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Sunday, October 15, 2023

Odds And Ends

 Just some miscellaneous articles I found interesting:

  • "Rod Serling: The Voyage into the Twilight Zone"--Gun America. A brief biography of Serling, with particular emphasis on his service in World War II. As a paratrooper, he had hoped to be sent to Europe to fight Nazis, but instead his unit was deployed to the Pacific to fight in the campaign there, including the liberation of the Philippines. While there, he won the Bronze Star. As a demolition expert, he appears to have mostly used an M1 carbine. 
  • "Comet Impact Sparked a Massive Change on Earth 13,000 Years Ago"--ScienceAlert. The article contends that a comet impact caused the Younger-Dryas and prompted a shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture. An excerpt:

    •     "We present substantial new quantitative evidence and interpretations supporting the hypothesis that comet fragments triggered near-global shifts in climate ~12,800 years ago, and one airburst destroyed the Abu Hureyra village," the authors write.

        The sediment layers revealed many factors, including types of plants collected in warmer, humid days before the YD climate change and in the colder, drier days after.

        "These data include changes in building architecture, diet, the early stages of persistent cultivation of domestic-type grains and legumes," the team adds, "and the initial penning of livestock, marking the beginning of sustained agriculture and animal domestication." 
     
  • "A Sword for the Ages"--Archaeology Magazine. 
A zigzag pattern, now tinged with the green-blue patina of oxidized metal, adorns the octagonal hilt of a rare sword dating to the Middle Bronze Age in Germany (1600–1200 B.C.) that was recently excavated in the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. Archaeologists discovered the weapon—which is in such pristine condition they say it still glints—alongside the remains of a woman, man, and child and a smattering of artifacts including arrowheads, daggers, and jewelry. Forged entirely of bronze, the 26-inch-long weapon is the work of a skilled swordsmith. Although it weighs approximately two pounds, it is so well balanced that it would have been effective for cutting or slashing, but the lack of wear on the blade and hilt suggests it was never used.

Based on the photo, the weapon is intact other than the light patina of oxidation mentioned above.

    The find was uncovered within the remains of a 2,000-year-old marketplace east of the well-preserved Temple of Zeus in Anatolia, a site of intense excavation since its rediscovery in 1998.

    The archeologists uncovered 10 different hues of ancient Roman makeup pigments, mostly shades of red and pink, as well as jewelry, perfume bottles and other cosmetic antiquities. 

Their ideas of beauty do not seem much different from ours, although perhaps more painful as, according to other articles I've read and videos I've watched, they tended to pluck rather than shave. 

Helion, a fusion power company, and Nucor Corporation, the largest steel producer and recycler in North America, today announced an agreement to develop a 500 MWe fusion power plant at a Nucor steel manufacturing facility in the United States. This collaboration is aimed at accelerating the future of clean energy in the industrial manufacturing sector.
    It is not a secret that the western political class undergoes a selection process before being set loose on their populations. Various programs have been set up to recruit and indoctrinate promising young (and not so young) people for leadership positions in government and business. Some of these programs are shady and operate on a personal level while others have a “probing function” and are out in the open – such as the WEF’s “young global leaders” program. A significant number of high-level people are involved in this recruitment drive, including SPECTRE agents Klaus Schwab and George Soros. A recent success is Nikol Pashinyan who has been reconfigured as a suicide drone and aimed at the Armenian people.

    After selection and ideological enhancement, these leaders are assisted in infiltrating governments and organizations around the world – as Klaus Schwab has bragged about publicly. Should they succeed, they are protected and assisted at every turn, and then provided with a well-paid job at some international organization as a reward for their service and loyalty. The assistance and protection is usually carried out by government or supranational organizations, including EU organizations, and various intelligence services, which have an enforcement role. Step out of line and there will be a scandal. If you are a leader of a country, there will be regime change. This process is both intended to ensure loyalty of the recruited and to keep the others in line.
    Command and staff colleges had traditionally been the places where aspiring senior commanders really learned their trade as majors or lieutenant commanders. This used to include a serious study of military theory, history and staff planning. That is not currently the case.

    Today, seminar groups are led by two instructors -- one a uniformed officer and the other an academic. There is generally no requirement that either be an expert in combined-arms combat on land, in the air, or on the sea. In some cases, they're simply not knowledgeable about the study of war.

    If there is a constant in the military profession, it is that the great captains -- with the possible exception of born military geniuses such as Genghis Khan -- have been keen students of history. The greats, from Alexander to Patton, have been avid readers of history, through which they learned the patterns of conflict. War is largely immutable. Technologies change, but the nature of war largely remains the same. Even Genghis -- who was probably illiterate -- sent his aspiring commanders to study under his great subordinate Subutai, arguably one of the great strategic and operational geniuses of history. Patton could see a situation in Sicily that reminded him of a similar battle in the Second Punic War. Offering second-rate advanced degrees in national security studies or international relations is no substitute for the serious study of war. Advanced degrees can be obtained through the GI Bill.

Connecticut limits who can return a voter’s absentee ballot, and the lawsuit alleges that video footage of a ballot drop box appears to show multiple people depositing multiple absentee ballots into the receptacle, — called ballot harvesting — including a Ganim supporter.

