Secret HistoryS


Dig

Syphilis-ridden 18th century mummy found in Swiss church is relative of Boris Johnson

Sarah Knapton
Telegraph
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:58 UTC
The mummy and Boris
© GettyThe mummy and Boris
A syphilis-ridden 18th century mummy dug up from a Swiss church is the great-great-great-great-great- great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson, it has emerged.

The body was uncovered in 1975 during renovations on Basel's Barfusser Church, but her identity has remained a mystery for more than 40 years.

Known as 'Switzerland's most famous mummy', the woman was buried in front of the altar, and found wearing expensive clothes, with no signs of malnutrition, suggesting she had been wealthy.

Comment: Science is showing how our lineage can have profound affects on the generations that follow: And on Boris:

Read More...
Info

Archaeologists discover 10,000-year-old drawing tool


University of York
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 05:33 UTC
Ancient Crayon
© Paul Shields/University of YorkThe crayon revealed a sharpened end.
Archaeologists say they may have discovered one of the earliest examples of a 'crayon' - possibly used by our ancestors 10,000 years ago for applying colour to their animal skins or for artwork.

The ochre crayon was discovered near an ancient lake, now blanketed in peat, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire. An ochre pebble was found at another site on the opposite side of the lake.

The pebble had a heavily striated surface that is likely to have been scraped to produce a red pigment powder. The crayon measures 22mm long and 7mm wide.

Ochre is an important mineral pigment used by prehistoric hunter-gatherers across the globe. The latest finds suggest people collected ochre and processed it in different ways during the Mesolithic period.
Read More...
Star of David

The not-so-secret life of the late Mathilde Krim

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:00 UTC
Johnson with Mathilde Krim, at dinner, undated photograph
Johnson with Mathilde Krim, at dinner, undated photograph.
On January 15, Mathilde Krim, a scientist and socialite, died on Long Island at 91, and the obituaries described her courageous leadership in the fight against AIDS. Krim was incensed by the widespread stigmatization of AIDS victims as somehow deserving the disease, and she worked to lift prejudice that kept our society from taking the illness seriously. (I saw her work for myself, attending a fundraiser at her East Side townhouse back in the 90's).

What the news has not told you about is Krim's other great achievement: helping to swing the White House to Israel's side in the 1960's. The no-daylight policy of U.S. alignment with the Israeli government, so obvious today in Trump's deference to Netanyahu, was born under Mathilde Krim's dear friend Lyndon Johnson. In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side, and advised him on what to say publicly.

"Johnson was the pivotal president for our relationship with Israel and I think Mathilde Krim's sway over Johnson was such that it turned the entire relationship, allowing Israel to continue on, especially after the Six Day War, in a manner that defied not only the U.N. but the whole world with regard to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians," says Martin Brod, a retired systems analyst in New York who has long studied the role of Israel's American friends in cementing the special relationship. Here is that story.
Read More...
Star of David

Poisoned toothpaste and exploding phones: Israel linked to 2,700 assassination operations during its 70 year existence, far more than any other western country

Ethan Bronner
The National Post
Sat, 27 Jan 2018 12:14 UTC
A new book also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, an act its officials have consistently denied
Netanyahu
© ReutersIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target's life. Armed drones. Exploding cell phones. Spare tires with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Islamic holy men.

A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed, they add up to far more than any other Western country, the book says.

Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names. The result is the first comprehensive look at Israel's use of state-sponsored killings.

Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, and running more than 600 pages, "Rise and Kill First" makes the case that Israel has used assassination in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack. It also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, an act its officials have consistently denied.

Comment: Just a few more examples...

Read More...
Che Guevara

Cycles of History: 2018 brings echoes of Europe's nationalist rebellions of 1848

James P. Pinkerton
Breitbart
Sun, 28 Jan 2018 12:56 UTC
revolution
© Wikimedia Commons
Populist-Nationalism, Right and Left

Here's a headline that a lot of people -- especially among the entrenched elite -- won't want to see: "2017 Was the Year of False Promise in the Fight Against Populism: The populist wave seems like it may have crested. The data proves otherwise." In other words, the populists are still on the march. Uh oh.

That headline appeared in Foreign Policy magazine, a publication not on the top of many populist reading lists. The two authors, Yascha Mounk and Martin Eiermann, are both associated with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Blair, as we all recall, was the prime minister of the United Kingdom for a decade; he was, and is, a devout apostle of globalism.
Read More...
Attention

The origins of the 1959 Mt. Kenya Safari Club and its possible changing tides: 'Safari Club II' what is it?

Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture Foundation
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Safari Club II
© Unknown
During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency convinced certain European and Middle Eastern allies to establish an informal intelligence alliance whose links to the United States would be "plausibly denied" in typical CIA parlance. In 1976, a group of pro-Western intelligence agency directors secretly met at the Mt. Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki, Kenya to hammer out an informal pact designed to limit Soviet influence in Africa and the Middle East. The group met under the auspices of Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Although Khashoggi was present at the first meeting of what soon became known as the "Safari Club," Kenyatta and Kissinger were not present at the inaugural spymasters' meet-up.

Signing the original charter of the Safari Club in Kenya were Count Alexandre de Marenches, director of the French Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) foreign intelligence agency; Kamal Adham, the chief of Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, the Saudi intelligence service; Egyptian Intelligence Service director, General Kamal Hassan Aly; Ahmed Dlimi, the head of Morocco's intelligence service; and General Nematollah Nassiri, the head of Iran's SAVAK intelligence agency. There are indications, but no actual proof, that the head of Israel's Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, took part in the first Safari Club meeting in Kenya.
Read More...
Question

Brief history of the Ukrainians

Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Oriental Review
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:59 UTC
Historical Map of Ukraine
Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire from the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson's theory-model of the "imagined community" - a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. Before 2014 Ukraine was a home of some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent of those who declared themselves as the Ukrainians. Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or the Belarus as "foreign" but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of the Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].

The process of self-constructing identity of the Ukrainians after 1991 is basically oriented vis-à-vis Ukraine's two most powerful neighbors: Poland and Russia. In the other words, the self-constructing Ukrainian identity (like the Montenegrin or the Belarus) is able so far just to claim that the Ukrainians are not both the Poles or the Russians but what they really are is of a great debate. Therefore, an existence of an independent state of Ukraine, nominally as a national state of the Ukrainians, is of a very doubt indeed from both perspectives: historical and ethnolinguistic.
Read More...
Magnify

Has the mysterious Voynich manuscript finally been deciphered?


RT
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:35 UTC
Voynich manuscript
© Universal History Archive / UIG / Getty images
Mysterious text from the Voynich codex, a brightly illustrated ancient manuscript, may finally have been deciphered, according to a new study from computer scientists in Canada.

For decades codebreakers have poured over the 240-page relict, from which pages have been carbon dated back to the early 1400s. It has been suggested that the manuscript, which is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and contains brightly colored images of plants and an unknown language, is a medieval medical journal for women.

But the purpose of, or information within, the Voynich codex has never been agreed upon by researchers and academics - despite the best efforts of WWII enigma code breakers in Britain. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the man who brought the text to wider knowledge in the early 20th century, the codex could also be an elaborate hoax, as suggested by Keele University linguist Gordon Rugg.

However, now Greg Kondrak from the University of Alberta claims to have made strides in deciphering the seemingly lost language contained within the codex pages, reported CBC News.

Comment: See also: Simple solution for deciphering Voynich manuscript met with skepticism
This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a "solution" for the Voynich manuscript. The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women's-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.


Read More...
Document

"Wanted for treason" flyer distributed in Dallas before JFK's assassination

Rebecca Onion
Slate
Fri, 15 Nov 2013 13:00 UTC
jfk assassination dallas
© East News/ UPI Photo / eyevine
This flyer, around 5,000 copies of which were distributed around Dallas in the days before President Kennedy's November 22, 1963 visit, accused Kennedy of a range of offenses, from being "lax" on Communism, to "appointing anti-Christians to Federal office," to lying to the American people about his personal life.

General Edwin A. Walker, a Texan who served in World War II and the Korean War, had resigned his Army post in 1961 after a Kennedy-ordered investigation found that he had violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity on the job, by distributing John Birch Society literature to his troops. Walker moved to Dallas and became a leader of right-wing activity in the city (more on the full range of that activity here). The ex-General led resistance to James Meredith's 1962 enrollment at the University of Mississippi and unsuccessfully ran for the position of Texas governor.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Dig

British archaeologists find 10,000-year-old 'crayon' in Scarborough


BBC News
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 19:07 UTC
10,000 year old crayon
© University of YorkThe crayon was discovered near the site of an ancient lake
An ochre crayon thought to have been used to draw on animal skins 10,000 years ago has been found by archaeologists.

The crayon, which is just 22mm long, was discovered near the site of an ancient lake which is now covered in peat near Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

An ochre pebble was found at another site on what would have been the opposite side of the lake.

The area is near one of the most famous Mesolithic sites in Europe, Star Carr.
Read More...