Dear Reader,

This post is for anyone who loathes racism, both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab, and who feels they have not heard details of the Palestinian side of the history of the establishment of Israel in 1948. It continues a series of posts I have been doing on a book by Palestinian historian Nur Masalha titled Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. As the title indicates, the research Masalha addresses is the extent to which the Jewish Zionist movement was seriously preparing to transfer the Arabs out of Palestine prior to 1948. The significance of the research is that it indicates that the popular notion that the Palestinians virtually voluntarily left Palestine at the establishment of the state of Israel and the first war with the neighbouring Arab states is a myth.

So if you are someone who cannot tolerate any suggestion that there could possibly be two sides to the situation besetting Palestine today then don't read any further. If you are obsessed with a one-sided narrative that Israelis are saintly innocent victims and Palestinian Arabs are devilish bloodthirsty monsters, go away.

Thank you.

On June 8, during Israel's preemptive Six-Day War, an act of aggression, not self-defense against regional Arab states, the IDF did the unthinkable.

It provocatively attacked its main ally, striking the USS Liberty intelligence gathering ship, in international waters about 25.5 nautical miles northwest of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in international waters.

The incident took 34 US lives, another 171 wounded, the vessel severely damaged, lucky to stay afloat.

It was deployed to monitor belligerents' communications in response to Israeli aggression on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq - not the other way around.

Archaeologists excavating a gothic church graveyard in Lisbon, Portugal, made a discovery for the annals of medical history: an ovarian tumor that had started forming teeth.

Today, doctors know that this type of cyst, called a teratoma, is the most common tumor that occurs in the ovaries. But scientists are just starting to learn about past teratoma cases thanks to new evidence from the archaeological record.

A teratoma, which essentially translates as "monstrous swelling" from Greek, can occur when cells that should become eggs start multiplying abnormally and form mature tissues like hair, teeth and bones.

These cysts account for up to 20 percent of all ovarian tumors, and most develop in women of reproductive age, according to past studies. These masses are usually benign and go unnoticed, without causing any symptoms. But some can be cancerous, and some can grow so large that they cause severe pain, or twisting in the ovaries. The largest reported teratoma was 18 inches by 10 inches (45 by 25 centimeters), removed from a 74-year-old woman, according to one review.

If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

The widow of Cyrus Vance, the only US Secretary of State to resign in protest against his president's actions in a hundred years, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor and Vance's rival, "that awful man". Not a single official of the State Department under Vance during the Carter Administration of 1977 to 1981, thought differently. Most of them had monosyllabic terms for Brzezinski. Since Brzezinski died last Friday, not a single member of his own White House staff has made a public statement in his honour, memory or defence. The mute ones include Madeleine Albright, who owed to Brzezinski her career promotion as an academic, then White House staffer, then Secretary of State herself.

Despite the disloyalty of those closest to him, and the detestation for Bzezinski of those further away, he was, and remained, Carter's favourite. Between 1977 and 1981, Brzezinski's time with Carter, according to the White House logs, amounted to more than 20% of the president's working time. That's 12 minutes of every hour — no other official came close. On Friday, shortly after Brzezinski's death was announced by his family, Carter issued a statement extolling him as "a superb public servant...inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor ...brilliant, dedicated, and loyal. I will miss him."

A new book by famed Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit author J.R.R Tolkien was released Thursday - a century after the literary genius first penned the story.

Beren and Lúthien brings readers back to the mythical realm of Middle Earth, a land occupied by humans, elves, dwarves, wizards (both good and evil) and, of course, bloodthirsty orcs.

Foreword

The good news for the Academic Acolytes is that their gainful employment is guaranteed in the short term because new discoveries must be careful shaped and retro-fitted onto the existing Etruscan Ecclesiastical Empire embroidery they call history.

The bad news for the Academic Acolytes is that the warp and weft of their underlying historical fabric is flimsy, frayed and failing.

The terms warp and weft refers to the threads that make up a loomed or woven fabric. Warp threads are the threads that run along the length of the yardage and parallel to the selvedge. Weft threads are the threads that run from selvage to selvage (side to side).

Embroidery Basics: Warp and Weft - Cheryl Fall

Therefore, in the longer term, the Academic Acolytes are doomed to extinction [just like the Dodo] because their narratives [and frantic arm waving] simply don't fly.

