Next August will make this blog idea 10 years-old. I learned quite a bit during that time. I would say that I received some of the best education ever just by doing the darned thing. You have to think before you publish. It becomes a habit.
I don’t really like the design of the new blog. I don’t care right now; what was bothering me was knowing this blog is almost full (97%) and I had to move quickly. However, I start with a handicap because I refuse to pay for it. I figure WP makes enough just from advertising on my pages. Also, I want the poorest persons from Nepal or Rio De Janeiro, or whatever, to have the same privileges I have. That is why we have the Internet. Not just to make money ye capitalistic swine. Happy face emoticon.
Michael McCaffrey lives in Los Angeles where he works as an acting coach, screenwriter and consultant. He is also a freelance film and cultural critic whose work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog.
21 Mar, 2020
Regular Americans can no longer numb themselves with sports and gluttony, freeing them to clearly see the malignantly craven ruling class that exploits and despises them. If only they would open their eyes to reality.
Anyone who has eyes to see can clearly make out that America is an addled empire in steep decline that is firmly entrenched in its bread-and-circuses stage. This has been brought into clear focus due to Covid-19. Since there is now a shortage of bread, as supermarket shelves are bare, and the distraction of the circus of sports has been indefinitely removed from the culture, Americans are left with little to distract them from cold, hard reality.
With no brawls or ballgames to watch, and the fear of potential hunger gnawing at their bloated bellies and brains, and with social distancing leaving them isolated with little but their thoughts as company, Americans will now find it harder and harder to ignore the truth about their country and its deplorably corrupt media, financial, government, education and health care systems, that is staring them in the face.
As the old adage goes, crisis reveals character, and the coronavirus contagion is a crisis of epic proportions that is revealing America to be utterly devoid of any redeeming character whatsoever.
If America were a sane, healthy, and rational country this would be a great opportunity for change to occur…alas, it is not. America is an insane, unhealthy and irrational nation, and so any genuine change is inconceivable.
For example, this crisis has once again revealed the house of cards that is the smoke and mirrors American economy. The American economy has long been rigged through financialization, where stock buybacks and accounting shenanigans inflate the stock market but create nothing of substance for the masses except the illusion of prosperity. Here in America the economy long ago stopped working for regular folks, as evidenced by the fact that despite productivity soaring, for the last forty years wages have remained stagnant, while the cost of living has escalated.
The American Way has devolved into a bizarre reverse-Robin Hood world, where the rich steal from the poor and keep it for themselves. Proof of this is that this Covid-19 crisis will undoubtedly be used, just as the 2008 collapse, as a way for the malicious narcissists in Washington, Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms to come together to assure that all their losses are socialized and their profits privatized. Casinos, cruise lines, airlines, hotels and others are already lining up — including of course the scoundrels on Wall Street — for their taxpayer-funded handout.
Bailing out working- and middle-class Americans, though, is an absolute non-starter for the ruling elite. The upper crust will throw around vacuous catch phrases, like the deliciously ironic “moral hazard,” to make their argument, which is pretty rich considering the vermin on Wall Street and their cronies on Capitol Hill are so morally bereft, it is a hazard to all humanity.
Coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as the cancerous corruption that is endemic in our oligarchic corporatocracy. For proof of that look no further than Nancy Pelosi’s emergency “sick pay” bill, that exempts companies of over 500 employees from paying sick pay — and has a boatload of special exemptions for businesses below that threshold — which leaves all but 20% of workers eligible for benefits. The holes in Pelosi’s bill are bigger than the gaping void where her brain and soul should be.
This corruption of the elites is bipartisan, as evidenced by two Republican Senators, Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler (who is married to Jeffrey Sprechter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange), who allegedly took advantage of classified briefings on the impending severity of coronavirus in late January and early February to pull off some slick insider trading maneuvers so they could cash in before the public had any clue what was coming. Both, of course, deny any impropriety.
The egregious economic divide in America is further highlighted by the Covid-19 debate over whether to close schools amidst the crisis. The reason this debate raged on well past the rational time to act is that our education system is not a system of learning but rather a glorified daycare and food delivery service.
Proletarian parents are unable to stay home and raise their kids anymore because it now takes two parents — usually working multiple jobs — to make less equivalently than what one working parent did forty years ago.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 70% of all students are below the poverty line and rely on the school system for the majority of their meals. In the wealthiest country on the planet, that is absolutely disgraceful. The virus of structural economic inequality isa much more long-term and deadly problem than coronavirus, and the ruling class and their shameless lackeys in the press, have no interest in ever honestly addressing or acknowledging it.
The corporate whores in Congress and the White House (of both parties) also gleefully inform Americans that universal, single-payer health care, which every other industrialized nation in the world already has, is a pipe dream and impossibility.
They tell us they could never ever pay for something so decadent and luxurious as health care, but then they magically pull $1.5 trillion out of their gold-plated assholes in order to stave off a collapse of their own making. It is amazing how the Lords of Finance can make money miraculously appear in order to get things done when it is their exorbitant wealth on the line, and not ordinary Americans’ health and wellbeing.
Coronavirus is a crisis that is revealing the ugly truth about America and the malignant character of its ruling class. The crisis is going to get worse before it gets better, but it eventually will get better. America, on the other hand, will only get much worse, with no hope that it is ever going to get better.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Claire Edwards was speaking at a seminar in Oslo, Norway, on Saturday 26 October 2019.
