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6,800 year old "roundel" discovered in Poland

Hannah Osborne
Newsweek
Mon, 18 Nov 2019 10:50 UTC
poland roundel
Nowe Objezierze
A huge ancient ritual site dating back over 6,800 years has been discovered in Poland. It is believed to have been used by neolithic people for between 200 and 250 years, with new features added every few dozen years, archaeologists have said.

The circular structure is 360 feet in diameter, which is over three times the size of the inner Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge and roughly the same size as the monument's outer ditch.

The structure, which has been called a "roundel" because of its circular shape, was first spotted in 2017. Since then archaeologists have been working at the site to understand its significance. In an article on PAP, a website run by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education Website, researchers have announced radiocarbon dating indicates the site was built before 4,800 B.C.

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

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Sherlock

Impact of Justinian plague questioned in new study


Medievalists
Mon, 18 Nov 2019 12:37 UTC
Justinian
© Petar Milošević / Wikimedia CommonsMosaic of Justinian I from the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna.
Historians have long believed that the plague, which swept through the Mediterranean region in the sixth century, led to a massive loss of life, rivaling even the Black Death. However, a new study suggests that the pandemic's effects have been exaggerated and that not enough evidence exists to show that it was devastating as many have believed.

The Plague of Justinian, also known as the Justinianic Plague, first reached the Byzantine Empire around the year 541 and spread to North Africa and Western Europe. Caused by Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium responsible for Black Plague, this plague would continue to recur in parts of Europe up to the mid-eighth century.

Accounts of the plague are dominated by the writings of Procopius, a Byzantine scholar who lived in Constantinople when the pandemic broke out. His narrative tells a story where the plague was catastrophic. For example, he writes:

Comment: Perhaps part of the problem lies with a lack of understanding of just how many died because of other events, such as famine, flooding, earthquakes, and so on. What is clear is that the period was racked with disaster: And for Precopius' fascinating insight into Justinian's rule, see: Truth or Lies Part 8 Procopius: Secret History

See also: Also check out SOTT radio's Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar! for more details on the preceeding events and the tumult that continued for at least a century. From the transcript:
540: Cometary bombardment (according to the Chinese historical record); Gildas reports cometary bombardment up in the northern regions of the U.K.; there was a collapse of the great dam of Mareb in Yemen, the country of Sheba...so that was an interesting year, 540...

541: The plague began in Egypt; there was a comet in Gaul; earthquake occurred in Kyzicus...there was a comet, there was drought, earthquake, earthquake, blah-blah-blah...so I'm getting this from all these different chroniclers...

542, the sun appeared at noon day...plague began in the east...

543: Plague in Mesopotamia...

544: Plague in Italy, southern France, Spain...

545: Plague in Persia; famine; plague (Mesopotamia 546)...

547: Tremendous thunder and lightning...

549: Flood in Cilicia; plague in the British territories (according to the Bishop of Llandaff)...

551: Another Beirut earthquake and tsunami; earthquake over the Middle East; "the sea retreats" (John Malalus)...

553: Earthquake, terrible thunder, and lightning (from Chronicle of Theophanes)...

554: Earthquake in Constantinople; the destruction of Baalbek (now that's interesting...wait till you read the next book and hear about Baalbek--that's very, very interesting)...

555: There's another earthquake in Constantinople and plague...

556: Famine [in] Constantinople, plague, ashes fell from the sky...

[...]

Jason: Can I make one small point? I mean, this is not like they had the internet (you know, where you can read about it)...like, oh, there was a 2.5 in such and such a place. Just imagine how big such a thing would have had to be, that somebody would have had to travel over to some other place and say, "Oh, by the way, there was an earthquake." And it would have been really big news. (So, it's not like we're tracking a 2.1 earthquake)...

Laura: These are city-destroying earthquakes, by the way. I told you that I'm just giving you the short version. These were city-destroying earthquakes, nation-destroying plagues of grasshoppers, city-destroying floods...


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Light Saber

Paul Robeson and the Battle for the Soul of America

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Paul Robeson
American singer, acclaimed actor of stage and screen, political activist and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976), rehearses in relaxed mood at the piano. ( Keystone Features/Getty Images )
America today stands at a crossroads. Where an entrenched oligarchy strives desperately to keep hold of those military, intelligence, financial and federal institutions which it spent decades infesting, while attempting to overthrow a nationalist president who has worked to end the "forever wars" while cooperating with both Russia and China.

This fight within the heart of America has been confusing for many people who accustomed themselves to interpret world history from the distorted lens of the age in which they live.

Such confused people cannot fathom HOW America could possibly be anything but an imperialistic nation infested with self-contradiction: A nation founded on Liberty but relying on exploitation, usury and institutional racism.

This confusion can easily be resolved by taking off the distorted glasses of "the present" and look at history as a process defined by the clash between two opposing views of mankind: a creature born free or enslaved.

