Secret HistoryS


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: 'The State Cannot Convict Itself': Operation 'Gladio' & the Crimes of U.S. Empire

Gary Weglarz
Global Research
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 09:19 UTC
Malcolm X
The key institutions of Western societies have lost their credibility. They fail to merit either the respect or loyalty of the domestic populations they purport to serve.

Testing the validity of this assertion requires examination of Western institutions from a holistic rather than fragmentary perspective. This is easier said than done.

There exists a massive amount of near real-time web based information available for us to process daily if we are attempting to keep abreast of world events. This often leaves us diligently evaluating recent events, while lacking the opportunity to step back and assemble these discrete events into a more comprehensible whole.

The assassinations of the entire elite level of progressive leadership in the United States during the 1960s (JFK, Malcolm X (image left), MLK & RFK within a 5 year period).In Europe this includes the later assassinations of Aldo Moro and Olaf Palme.

Following is but a partial list of the crimes of the U.S. empire (with the routine complicity of many Western European governments) over the decades since the end of WWII. It is important to briefly review them as the intersection of these orchestrated criminal actions casts light on the lack of legitimacy of Western governments and institutions:
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Archaeology

1.6 Billion year old fossils unearthed in India may represent the earliest-known plants

Will Dunham
Reuters
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:21 UTC
1.6 billion year old fossil oldest plant
© ReutersAn X-ray tomographic picture of fossil thread-like red algae, tinted to show detail, unearthed in central India may represent the oldest-known plants on Earth, dating from 1.6 billion years ago, according to research published in the journal PLOS Biology.
Fossils unearthed in India that are 1.6 billion years old and look like red algae may represent the earliest-known plants, a discovery that could force scientists to reassess the timing of when major lineages in the tree of life first appeared on Earth.

Researchers on Tuesday described the tiny, multicellular fossils as two types of red algae, one thread-like and the other bulbous, that lived in a shallow marine environment alongside mats of bacteria. Until now, the oldest-known plants were 1.2-billion-year-old red algae fossils from the Canadian Arctic.

The researchers said cellular structures preserved in the fossils and their overall shape match red algae, a primitive kind of plant that today thrives in marine settings such as coral reefs but also can be found in freshwater environments. A type of red algae known as nori is a common sushi ingredient.

"We almost could have had sushi 1.6 billion years ago," joked Swedish Museum of Natural History geobiologist Therese Sallstedt, who helped lead the study published in the journal PLOS Biology.
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Info

Earth's past volcanic eruptions revealed

Alexandra Witze
Nature
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:59 UTC
Deccan Traps
© Dinodia Photos/GettyIndia’s Western Ghats mountains contain igneous rock deposited 66 million years ago by a volcanic eruption in the Deccan Traps.
Enormous volcanoes vomited lava over the ancient Earth much more often than geologists had suspected. Eruptions as big as the biggest previously known ones happened at least 10 times in the past 3 billion years, an analysis of the geological record shows.

Such eruptions are linked with some of the most profound changes in Earth's history. These include the biggest mass extinction, which happened 252 million years ago when volcanoes blanketed Siberia with molten rock and poisonous gases.

"As we go back in time, we're discovering events that are every bit as big," says Richard Ernst, a geologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and Tomsk State University in Russia, who led the work. "These are magnificent huge things."

Knowing when and where such eruptions occurred can help geologists to pinpoint ore deposits, reconstruct past supercontinents and understand the birth of planetary crust. Studying this type of volcanic activity on other planets can even reveal clues to the geological history of the early Earth.

Ernst presented the findings this month to an industry consortium that funded the work (see 'Earth's biggest eruptions'). He expects to make the data public by the end of the year, through a map from the Commission for the Geological Map of the World in Paris.
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Dig

Six ancient cities built one on top of the other for over 2,000 years unearthed in Kaifeng, China


Archaeology News Network
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 17:30 UTC
Ancient city in China
Six ancient cities buried deep underground and spanning several dynasties over 2,000 years, have been unearthed in Kaifeng, in the east of China's Henan province.

The 2000-square-meter site boasts cultural relics from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), with each city piled one on top of the other.

It includes city gates and walls form the Song Dynasty (960-1279), roads from the Song to the Qing Dynasties, civilian homes and courtyards from the Qing Dynasty, plus courtyard walls from Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).
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Archaeology

400,000 yr-old half-skull found in Portuguese cave points to mystery people

Kerry Sheridan
Yahoo News
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 14:22 UTC
aroeira neanderthal skull
© Javier TruebaThe skull found in the Aroeira cave, which dates from the mid-Pleistocene about 400,000 years ago
The discovery of a 400,000-year-old half skull in Portugal has offered tantalizing hints about a possible ancestor of the Neanderthals, researchers said Monday.