Elon Musk has now applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch a further 30,000 satellites into Earth orbit, bringing the current total to 53,000 (October 2019). With the issues of space debris and weaponization being the two major issues of concern at the UN year after year, this is a mad enterprise, especially when NATO intends to declare space a domain of warfare in December 2019.
We stand at the brink of extinction if we do not stop the madness.
Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Since May 2018, she has collaborated with Arthur Firstenberg to publish the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org), which is available in 30 languages. The Appeal has attracted over 153,000 individual and group signatories from more than 207 countries as of 7 October 2019. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.
This image shows an oil well in an agricultural field in the town of al-Qahtaniyah, in Syria’s Hasakah province near the Turkish border on June 10, 2019. (Photo by AFP)
Russia has slammed President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy troops into Syrian oil fields as “criminal activity,” accusing the US of seeking to smuggle out oil worth over “$30 million” per month.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the US was “pumping oil out of northeastern Syria” while masking “its criminal activity by some pretexts of a struggle against the Daesh terrorist group.”
The remarks come after Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all troops from northeastern Syria, announcing last week the deployment of about 500 troops to the oil fields controlled by US-backed Kurdish forces.
Speaking earlier this week, Pentagon chief Mark Esper said the deployment will seek to secure oil resources from Daesh. Washington, he said, will use “overwhelming” force against any other actor challenging the US, including Syria’s own government.
Speaking last week, however, US President Donald Trump suggested that Washington sought economic interests by controlling the oil fields.
“We want to keep the oil, and we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, have some cashflow. Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly,” said Trump.
The developments come as Damascus is in great need of its major oil deposits in order to gain revenue and address its energy needs amid crippling unilateral Western sanctions targeting the war-ravaged country.
Due to the sanctions and war, Syria is currently extracting only 10 percent of its pre-war oil production capacity.
A graph showing Syria’s annual oil production demonstrates how the foreign-backed terrorist insurgency in Syria (2011-2019) has led to a steep fall in the country’s oil production. (Image via Bloomberg)
Zakharova said the US was effectively “bypassing its own sanctions” against Syria by seizing the country’s oil.
She added that Washington was hypocritically declaring “commitment to some democratic values and international law” while flagrantly violating the country’s sovereignty.
The spokeswoman stressed that it was within the rights of the international community to question America’s activities, warning that US troops were “not going to leave the areas in the near future”.
Syria, along with Iran and Turkey, have already denounced Washington’s illegal appropriation of Syrian oil.
Speaking on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif sarcastically praised Trump for admitting that he intends to “secure” the Syrian oil.
“At least President Trump is honest to say what the United States intends to do,” Zarif quipped.
“The United States has bombed and/or invaded: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Cuba, Panama, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala and Cambodia to name just a few of the examples we are aware of. Yet mainstream media discussions about ‘threats to world peace’ never mention the trigger happy US.”
According to a fresh United Nations Report, the US and its allies in Afghanistan have been responsible for more civilian deaths in the country than the Taliban* whom they are supposed to be fighting. What a damning indictment of US Foreign policy and engagement.
Although US troops are supposed to be no longer engaged in actual combat they are on the ground and provide arms, training and logistics to the fledgeling Afghan army. The US air force also provides air support and executes deadly airstrikes regularly.
At least 3,812 civilians have been killed or wounded in the first half of 2019, the United Nations said, noting a big increase in the number of casualties caused by government and NATO-led troops.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) called the toll “shocking and unacceptable”, and urged parties to Afghanistan’s 18-year war to heed a demand from Afghan delegates at a recent peace conference in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, to reduce civilian casualties to zero.
The United Nations report said 83 percent of casualties from airstrikes were attributed to “international military forces,” essentially pointing the finger at the United States military, which is the only member of the international coalition in Afghanistan that carries out airstrikes. The Afghan Air Force was responsible for about 10 percent.
In the first six months of the year, the conflict killed nearly 1,400 civilians and wounded about 2,400 more. Afghan forces and their allies caused 52 percent of the civilian deaths compared with 39 percent attributable to militants — mostly the Taliban, but also the Islamic State* [Daesh in Arabic]. The figures do not total 100 percent because responsibility for some deaths could not be definitively established. So 717 civilians have been killed by the US and its allies compared to 531 civilians killed by the Taliban or others.
Even the mainstream US paper, The New York Times, was compelled to state:
“Afghan security forces and their American-led international allies have killed more civilians so far this year than the Taliban have, the United Nations said in a report on Tuesday, once again raising alarm that ordinary Afghans are bearing the brunt of an increasingly deadly 18-year war”.
The United States has bombed and/or invaded: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Cuba, Panama, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala and Cambodia to name just a few of the examples we are aware of. Yet mainstream media discussions about ‘threats to world peace’ never mention the trigger happy US. Sure North Korea, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are mentioned and demonised constantly but never the country that is actually the most aggressive and dangerous on the planet. If you are looking for the single biggest threat to world peace look no further than the United States of America. A recent United Nations Report confirms that fact.
In the last few weeks the ratcheting up of hysteria and demonising of Iran has been put into full gear. A country that has not invaded another nation for 200 years and has itself been invaded twice in the last century, 1941 and 1980, is the biggest threat on the world stage according to US billionaire owned media outlets.
In 1980 Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq whom the US and UK were supporting, encouraging and arming Hussein to the teeth. A bloody and brutal eight-year conflict ensued which claimed several million lives. Iran did not seek or start that war but accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 1988. They have no desire to start any new wars.
In the intervening period between 1980 and now, however, the US and UK not only switched from arming and supporting Saddam Hussein, they actually invaded Iraq in 2003 to illegally depose him and killed over one million Iraqi civilians in the process.
