m going with this?

Kids today .

Heh.

Jaim however shows his ass once again. It is deliciuos to watch the gears spinning in his head. I bet teaching in the states was an unpleasant situation. It is never fun operating outside the boundries of your abilities.

You had absolutely no cites… And Repack was at least smart enough to know that he had gone to the wrong source to back his play. Did the Arabs preserve Greek thought? Who said they didn’t?

But who said the “Muslims invented … modern math and medicine”? That would be you, chuckles.

Quit while you’re behind, Jaimie !

And the Arabs who preserved Greek thought? They did a hell of a lot more of a service to modernity than many of the Western Europeans who were burning people at the stake for questioning the authority of the Pope at the time.

To base your “scholarship” on the rankest of anti-Muslim bigotry would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and sad. (For starters, not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab.) But hey, we expect no less from the nutter trolls around here.

But please, at what accredited university do you teach history? I’d love to check out some of your peer-reviewed academic articles.

“Another accomplishment — our Law Department protected states’ rights — two huge U.S. Supreme Court reversals came down against that liberal Ninth Circuit, deciding in our state’s favor over the last two weeks. We’re protectors of our Constitution — federalists protect states’ rights as mandated in 10th amendment.”

http://www.gov.state.ak.us/exec-column.php

Paul Begala’s great post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/sarah-palin-turns-pro_b_225633.html

Her speech was not off the cuff. Palin wrote it herself and posted it word for word on her website just as the press conference was starting. She read the speech into a portable, mobile teleprompter. Greta’s show posted enough video that it included pan back shots showing the teleprompter Palin read into, with a camera on either side of the teleprompter. Paul Begala’s take at HuffPo on her posted text is priceless, with all of its various ALL CAPS and exclamation points and odd punctuation. Her rambling syntax was planned, and all the more frightening.

Once again, you have convinced yourselves that if you believe it to be true, I must be wrong.

The “word” ‘algebra’ is not from Arabic. The name al-Jibr is the name of the Arab mathematician who wrote down the work of the Greek mathematicians he learned about.

As did al-Kwarizmi (algorithm). Call me dumb again, you pitiful buffoons… You don’t know jack shit about how the Arabs collected and preserved the information they got from the Greeks. That’s what you get for relying on the World Book Encyclopedia of the Internet.

Go read up on al-Mansur, the library at Baghdad, and the Nestorians, and their connection to Prince Henry the Navigator.

Have you never heard the saying, “It is better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Jaim, your ageist insults are yet another glaring example of the hypocrisy of the modern leftist. No wonder you’re not teaching in the United States. You’d be laughed out of the room.

And just in case you are thinking of asking me for a link, check right here:

http://tinyurl.com/l9gdw6 [esp pp 516, et. seq. ]

When it comes to the “Spanish Bridge” and how the Muslims conserved and conveyed the information of the Ancients to late Medieval Europe, I know what I know. Do you think I would just make some stuff up, so some jimokes like you could call me on it?

Learn this and learn it well: You don’t know everything, or half of everything, or one – quarter of everything, or one – tenth of everything. I have as much education as either of you, and have probably read more books than either of you, and been more places in the world than either of you. I certainly have spent more time on earth than either of you. You may never respect your elders, but don’t ever think you’re better than me because you’re younger.

As for Sarah Palin, there’s really not much that needs to be said. Palin. Limbaugh. Sanford. Jindal. This is your modern GOP. These are the reasons why it’s almost dead. Just look at the fuckwits like Dennis and Jay who actually try and defend these people.

The good guys have won.

There must be a reason why the word algebra is from Arabic. Maybe because Islamic mathematicians did the hard work. From Wiki:

Ancient civilizations wrote out algebraic expressions using only occasional abbreviations, but by medieval times Islamic mathematicians were able to talk about arbitrarily high powers of the unknown x, and work out the basic algebra of polynomials (without yet using modern symbolism). This included the ability to multiply, divide, and find square roots of polynomials as well as a knowledge of the binomial theorem. The Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyam showed how to express roots of cubic equations by line segments obtained by intersecting conic sections, but he could not find a formula for the roots. A Latin translation of Al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra appeared in the 12th century.

Has anyone noticed that Sally Palin strongly resembles Sally Field in Sybil? And Palin is even more fucked in the head than that movie’s title character…

Ended roughly at the same time Europe discovered the route around Africa, and stopped using the Silk Road.

You’ve got your “chicken” and “egg” mixed up. The Silk Road became a rather expensive “Toll Road” thanks to the Muslims. To get the pepper required to preserve meat, it had now become worth the effort to go around the Cape to get to Asia, or at least the western coast of India, to trade with Chinese traders.

It has been theorized that Columbus was not looking for a western route to Asia, but had gathered information to the effect that a land mass 3,000 miles across could be found 3,000 miles west of Europe.

See that zero on your keyboard, Frank? Thank a muslim for that.

Actually, you can thank an Indian – south asians had a decimal system which included a special symbol (.) for “naught” by the 3rd century BC. The concept made its way to Europe via the Arab world around AD 800. The name “zero” does come from the Arabic word “zifr.”