The Challenge

If you've got some time [and brain cells] to kill over a wet weekend then try getting your head around how the Etruscan Ecclesiastical Empire [and their Academic Acolytes] went about distorting and duplicating elements of Iranian history.

The central challenge is to unscramble the historical narrative that's been mangled and mutilated to accommodate the Western narratives of the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece.

There are four mainstream narratives that cover the same ground.

Are any of them vaguely truthful?

On a day in early December, one of Moscow's agents in the United States, working undercover as a journalist for Izvestia, reported a private meeting with the president-elect's "closest adviser." The adviser, who met privately with the Russian spy, was frank and hopeful about a significant improvement in relations from the previous administration. He "stressed that was not merely expressing his personal opinion but the position of the future president." The two men met alone, and there was no American record made of the encounter.

This is not a report about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose activities during the transition are now being investigated. Nor it is about Jared Kushner, who, the Washington Post reported on Friday, approached Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last December to propose a secret communications channel. The meeting described above took place in 1960, and the "close adviser" was the incoming president's brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It is not unusual for the Russians to want to establish contacts with an incoming presidential administration, especially when there is tension between the two countries. It is also not unusual for an American administration to use back channels to probe the intentions of adversarial powers. But December 1960 was not December 2016. The RFK meeting likely came at the request of the Russians, not the Americans. It was not held in secret—it was noted on RFK's telephone log. And Robert Kennedy, despite general encouraging words, made no promises, suggested no follow-up, and was in no way working against the outgoing Eisenhower administration. The Russians were smart in focusing attention on the president-elect's brother. He would eventually be involved in historic back channel activity, but well after the inauguration. And all these years later, such communications have been revealed as a canny and patriotic initiative by the Kennedy administration.

A 4,000-year-old henge monument, containing five well-preserved human burials, has been discovered in England, archaeologists announced.

This Neolithic earthwork was found in Newbold-on-Stour, in Warwickshire County, this spring, ahead of the construction of houses. Developers in England often need to conduct an archaeological assessment of the land they want to build on. And when a geophysical survey revealed that there could be a henge at this site, a team from Archaeology Warwickshire started digging.

The archaeologists announced this week that they found a simple monument that consists of a circular ditch dug in segments and an embankment created from that dug-out soil. They also found five bodies buried within the monument.

"Count me out if it's for violence. Don't expect me at barricades unless it is with flowers.... What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, it's no good shooting people."—John Lennon

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

America is still wrestling with many of the same problems today—endless wars, civil unrest, campus riots, racial tensions, police brutality, divisive politics, overreaching government agencies and threats to freedom—that it struggled with 50 years ago when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The hippies of the Sixties Generation who embraced flower power, opposed war and didn't "trust anyone over 30" are now senior citizens who voted for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, both warmongers with greater loyalties to Wall Street than "we the people."

The Baby Boomers—"the generation that battled over Vietnam and civil rights, that gave us the modern self-help movement and Woodstock"—have become today's Establishment. As Bruce Cannon Gibney writes for the Boston Globe, "Let us dispense with ideas that aging flower children have substantial claims on goodness, as boomers liberal and conservative alike engaged in warrantless wiretapping, extrajudicial assassinations, gratuitous assaults on the dignity of minorities, mass disenfranchisement, the erection of a vast and useless penal state, and policies of cavalier disregard."

And the rebellious music and anti-war message of Sixties musicians, movements and symbols have since been co-opted by corporations that have come to realize that "there was lots and lots of money to be made." As historian Bertram Gross explains, "The counterculture became absorbed into the Establishment, functioning more and more as an arm of business operations in entertainment, clothing, foods, and foreign cars, while the New Left and the many organizations of white and black revolution collapsed into sawdust."

In retrospect, as Rolling Stone conceded, perhaps the Sixties Generation and "1960s rock didn't save the world—maybe didn't even change the world enough," but it was still a transformative time for those coming of age and trying to find their place in the world, and the Beatles played a large part in shaping that conversation.

No album was more influential than the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Indeed, when Rolling Stone announced its top 500 pop music albums of all time several years ago, perched at the top of the heap was Sgt. Pepper.