"The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that Civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captives to the judgement of law, is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever paid to reason." -Justice Robert Jackson, Nov. 21, 1945

It is often forgotten what sort of a battle occurred after WWII to establish the Nuremberg Trials which gave the world a revolutionary code of law which even today offers many of the remedies to the Gordian Knots blocking our way to a peaceful future. By the end of the war, many European leaders of the allied nations wished to simply put leading Nazis against a wall to face a firing squad and return to "business as usual".

As I've outlined in many recent writings, it was only through the intensive efforts of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and his leading allies in both the USA and Russia that a different course of action was decided upon and an official international tribunal was sanctioned that generated a total legal paradigm shift in international law that has been too easily taken for granted (due largely to the lack of effect these laws have had on post-WWII practice).

Among those revolutionary reforms included the unprecedented mandate that wars of aggression would henceforth be illegal in the eyes of the law. The tendency for those higher officials carrying out inhuman orders to escape responsibility for their actions or omissions of correct action were deemed insufficient defenses under the higher moral principle of "known or should have known".

Water and air are highly mutable resources that exist in a myriad of physical states and dimensions, and due to their affectivity, these entities participate in a multitude of interactions capable of sustaining life, transforming environments, and shaping human behavior.

As air and water circulate between the atmosphere and the landscape through the process of evapotranspiration, humans interact with and form relationships-or bio-cultural associations-with these substances. Facets of human life, like breathing, cooking, bathing, agriculture, and engaging with the outdoors, become intertwined with a region's hydroclimate. Interactions with air and water, in turn, influence the ways humans construct and modify their societies.

As the climate shifts, bio-cultural associations are often altered in the process. Archaeologists analyze the impacts of climate change on human history and have frequently identified correlations between the Medieval Climate Optimum-spanning from the 9th century to the 13th century-and periods of societal change.

Long ago, ancient mariners successfully navigated a perilous ocean journey to arrive at Japan's Ryukyu Islands, a new study suggests.

Archaeological sites on six of these isles — part of a 1,200-kilometer-long chain — indicate that migrations to the islands occurred 35,000 to 30,000 years ago, both from the south via Taiwan and from the north via the Japanese island of Kyushu.

But whether ancient humans navigated there on purpose or drifted there by accident on the Kuroshio ocean current, one of the world's largest and strongest currents, is unclear. The answer to that question could shed light on the proficiency of these Stone Age humans as mariners and their mental capabilities overall.

Now, satellite-tracked buoys that simulated wayward rafts suggest that there's little chance that the seafarers reached the isles by accident.

Researchers analyzed 138 buoys that were released near or passed by Taiwan and the Philippine island Luzon from 1989 to 2017, deployed as part of the Global Drifter Program to map surface ocean currents worldwide. In findings published online December 3 in Scientific Reports, the team found that only four of the buoys came within 20 kilometers of any of the Ryukyu Islands, and these did so only as a result of typhoons and other adverse weather.

In 1974 world-renowned author of The Gulag Archipelago Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a short essay to his Soviet compatriots beseeching them to live in truth. The message, called "Live Not By Lies" was a call to not feed into the communist government's ubiquitous daily diet of falsehoods used to perpetuate the overwhelmingly oppressive system in place. Fast forward nearly fifty years and western civilization now finds itself facing an uncannily similar situation - ideologically, politically and socially. Greatly expanding on Solzhenitsyn's letter, journalist Rod Dreher takes a stark look at our present predicament in his new book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.

This week on MindMatters we discuss Live Not by Lies with Rod Dreher and take a hard look at the radical left's 'soft totalitarianism' already tearing away at the very fabric of society. Between Big Tech's cancelling of conservative perspectives, ideologically motivated political policies, mass consumer surveillance, and the misled foot soldiers that threaten to attack and burn all those who disagree with them, Dreher asks the prescient question - what should one do in the face of such an onslaught?

Making use of invaluable interviews and accounts of Christian dissidents who lived under communism in Eastern Europe, Dreher relates the thoughts, strategies and faith that assisted those who sought to live in truth under the harshest and most harrowing of communist regimes. We also delve into why the church and Christianity was specifically targeted and sought out as an enemy of the state, and why the conscience inherent in religion is quite often exactly what makes it such a powerful enemy of totalitarian thinking.


Running Time: 01:20:17

Download: MP3 — 73.5 MB

The 1990s was a time of immense suffering for the Russian people. As the impending collapse of the USSR became discernable, insiders such as Nikolai Kruchina, Viktor Geraschenko, and Leonid Veselovsky created a planning group to ensure the continued influence of Soviet-era officials by transferring Russian state assets to offshore shell companies and thus stripping the country's wealth. One such offshore company, FIMACO, was used to pilfer an estimated $50 billion from the nation. Viktor Gerashchenko, the head of the central bank of Russia, sent a memorandum demanding transfers from FIMACO be covered up. It was through this looting that liquid capital was generated and used by future oligarchs to build their fortunes. An early beneficiary of this arrangement was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had started his career as a minor Soviet official and whose Yukos oil conglomerate was tied to FIMACO. In return for his help Viktor Gerashchenko was later given a position as the chairman of Yukos by Khodorkovsky.