Comment: The Legacy of Paul Robeson: Football star, leading man, communist, outcast, hounded for his beliefs by the US gov't

On Henry Wallace:

Untold History of the United States: The coup against Henry Wallace and what might have been

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Car Black

USSR 'driver-in-chief' almost killed Nixon when he took the wheel, but was never fined in his life


RT
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 19:37 UTC
Brezhnev
© Sputnik / Kirill Kallinikov
Documents celebrating Leonid Brezhnev's lifelong love for posh cars and reckless driving have been sold at auction in Moscow. The big man's tastes were a nightmare for his guards and a driveway to his heart for foreign leaders.

Brezhnev's driving documents have changed ownership between two unidentified private collectors this week. What is known is that in exchange the buyer paid about $24,000. The laminated papers include a driver's license in Brezhnev's name - which also authorized him to take the wheel of pretty much any commercial ground transport - and a punch-through card that every Soviet driver had to carry.

The card was for a sort of three-strike system, in which a certain number of violations of the traffic code resulted in a revocation of the license, but Brezhnev's was obviously not meant for any street cop to lay hands on. In fact, the two documents had been a jokey gift from his protégé and friend, Interior Minister Nikolay Shchelokov, and were made in December 1976, shortly before Brezhnev's 70th birthday.

Brezhnev was an avid driver and loved fast cars and his status as the undisputed Soviet leader gave him ample opportunities to satisfy both cravings.
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Info

Over 140 new geoglyphs discovered at Nazca


Yamagata University
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 20:05 UTC
New Nasca Birds
© Yamagata UniversityLeft - Bird (line type) and Right - Bird (processed picture)
A research team led by Professor Masato Sakai (Cultural anthropology, Andean archeology) at Yamagata University discovered 142 new geoglyphs, which depict people, animals and other beings, on the Nasca Pampa and surrounding area in Peru, South America.

Situated mainly in the west of the Nasca Pampa, these new geoglyphs were identified through fieldwork and analyzing high-resolution 3D data, among other activities conducted up to 2018. The biomorphic geoglyphs are thought to date back to at least 100 BC to AD 300. Additionally, in a feasibility study carried out from 2018 to 2019 together with IBM Japan, the university discovered one new geoglyph by developing an AI model on the AI server IBM Power System AC922 configured with the deep learning platform IBM Watson Machine Learning Community Edition (formerly known as IBM PowerAI) . This study explored the feasibility of AI's potential to discover new lines, and introduced the capability to process large volumes of data with AI, including high-resolution aerial photos, at high speeds. This represented the first glyph at the site discovered by an AI.
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Snowflake Cold

Little Ice Age lessons: A tumultuous history of resilience and surprises

Dagomar Degroot
Aeon
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 23:49 UTC
Avercamp ice age
© Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamWinter Landscape with Ice Skaters (c1608), by Hendrick Avercamp. Avercamp was deaf and mute and specialised in painting scenes of the Netherlands in winter.
Midway through the 17th century, Dutch whalers bound for the Arctic noticed that the climate was changing. For decades, they had waited for the retreat of sea ice in late spring, then pursued bowhead whales in bays off the Arctic Ocean islands of Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen. They had set up whaling stations and even towns in those bays, with ovens to boil blubber into oil. Europe's growing population demanded oil for lighting and cooking, and for industrial purposes that included the manufacture of soap. Now, thick sea ice kept whalers from reaching their ovens even in mid-summer. Climate change, it seemed, had doomed their trade.

Yet in the frigid decades of the late-17th century, the Dutch whaling industry boomed. Whalers discovered how to boil blubber aboard their ships or on sea ice, then learned how to transport it from the Arctic to furnaces in Amsterdam. There, labourers boiled the oil until it reached a purity never achieved in the Arctic, giving Dutch whalers a competitive edge in the European market. Shipwrights greased and reinforced the hulls of whaling vessels so that they could slide off thick ice and survive the occasional collision. The governing council of the Dutch Republic - the country that would become the Netherlands of today - allowed a corporate monopoly on whaling to expire, and thereby encouraged competition between hundreds of new whalers. Ironically, by provoking crisis, climate change spurred a golden age for the Dutch whaling industry.

Comment: See also: And, for more, check out SOTT's radio shows on the topic: As well as our monthly documentary tracking the shifts occuring: SOTT Earth Changes Summary - October 2019: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs



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Blue Planet

Ice Age footprints of mammoths and prehistoric humans revealed for the first time using radar

Matthew Robert Bennett
The Conversation
Tue, 12 Nov 2019 12:01 UTC
mammoth
The mammoth lumbers through our imaginations when we think about the world during the most recent Ice Age. They're just one of many giant creatures that our ancestors lived alongside and which became extinct when the climate changed. The giant ground sloth - a large herbivore which was endemic to the Americas - is another.