The Iraq war was based on a false premise of weapons of mass destruction possession. Dossiers were invented, grainy videos were created and a compliant press and media went into overdrive to propagandise on behalf of the US and UK.
President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair deliberately lied to their respective political chambers to justify an unnecessary and brutal ‘shock and awe’ strategy of carpet bombing followed by physical invasion. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they both knew it. After all the US and UK possessed the receipts for all the weapons Saddam Hussain had. The US and UK had sold those weapons to him during his most tyrannical years in power. When he was gassing the Kurds and killing almost 5,000 mostly women and children in Halabja in March 1988 he was using US and UK supplied planes and materials. After the atrocity both the US and UK continued to supply Iraq and Saddam with arms.
Since the 2003 invasion, Iraq has been a basket case nation. Infrastructure decimated, political structures destroyed and over one million civilian lives extinguished. American media duped many Americans into believing Iraq was behind the horrible 9/11 attacks which devastated New York. They had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and al Qaeda or ISIS* Islamic terrorists had no presence or base in Iraq prior to 2003. Now the country is riven with ISIS sponsored terror attacks and religious and tribal civil wars. Only weeks ago the capital Baghdad witnessed a suicide bomb attack that claimed 250 civilian lives, the largest single civilian loss of life since 2003. American invasion and intervention has been a disaster for Iraq and its population.
The civilised world has to unite and muster the courage to expose the dastardly role of the US in destabilising so much of the world through deadly bombings and invasions and the economic terrorism of sanctions designed to cripple countries abilities to produce enough food to feed their populations and build the sanitary infrastructures to keep them safe from disease. The brutal economic sanctions imposed on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba right now are not only illegal they are also immoral. Despite scores of United Nations condemnations for such unilateral and illegal actions the US persists in its deadly cowboy actions.
America has now been informed it is killing more civilians in Afghanistan than the Taliban or other supposed terrorists. If facts like that don’t convince them to change tack and stop interfering militarily and economically in other countries uninvited what the hell will?
*al Qaeda, Taliban and Daesh (Islamic State, ISIL, ISIS, IS) are terrorist organisations banned in Russia and many other countries.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
The publishers’ contribution is often little more than taking work produced at public expense and sticking it behind a paywall.
The JNU Data Depot is a joint project between rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously), bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, and a research team from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University: together, they have assembled 73 million journal articles from 1847 to the present day and put them into an air-gapped respository that they’re offering to non-commercial third parties who want to perform textual analysis on them to “pull out insights without actually reading the text.”
This text-mining process is already well-developed and has produced startling scientific insights, including “databases of genes and chemicals, map[s of] associations between proteins and diseases, and [automatically] generate[d] useful scientific hypotheses.” But the hard limit of this kind of text mining is the paywalls that academic and scholarly publishers put around their archives, which both limit who can access the collections and what kinds of queries they can run against them.
By putting 73 million articles in a repository without having to bargain with the highly concentrated and notoriously rent-seeking scholarly publishing industry, the JNU Data Depot team are able to dispense with the arbitrary restrictions put on data-mining. They believe that they are on the right side of Indian copyright law as well, as they are a scholarly institution that is making a single digital copy for local use, and not circulating the articles on the internet; they believe that these precautions might shield them from a lawsuit.
They’re relying on the precedent set in a 2016 Delhi High Court Ruling that turned on the legality of a copy shop that sold photocopied selections from expensive textbooks, where the court held that section 52 of the 1957 Copyright Act allows reproduction of copyrighted works for education and research.
Malamud won’t say where the articles came from, but he did tell Nature that he came into possession of eight hard-drives’ worth of articles from Sci-Hub, the pirate research site whose mission is to liberate scholarly and scientific works from paywalls and ensure that they are universally available. Sci-Hub was founded in memory of Aaron Swartz, a collaborator of Malamud’s who was persecuted by the FBI and threatened with decades in prison for downloading scientific articles from MIT’s network. Swartz hanged himself in 2013 after the federal prosecutors in the case had used legal delaying tactics to drain Swartz’s savings, including the sums he got from the sale of Reddit, which had acquired a company he founded, to Conde Nast.
Malamud argues that the High Court ruling applies regardless of the source of the articles and that the Google Book Search precedent also makes his project legal under US law as well.
The project has already attracted users, like National Institute of Plant Genome Research computational biologist Gitanjali Yadav, who is using the Depot to augment her EssOilDB, a database of chemicals secreted by plants that is heavily used by drug developers, perfumiers, and other kinds of researchers. EssOilDB was built with queries against Google Scholar and Pubmed, but the Depot’s repository holds out the possibility of massively expanding it.
Other projects eyeing up the Depot include a database of genes linked to type 2 diabetes; and an MIT Media Lab group that studies “how academic publishing has evolved over time” and hopes to “forecast emerging areas of research and identify alternatives to conventional metrics for measuring research impact.”
Though the research that Malamud is reproducing is often copyrighted by for-profit scholarly publishers, they typically do not pay to undertake, document, edit or review the papers they publish. The vast majority of the research in journals is publicly funded, and the authors of these works — the scientists and scholars who conduct the research — are not compensated for signing over their copyrights to journals. The journals also rely on volunteers (again, generally scholars whose salaries are paid by public grants or public universities and research institutions) to sort, edit and review the articles they publish, as well as to sit on the editorial boards of their journals. The publishers’ contribution is often little more than taking work produced at public expense and sticking it behind a paywall.
