Your Happening World (November 7th through November 10th)

  • Taizong’s hell – The Chinese hell scrolls presented here treat the afterlife as a spectacle, as a display intended for public consumption. Ostensibly based on popular tales such as Tang Emperor Taizong's visit to hell in the first half of the seventh century C.E., they attract their viewers through their dark and yet cartoonish torture scenes, appealing to the same morbid curiosity fed by gothic novels, horror movies and Halloween ghosts in the West. Yet their main function was not entertainment but didactic, propagating a basic message of retribution. Every act of goodness will be rewarded; every act of evil will be justly answered.
  • Tax Research UK » The personal tax statement George Osborne doesn’t want you to see – Linkis.com – Add together the cost of subsidies to banks, the subsidy to pensions and the subsidy to savings (call them together the subsidy to the City of London) and they cost £103.4bn a year – more than the cost of education in the UK.
  • Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought, new evidence suggests – Conventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier.
  • Leefbaar hangt stad vol met Pieten – NOS Nieuws – In Rotterdam zijn honderden Zwarte Piet-poppen opgehangen aan lantaarnpalen. Om hun nek hangt een briefje met de tekst "Wij willen blijven". De pietjes zijn door de stad verspreid door de politieke partij Leefbaar Rotterdam.
  • Budapest autumn: hollowing out democracy on the edge of Europe | World news | The Guardian – Eva Acs, an agronomist who has run the thriving organic farm for 22 years, is at her wits’ end. “The state just took the farm away. We were absolutely punished and rubbed out. Then the private security firms came in and closed down the roads and blocked the tractors. The new owners destroyed all our plants and crops. Just to bankrupt us and hurt us.”