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Best of the Web: The Secret Origins of Silicon Valley: What The Big Tech Companies Do Not Want You to Know

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00 UTC
The Secrets of Silicon Valley
Once a sleepy farming region, Silicon Valley is now the hub of a global industry that is transforming the economy, shaping our political discourse, and changing the very nature of our society. So what happened? How did this remarkable change take place? Why is this area the epicenter of this transformation? Discover the dark secrets behind the real history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech giants in this important edition of The Corbett Report.

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

Watch this video on BitChute / DTube / YouTube or Download the mp4

Comment: As an addendum to this piece, Corbett adds this very interesting tidbit about William Shockley, one of the two creators of Silicon Valley:



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Star of David

Israeli miscalculations and hubris led to the rise of Hamas

Andrew Higgins
The Wall Street Journal
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:20 UTC
hamas parade
© Reuters / Mohammed SalemAmilitary parade marking the 27th anniversary of Hamas' founding, in Gaza City December 14, 2014.
Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
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Fish

Prehistory Decoded - An ancient fish tale

Dr. Martin Sweatman
Prehistory Decoded
Sat, 13 Jul 2019 23:59 UTC
Ancient Fish Symbol
© Prehistory Decoded
Of course, we are familiar with the fish symbol representing Pisces. But at Gobekli Tepe, and later throughout the Near East, Pisces is represented by the tall bending bird - which probably eventually became the Egyptian god Thoth. So when and where did the switch for Pisces from tall bending bird to fish happen?

The earliest potential Pisces-fish symbol might be the carved salmon in the L'Abri du Poisson cave, France (BTW, Don's maps is a simply brilliant resource for Palaeolithic art - how he found the time to visit all these sites, I'll never know). Unfortunately, this fish carving can't be radiocarbon dated, so we can't know whether it corresponds to Pisces or not. But given that we have proven that animal symbols in Palaeolithic art do generally represent constellations, and given the undoubted effort and expertise that has gone into this particular one, it appears to be a good candidate.

We also saw fish carved onto some Mesopotamian seal stamps from around 3200 BC, and wondered if they too represented Pisces (see an earlier post on the origin of writing). If they do, they must be older than thought, because Pisces is the winter solstice only until 3600 BC. From around 3600 to 3400 the winter solstice transitions from Pisces to Aquarius, typically represented by the stag or ibex (see an earlier post 'stag vs ibex').

I recently briefly visited the British Museum in London - Wow! The place is full of stuff we have plundered from around the world. A treasure trove of past misdemeanors, with so many animal symbols. It's tricky to work out which cultures actually knew about our ancient zodiac, and which ones didn't. Not all animal representations are zodiacal - some simply represent animals, as you might expect. Nevertheless, the further back in time we go, the more consistently we observe agreement with our ancient zodiac. It seems the advent of writing, which allowed a more accurate representation of dates, spelled the beginning of the end for our zodiacal system.
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Cloud Grey

Chaco Canyon and food scarcity


Popular Archeology
Wed, 10 Jul 2019 12:00 UTC
Chaco Canyon
An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex's great kiva.
Chaco Canyon, a site that was once central to the lives of pre-colonial peoples called Anasazi, may not have been able to produce enough food to sustain thousands of residents, according to new research. The results could shed doubt on estimates of how many people were able to live in the region year-round.

Located in Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, Chaco Canyon hosts numerous small dwellings and a handful of multi-story buildings known as great houses. Based on these structures, researchers think that it was once a bustling metropolis that was home to as many as 2,300 people during its height from 1050 to 1130 AD.

But Chaco also sits in an unforgiving environment, complete with cold winters, blazing-hot summers and little rainfall falling in either season.

"You have this place in the middle of the San Juan Basin, which is not very habitable," said Larry Benson, an adjoint curator at the CU Museum of Natural History.

Comment: There is strong evidence that at least at one time a society that occupied Chaco Canyon had sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and this would have necessitated a stable population in some form; Chris Hedges notes in What we can learn from the collapse of the Chaco Canyon civilisation that:
It fell into precipitous decline after nearly three centuries. The dense forests of oak, piñon and ponderosa pines and juniper that surrounded the canyon were razed for construction and fuel. The soil eroded. Game was hunted to near-extinction. The diet shifted in the final years from deer and turkey to rabbits and finally mice. Headless mice in the late period have been found by archaeologists in human coprolites-preserved dry feces. The Anasazi's open society, one where violence was apparently rare, where the people moved unhindered over the network of well-maintained roads, where warfare was apparently absent, where the houses of the rich and powerful were not walled off, where the population shared in the spoils of empire, was replaced with the equivalent of gated, fortified compounds for the elites and misery, hunger, insecurity and tyranny for the commoners. Dwellings began to be built in the cliffs, along with hilltop fortresses, although these residences were not close to the fields and water supply. Defensive walls were constructed along with moats and towers. The large, public religious ceremonies that once united the culture and gave it cohesion fractured, and tiny, warring religious cults took over, the archaeologist Lynne Sebastian notes.
Another interesting point can be found in Ancient American farmers supplemented poor diet with corn fungus:
[...]

The ancestral Pueblo people who lived in what is now known as the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States shifted from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle centred on crop-growing around 400BCE.

[...]

The primary crop cultivated was maize (known in the US as corn), which accounted for an estimated 80% of calorific intake.

[...]

However, no Basketmaker II human remains ever tested have shown evidence of such an illness. This fact leads to the obvious conclusion that the people must have been able somehow to access the crucial nutrients. There is evidence that at least one community boiled maize in limestone, which would have made some amino acids locked up in the corn more biologically available - but even then the amounts would still have been too small to meet dietary needs.
See also:

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Info

Skulls provide earliest known evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia

Dyani Lewis
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 10 Jul 2019 18:24 UTC
Oldest Human Skull
© KATERINA HARVATI, EBERHARD KARLS UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGENThe oldest human in Europe: Apidima 2 cranium (right) and its reconstruction (left).
Two skulls chiselled from a slab of Greek rock have deepened our understanding of early humans living on the European continent.