The vast majority of large scholarly publishers told Nature “that researchers looking to mine their papers needed their authorization.”
Malamud acknowledges that there is some risk in what he is doing. But he argues that it is “morally crucial” to do it, especially in India. Indian universities and government labs spend heavily on journal subscriptions, he says, and still don’t have all the publications they need. Data released by Sci-Hub indicate that Indians are among the world’s biggest users of their website, suggesting that university licences don’t go far enough. Although open-access movements in Europe and the United States are valuable, India needs to lead the way in liberating access to scientific knowledge, Malamud says. “I don’t think we can wait for Europe and the United States to solve that problem because the need is so pressing here.”
A supermarket in Canada has gone to hilarious and innovative lengths to encourage shoppers to bring reusable bags to its store.
Credit: Credit: East West Market
(TMU) — In many grocery stores, customers who forget to bring reusable bags have to pay between .5 and .25 cents per single-use bag. This doesn’t really deter the average customer from relying on plastic, however, which is why a supermarket in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, has gone to hilarious and innovative lengths to encourage shoppers to care more about the environment.
If customers forget to bring reusable bags to East West Market, their only option will be to carry their goods out in single-use plastic bags with embarrassing slogans printed on the sides. The designs vary but include “Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium” and “The Colon Care Co-op.”
As Unilad reports, the tactic is simply meant to “nudge” shoppers in a more sustainable direction.
Credit: East West Market
East West Market’s goal is simple: encourage more customers to care more about plastic dependance and reduce their carbon footprint. David Lee Kwen, the owner of the independent grocery store, explained the reasoning behind the blush-worthy bags:
“The message is, we should make a conscious effort to save our planet one step at a time. [Plastic bags] are a big problem, and every step helps.”
Credit: East West Market
East West Market doesn’t just embarrass shoppers with silly slogans, it also charges 5 cents per bag. This means customers have to pay for the privilege of walking around with a bag which reads, ‘Wart Ointment Wholesale’.
Credit: East West Market
But in some ways, the plan has worked too well. Some shoppers have purchased the bags as a fun novelty item to share with friends. At least it’s getting the word out!
Though Vancouver has not yet passed a ban on single-use plastic like Canadian city Victoria, it is making sustainable strides. The city’s Single-Use Item Reduction Strategy, for instance, requires business to invent ways to clamp down on plastic use.
The northern Paiutes of Nevada have an ancient oral tradition that they have passed down from generation to generation that usually causes the hearer to pause in bewilderment. The Paiutes state that long ago in ages past they went to war against a ferocious enemy known as the “Si-Te-Cah” or “Saiduka.”
Now, here is where this prehistoric tale becomes fascinating. According to the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cah were a race of red-haired cannibalistic giants that would literally devour the flesh of their foes! The chronicle states that after three years of blood-weary-battles, a coalition of regional tribes finally unified together to conquer this savage enemy. The allied tribes bravely pushed the Si-Te-Cah back into the depths of a very large cave and quickly covered the entrance with brush piles. A fire was then set ablaze that began to suffocate the giants and any would-be escapees were quickly shot with a fury of fire-piercing arrows. The giant cannibalistic carnivores finally met their grim fate in a blazing cavernous inferno.
“Si-Te-Cah” is said to be translated as “Tule-Eaters” in the Northern Paiute language. Tule is a species of water plant that grows in marshes across North America and would have grown in “Lake Lahontan,” a Pleistocene lake that once covered much of northwestern Nevada around 12,700 years ago. According to the oral tradition, the giants used the tule to weave rafts in which to navigate the lake, flee surprise attacks from the Paiutes and worst of all – capture the Paiute women who would gather tule near the shore of Humboldt lake. [1]
The Written Account
The legend of the Red haired giants began to rapidly spread in 1883 when Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of Chief Winnemucca, wrote the first known autobiography by a Native American woman called “Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.” In her book, Winnemucca discusses a tribe of barbarians that she says were known as the “People-Eaters” who lived along the Humboldt river and who would waylay her people and eat them. She states the following in her memoirs…
My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with this reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family. (2)
Giant stature and red hair would obviously be considered genetic anomalies in the context of this account. So to the skeptics who say the Si-Te-Cah were not actually giants but just a tall enemy tribe, I ask the following questions…
Q. Why did the Si-Te-Cah have red hair & not black hair like the other indigenous tribes of the area?
Q. Why would one of the most influential Paiute families of the region save the red hair of their enemy and carefully pass it down from generation to generation and then trim their most treasured garments with it if it was just the hair from a normal human being?
Comment: The full text of Sarah Winnemucca’s story of the Si-Te-Cah reads as follows:
Among the traditions of our people is one of a small tribe of barbarians who used to live along the Humboldt River. It was many hundred years ago. They used to waylay my people and kill and eat them. They would dig large holes in our trails at night, and if any of our people travelled at night, which they did, for they were afraid of these barbarous people, they would oftentimes fall into these holes. That tribe would even eat their own dead – yes, they would even come and dig up our dead after they were buried, and would carry them off and eat them.
Now and then they would come and make war on my people. They would fight, and as fast as they killed one another on either side, the women would carry off those who were killed. My people say they were very brave. When they were fighting they would jump up in the air after the arrows that went over their heads, and shoot the same arrows back again.
My people took some of them into their families, but they could not make them like themselves. So at last they made war on them. This war lasted a long time. Their number was about twenty-six hundred (2600). The war lasted some three years. My people killed them in great numbers, and what few were left went into the thick bush. My people set the bush on fire. This was right above Humboldt Lake. Then they went to work and made tuly or bulrush boats, and went into Humboldt Lake. They could not live there very long without fire. They were nearly starving.
