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Star of David

Solzhenitsyn - Banned all over again

Peter Myers
Mail Star
Sun, 12 Jan 2014 05:14 UTC
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Solzhenitsyn's last and greatest book - freely available in Russia - is facing the same censorship in the West that The Gulag Archipelago faced in the Soviet Union. That's because it deals with the Jews - specifically, their role in the Bolshevik Revolution.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that he had been "convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime".

The Gulag Archipelago, which sold 30 million copies in 35 languages, never was published in the Soviet Union. Despite KGB attempts to confiscate it, the manuscript was smuggled out and published in the West. Now, it is mandatory reading in Russian schools.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's last book is facing the same censorship in the West that The Gulag Archipelago faced in the Soviet Union. That's because it deals with the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Solzhenitsyn's book Two Hundred Years Together: Russo-Jewish History was published in Russian in 2001/2. Since then, German and French editions have been published, but no English-language edition.

The wikipedia webpage on Alexander Solzhenitsyn includes this statement:
"Solzhenitsyn also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). Never published in the USA, this book stirred controversy and caused Solzhenitsyn to be accused of anti-Semitism."
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Blue Planet

Gunung Padang: The lost records of Atlantis?

Graham Hancock
Facebook.com
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:30 UTC
Gunung Padang
© Pon S PurajatnikaArtist's impression of Gunung Padang as it would have looked in antiquity
"Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Centre for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. "Old stories about Atlantis and other a great lost civilizations of prehistory, long dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be proved true."

I'm climbing with Dr Natawidjaja up the steep slope of a 300-ft high step-pyramid set amidst a magical landscape of volcanoes, mountains and jungles interspersed with paddy fields and tea plantations a hundred miles from the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia.

The pyramid has been known to archaeology since 1914 when megalithic structures formed from blocks of columnar basalt were found scattered amongst the dense trees and undergrowth that then covered its summit. Local people held the site to be sacred and called it Gunung Padang, the name it still goes by today, which means "Mountain of Light", or "Mountain of Enlightenment", in the local Sundanese language. The summit, where the megaliths were found arranged across five terraces had been used as a place of meditation and retreat since time immemorial, archaeologists were told, and again this remains true today.
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Black Magic

Charms to ward off demons found under ancient floors

Megan Gannon
LiveScience
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 16:49 UTC
Ancient Artifacts
© Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/Harvard UniversityThese deposits were buried under an ancient floor in Sardis nearly 2,000 years ago. Archaeologists who found them in 2013 suspect the artifacts may have been part of a ritual to ward off disaster.
Residents of Sardis, an ancient city in modern-day Turkey, spent decades rebuilding after a devastating earthquake struck one night in the year A.D. 17. To ward off demons and future disasters, some locals may have sealed eggshells under their new floors as lucky charms, archaeologists found.

In the summer of 2013 archaeologists were excavating an ancient building at Sardis that was constructed after the earthquake. Underneath the floor, they found two curious containers that each held small bronze tools, an eggshell and a coin, resting just atop the remains of an earlier elite building that was destroyed during the disaster.

The objects in the odd assemblages were important in ancient rituals to keep evil forces at bay, and the archaeologists who found them believe they could be rare examples of how the earthquake affected ancient people on a personal level. [See Images of the Ritual Offerings at Sardis]
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Question

Shocking evidence Hitler escaped Germany


WND.com
Sun, 05 Jan 2014 14:12 UTC
Newly declassified FBI, U.S. intel files raise startling questions.

Hitler Escaped_3
© WND.com
Washington - Everyone knows Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945.

At least, that has been the conventional wisdom.

Now comes WND senior staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi's new book, Hunting Hitler: New Scientific Evidence That Hitler Escaped Germany."

Examining declassified FBI and U.S. military intelligence files, Corsi makes a compelling case that U.S. investigators suspected from the beginning Hitler had escaped. For political purposes, the evidence indicates, they were willing to go along with the cover story that in the final days of World War II, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, and the two took their lives in a joint-suicide ritual just before the Soviet army entered Berlin.

But the truth is, no one actually saw Hitler commit suicide. There are no photographs documenting a joint suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, and the bodies of the two were never recovered or preserved for positive identification.
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Info

Lasers unearth Lost 'Agropolis' of New England

Nsikan Akpan
Science Now
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 17:45 UTC
Aerial Images
© (left to right) UConn MAGIC and CT State Library; CTECO; USDA/NRCSHiding in plain sight. Aerial images of Plainfield, Connecticut, show a farmed region in 1936 (left) and 2012 (middle). LiDAR digital elevation maps (right) unveil the roads, stone walls, and buildings of a former “agropolis,” hiding beneath the canopy.
Hidden ruins are customary in the wild jungles of South America or on the white shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Now, researchers have uncovered a long-lost culture closer to Western civilization - in New England.

Today, southern New England is shrouded by lush forests, whose autumnal colors attract thousands of tourists and hikers each year. Urban hubs - Boston, Providence, Hartford - are peppered throughout. Rewind the clock 300 years, however, and the landscape would be unrecognizable, with much of the wooded countryside replaced by hundred-acre farms. Agriculture was king in New England until widespread industrialization in the 19th century led farmers to abandon their fields and move to cities. The forest stirred and soon reclaimed the disavowed land, cloaking the structural relics of a vast agrarian past.