We can study these extinct animals from their bones - but also from the preserved footprints they left in mud. But these footprints are often hard to find - and while they can tell us about the presence of an animal, they don't always tell us much about the animal itself, like how it walked, for instance. The giant ground sloth was unusual in that it walked on the outside of its feet.

Comment: See also:

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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Reporter uncovers history-changing Manson family connections to CIA, mind control and Hollywood

John Vibes
The Mind Unleashed
Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:25 UTC
Charlie Manson book Chaos
The crimes of the Manson family resulted in one of the most famous murder trials in history, but new research has come to light that could totally change the history of the case.

Much of what was believed to be true about the Manson murders and the cult that carried them out comes from a narrative that was spun by prosecutor Vince Bugliosi, both during the trial and in his book Helter Skelter — the best selling true crime novel of all time.


Comment: And even that is fake!


Nothing about the murders made any sense. There was a strange cult of hippies that were killing celebrities for apparently no reason, and the young people carrying out the crimes seemed to be under the spell of a charismatic lunatic and failed musician named Charles Manson. Bugliosi created a narrative that Manson and his followers had no personal motive in the killings, but were attempting to instigate a race war by framing the Black Panthers for the crimes.

However, in the years since, many researchers have had trouble making sense of the story that was established by Bugliosi. Manson was certainly a racist and problematic in a variety of other ways, but there is ample evidence that the story we have come to accept about the cult and their crimes is a total fabrication.

Comment: For an in-depth look at how the CIA infiltrated, influenced and controlled the culture of the California music scene at the same time as the Manson family's exploits, see the extensive series on Laurel Canyon. After doing so, you'll likely never view hippies, rock music or the CIA in quite the same way again.

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Monkey Wrench

The Great Pretender: Stanford psychology professor cherry-picked data in famous study of psychiatric institutions

Susannah Cahalan
New York Post
Sat, 02 Nov 2019 21:12 UTC
David Rosenhan
© Denver Post via Getty ImagesStudents loved professor David Rosenhan for his golden voice and charismatic teaching style, but his ability to embroider a story infected his research.
Stanford psychology and law professor David Rosenhan could transfix an audience in a crowded lecture hall with just a few words.

"What is abnormality?" he would ask undergraduate students, his deep and resonant golden voice building and booming. "What are we here for? Some things will be black ... Others will be white. But be prepared for shades of gray."

Rosenhan would know. His own life, as I would later find out, was filled with shades of gray.

He wasn't particularly attractive — the word often used to describe him was "balding" — but there was something magnetic, even seductive, about him, especially in front of a crowd.

His students called it a gift, describing his ability to "rivet a group of two to three hundred students with dynamic lectures that are full of feeling and poetry." One student recalled how Rosenhan opened one of his lectures while sitting on a student's lap — as a way to test the class' reaction to abnormal behavior.

His research work was also groundbreaking. In 1973, Rosenhan published the paper "On Being Sane in Insane Places" in the prestigious journal Science, and it was a sensation. The study, in which eight healthy volunteers went undercover as "pseudopatients" in 12 psychiatric hospitals across the country, discovered harrowing conditions that led to national outrage. His findings helped expedite the widespread closure of psychiatric institutions across the country, changing mental health care in the US forever.

Comment: Rosenhan is merely one in a long line of 'scientists-in-name-only' who have inflicted untold harm using suspect data and flawed analyses:

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Pharoah

Ancient Egyptian ibises were wild birds

Dyani Lewis
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:33 UTC
Egyptian Book of the Dead Depiction
© Wasef et al, 2019A scene from the Books of the Dead (The Egyptian Museum) showing the ibis-headed God Thoth recording the result of the final judgement.
An analysis of ancient DNA extracted from the mummified remains of sacred ibises suggests ancient Egyptians captured the birds from the wild rather than farming them.

In Australia, the white ibis is unceremoniously referred to as a bin chicken, for its propensity to scavenge scraps from rubbish bins.

But in ancient Egypt, its relative, the sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus), was revered.

It was seen as a living representation - or even physical manifestation - of the God of Wisdom, Thoth, perhaps because it looks like a scribe writing on water when it dips its long slender beak into the water to feed.

Archaeologists have unearthed several million mummified ibises from a roughly 800-year period between 600 BCE and 250 CE.

Unlike victual mummies, which were buried in a person's tomb to come alive in the afterlife, ibis mummies were usually what's known as votive mummies.

These would have been purchased from a temple devoted to the God Thoth and displayed as an offering, much like candles or sticks of incense in Buddhist temples today.

After a period of time, the ibis mummies - some roughly wrapped in bandages, others exquisitely decorated - were moved into catacombs, vast underground tunnels and storage rooms beneath the temple.
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