My people were watching them all round the lake, and would kill them as fast as they would come on land. At last one night they all landed on the east side of the lake, and went into a cave near the mountains. It was a most horrible place, for my people watched at the mouth of the cave, and would kill them as they came out to get water.
My people would ask them if they would be like us, and not eat people like coyotes or beasts. They talked the same language, but they would not give up. At last my people were tired, and they went to work and gathered wood, and began to fill up the mouth of the cave. Then the poor fools began to pull the wood inside till the cave was full.
At last my people set it on fire; at the same time they cried out to them, “Will you give up and be like men, and not eat people like beasts? Say quick – we will put out the fire.” No answer came from them. My people said they thought the cave must be very deep or far into the mountain. They had never seen the cave nor known it was there until then. They called out to them as loud as they could, “Will you give up? Say so, or you will all die.” But no answer came. Then they all left the place.
In ten days some went back to see if the fire had gone out. They went back to my third or fifth great-grandfather and told him they must all be dead, there was such a horrible smell. This tribe was called people-eaters, and after my people had killed them all, the people round us called us Say-do-carah. It means conqueror; it also means “enemy.”
I do not know how we came by the name of Piutes. It is not an Indian word. I think it is misinterpreted. Sometimes we are called Pine-nut eaters, for we are the only tribe that lives in the country where Pine-nuts grow.
My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with this reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called the mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family.
About 93 miles northeast of Reno and situated inside an outcrop of limestone that forms part of the Humboldt Mountains, Lovelock Cave sits like an ancient fortress. As I entered this massive cave that is approximately 150′ x 35′ at its widest point, I felt as if I was going back in time. The first thing I noticed was that the entire cave roof was charred black from fire and smoke. But, before I document the incredible discoveries found inside the cave, check out this quick video of my visit to this amazing site a few years ago:
The Artifacts And Specimens
In the autumn of 1911, a group of miners led by David Pugh and James Hart began digging out 250 tons of bat guano to be used as fertilizer when they began to discover countless well-preserved prehistoric artifacts. The University of California was notified and eventually sent out L. L. Loud in the spring of 1912 to conduct archaeological excavations at what is now known today as Lovelock Cave.
Loud obtained over 10,000 artifacts and specimens from the cave. The collection was divided up between the Nevada Historical Society and the University of California. A further excavation was conducted in 1924 by the Heye Foundation who employed M.R. Harrington, who also collaborated with Loud. In their 1929 field guide titled “Lovelock Cave,”
Loud and Harrington mention a few different dates regarding when ancient inhabitants might have first visited Lovelock Cave with the oldest date being around 4000 B.C. However, a mummy found nearby in Spirit Cave, has since been carbon dated at around 10,000 B.C. 1 Unfortunately, Loud did not maintain a comprehensive report of the excavations so all of the detailed information is not available. These archaeologists found artifacts, specimens and remnants of advanced basketry, weaving, pipes, ice picks, nets, balls, knots, darts, horns, weapons, skin, human body parts, zoomorphic stone effigies and more. In their book “Lovelock Cave,” Loud & Harrington make the following statement:
The preservation conditions in Lovelock Cave are unusually favorable, recalling those of Egypt and Peru and being equaled at only a very few sites discovered in North America.
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California wrote:
Lovelock Cave, despite years of destruction, is one of the most important sites in the history of North American archaeology.
But, it gets better. The following are some of the most fascinating artifacts and specimens that were uncovered.
The Calendar
A donut-shaped stone with 365 notches carved along the outside and 52 corresponding notches along the inside, which some believe is a calendar.
Eleven duck decoys made of rush and tule were found painted and feathered and are considered to be some of the world’s oldest and most elaborate ever discovered. The original decoys are now preserved at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
The Sandals
The sandals found inside Lovelock Cave are not like others from the region. These tule sandals are known as V-Twined-Bag-type sandals, as they are made in the same way as woven bags. There are many reports that a pair of these sandals measured 15 inches long. [2]
The Burnt Arrow Shafts
Loud and Harrington state: “Tending to confirm the Northern Paiute legend of the assault on the cave are the fire-arrow foreshafts… A very large number of arrow fragments were found in the crevices of the rockfall blocking the mouth of the cave, as if they had been shot into it… as if fired by the flaming arrows mentioned in the legend.”
I found several statements by Loud and Harrington that seem to indicate their surprise at finding extremely large arrow shafts. It’s almost as if it’s so hard for them to believe, that they surmise if the arrow shafts were made for different purposes:
Of weapons we found only a large, heavy, pointed foreshaft of greasewood, larger than those commonly used for arrows …
The arrow fragments and foreshafts typical of the upper levels were not found in this one, but instead a single pointed foreshaft so large that it probably belonged to an atlatl dart rather than to an arrow.
Q. Were these abnormally large shafts made and used by the Si-Te-Cah to battle the Paiutes?
The giant pestle was not discovered during the Loud & Harrington excavations, but was found some time after. Dr. Gene Hattori who is the curator of Anthropology at the Nevada State Museum makes the following shocking statement about the giant pestle… “We recently received a donation of a pestle that was found below the mouth of Lovelock Cave and it is extraordinary large and very heavy… it is much larger than we usually find… it was found below Lovelock Cave and well within the Si-Te-Cah territory. So, this could have been one of the pestles used by the red headed giants and might account for its large size because of the large people that were using it.”
