Interesting.
Atmospheric scientist Bill Nichols offers a refreshing reconsideration of climate issues, with emphasis on the electrodynamic environment of the Earth, largely overlooked in the polarized debates on climate change.
New research paper says we are still at risk of the plague
Results show that a number of factors show we are still at risk of plague today. This is largely due to transport trade and novel threats in developing countries where multi-drug resistant pathogens are currently emerging and spreading rapidly. This genetic change has also contributed to a development in the way the bacteria infect new hosts meaning they can now live in mammalian blood.
The study also highlighted the need for effective management of epidemics in future. Fear of an infection can have a negative impact on a population’s economic situation due to a significant loss of tourism, and widespread panic. History has shown us that providing the necessary information about diseases and improving the management of epidemics are vital steps for avoiding panic and containing diseases.
If it comes, it won’t be the old one, but a new one. I’ll be discussing plagues in detail in the next volume of my Secret History of the World series!
Great interview. Short but pithy! He says that the global warmists are “committed to bullshit”! That’s about it.
Alexander Cockburn dumps on nuclear loving greens and man made global warming
I’m not sure that people are awake enough and smart enough to really grasp what this means. Normalcy bias takes over and people think “it won’t happen here”. Or they are authoritarian followers and think the PTB can do what they like “for our good”. The PTB, on the other side, are just doing this as a test – because they are pretty sure they can get away with it for the mentioned reasons. They’ll start with 10% and then go to 50% to 75% to 80%. But really, if I were you and had savings, I’d remove them from banks. It will happen; they do not want anyone to have any resources to resist their full-spectrum dominance.
The crazy theft of depositor savings in Cyprus could start a European bank run on Monday
You can be forgiven for thinking that you don’t need to give a hoot about what’s going on in Cyprus this weekend.
After all, it’s just a little island somewhere in the Mediterranean.
But what’s going on in Cyprus could actually matter – not just to the rest of Europe, but to the rest of the world.
Here’s the short version of what’s happening:
Cyprus’s banks, like many banks in Europe, are bankrupt.
Cyprus went to the Eurozone to get a bailout, the same way Ireland, Greece, and other European countries have.
The Eurozone powers-that-be gave Cyprus a bailout – but with a startling condition that has never before been imposed on any major banking system since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008.
The Eurozone powers-that-be (mainly, Germany) insisted that the depositors in Cyprus’s banks pay part of the tab.
Not the bondholders.
The depositors. The folks who had their money in the banks for safe-keeping.
In the Name of Sanity, by Lewis Mumford
Parts of this book were written in 1946 just as the world was emerging from the insanity of the second World War. What Mumford described was, basically, the foundations of the ensuing cold war. It’s chilling to realize that what he predicted did happen, and even more chilling to see how his predictions have played out in 9-11 and everything that has happened since then.
Mumford was very concerned about the planet and humanity at a time when very few other people had the same vision that he did. He wrote about the coming of an era of hate, fear, suspicion and violence which is most certainly the norm of our present day in almost the exact terms he predicted.
Mumford’s primary concern was that humanity has come to rely on aggression for national security instead of making peace and helping others and accepting a multi-cultural world. He saw clearly that we were becoming the barbarians we think are “over there” somewhere else, that we need to control or destroy.
A timeless and timely book, simply and eloquently argued; a must read for everyone.
The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
I read references to the work of Fustel de Coulanges in the writings of the great and heroic French historian Marc Bloch (The Historian’s Craft) and was intrigued enough to get and read it. What an eye-opener! It is undoubtedly among the top 10 seminal historical works ever written, in my opinion. Considering the data that Fustel did not have access to, for which some criticize him, makes this achievement even that much more impressive. His thought revealed in his writing is clear, insightful, brilliant.
What you will find in this book is a masterful story of the descent of the many institutions to which we are still heir though the context and specific manifestations have changed. In many cases, we believe things about why this or that custom has always been with us that are wrong, and Fustel sets out the evidence for what is really behind such things as marriage ceremonies, carrying the bride over the threshold, the foundations of the legal system including why it was the eldest son who got everything for thousands of years, and so forth. There are many questions about why things are the way they are answered in this book.
As other reviewers have noted, there are many descriptions in The Ancient City that will bring elements of the Bible to mind. The big question nowadays is: did the Bible borrow from other stories and cultures to create a “history of Israel” that never actually happened? Were some of those stories Greek? And were the Greek stories influenced by elements from Anatolia and Mesopotamia, coming to the Bible by a circuitous route? Did the authors of the Septuagint borrow from Homer and Herodotus?
These are all questions that are interesting and can be better formulated by also reading Russel Gmirkin’s book, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, and Bruce Louden’s book, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East.
Despite some of the nit-picking criticisms that have been directed at Fustel over the years, I’ve never found a significant argument that Fustel got it wrong. His sweeping overview of “how things must have happened” by taking what we know and back-engineering it, is amazing. Everyone should – and can – read it because Fustel was not a stuffy academic who wanted to wrap bizarre ideas in obscure language: he wanted to set out a rational view of why our culture is the way it is which can seem to be totally irrational until you understand what is behind things. If he had had knowledge of periodic cosmic catastrophes such as those explicated in the works of Victor Clube and Bill Napier (The Cosmic Serpent), as well as Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith (The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture) he would have been able to take the topic to its most basic level: fear of death manipulated by individuals seeking power. For that part of the story, you need to read Becker’s Escape from Evil.