The fossil was unearthed from the Aroeira cave site, and marks the oldest human cranium fossil ever found in Portugal, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

But there is plenty of mystery around the skull. Researchers don't know if it was from a male or female, how the person died, or even what form of early human it was.

"There is a lot of question about which species these fossils represent. I tend to think of them as ancestors of the Neanderthals," co-author Rolf Quam, an anthropologist at Binghamton University, State University of New York, told AFP.

"It is not a Neanderthal itself," he added. "It has some features that might be related to the later Neanderthals," including a lump of bone near the ear called the mastoid process.
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Meteor

Prehistoric Native American culture may have been wiped out by an asteroid


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 09:33 UTC
Asteroids in space
© NASA
The Clovis people were a prehistoric Native American culture that existed roughly 13,200 to 12,900 years ago who suddenly died out at the end of the last Ice Age, along with 35 iconic species of animals with little or no explanation as to why - until now.

A team of three archaeologists at the University of South Carolina recently published a study which looked at 11 dig sites across North America and found elevated levels of platinum in very specific soil layers.

"The presence of elevated platinum in archaeological sites is a confirmation of data previously reported for the Younger-Dryas onset several years ago in a Greenland ice-core," Christopher Moore, the lead author of the study, told the Archaeology News Network.

This 'Younger-Dryas' period is best known as one of extreme cooling that began around 12,800 years ago and lasted for roughly 1,400 years. This period coincided with the end of the Clovis culture and the extinction of over 35 species of Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. But why would they die out if they had already managed to survive through an ice age.

"Platinum is very rare in Earth's crust, but it is common in asteroids and comets," Moore said. In other words, North America may well have witnessed an extinction-level event similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs, but one third of its size.
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Info

Albert Einstein's thoughts on the meaning of life

Paul Ratner
Big Think
Sun, 12 Mar 2017 19:22 UTC
Albert Einstein
© AFP/Getty ImagesPortrait taken 06 February 1938 at Princeton University of physicist Albert Einstein, author of theory of relativity.
Albert Einstein was one of the world's most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.

The collection of essays and ideas The World As I See It gathers Einstein's thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says "at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age".

In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity.
"What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life," wrote Einstein.
Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.
Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein's spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.
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Fish

420 million-year-old 'armored' fish fossil found in SW China


RT
Sun, 12 Mar 2017 21:33 UTC
Life restoration of Sparalepis tingi (foreground) and other fauna from the Kuanti Formation
© journals.plos.orgLife restoration of Sparalepis tingi (foreground) and other fauna from the Kuanti Formation.
Scientists in China have discovered a rare fossil fragment of an "armored" fish, which may prove that the so-called Fish Age happened much earlier in Earth's evolutionary history than previously thought.

A partial fossil of the Sparalepis tingi, a 20cm-long fish, found in China's Yunnan province could turn the paleontological world on its head. Named after the Sparabara infantry of the Persian Empire, the fish's scales resemble the wicker shields the warriors carried into battle.

For decades, the fossil evidence has led the scientific community to believe the surge in global vertebrate, jawed fish populations began during the Devonian Period (419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago).
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Info

5066 yo tree is considered the oldest known living organism on Earth


The Vintage News
Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
Oldest tree
Hidden in the mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah, lurk some of the oldest known long-living species of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, or Pinus longaeva. One member of this species, noted to be 5066 years old, is considered the oldest known living organism on Earth. The ancient tree can be found in the White Mountains in California, but its exact location is kept secret. The tree was cored by specialist Edmund Shulman, dedicated researcher and explorer of long-lived trees, and its age was determined by Tom Harlan.

The age of the tree means that it was alive while Stonehenge was under construction and around the time when the first writing system was invented in Sumeria.

Dating from the Bronze Age, the Great Basin bristlecone pine belongs to a species that does not grow taller than 15 meters, and its trunk does not extend in diameter more than 3.6 meters. These ancient trees have knotted and gnarled appearance, especially those growing at higher altitudes. They also have reddish-brown bark with deep fissures.

The Great Basin bristlecone pine differentiates from the Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine in its needles; the first always have a pair of unceasing resin canals, and so lack the emblematic small white resin flecks of the second. Unique too are its cones that are more rounded compared to the more pointed ones of the other species.
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Book 2

Margaret Atwood: What 'The Handmaid's Tale' means in today's world

Margaret Atwood
New York Times
Fri, 10 Mar 2017 23:10 UTC
Handmaids tale
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid's Tale. I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I'd rented.

The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain — Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. "It can't happen here" could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
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