Q. Why is this giant pestle only able to be seen in a private back room at the Nevada State Museum and not on display for public viewing?
It is pretty amazing to me that we now have both of the original archaeologists who first excavated Lovelock Cave, as well as the curator of Anthropology at the Nevada State Museum on record validating the oral tradition of the Paiutes and the written record by Sarah Winnemucca regarding a race of red-haired cannibalistic giants called the “Si-Te-Cah.”
Again in their 1929 book “Lovelock Cave,” archaeologists Loud and Harrington state the following:
The Northern Paiute have accounts of an extinct people living in various localities in Nevada which recall the beliefs in northwestern California regarding an ancient now extinct race of supernatural beings.
Richard J. Dewhurst, Researcher and Emmy award-winning writer & author of the book “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America,” says the following:
The artifacts themselves prove that an advanced culture did indeed predate the Paiute Indians.
The Humanoid
As I scoured the appendices in the back of Loud and Harrington’s field report, I was shocked to see this photograph of what appears to be a child-like humanoid that had been mummified and wrapped in a woven fur robe. Consider the size of the skull in comparison to the size of the body. Look at the placement of the large eye-sockets along with the smallish face and jaw. [3]
Q. Is this yet another strange genetic anomaly such as the red-hair and gigantic size of the “Si-Te-Cah?”
Based on their oral traditions, the northern Paiutes would be the only people to have actually seen the red-haired giants known as the “Si-Te-Cah” alive in the flesh. However, there are many witnesses who claim to have seen the bones and skulls of these prehistoric cannibalistic carnivores that measured anywhere from 7 feet to 10 feet in length.
The Miners
After centuries of bat guano build-up upon the cave floor, the first people we have on record of being on scene at Lovelock Cave were the guano miners in 1911. Miner James H. Hart testifies to the following:
After some of the best specimens had been destroyed… In the south end of the cave, ‘about twenty feet deep,’ we unearthed some skeletons. In the north-central part of the cave, about four feet deep, was a striking looking body of a man ‘ six feet six inches tall. ‘ His body was mummified and his hair distinctly red… the man was “a giant. [1]
6-6 ft may not be considered a giant, but it is creeping close to the 7ft benchmark. And we do have Hart on record confirming it had red-hair and declaring it “A Giant.” So, along with the length of this skeleton, we should also consider the girth and mass of these bones as well in light of Hart’s comments.
John T. Reid was a mining engineer and an amateur anthropologist from Lovelock, Nevada who could speak the Paiute language. Reid claims to have examined and measured several giant skeletons that were either from Lovelock Cave or the surrounding area. Below is a newspaper article from the “Nevada State Journal” from April 17, 1932 that mentions Reid and a 7-7 foot giant skeleton as well as two of Reid’s encounters with giant bones.
In February, 1931, a Lovelock resident informed Reid of the “weathering out” of a large skeleton on the lake bed near Lovelock Cave. This was excavated with great care and all the bones were recovered. Before removing it, Reid measured it in situ and it proved to be ” 7 feet 7 or 6 inches in height… It had been buried in a shroud and covered with a dark substance, perhaps charcoal.”
The “Lovelock Review-Miner” reported on June 19, 1931 that Lloyd De La Montoya of California had discovered the skeleton of a “giant” on the lake bed near Toy… Reid, John Foster and Thomas J. Chapel set out across the dry flat to the site… the skeleton was recovered… it was deduced that this man had been “nine and one half or possibly ten feet” tall. [2]
The Archaeologists
In their 1929 field report entitled “Lovelock Cave,” archaeologists Loud & Harrington make the following statements about the skeletons and skulls:
It is quite likely that members of the crew excavating the guano took away bones, especially skulls… The best specimen of the adult mummies was boiled and destroyed by a local fraternal lodge, which wanted the skeleton for initiation purposes. Several human mummies and parts of mummies were obtained by the guano crew and the writer…. Much of the hair found on the mummies in the cave is reddish.[3]
Q. Was this “best specimen” of the adult mummies a giant skull? We now have Loud & Harrington confirming that they uncovered mummies with red hair. In the appendices of their book, they also reveal two intriguing photos – one of a humanoid looking child (See here in part 2) and one of this large skull shown here.
The Mummies and Giant Skeletons Discovered Near Lovelock
The “Nevada Review Miner” published an article in it’s 1931 June issue reporting two very large skeletons that were found in the Humboldt dry lake bed near Lovelock Cave. One measured 8.5 feet in length and was described as having been wrapped in a gum-covered fabric similar to Egyptian mummies. The other skeleton was nearly 10-feet long.
This newspaper article dated January 24, 1904 from “The Saint Paul Globe,” documents the discovery of a “Skeleton of a gigantic human being” in Winnemucca, Nevada by workers who were digging in the gravel. A “Dr. Samuels” examined it and pronounced it to be nearly eleven feet in height.
