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Maurice Pappworth: The doctor who exposed the UK's horrible and useless medical experiments on patients

hospitals of the 1950s and 60s
© Heritage Images/Getty
In hospitals of the 1950s and 60s, doctors had enormous power. Maurice Pappworth wanted to stop them abusing it
In the 1960s, British medics took sometimes fatal liberties with unsuspecting patients in the name of science. Maurice Pappworth wasn't having any of it

Maurice Pappworth was a "pestilential nuisance", according to his obituary. It was meant as a compliment. A whistle-blower before the modern meaning of the term was invented, he exposed how many of his fellow doctors in the 1960s, often at British teaching hospitals, were treating their patients with as much respect as lab rats, and sometimes killing them in the process.

In his explosive 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, he revealed how unsuspecting patients were being "subject to mental and physical distress which is in no way necessitated by, and has no connection with, the treatment of their disease". They were being sacrificed to science by "wolves in white coats", said one reviewer of his book. And not just in hospitals: in prisons, orphanages and psychiatric centres, too.

The book created headlines around the world, and Pappworth pulled no punches, likening the situation to the foul work of doctors in Nazi concentration camps. With the war so recent, this comparison inevitably whipped up outrage among his peers.

Comment: The scope of Nazi-style experiments documented from places around the world, and even in the most 'democratic' of nations, is shocking:


Evil Rays

Historian: A 'red scare' is launched by the elites every 20 to 30 years

red menace
Edward Herman was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business. He was also a well-known writer and historian, who co-wrote a number of books with "the World's top public intellectual", Noam Chomsky.

Herman says that fatcats launch a Red Scare every 20 to 30 years in order to roll back any gains in wealth and rights gained by the public, and to browbeat everyone into allowing policies which redistribute power back to the fatcats:

Dig

Discovery: Thousands of dead bodies buried under the University of Mississippi Medical Center

Unearthing coffins
© BBC
Researchers unearthing coffins
As many as 7,000 dead bodies were found buried under a portion of the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus, the Clarion-Ledger reports. The remains likely belong to the patients of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, the state's first mental institution that opened in 1855.

During construction in 2012, 66 bodies were uncovered.

"In size, they are fairly uniform," the school wrote about the coffins that were uncovered. "About six feet long but alarmingly narrow, as if each held a pair of stilts instead of a human skeleton."

In 2014, the newspaper reported that they found 1,000 more bodies when the school did radar testing in preparation for construction of a new parking garage for the dental school.

At this point, the school has uncovered more than double that figure, and an estimated 7,000 will likely be found total.

Paying an outside company to handle exhumations and reburials would cost $3,000 each, or up to $21 million, according to Newser.

Now the university is trying to figure out if it will invest in an 8-year effort that would cost closer to $3 million. They will likely create a memorial, and possibly a lab that would allow researchers to study the remains and gain insight into asylum living.

The asylum closed in 1935 -- 20 years before the school opened.

Archaeology

Archaeologists discover human remains buried in mysterious sand mounds in Australia

sand mounds
© Virtus Heritage
The origins of a series of mysterious sand mounds in a remote part of Queensland, Australia, may have finally been solved after human remains were discovered lying within.

The human remains interred in burial mounds in Mapoon, western Cape York, could be up to 6,000 years old - making them older than the Egyptian pyramids, according to archaeologists.

While the indigenous Tjungundji people long believed the mounds held the remains of their ancestors, others suggested they were natural formations or created by birdlife.

"The origins, ages and functions of these mounds have been debated by researchers for decades and the age of these features is uncertain," lead archaeologist Dr Mary Jean Sutton said in a statement to RT.com.

Comment: It's incredibly interesting that burial mounds have been used by societies around the globe that have no apparent connection to each other. Just as the ancient Australians used burial mounds, so did other groups around the world:


Fireball

The Big Burn - Global fire 13k years ago

YDB Event
© UC Santa Barbara
Black dots represent locations of 129 lake cores exhibiting charcoal records and purple dots represent marine sites with charcoal and/or soot spanning the Younger Dryas onset.
Some 13,000 years ago, a cataclysmic event occurred on Earth that was likely responsible for the collapse of the Clovis people and the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons.

That juncture in the planet's geologic history - marked by a distinct layer called the Younger Dryas Boundary - features many anomalies that support the theory of a cometary cloud impacting Earth. The collision triggered a massive biomass burning event, and the resulting soot, ash and dust in the global atmosphere blocked out the sun, which prevented photosynthesis - a phenomenon called impact winter.

For more than a decade, UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus James Kennett has studied elements found at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB). He has collaborated with scientists around the globe, providing evidence at the YDB for a platinum peak as well as for spherules, melt glass, nanodiamonds and other exotic materials that can be explained only by cosmic impact.

Kennett and his colleagues have now published new research in the Journal of Geology. In two papers, they analyze existing published scientific data from ice, glacier, lake, marine and terrestrial sediment cores, finding evidence for an extensive biomass burning episode at the YDB layer representing one of the most extreme events - if not the most extreme - ever experienced by our own species, anatomically modern humans. Recent extreme climate and burn events like those in California pale by comparison, Kennett said.

Comment: 12,800 years ago: Cosmic impact produced global fires larger than dinosaur killer event - Research


UFO

How UFO reports narration change with the technology of the times

UFOs
© mik38 / iStock
Reports of weird, wondrous, and worrying objects in the skies date to ancient times.
In 1896, newspapers throughout the United States began reporting accounts of mysterious airships flying overhead. Descriptions varied, but witnesses frequently invoked the century's great technological achievements. Some sources reported dirigibles powered by steam engines. Others saw motorized, winged crafts with screw propellers. Many recalled a flying machine equipped with a powerful searchlight.