The specimens were found in the Apidima Cave - a site etched into a seaside cliff - in Southern Greece in 1978. Their significance is only now being revealed, in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Both skulls - named Apidima 1 and Apidima 2 - were washed into a gap in the cave wall and then cemented into place thousands of years ago.

Despite being found just 30 centimetres apart in the same block of breccia, the new study reports that they aren't the same age. Nor are they from the same species.

"Previous studies have all assumed that these two specimens were of the same geological age, but also the same taxonomic attribution," says palaeoanthropologist Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, who led the study.

Harvati and her colleagues created careful 3D reconstructions of both skulls, and compared them, using a shape analysis technique known as geometric morphometrics, to other fossil specimens and modern-day human skulls.
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Compass

The first Europeans weren't who you might think

Andrew Curry
National Geographic
Tue, 09 Jul 2019 20:37 UTC
Yamnaya
© DANUBIAN ROUTE OF YAMNAYA CULTURE PROJECT, NATIONAL SCIENCE CENTER, POLANDThree waves of immigrants settled prehistoric Europe. The last, some 5,000 years ago, were the Yamnaya, horse-riding cattle herders from Russia who built imposing grave mounds like this one near Žabalj, Serbia.
The idea that there were once "pure" populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States.

Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe.

The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Seven or more human types inhabited the planet before homo sapiens

Bridget Alex
Discover Magazine
Mon, 08 Jul 2019 13:12 UTC
Cave Painting
© Jannarong/ShutterstockLong before this cave painting was made, our ancestors met and interacted with multiple types of ancient human.
For the past ~40,000 years, Homo sapiens — modern humans — has been the only Homo species on Earth. But for most of our history, there were close evolutionary cousins of ours, human but not quite like us, coexisting and evolving at the same time in different regions.

Some of our now-extinct relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are well known. Others, like the recently-discovered Denisovans or Homo naledi have hardly made it into textbooks yet. And hints of even more human forms have been found in incomplete fossils and genetic patterns, although these relatives are poorly understood. Modern humans were just one of many variations on the Homo theme.

Now, as cutting-edge techniques uncover new evidence and reassess old finds, we're closer to knowing how many types of humans coexisted with our ancestors
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Dig

Ziklag? 3,000 year old city found south of Jerusalem ignites biblical debate

Ruth Schuster and Nir Hasson
Haaretz
Mon, 08 Jul 2019 10:44 UTC
ziklag
© Emil Aljem, Israel Antiquities Authority
Unlike a dozen other leading archaeologists, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel had no intention of searching for the lost biblical town of Ziklag when he commenced excavations in 2015 at Khirbet a-Ra'i, located between Kiryat Gat and Lachish. However, as the twice-yearly dig seasons progressed at the site, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Jerusalem, he and his two co-excavation directors, Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Dr. Kyle Keimer of Macquarie University in Sydney, noted that it was starting to resemble the biblically attested Philistine town of Ziklag, a well-recorded site where the future King David sought refuge from King Saul.

After seven dig seasons that uncovered some 1,000 sq.m., the archaeological team found evidence of a Philistine-era settlement from the 12-11th centuries BCE under layers of a rural settlement dating to the early 10th century BCE, largely considered the Davidic era. Among the findings were massive stone structures and typical Philistine cultural artifacts, including pottery in foundation deposits — good luck offerings laid beneath a building's flooring. Some of the olive pits and other organic objects found in the deposits were sent for carbon dating, which confirmed their contexts, said the archaeologists.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Snakes in Suits

The British roots of the Deep State: How the Round Table infiltrated America

Matthew Ehret
Oriental Review
Sat, 06 Jul 2019 17:44 UTC
Integrity Initiative
With the nearly weekly revelations that the British Foreign Office, MI6, and GCHQ have been behind the long standing agenda to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump and undo the peaceful alliance between nationalist leaders in America, Russia, China and elsewhere, a new focus on the British hand in undermining the United States has become a serious thought for many citizens. In the first week of the new year, fuel was added to this fire when internal memos were leaked from the British-run Integrity Initiative featuring a startling account of the techniques deployed by the anti-Russian British operation to infiltrate American intelligence institutions, think tanks and media.

For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. Throughout 2019, leaks have been released featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump's election, demonstrating that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up "clusters" of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.

Comment: For more on this topic:

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Blue Planet

12,300 year old campsite replete with bird bones and tobacco found in Utah Desert

Blake de Pastino
Western Digs
Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:00 UTC
utah desert
© Todd CromarDaron Duke, Far Western Anthropological Research Group project leader, carefully cleans a large spear tip before removing it from the ground at an archaeological dig site on the Utah Test and Training Range, July 13, 2016.
In the dead-flat desert of northwestern Utah, archaeologists have uncovered a scene from a distant, and more verdant, time.

Just a few centimeters below the sun-baked surface, researchers have discovered a campsite used by prehistoric hunter-gatherers 12,300 years ago — when Utah's West Desert was lush wetland.

Artifacts found at the site include the charred remains of an ancient hearth, a finely crafted spear point, and, most surprising, a collection of tobacco seeds — likely the earliest evidence of tobacco use ever found in North America.

"What makes this interesting is there's no direct evidence of anybody using tobacco past 3,000 years ago," said Dr. Daron Duke, senior archaeologist with the Nevada-based Far Western Anthropological Research Group, in a press statement.

"And this was 12,000-plus years ago!"

Comment: See also:

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