13 miles east of Fallon Nevada is Spirit Cave. In 1940, two very well preserved mummies were found expertly wrapped in highly sophisticated weaving by Sydney & Georgia Wheeler working for the Nevada Sate parks division. The mummies were radio carbon dated to 9,400 years before the present. DNA testing of the mummies by Douglas W. Owsley, division head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History revealed that the mummies were of Caucasian origin, with a long face and cranium that most closely resembled either Nordic or Ainu ancestry and bore no ancestry relationship to either the Paiute or Shoshone tribes. This groundbreaking news has received barely a glimmer of attention in the outside world. [4]
The Humboldt Museum Witnesses
There are a handful of people who have testified to seeing giant skulls from Lovelock Cave in a storage room at the Humboldt Museum in Winnemuca, Nevada. Two of theses witnesses are Don Monroe and M.K. Davis. Below are a series of statements made by M.K. Davis regarding their experiences:
The Humboldt Museum in Winnemucca Nevada used to keep a series of human skulls in a cabinet in the basement for private viewing. They have now repatriated the skulls and no longer have them. I saw them in 2006 and photographed them in the cabinet. Don Monroe photographed them some 30 odd years ago and they were different. Compare the photos and you can see that not only are some missing but there is an extraordinary mandible that was there in the prior photo but missing from the later one. This mandible has had the teeth filed. Here is the photo that Don Monroe took some 30 plus years ago. Pay attention to the fact that there are more artifacts then and more particularly to the mandible that is arrowed.
“These photos are original prints taken some forty years ago in the basement of the Humboldt museum in Winnemucca, Nevada by Don Monroe. The Museum now denies the existence of this and other skulls. Why??? Notice what appears to be “double rows” of teeth.”
“These photos were taken by Don Monroe back in the 1970’s and recently discovered among his things that were boxed up. Don Monroe has been adamant that there were large skulls there then, that are now missing. This seems to support his claim. I hope that this serves to clear up whether these larger skulls did exist at the Humboldt Museum. Right now they emphatically deny that such skulls were ever there. They obviously were.” [5]
Notice how large the reddish looking skull in the middle is in comparison to the other skulls.
The photograph at the top of this blog post as well as the next one below appear to be taken by another witness at the Humboldt museum by the name of “Donn Quijote.” I first saw his pictures and read his testimony in an archaeological blog forum. His story and photographs seem to closely corroborate what M.K. Davis and others have said:
I was lucky enough to be shown these skulls before they were told to keep them from the public. This was in Nov 2008. Having read about the skulls on the internet, and I was making a trip to California, I stopped by the museum in Winnemucca to see if there really were giant skulls. I looked through the museum and saw artifacts from the Lovelock Cave were they were supposed to have been found, but didn’t see any human remains.
My wife & I then asked the curator there, a lady in her 80’s or so, where the giant skulls were. She got a big smile on her face and asked me to follow her. She led us back into a storage room and opened up a cabinet with the remains of 4 large skulls. She said that people from all over the world come there to ask her about those skulls.
I asked why they weren’t on display and she said it was because they did not want them to be taken away by any claim from the Indians, and also that Nevada state does not deem them authentic. But according to accounts of Indians themselves, they are not even the same race. I asked her if it was true if there were large red headed mummies taken from the cave, and she said that they were and that she had seen them, but they were taken to UC Berkeley… [6]
Notice the same large reddish skull that was photographed by Don Monroe decades earlier appears to be pictured here in 2008.
In their 1929 field report “Lovelock Cave,” archaeologists Loud & Harrington seem to make a cryptic statement regarding their findings:
The lot from which each specimen came is recorded in the catalogue of specimens in the University of California Museum of Anthropology, but except where the fact seems pertinent to some problem it is not presented in the following account. [7]
Q. Does this statement indicate that any giant skeletons and skulls they might have uncovered were considered a “problem (Pre-Indian Caucasian culture)” to main-stream scientific thought and were therefore not recorded in their catalogs and furthermore not put on display for public viewing?
Richard J. Dewhurst, Researcher and Emmy award-winning writer and author of the book “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America,” says the following:
Recently it has been confirmed that four of the ancient skulls unearthed at Lovelock Cave are, in fact, in the possession of the Humboldt Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada. According to Barbara Powell, who is the director of the collection, the museum is prohibited by the state of Nevada from putting the skulls on public display because “The state does not recognize their legitimacy.” They are instead kept in the storage room and shown to visitors from all over the world only by request. In addition, Powell said that additional bones and artifacts were transferred to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of anthropology in Berkeley, California, where they are kept but also never put on display. What is significant to note is that the scientific community has assiduously scrubbed all references to the six-to-eight-foot-tall, red-haired skeletons found at the site. As will be seen, this repeated effort to clear the historical record of all references to a pre-Indian Caucasian culture in the United States can be seen as working in harmony with the NAGPRA policies of the federal government, which works on agendas based on political correctness and not objective science. [8]
Explorer, author and co-creator of “The Watchers” film series, L.A. Marzulli makes the following statement:
The question is why would men of science deliberately engage in this? And, I believe I have an answer. If skeletons exist, and by all of the overwhelming evidence both from the written record found in newspapers and accounts from scientists, as well as the oral traditions from Native Americans, they pose a direct threat to the pervading world view, Darwinism. [9]
The Pieces of the Puzzle
To bring this 3 part investigative series to a conclusion, let me lay out all the pieces of the puzzle for you one last time:
We have the Paiute oral tradition of red-haired giants who they burned alive inside a cave.
We have the written account from Sarah Winnemucca about the red-haired “People Eaters” and her most treasured dress passed down from generation to generation trimmed with this red hair.
We have Lovelock Cave that is charred black from fire and burnt arrow shafts found inside of it.
We have testimony from the archaeologists and the curator of anthropology at the Nevada State Museum of the advanced artifacts, extra large weapon shafts and giant pestles found in and around the cave.
We have photographs of the humanoid looking mummy and the large skull found inside the cave.
We have the archaeologists on record saying that the mummies found inside the cave had red hair.
We have the testimony of the miners and the newspapers reports of several 7 to 10 foot skeletons that were unearthed.