As technologies of flight evolve, so do the descriptions of unidentified flying objects. The pattern has held in the 21st century as sightings of drone-like objects are reported, drawing concern from military and intelligence officials about possible security threats.

While puzzling over the appearance of curious things overhead may be a constant, how we have done so has changed over time, as the people doing the puzzling change. In every instance of reporting UFOs, observers have called on their personal experiences and prevailing knowledge of world events to make sense of these nebulous apparitions. In other words, affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads.

Nuke

"Vela Incident": Is Israel behind 1979's mysterious nuclear explosion?

The 'Vela Incident' remains one of the genuine whodunits - and whodunwhat - of the 20th century
Nuclear explosions
© Postmedia News
Nuclear explosions create an M-shaped signal on light detectors in the first second or so after they detonate.
There are many names for whatever happened in the South Atlantic on Sept. 22, 1979, but the most typical one is "the Vela Incident." It is one of the genuine mysteries of 20th-century history - not a contrived mystery like "Who killed the Lindbergh baby?", but the real deal: a whodunit, combined with a whatwuzzit. At just past midnight on the key date, an American satellite designed to detect nuclear explosions, Vela 6911, "announced" to ground stations that it was pretty sure it had just seen one.

The inferred location of the blast was about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. This may not seem like an important clue to post-Cold War babies; people forget that South Africa is known to have had the bomb throughout the 1980s. The apartheid regime built a half-dozen warheads for tactical use and regional deterrence against such Communist-influenced neighbour states as Angola. In 1989, during the run-up to South African democracy, the republic voluntarily dismantled its nukes. Over the next decade it joined the major nonproliferation treaties, and even led the creation of a new one, the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty.

Comment: It is interesting to see how a small "rogue state" in middle east can influence and control the entire American empire and its influence.


UFO

Clinton and the UFOs: Did he ever find out if the truth was out there?

BillyClintonUFO
© AP/Doug Mills/Getty/ursatii/Salon
Bill Clinton and friends
In 1999, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would have required across-the-board cuts to most federal agencies and depart­ments, including the Department of Education, which President Clinton learned about as he was about to meet with a delegation of edu­cators. The budget cuts also meant that teachers would probably not be getting any raises, something that irked Clinton to the point where, in an impromptu and unscripted remark, he said, channeling Ronald Reagan's famous statement, "If we were being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn't be playing these kinds of games." Funny how when Ronald Reagan said the same thing to the United Nations, folks commented that Reagan sure knew how to illustrate a point. When Clinton made his statement, Rush Limbaugh thundered into his microphone, "What's he going to do, arrange one?"

Just three years earlier, while on a trip to Ireland where he was visiting a very troubled Belfast, Clinton read a letter he received from a child named Ryan, who had asked him about what he knew regarding stories of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Clinton hadn't come to talk about UFOs. He was trying to make a point regarding how children can be victimized by political violence. In front of his Belfast audience, Clinton said to Ryan, "No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947." But then he added, to the delight of his audience, "and Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know."

Clinton did want to know, Webster Hubbell, Clinton's associate attor­ney general, wrote in his own memoir. As AAG, Hubbell claimed that President Clinton asked him to find out all that he could about two things: who killed JFK and what the government knew about UFOs. He reported to the president after being stonewalled by the relevant agencies that there was a secret government that closely holds secrets to which the president doesn't even have access.

Comment: The Condon Committee was the informal name of the University of Colorado UFO Project, a group funded by the United States Air Force from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado to study unidentified flying objects under the direction of physicist Edward Condon. The result of its work, formally titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, and known as the Condon Report, appeared in 1968.

"Conclusions and Recommendations", Condon wrote: "Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." He also recommended against the creation of a government program to investigate UFO reports.


Георгиевская ленточка

Yeltsin interview from 1990: 'In the Politburo, they were ready to betray, besmirch, and defile'

Boris Yeltsin

Boris Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.
A previously never-before-seen interview with Boris Yeltsin from June 1990

Alexander Cheparukhin, a music promoter and the founder of Greenwave Music (which has organized performances in Russia by Michael Nyman, Kraftwerk, Kronos Quartet, and others), recently shared a previously unreleased video interview from June 1990 with Boris Yeltsin in honor of what would have been the late president's 87th birthday. An environmental activist at the time, Cheparukhin spoke to Yeltsin aboard a train car headed from Moscow to Riga. Austrian journalist Werner Kreutler was along for the ride. Just days earlier, Yeltsin had been elected to serve as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Meduza summarizes this new footage of Boris Yeltsin.

Comment: Yeltsin had many personal faults and made questionable decisions. But in the end he loved Russia enough to bequeath it a man who could accomplish what he was unable to, Vladimir Putin



Microscope 1

Groundbreaking DNA test on 10,000-year-old fossil reveals first modern Brits were black

Cheddar Man
© Justin Tallis / AFP
A pioneering genetic analysis of the UK's oldest complete skeleton, which is around 10,000 years old, has revealed that the first modern Britons had a "dark to black" complexion.

The National History Museum carried out cutting-edge genetic sequencing and facial recognition technology on the 'Cheddar Man,' the skeleton found near Gough's Cave in the Cheddar Gorge, and found that the first British settlers had dark skin, dark curly hair and possibly blue eyes.

The research on the Mesolithic fossil undermines the commonly held assumption that a people's geographical origin is a determinant of skin color and physique.