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Birch bark tar was used in medieval England


Medievalists
Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:38 UTC
Skeleton
© Oxford Archaeology EastSkeleton from grave 293, Anglo-Saxon child burial.
Birch bark tar was used in prehistoric times in England. Now, researchers have discovered that this manufactured product was even used in early medieval England.

Scientists from the University of Bristol and the British Museum, in collaboration with Oxford Archaeology East and Canterbury Archaeological Trust, were able to find two examples of the product during recent excavations.

The use of birch bark tar dates back to the Palaeolithic era. It is very sticky, and is water resistant, and also has biocidal properties mean that it has a wide range of applications, for example, as a multipurpose adhesive, sealant and in medicine.

Archaeological evidence for birch bark tar covers a broad geographic range from the United Kingdom to the Baltic and from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. In the east and north of this range there is continuity of use to modern times but in western Europe and the British Isles the use of birch bark tar has generally been viewed as limited to prehistory, with gradual displacement by pine tars during the Roman period.

Comment: Recently birch bark tar discovered on an archaeological site contained sufficient traces of DNA for scientists to recreate the genome of a 5,600 year old Dane. With this new realisation of just how commonly used it was, and over such vast stretches of time and geographic regions, one wonders how many more insights it could provide.

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7,000 year old "sea wall" in Israel lost to Neolithic sea level rise

Ben Guarino
Washington Post
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 20:00 UTC
Tel Hreiz
© Ehud GaliliA segment of the sea wall at Tel Hreiz.
Seven thousand years ago, long before modern industry began to heat the planet, rising seas threatened a community on the coast of Israel. The villagers needed to defend their home, so they built a wall.


Comment: Sea levels don't appear to be rising, and the above just reaffirms the cyclical nature of climate on our planet.


It failed. People abandoned the village. The Mediterranean Sea swept inland and drowned the buildings.

But the sea may protect what it ruins. Cool water and a meter-thick layer of sand preserved the paraphernalia of Neolithic life, such as olive pits, bowls, animal bones and graves. The wall stands out: It is a 100-meter row of boulders that runs parallel to the ancient shoreline.

Comment: See also:

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Light Saber

Filmmaker Frank Capra: The battle against Hollywood and the Deep State in the Cold War Era

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
Frank Capra
Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
For those who find themselves with excess time this holiday season which they would prefer not to squander with idleness or Netflix binges, then I'd like to offer this serving of Frank Capra films to uplift the soul.

Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It's a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930's and 1940's but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind's higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:
"My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other"

Comment: Read SOTT editor Niall Bradley's look back at Capra's directed film Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia :

Historical anomaly: U.S. WWII propaganda film ACCURATELY portrays Russia and 'most epic battle in history'
The incredible thing is that not two years after this film was made, Russia became the new 'enemy of freedom'. In fact, we now know that the Atom Bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945 specifically to 'send Russia a message'. The international financiers pulling the strings behind Hitler and the Western Allies could not allow a parallel 'United Nations' to exist on the vast Eurasian landmass while they set about creating one centered on New York City.
See also:

"It's a Wonderful Life": The Most Terrifying Movie Ever

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Question

Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Are megalithic solstice sites older than we think?


Adapt 2030
Sun, 22 Dec 2019 23:33 UTC
Stonehenge
© YouTube/Adapt 2030 (screen capture)
As the seasons come and go, ancient cultures across the planet marked solstices with megalithic blocks. Adams calendar in South Africa is among the oldest on the planet, but what if sites like Stonehenge are far older that we are told and through the last century reworking of stone faces on the blocks make it appear much more recent. Did you know Stonehenge has been restored / reconstructed twice in the last 100 years. You will be fascinated by the black and white images.


Comment: Many questions remain regarding the construction, layout and true purpose of Stonehenge. See also:

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Star of David

How Mossad's attempt to smuggle Jews out of Ethiopia ended in rape, torture and imprisonment


Sputnik
Sun, 22 Dec 2019 17:53 UTC
mossad card
© Vk.com/mossadofficial
In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, Tel Aviv organised several large-scale operations to get over 23,000 Jews out of Ethiopia, a country plagued by hunger, civil unrest, and Cold War conflict. However, in mid-1986, one of those secret missions ended in disaster.

For over three decades, details on 'Operation Djibouti', a Mossad extraction mission so secret that not even the Israeli foreign ministry or the army knew about it, remained largely hidden from the public. Officials have refused to talk about it, and those involved have been largely ignored by the media.

The clandestine operation, which kicked off in August 1986, saw a Mossad agent infiltrate Ethiopia's Gondar region, then home to a large population of Ethiopian Jews, offering assistance to help take young Jews out of the country to Israel.


The new route was needed after 'Operation Moses', an earlier operation lasting between 1984 and 1985, and involving Jews being airlifted to Israel via Sudan, collapsed after Arab governments found out about it and put pressure on the Sudanese government to stop it. An estimated 8,000 Jews made it to Israel as part of Operation Moses, although some 4,000 more are thought to have died along the way.

Operation Djibouti, kicking off a year later, was much more modest in scale, with a Mossad agent named 'Z' managing to gather together a group of just 27 people, of whom 23 would eventually reach Israel. The plan was for the group to sneak into Djibouti, from where they would be flown to France, and on to Israel.

However, the operation quickly became a disaster and, as Haaretz contributor Roni Singer explains, "the ordeals [the emigres] underwent along the way - brutal violence, sexual abuse, in some cases abandonment in prison - left them scarred to this day."

Comment: Seventy years of lies, murder, backstabbing and double-dealing. It's unfortunate that intelligence agencies don't have the lifespans of people. It would be a great day to see Mossad die a suitably ignoble death in its 8th decade.