In 1991 the Soviet Union finally collapsed. That August, state treasurer Nikolai Kruchina, responsible for Russia's gold reserves, died by falling from his window. He had been a member of the planning group which originated the plot to steal state assets. His successor Georgy Pavlov fell to his death from a window two months later: the oligarchs were cleaning house.

In 2002 Professor Alceu Ranzi (Federal University of Acre) and Prof. Martti Parssinen (University of Helsinki) decided to form an international research team to study large geometric earthworks, called geoglyphs, at the Brazilian state of Acre in South-western Amazonia. Soon it appeared that a pre-colonial civilization unknown to international scholars built there geometric ceremonial centers and sophisticated road systems. This civilization flourished in the rainforest 2,000 years ago. The discovery supported Prof. William Balee´s (Tulane University) theory of early human impacts on the current Amazonian tropical forest composition that radically altered the notion of the pristine Amazon rainforest.

Now, the team published an article in Antiquity demonstrating that the earthwork-building civilization had a much longer human history behind it than was expected. The team members demonstrate that humans have regularly used fire to clear small open patches in the rainforest. These activities started quite soon after the last Ice Age ended thousands of years before the first geoglyphs were constructed. Thanks to the charcoal the humans left in the Amazonian soil during the last 10 000 years, it was possible to measure systematically carbon-13 isotope values of many samples. By using these values taken from archaeologically dated charcoal it was possible to estimate past vegetation and precipitation. The results published in Antiquity indicate that the forest main vegetation and precipitation have remained quite unchanged during the last ten thousand years until the 20th century.

No evidence of drier periods or natural/artificial savannah formations were observed before the current colonization started to penetrate into the southwestern Amazonia from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries onward. Hence, the authors argue that the theories of extensive savannah formations in the South-western Amazonia during the current Holocene period are based on a false interpretation of the connection between charcoal accumulation and natural fires due to drier climatic periods. These interpretations have not taken into account the millennial human presence in Amazonia.

The enigmatic Venus figurines, one of world's earliest known examples of art, are the subject of much conjecture.

Were they fertility symbols, religious objects, simple dolls or portraits, guides to beauty or even early pornography?

Now two US doctors and an anthropologist have thrown their thoughts into the mix, suggesting the pragmatic theory that the figurines are something of an advertisement for the best look to have in tough times.

Carved 30,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe, they depict women who are obese by modern standards (the new paper, in fact, is published in the journal Obesity) at a time and place "where you would not expect to see obesity at all", says lead author Richard Johnson from the University of Colorado.

"We show that these figurines correlate to times of extreme nutritional stress," he says. As such, they "emerged as an ideological tool to help improve fertility and survival of the mother and newborns".

"The aesthetics of art thus had a significant function in emphasising health and survival to accommodate increasingly austere climatic conditions."

The landscape was a diverse mix of gentle hills, marshes, wooded valleys, and swamps, inhabited by Mesolithic people who took advantage of the rich migrating wildlife and seasonal hunting grounds.

Fishing trawlers operating in the area have recovered a rich fauna of mammoths, lions, and other animals, and several prehistoric tools and weapons. Doggerland was named in the 1990s, after the Dogger Bank, which in turn was named after the 17th-century Dutch fishing boats called "doggers".

Around 8,000 years ago, the North Sea coast of Britain and Doggerland was struck by a massive tsunami caused by the Storegga Slides, a series of underwater landslips (the largest known from the Holocene) at the edge of Norway's continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea.

An eight-mile wall of prehistoric rock art featuring animals and humans has been discovered in the Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia, in the Amazon rainforest.

Dubbed the "Sistine Chapel of the ancients", the 12,500-years-old artwork was uncovered by a British-Colombian team of archaeologists under the leadership of José Iriarte, professor of archaeology at Exeter University, and was funded by the European Research Council.

Experts have dated the rock art based on the portrayal of animals that are now extinct, such as a mastodon — a prehistoric relative of the elephant, known to have inhabited North and Central America about 12,000 years ago. Among other animals portrayed in the rock art are fish, turtles, lizards and birds and people dancing and holding hands, reported The Observer.

Although the discovery was made about a year ago, the drawings were first unveiled for an upcoming documentary series by Channel 4: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon. The series is scheduled to hit the screens on 5 December.

Ella Al-Shamahi, an explorer and paleoanthropologist who presents the series, called the images "breathtaking" and said the discovery at Serranía de la Lindosa is "so new" that "they haven't even given it a name yet".

This year's archaeological season at the oldest salt mining center in Europe, which dates back to the 5 - 4th millennium BC and became the first prehistoric town on the continent, is now over. The site is located near the present town of Provadia (northeastern Bulgaria) and has been studied for years. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, archaeologists' work began later this summer, but the season was extremely successful.

The latest find by Prof. Vasil Nikolov and his team is a mass grave. Days ago, while exploring the bottom of an evaporation pool, archaeologists came across 6 skulls, including children's. It is not known whether the people buried there were killed in some of the attacks against the fortress city, or whether it was an internal conflict over salt, which was used as currency at the time.