In any event, The Ancient City is definitely a big piece of the puzzle. If you read the works of Julius Caesar, (Caesar’s Commentaries. The Complete Gallic Wars (Latin Edition)) you will want to read Fustel first so as to better understand that most amazing of heroes, the one who could have saved Rome had the wealthy elite not been so greedy and psychopathic, and had he not been so humane and forgiving.
In short, in order to understand a lot of things about ancient history, the history of Rome, and our own civilization which is the daughter of Rome, you need to read Fustel. And you will enjoy it and be glad you did!
I’ve been saying it for years too!
In this new video from Big Think, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says he’s almost embarrassed for our species that it takes a warning shot across our bow before legislators take seriously the warning they’ve been getting from astronomers that its a matter of when not if Earth will get smacked by an asteroid.
“But it took an actual meteor over Russia exploding with 25 times the power of the atom bomb in Hiroshima to convince people that maybe we should start doing something about it.
The latest research indicates that it’s not the multi-million-year larger space rocks that we need to be concerned about, but the swarms of smaller objects that wreak havoc on human civilizations far more often than people realise…
Nice little summation!
A serious topic, but we have a bit of fun with it.
Remember how we were told to eat all our veggies when we were younger because they were good for us? Is that really true? This week we’re going to take a look at the myth of the ‘balanced diet’ as promoted by the USDA and other state agencies. Mass cultivation of grains and vegetables has had devastating consequences for the planet’s biosphere, not least the one billion-plus people who go hungry daily, a top soil exhausted of the basic nutrients for growing crops, and a mechanized global food industry that poisons the environment at every stage of production.
GMOs are promoted by Big Agribusiness as the answer to global food shortages, but independent studies indicate that genetically modified food is not fit for human or animal consumption. GMOs are already prevalent in the food supply so is it too late to stop Monsanto’s world takeover? And is there really a food shortage to begin with? If Goldman Sachs and other market predators can pocket $400 million in 2012 alone from betting against the price of food, then commodity prices are clearly distorted. So what is the real outlook for food supply and demand?
People who seek healthy options appear to be hemmed in on all sides, but perhaps if we look to the past, we can find a way out? Our ancestors survived Ice Ages on paleo diets that were high in meat and saturated fats, and distinctly low on carbs. Tens of thousands of people experimenting with ‘going paleo’ have reported excellent health results – results that the Big Agribusiness and Big Pharma-sponsored scientific establishment said should not have happened.
But they did, and now, on the eve of global civilization’s collapse – due in large part to its addiction to increasingly refined carbs – word is getting around that saturated fat is where it’s at.
12 Year Old Vegan Has the Degenerating Bones of 80 Year Old
A 12 year old girl raised on a strict vegan diet was admitted to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, Scotland, suffering from a severe form of rickets. The girl had already experienced multiple fractures and been diagnosed with a degenerated spine comparable to that of an unhealthy 80-year-old woman.
Fox News reports the hospital doctors are under pressure to report the couple to police and social workers. Dr. Faisal Ahmed, a pediatrician treating the child, declined to discuss specifics, but allowed the dangers of forcing children to follow a strict vegan diet need to be publicized.
If raised strictly vegan, the child would almost certainly have severe deficiencies of Vitamins A and D, both of which are essential bone nutrients that can only be obtained from animal products. In all likelihood, she would also be lacking needed calcium, zinc, B-12 as well as other B vitamins, Vitamin K, the EPA and DHA fatty acids and the sulfur containing amino acids methionine and cysteine.
Not a surprise. Vegetables and fruits are silent killers. Man evolved to eat MEAT.
Are we becoming more stupid? Human brain has been ‘shrinking for the last 20,000 years’
It’s not something we’d like to admit, but it seems the human race may actually be becoming increasingly dumb. Man’s brain has been gradually shrinking over the last 20,000 years, according to a new report. This decrease in size follows two million years during which the human cranium steadily grew in size, and it’s happened all over the world, to both sexes and every race.
‘Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,’ Kathleen McAuliffe writes in Discover magazine. ‘The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.’
She was reporting on comments made by Dr John Hawks, an anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, who argues that the fact the size of the human brain is decreasing doesn’t necessarily mean our intelligence is in decline as well. Some paleontologists agree with this diagnosis, that our brains may have become smaller in size, but increasingly efficient. But others believe that man has indeed become steadily more stupid as he has evolved.
And it coincides, almost perfectly with the implementation of agriculture.
One-third of Americans cutting back on gluten consumption
More US residents are trying to avoid consuming gluten, the protein responsible for the condition known as celiac disease, than are dieting, according to recently released research conducted by market information firm NPD Group.
Furthermore, in January 2013, approximately one-third of all American adults said they are attempting to reduce or eliminate the substance in their diets. According to The NPD Group’s latest report, that’s the highest percentage since the group began asking American consumers about gluten consumption four years ago.
So, it’s getting to be mainstream. You can count on snake-oil salesmen to show up with all kinds of “gluten-free” products that are NOT.