See also:

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Star of David

Israel's takeover of Hebron forges ahead

Miko Peled
MintPress News
Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
trampoline
© Ariel Schalit/APJewish settlers jump on a trampoline as an Israeli solider stands guard in a Jewish-only settlement in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, March 7, 2019.
Hebron, Alkhalil, Palestine - Israel's Defense Minister Naftali Bennett recently announced the approval of a new Jewish only neighborhood in the old section of the Palestinian city of Hebron. This new neighborhood, which lies in the heart of the Palestinian city, will include as many as seventy residential units. The move is not Israel's first attempt to colonize Hebron. In 2017, the Israeli government approved the building of 31 housing units in a new settlement in the Old City on the now infamous Shuhada Street. According to a statement from the Defense Ministry, the construction project will double the number of Jewish residents in the city.

It often seems that Israel's actions in the West Bank are spurred by little more than a desire to compensate for lost opportunities and settle old scores. The ancient town of Amwas in the Latrun region was leveled immediately after 1967 as revenge for their fierce fighting against invading Zionist militias in 1948. Hebron is no expectation. At the end of 1948, when Zionist authorities occupying Palestine were discussing whether or not to continue their conquest and ethnic cleansing campaign, the southern portion of what is now the West Bank, and the ancient Palestinian city of Hebron specifically, were on the table.
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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The Best Thing About Communism Was The Jokes

Harrison Koehli, Carolyn MC, Elan Martin
Sott.net
Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
hammer tickle
A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing.

"I just heard the funniest joke in the world!"

"Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge.

"I can't. I just gave someone ten years for it."

With the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the world lost one of humanity's greatest cultural productions: the communist joke. Crossing cultures and borders, the jokes were unique, ubiquitous, and jam-packed with information. They were funny too. The mix of totalitarian power, propaganda, censorship, and ineptitude created the perfect climate for an underground joke-telling tradition.

In his book, Hammer and Tickle, Ben Lewis tracks down all the best jokes from the era, providing not only a handy compendium, but a cultural history of communism in the process. As communism changed, so did the jokes, revealing the different experiences and attitudes of the people during the times of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and then into the stagnation of the Brezhnev years and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Note, MindMatters will be back in January. Merry Christmas, everyone!


Running Time: 01:22:14

Download: MP3 — 107 MB

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Info

'Epilepsy demon' discovered on 2,700-year-old clay tablet in Iraq


University of Copenhagen
Fri, 20 Dec 2019 18:15 UTC
A 2,700-year-old cuneiform tablet from ancient Iraq describing medical treatments has suddenly revealed a secret - a hitherto overlooked drawing of the demon that the ancient Assyrians thought caused epilepsy. It is the earliest illustration of a demon that can be associated with epilepsy.
Clay Tablet
© University of CopenhagenThe demon can be spotted at the bottom of the image, horns and face to the left and legs to the right- See also the researcher's drawing below.
When Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll was studying a 2,700-year-old cuneiform tablet with ancient medical treatments at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin four years ago, he accidentally discovered a partially damaged drawing on the reverse of the tablet. A drawing that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a demon with horns, tails and a snake's tongue which, according to the text, was the cause of the dreaded illness Bennu-epilepsy.
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Pistol

Operation Fast and Furious: Forgotten history of the ATF's gunwalking scandal

Sam Jacobs
ammo.com
Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
OperationFastFurious
© ammo.comEric Holder, former AG during the Obama presidency
The ATF* isn't all bad. In fact, they had a policy of letting illegal gun purchases go between 2006 and 2011. It ended up getting U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry killed on December 14, 2010, and let Mexican criminals get enough guns that they were found at over 150 crime scenes where Mexican citizens were either killed or maimed. And some of the guns were used in the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris at the Bataclan. But other than that, it turned out just fine.

(In case you're not picking up on it, we're laying on the sarcasm very thick right now.)

You probably know what was officially called "Project Gunrunner" as "Operation Fast and Furious." Started under George W. Bush, this ATF policy audaciously grew under President Obama and became indicative of the perceived attack on American gun owners by both policy makers and their friends in the establishment media.

It's one of many scandals of the Obama Administration that was never given as much press attention as, for example, Russia buying Facebook ads about NoFap and Pizzagate. Given that the guns run by the ATF were allowed to kill hundreds and that subsequent Congressional investigations resulted in Eric Holder, President Obama's Attorney General, becoming the first sitting cabinet member to be held in criminal contempt of Congress ever, this is shocking. At least for anyone still under the illusion that the establishment media is a fair and impartial source of information.


Comment: * US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms

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Early human species may have survived long enough in Indonesia to have interbred with Denisovians


New Scientist
Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC
Excavations of Homo Erectus remains Ngandong Java
Excavations of Homo Erectus remains in 2010 in Ngandong, Java
An early human species may have survived in Java, Indonesia, until 108,000 years ago. Homo erectus endured so long that individuals may have interbred with more recent hominins, like the mysterious Denisovans.

It has long been unclear when H. erectus died out. Now a reanalysis of the youngest known remains may have pinned down the extinction date.

H. erectus was one of the first species in our genus, Homo. It evolved in Africa about 2 million years ago, then spread across Europe and Asia. Compared with earlier species, H. erectus had relatively large brains and used tools skilfully - although it was surpassed in both respects by later groups like Neanderthals and modern humans. H. erectus may be our direct ancestor.

H. erectus died out before modern humans reached Java, so it is unlikely the two species crossed paths. That means our species isn't in the frame for its extinction.

Comment: See also:

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