We have the mummies found nearby in Spirit cave carbon dated at 9,500 B.C. and DNA tests that prove they were not Paiutes but of Caucasian origin.
We have the photographs and testimonies from the Humboldt museum witnesses all telling the same story.
We have the Vice President of the Humboldt museum stating that the museum is prohibited by the state of Nevada from putting the skulls on public display.
Q. So did the Red-Haired Giants of Lovelock cave actually exist? I’ll let you decide…
(TMU) — Global peacefulness has improved for the first time in five years according to the Global Peace Index (GPI), which has recently released their 13th annual rankings of the most peaceful nations on earth. The world, however, is still less peaceful than it was just a decade ago.
The yearly study takes a complex look at a multitude of factors while ranking 163 countries from most to least peaceful. Some of the components taken into account while compiling the list range from homicide and incarceration rates to the presence of small arms, military expenditures, ongoing conflicts, terrorism, and the overall economic impact of violence.
Iceland is considered the most peaceful nation on Earth, a title it has held for 11 years.
In second place is New Zealand, followed by Portugal in third, Austria, Denmark, Canada, Singapore, Slovenia, Japan and the Czech Republic, to round out the top 10 most peaceful nations.
Afghanistan ranks dead last on the list, ranking it as the least peaceful nation on Earth, followed by Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Central African Republic, Libya, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia.
The United States ranks 128th, dropping four spots from last year. U.S. ally Saudi Arabia—well known for its human rights abuses—ranks only one spot behind at 129th.
It may come as a surprise to many Americans that China, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Republic of the Congo are just a few of the nations that rank higher than the United States.
Other notable nations include Australia ranking at 13th, Germany 22nd, United Kingdom 45th, France 60th, Iran 139th, Mexico 140th, Israel 146th, and North Korea 149th.
Shame on you Sweden, you used to be a light in the world. Now, You are merely another submissive lapdog of the USA. What did the USA offer you? Pathetic.
The reopening of an inquiry into allegations of rape against Julian Assange shows that even a “fading empire” like the US can get what it wants when it is backed by obedient states like the UK & Sweden, says George Galloway.
Former Labour MP George Galloway has told RT that Sweden is even more of a US vassal state than Britain. He believes attempts to get to the truth of rape allegations against the WikiLeaks co-founder are not genuine.
Given that the allegations against Julian Assange has been twice investigated and twice abandoned, there is no reason to believe this is a serious effort to try him for sexual assault allegations dating back almost an entire decade.
The political firebrand sees this latest move by Sweden as part of a bigger operation being conducted by the US.
Galloway insists that there is “every reason to believe that this is part of a maneuver whereby if the British courts don’t free him and comply fully with the United States’ wishes, well, the Swedes will.”
Sweden’s Director of Public Prosecutions Eva-Marie Persson made the announcement on Monday morning, confirming her office’s decision.
Persson told reporters at a press conference: “I have taken the decision to reopen the preliminary investigation.”
“As Mr Assange is currently incarcerated in the UK the circumstances now allow him to be extradited to Sweden on a rape warrant,” she added.
Responding to the announcement, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has claimed that the “case has been mishandled throughout.”
Hrafnsson added that several key details surrounding the investigation were suspicious after a Swedish prosecutor initially found that “no crime at all” had occurred, after which the case was reopened at the behest of the British authorities.
The rape allegations were leveled against Assange in a case which began almost a decade ago, before he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012. He has repeatedly denied them.
The world does not want the elite’s money or charity, pay your taxes at the rate of 90% like when the world had a semblance of “normal” economic equality in the fifties.
RT.com
24 Apr, 2019
With wealthy donors giving a billion dollars to restore Notre Dame following the devastating fire, some have been left asking why the money only comes after tragedy strikes. RT guests debate the Notre Dame patrons’ priorities.
“Two years ago you couldn’t get a crumb out of [the billionaires]”, argues journalist and social commentator Sonia Poulton. When Notre Dame was dilapidated and crumbling in a less-newsworthy way, these same rich donors were nowhere to be found, she noted. Poulton believs the billionaires are “show-ponying” trying to outbid one another, but only because there are laurels to be won. Meanwhile, these same figures still won’t lift a finger to help handle worsening economic issues in France including a steep rise in homelessness.
Former Republican US state senator John Loudon, on the other hand, says that critics have no right to tell others what to do with their money, regardless of how they think it should be spent. Arguing that France faces large numbers of vandalized churches every year, he believes it’s “a beautiful thing” that people are willing to spend their own money to help rebuild and restore.
What we should be worried about is Christian churches targeted around the world.
Should the Catholic Church and French government be picking up the tab for Notre Dame disaster, or are things better left in private hands? Watch the full debate on RT.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – A total of 803 people have lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) due to the infection with the Ebola virus since its outbreak in 2018, the DRC Health Ministry said.
“As of Sunday, April 14, 2019, [Ebola virus infection] totals to 1,251 cases [1,185 confirmed and 66 possible], 803 deaths”, the ministry wrote on Twitter late on Sunday.
On 12 April, the death toll stood at 764, while number of infection cases amounted to 1,206, according to the ministry’s figures.
At the same time, 371 people have been cured from the decease since the virus broke out in the DRC in 2018, the ministry added.On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) humanitarian organization issued a warning, saying the situation in the DRC was worsening as people had stopped seeking relief assistance due to loss of trust in Ebola responders.
The outbreak of Ebola is occurring in the DRC since August 2018.
The Ebola virus is a deadly disease that is spread through blood and body fluid. Symptoms include fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, sore throat, diarrhea.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
