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Saturday, July 22, 2023

Random News Stories And Articles

    Nearly 2/3 of the casualties in during World War II were civilians, mostly in Russia, China and especially Poland who lost more than 18% of her pre-war population, or one in six. In modern America that would work out to around 60 million dead. Losing 3,000 people on September 11th left a scar on our nation that only recently began to heal, and 3,000 isn’t even a rounding error in a population of over 300 million.

    WW II was a “total war” with both sides attacking non-combatant targets and both sides engaging in what would be considered war crimes, but strangely only the losing side was punished for them. The use of military forces to inflict terror on civilian, non-military targets was blessed by the “good guys” as a legitimate tool to bring about an end to hostilities. Most people know about the dropping of atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but fewer know about places like Dresden in Germany and Tokyo being firebombed. The line between the waging of war and acts of terrorism became quite blurry in the 1940s. War was no longer restricted to battlefields, waged between two opposing armies. It expanded to include civilians not just as “collateral damage” but as intentional targets. Being a non-combatant did mean you could avoid combat.

And he adds:

    The mantra of many conservatives and even /ourguys/ is that we just wanted to be left alone. That position is understandable and often I wish I could just slink away and be left alone, agreeing to hold my tongue if They would just leave me in peace to live out my days. The constant influx of negativity and my endlessly pessimistic response wears me down. What I have come to grips with is that withdrawal and seeking an uneasy peace is not possible. Every waking moment of our enemies is consumed by Their drive to exterminate us. We won’t be left alone because They will never allow us to live in peace for one simple reason:

    It is not what we say or do that makes Them hate us, it is simply our existence that drives their hatred. 

    Representative Jim Jordan revealed that the committee spoke to Laura Dehmlow, the Section Chief of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force on Monday.

    In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Jordan detailed how Dehmlow told the committee that personnel who warned big tech about the Biden laptop knew that it wasn't a Russian operative. 

    'After the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the story was Russian disinformation,' Jordan wrote. 

    Dehmlow said that on October 14, the day the story came out, when an FBI analyst began to respond that the laptop was real, when an FBI lawyer interrupted to say that the FBI had 'no further comment,' regarding the laptop's provenance.

    Later that day, when Dehmlow's Foreign Influence Task Force met with Facebook, she answered a question about the laptop with a 'no comment.'  

    'The FBI's failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling,' Jordan continued. 

    'The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look for a 'hack and dump' operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election.' 
    Ziegler, a 13-year veteran of the IRS who was the main case agent on the Hunter probe, claimed the federal tax investigation into the president's son 'supported felony and misdemeanor tax charges' - rather than just the misdemeanor tax charges Hunter is scheduled to plead guilty to next week as part of a deal that allows him to and avoid prosecution for a separate gun charge.

    The agents said under oath that U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the lead Hunter Biden prosecutor, asked Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves to bring those charges. But after Graves refused, Weiss threw out the potential felony charges and struck a plea deal with the president's son.
The migrant caravan formed on Saturday when a group of Venezuelan migrants began their journey. The migrants claimed Mexico’s government was delaying them and they had been waiting for government buses to take them north to the Chiapas capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez. The group had been staying at the Viva Mexico camp in Tapachula, where migrants told Breitbart Texas that authorities kept them in unsanitary conditions.

    The new population arose “in far eastern Europe on the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas,” Reich said. Archaeologists call them the Yamnaya. They were pastoralists who relied on grazing animals rather than growing crops.

    “The wheel had shortly before been invented and the horse domesticated,” Reich said. The Yamnaya hitched horses to wagons and used them to carry supplies out into the open steppe, allowing them to tend large grazing herds and exploit the steppe better than anyone before.

    Before the Yamnaya arose, a host of different cultures existed on the steppe, each of which left behind distinctive artefacts. Most of these groups then disappeared and were replaced by a homogenous Yamnaya culture.

    “These people spread over a vast territory from Mongolia to Hungary and into Europe, and are the single primary most important contributors to Europeans today,” Reich said. Only after the Yamnaya arrived do the ancient genomes start to resemble those of modern Europeans. Reich also suggested that the Indo-European languages – a vast group including most modern European languages – was first brought into Europe by the Yamnaya.