The article adds:

    Meanwhile, other Democratic candidates have also alleged election fraud reminiscent of claims made by GOP candidates nationwide, and largely ridiculed by media operatives.

    For example, last month in Mississippi, Hinds County District 2 Supervisor David Archie (D) claimed that Democratic Executive Committee Chair Jacqueline Amos was involved in fraud in the party primary election in August. Amos said that the primary was conducted “in keeping with applicable state law” and that Archie had “the right to challenge the results” of the election.

It also mentions cases from Virginia and Florida. 

    The FBI took over a 2020 probe into voter registration fraud that began in Michigan but has denied a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the investigation, citing an exemption in that law regarding ongoing investigations.

    According to the dozens of pages of police reports from the Muskegon Police Department and Michigan State Police, a firm called GBI Strategies was under scrutiny as an organization central to alleged voter registration fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The matter was initially investigated by city and state authorities before the FBI took over. 

    Contacts between local law enforcement and the FBI continued into 2022 but there is no evidence of what happened after that in the memos obtained by Just the News through requests made under Michigan's own Freedom of Information Act.

    Last week, the FBI denied a Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts request from Just the News regarding records from the investigation into GBI Strategies.
    Last week, Headline USA revealed that a longtime FBI informant co-founded one of America’s oldest and largest neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement, which participated and committed violence in the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.

    With only a little over 20 NSM members at Charlottesville, the group’s involvement could, at first blush, be viewed as relatively minor—if viewed in isolation.

    But that’s far from the whole story.

    Court records further show that the NSM was part of a larger neo-Nazi coalition called the Nationalist Front, an alliance comprising a number of other groups at Charlottesville that were allegedly infiltrated by the FBI, including the Confederate Hammerskins and the League of the South.

    Moreover, a fourth member of the FBI-linked Nationalist Front, the now-defunct Vanguard America, was seen marching with James Fields—the man who murdered counterprotester Heather Heyer with his car.

    Vanguard America has since mutated into yet another group widely believed to be infiltrated by the FBI: the Patriot Front.

    The accusations about the League of the South and the Confederate Hammerskins come from former NSM member and convicted felon Bill White. As Headline USA reported last week, the prison inmate’s accusations are newsworthy because he’s provided FBI memos and affidavits to support at least some of his claims, and because the U.S. government has retaliated against him for his disclosures.
The FBI is hiring credentialed teachers (K-12) to work as special agents. It’s obviously not a secret—just Google FBI hiring teachers. The obvious question is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be hiring teachers. I have the answer from the inside. They plan to embed these teachers in school systems nationwide to report on teachers, administrations, and school boards suspected of “domestic terrorism”, which is to say, going against the woke agenda that USGOV supports.
    Israeli software maker Insanet has reportedly developed a commercial product called Sherlock that can infect devices via online adverts to snoop on targets and collect data about them for the biz's clients.

    This is according to an investigation by Haaretz, which this week claimed the spyware system had been sold to a country that is not a democracy.

    The newspaper's report, we're told, marks the first time details of Insanet and its surveillanceware have been made public. Furthermore, Sherlock is capable of drilling its way into Microsoft Windows, Google Android, and Apple iOS devices, according to cited marketing bumf.

    "According to the findings of the investigation, this is the first case in the world where a system of this sort is being sold as technology, as opposed to a service," journo Omer Benjakob wrote, adding Insanet received approval from Israel's Defense Ministry to sell Sherlock globally as a military product albeit under various tight restrictions, such as only selling to Western nations.
    At a Nara police station, the suspect—a 41-year-old named Tetsuya Yamagami—admitted to the shooting barely 30 minutes after pulling the trigger. He then offered a motive that sounded too outlandish to be true: He saw Abe as an ally of the Unification Church, a group better known as the Moonies—the cult founded in the 1950s by the Korean evangelist Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yamagami said his life had been ruined when his mother gave the church all of the family’s money, leaving him and his siblings so poor that they often didn’t have enough to eat. His brother had committed suicide, and he himself had tried to.

    “My prime target was the Unification Church’s top official, Hak Ja Han, not Abe,” he told the police, according to an account published in January in a newspaper called The Asahi Shimbun. He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was “deeply connected” to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been.

    Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true. After a quick huddle, the police appear to have decided that the Moonie connection was too sensitive to reveal, at least for the moment. It might even affect the outcome of the elections for the Upper House of the Diet, set to take place on July 10. At a press conference on the night of the assassination, a police official would say only that Yamagami had carried out the attack because he “harbored a grudge against a specific group and he assumed that Abe was linked to it.” When reporters clamored for details, the official said nothing.

    After the election, the Unification Church confirmed press reports that Yamagami’s mother was a member, and the story quickly took off. The Moonies, it emerged, maintained a volunteer army of campaign workers who had long been a secret weapon not just for Abe but for many other politicians in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remains in power under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Later that month, the Japanese tabloid Nikkan Gendai published a list of 111 members of parliament who had connections to the church. In early September 2022, the LDP announced that almost half of its 379 Diet members had admitted to some kind of contact with the Unification Church, whether that meant accepting campaign assistance or paying membership fees or attending church events. According to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun, 290 members of prefectural assemblies, as well as seven prefectural governors, also said they had church ties. The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.

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