China Setting New LNG Import Records -- December 26, 2018

Over at "the big stories" I note that with regard to nuclear energy, it is ... going ... going ... gone. Then, by country, headlines for a post-nuclear energy world, including China (same as first link below).


December 27, 2018: Chinese LNG imports setting new records. 

December 26, 2018, added:

• LNG demand forecast to surge, Wood Mackenzie, December 14, 2018.
• Chinese crude oil demand insatiable, October 22, 2018.
• Global imports, by country, October 19, 2018.
• LNG demand will post strong growth to 2027, October 17, 2018.
• Story of the year, natural gas, SeekingAlpha, September 29, 2018.
• It's all about LNG, September 11, 2018.

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Virgil's Aeneid: A New Translation by Frederick Ahl

I've talked about this a couple of times, either on this blog or another blog. I forget.

I had never read Aeneid before. I am reading a few pages at a time. It is absolutely incredible. It will probably take a me a year to read it from start to finish. It's been several weeks now and I'm only on page 17 of a translation that is 327 pages long. LOL.  

While reading the scene in which Aeneas meets his mother Venus in Carthage I was struck by the allusions to the New Testament. Mind you, I had just seen the Virgin Mary at the top of the alter at the church in Taos Pueblo and had just observed the Christmas Eve procession so the Virgin Mary was certainly lurking in my conscious/sub-conscious boundary.

It was Virgil's reference to incense and myrrh that caught my attention. Virgil certainly suggested a relationship between the cult of the Virgin Mary and the cult of Aphrodite/Venus. I was curious if others had noted this.

A quick google brought me to this from wiki:

Early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes.

In the Early Middle Ages, Christians adapted elements of Aphrodite/Venus's iconography and applied them to Eve and prostitutes, but also female saints and even the Virgin Mary.

Christians in the east reinterpreted the story of Aphrodite's birth as a metaphor for baptism; in a Coptic stele from the sixth century AD, a female orant is shown wearing Aphrodite's conch shell as a sign that she is newly baptized.

Throughout the Middle Ages, villages and communities across Europe still maintained folk tales and traditions about Aphrodite/Venus and travelers reported a wide variety of stories.

Numerous Roman mosaics of Venus survived in Britain, preserving memory of the pagan past.

In North Africa in the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe encountered mosaics of Aphrodite and reinterpreted her as a symbol of the sin of Lust, arguing that she was shown naked because "the sin of lust is never cloaked"and that she was often shown "swimming" because "all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs." He also argued that she was associated with doves and conchs because these are symbols of copulation, and that she was associated with roses because "as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but is swept away forever."