    Around the same time, people in the vicinity of Spain began making distinctive beakers. These seem to be associated with a set of religious beliefs, known as the Bell Beaker Culture. It first spread by word of mouth, until the incoming Yamnaya adopted it – at which point it became a marker of their expansion.

Replacement 
 
    In February, Reich’s team showed what happened when the Yamnaya’s descendants arrived in Britain 4500 years ago. Within a few hundred years, about 90 per cent of the local gene pool was replaced. The people who made Stonehenge were seemingly wiped out, and few of their genes have survived to the present day. The previous style of artefacts was replaced by Bell Beaker Culture. It’s not clear what happened, but the newcomers may have carried unfamiliar diseases that wiped out the locals. The climate was shifting at the time, which might have added to the problems the locals experienced.

    Now the team has examined what happened on the Iberian peninsula. The Yamnaya’s descendants began mixing with the locals from 4500 years ago. The resulting population had 40 per cent Yamnaya ancestry and 60 per cent local ancestry. So unlike Britain, many of the original farmers managed to pass on their genes.

    But that’s not the complete story. The team found a dramatic shift in the Y-chromosomes, which are only carried by males. “There’s a complete Y-chromosome replacement,” Reich said. The original males’ DNA vanished from the gene pool. “That means males coming in had preferential access to local females, again and again and again,” Reich said.

    This looks like a violent conquest, in which an invading army killed or enslaved the local males and took the local females for their own. “The collision of these two populations was not a friendly one, not an equal one, but one where the males from outside were displacing local males and did so almost completely,” Reich said.

    This could only have happened if society had come firmly under the control of the males, with females being treated as second-class citizens or even property – unlike the more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies that had long since disappeared.

    The first thing to notice here is the bizarre contradiction in behavior on the part of both men.

    Graves, assuming our eyes and the police account do not deceive us, is crazed enough to fatally stab someone in broad daylight, in full view of plenty of witnesses.

    But he wasn’t crazed enough that he didn’t make sure to look out for traffic and even pause his attack to ensure the two women could safely cross.

    As for the 36-year-old victim, who is still unidentified by police — but reportedly was wanted for a Baltimore murder of his own — it’s not at all to blame the deceased to observe that he appeared to have had several chances to simply run away.

    Instead, he chooses to stand and try to fight a man pointing a knife toward his torso.

It reminds me of the article I mentioned the other day from Grant Cunningham about self-defense largely being a matter of not being there, even if that means you apologizing and leaving. 

  • This is from early this year: "Young sacrifice belief in God on altar of Satanism"--The Telegraph. The article relates that "while the macabre occult rituals, virgin sacrifices, chalices of blood and belief in the actual Devil are a thing of the past, Satanism is luring increasing numbers of young people disillusioned with 'outdated' and 'dogmatic' traditional religions to join its fold by offering an 'alternative' to 'stuffy', traditional faiths." The "outdated", "dogmatic", and "stuffy" complaints are, according to the article, related to traditional views on sexuality and gender identity.  
  • FLASHBACK: "For writer who broke Epstein case, a rumored Mossad link is worth digging into"--Times of Israel (July 26, 2021). Not a lot on a Mossad link, but a lot of background on Epstein, Robert Maxwell, and Epstein's relationship with Maxwell's family.
    • More: "Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?"--Rolling Stone. Steven Hoffenberg, who was jailed for a $450M ponzi scheme (or which $100M was apparently stolen and moved offshore by Epstein) had told the reporter that Epstein was involved in intelligence circles. And when the reporter had raised it with Epstein, he went berserk denying it and threatening to ruin the author's life if anything was published about it. But the author describes other tidbits suggesting that Epstein did have intelligence connections.
  • FROM WAYBACK: "Fairy Tales Could Be Older Than You Ever Imagined"--Smithsonian Magazine (2016).

In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a folklorist and an anthropologist say that stories like "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" are much older than originally thought. Instead of dating from the 1500s, the researchers say, some of these classic stories are 4,000 and 5,000 years old. This contradicts previous speculation that story collectors like the Brothers Grimm were relaying tales that were only a few hundred years old.

3 comments:

  1. I, for one, am shocked that the Biden family would use the full force of government to corrupt the electoral process and gain financially. Shocked.

    ReplyDelete