One, zero, zero, one, zero, one. Zero, one, one...

That is the language of computers. Every clever thing your computer does - make a call, search a database, play a game - comes down to ones and zeroes.Actually, it comes down to the presence (one) or absence (zero) of a current in tiny transistors on a semiconductor chip.Thankfully, we do not have to program computers in zeroes and ones.

Microsoft Windows, for example, uses 20GB, or 170 billion ones and zeroes. Printed out, the stack of A4 paper would be two and a half miles (4km) high. Imagine setting every transistor manually.

Ignoring how fiddly this would be - transistors measure just billionths of a metre - if it took a second to flip each switch, installing Windows would take 5,000 years.

Early computers really were programmed rather like this.

Part three: What is the Fabian Society and to What End was it Created?

Our first two installments have dealt with the origins of the Deep State in North America by reviewing the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship/Chatham House network at the end of the 19^th century and the infiltration of indoctrinated scholars into every governing branch of western society. We traced the key players in this Oxford-based network who were formed with the intent of fulfilling the will of Cecil Rhodes to "form a church of the British Empire" and undo the effects of the American Revolution as a global phenomenon. We also saw how these networks worked closely with another early "think tank" called the Fabian Society in order to advance an agenda that required the destruction of the sovereign nation state system which had been founded upon the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. This was exemplified by the 1999 "Chicago speech" of Fabian asset Tony Blair when he stated that the world must now embark upon a "post-Westphalian order" setting the stage for 9/11 and the new era of regime change that was soon unleashed. In the following report, we will look at the origins of the Fabian Society, by examining some of its founding members and governing philosophy.

Click here for part one: The Rise of the Round Table Movement and the Sad Case of Canada (1864-1945)

Click here for part two: Milner's Perversion Takes Over Canada (1945-1971)

The medieval peasant diet that was 'much healthier' than today's average eating habits: Staples of meat, leafy vegetables and cheese are found in residue inside 500-year-old pottery

English peasants in Medieval times lived on a combination of meat stews, leafy vegetables and dairy products which scientists say was healthier than modern diets. Food residue inside 500-year-old pottery at the medieval town of West Cotton in Northamptonshire revealed the eating habits of normal folk.

They would have dined on bread and so-called 'white meats' - a term used by peasants which included butter and various cheeses. Poor people couldn't afford finer delicacies like fish but the presence of oats and barley proves they had access to carbohydrates, likely in the form of bread.

Early human beings who lived around 120 000 years ago in South Africa were "ecological geniuses" who were able to exploit their environment intelligently.

New discoveries made at the Klasies River Cave in South Africa's southern Cape, where charred food remains from hearths were found,provide the first archaeological evidence that anatomically modern humans were roasting and eating plant starches, such as those from tubers and rhizomes, as early as 120,000 years ago.

The new research by an international team of archaeologists, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, provides archaeological evidence that has previously been lacking to support the hypothesis that the duplication of the starch digestion genes is an adaptive response to an increased starch diet.

"This is very exciting. The genetic and biological evidence previously suggested that early humans would have been eating starches, but this research had not been done before," says Lead author Cynthia Larbey of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. The work is part of a systemic multidisciplinary investigation into the role that plants and fire played in the lives of Middle Stone Age communities.

The interdisciplinary team searched for and analysed undisturbed hearths at the Klasies River archaeological site.

"Our results showed that these small ashy hearths were used for cooking food and starchy roots and tubers were clearly part of their diet, from the earliest levels at around 120,000 years ago through to 65,000 years ago," says Larbey. "Despite changes in hunting strategies and stone tool technologies, they were still cooking roots and tubers."

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

One of my favorite words is lox," says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel-a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it "The Classic." But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. "The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably 'lox,' and that's exactly how it is pronounced in modern English," he says. "Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means 'smoked salmon.' It's really cool that that word hasn't changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish."

How scholars have traced the word's pronunciation over thousands of years is also really cool. The story goes back to Thomas Young, also known as "The Last Person Who Knew Everything." The 18th-century British polymath came up with the wave theory of light, first described astigmatism, and played a key role in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. Like some people before him, Young noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it "Indo-European."

A Russian farmer accidentally uncovered the 2,500-year-old remains of three elite members of an ancient nomadic tribe and a horse's skull, hidden for millennia on his land.

The Sarmatian remains were found in wooden coffins at a burial site within a large mound in the village of Nikolskoye, in the Astrakhan region. Rustam Mudayev made the exciting discovery when he came across a bronze cauldron while digging on his farmland. He reported the find and archaeologists began excavating the site.

Everyone is by now well aware, whether through personal experience or vicariously via the news, of the toxic legacy of Christian fundamentalism. Whether it's authoritarian dogma or the many scandals that have plagued the Catholic church, many so-called 'Christians' have given plenty of ammo to their accusers. Meanwhile individuals are largely left to fend for themselves in a society that was founded on Christianity but that is overwhelmingly nihilistic and materialistic, denying its own history in the process.

So today, on MindMatters, we discuss those aspects of the Christian belief system that may well be worth keeping and that have definitively shaped our world. Using sociologist of religion Rodney Stark's book Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, we discuss how Christian beliefs formed the moral matrix of the Western mind from the collapse of Rome onwards. As Stark argues, centuries of belief in free will and individual responsibility in an intelligently designed universe provided the primary impetus for the West to abolish slavery, institutionalize science, use capitalism to improve the lot of the common man, and even pursue the freedom to repudiate Christianity itself.

If he's correct, then losing sight of what these Christian beliefs once stood for (and no they're not just 'fairy tales and dogmatic superstitions') we lose sight of the higher motivation that led ordinary people to found these great enterprises - arguably the few positive aspects of Western society left. So, while today it is fashionable to deny that consciousness exists, and that beliefs can have any impact on reality, today we will be entertaining a different hypothesis - that what we believe matters, and that, in order to understand our history, we should understand the good inherent within Christianity and not just the bad.


Running Time: 01:07:09

Download: MP3 - 61.5 MB

THE AMERICAN MILITARY'S ATOMIC BOMBING of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 "was the worst manmade event ever, by far," according to the geologist Mario Wannier. "You have a city, and a minute later you have no city." At least 70,000 people were killed by the initial impact; the final death toll, accounting for radiation, could surpass 145,000. Wannier and his colleagues recently stumbled upon tiny remnants of this massive event on the beaches of Japan's Motoujina Peninsula. These glass particles formed out of the explosion, and have resided on nearby beaches ever since. They published their findings this week in the journal Anthropocene.

Wannier had been studying beach debris from different areas in order to compare the health of different marine ecosystems, when some particles from the Motoujina Peninsula struck him as unusual. Next to particles generated by plants or animals, these were "aerodynamic, glassy, rounded"-they reminded him of what he had seen in sediment samples from the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, the geological marker of the mass extinction that erased the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. Research suggests that the mass extinction was triggered by meteorite impact, which would have ejected ground materials into the atmosphere that descended back down as glass.

Ancient workers used molten iron to repair Pompeii's streets before the historic and devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, a team of archaeologists has discovered.

The discovery reveals a previously unknown method of ancient Roman street repair and represents "the first large-scale attestation of the Roman use of molten iron," wrote researchers Eric Poehler, a classics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Juliana van Roggen, an independent researcher; and Benjamin Crowther, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, in a paper recently published in the American Journal of Archaeology.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it covered the city in ash and lava; though the eruption killed many of Pompeii's inhabitants, it also preserved the city in time.

Iron streets