In a new study, which will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, geographers Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, uncovered these preserved sites without ever lifting a shovel. Using aerial surveys created by LiDAR, a laser-guided mapping technique, the team detected the barely perceptible remnants of a former "agropolis" around three rural New England towns.
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Cardboard Box

Flashback French government queries U.S. State Dept. about fatal 1951 LSD attack on village in south of France


prweb.com
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:19 UTC
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Prompted by a new book release, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research has received a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency, Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), concerning a recent account of American government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France. The DGSE is the French counterpart of the CIA.

The incident took place in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, and is described in a recent book about the 1953 death of an American biochemist, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. The book, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr., was published in late November 2009 by TrineDay, which specializes in books about "suppressed information."

The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold, or to organic mercury poisoning. But Albarelli reports that the outbreak resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He notes that the scientists who produced both alternative explanations worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

Comment: See here for more on the author's comments regarding the shady deal between the French government and U.S. Army scientists.

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Info

Toxic wine led to Alexander the Great death: NZ scientist

Matthew Backhouse
New Zealand Herald
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 15:47 UTC
Alexander the Great
© Wikimedia CommonsBust of a young Alexander the Great from the Hellenistic era, British Museum.
An Otago University scientist may have unravelled a 2000-year-old mystery of what killed Alexander the Great.

National Poisons Centre toxicologist Dr Leo Schep thinks the culprit could be poisonous wine made from an innocuous-looking plant.

Classical scholars have been deeply divided about what killed the Ancient Greek leader, who built a massive empire before his death, aged 32, in June of 323BC. Some accounts say he died of natural causes but others suggested members of his inner circle conspired to poison him at a celebratory banquet.

Dr Schep, who has been researching the toxicological evidence for a decade, said some of the poisoning theories - including arsenic and strychnine - were laughable.

Death would have come far too fast, he said.
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Heart - Black

How the railroad wiped out Passenger pigeons

Sarah Zhang
gizmodo.com.au
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 12:40 UTC
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The advent of the railroad collapsed our notions of time and space, and it carved out entire industries whole - we of the 21st century have only the internet for comparison. It also swallowed entire species: The story of how railroads drove the passenger pigeon to extinction - and bison to the brink of it - is a story of how a technological system can radically transform an entire landscape in just a few years.

To someone living in 1800, the decimation of passenger pigeons and bison would have seemed impossible. There were so many. Billions of passenger pigeons blotted out the sky for days during their migration. Millions of buffalo rumbled like thunder across the plains. But in 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in a zoo, and only a few hundred bison remained in the world.

How did we get there? Let's start with the passenger pigeon, whose demise did, at least, spark the conservation movement that helped spare the bison of the same fate.
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Magnify

Catalhoyuk mural may depict ancient volcanic eruption


pasthorizonspr.com
Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:16 UTC
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© John Swogger Rendering of a wall painting discovered at Shrine 14 during the original excavations of Çatalhöyük by British archaeologist James Mellaart in the 1960s and said to depict Hasan Dagi erupting
A mural excavated at the Neolithic Çatalhöyük site (Central Anatolia, Turkey) has been interpreted as the oldest known map. Dating to 6600 BCE, it putatively depicts an explosive summit eruption of the Hasan Dağı twin-peaks volcano located 130 km northeast of Çatalhöyük, with a birds-eye view of a town plan in the foreground.

This interpretation has always been controversial, not least because independent evidence for a contemporaneous explosive volcanic eruption of Hasan Dağı has been lacking. However, recent volcanic rock dating suggests the painting of the Çatalhöyük mural may have overlapped with an eruption, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Axel Schmitt from the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues from other institutions.

Analysed volcanic rock samples

Scientists analysed rocks from the nearby Hasan Dağı volcano in order to determine whether it was the volcano depicted in the mural. To determine if Hasan Dağı was active during that time, scientists collected and analysed volcanic rock samples from the summit and flanks of the Hasan Dağı volcano using (U-Th)/He zircon geochronology. These ages were then compared to the archaeological date of the mural.
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Calculator

Earliest math document discovered in China


WantChinaTimes
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 16:04 UTC
Mathematical Document
© XinhuaThe bamboo slip mathematical document.
China's earliest mathematical document dating back more than 2,200 years ago has been discovered by archeologists and experts, they announced Tuesday.

The document consists of a mathematical formula inscribed on bamboo slips from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), according to Li Xueqin, head of the Research and Conservation Center for Excavated Texts of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The unearthed document provides a formula for the multiplication of any two whole numbers under 100 and certain fractions, said Li, a well-known historian.

The document is the earliest of its kind discovered so far and has filled in a historical blank for mathematical documents prior to the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE), according to Guo Shuchun, director of the Chinese Society of the History of Mathematics.

It is older and had greater calculating functions than other ancient multiplication tables discovered, said Guo.

"It was very advanced for the world at that time and is an important discovery in the mathematical history of China and even the world."

In July 2008, Tsinghua University acquired a rare collection of 2,500 slip bamboo items belonging to the late Warring States period, which had been smuggled out of China.

Source: Xinhua
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