Quote:GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinian workers in the Gaza Strip have found dozens of ancient graves, including two sarcophagi made of lead, in a Roman-era cemetery — a site dating back some 2,000 years that archaeologists describe as the largest cemetery discovered in Gaza.

Workers came upon the site last year during the construction of an Egyptian-funded housing project near Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip. Since then, crews have worked to excavate the 2,700-square-meter (2/3 acre) site with the support of French experts.

Now, what was once an inconspicuous construction lot — surrounded by a grove of nondescript apartment buildings — has become a gold mine for archaeologists looking to understand more about the Gaza Strip.

Gaza, a coastal enclave home to some 2.3 million people, has a rich history stemming from its location on ancient trade routes between Egypt and the Levant. But a number of factors — Israeli occupation, Hamas’ 16-year takeover of the territory and rapid urban growth — have conspired to endanger many of the besieged strip’s archaeological treasures.

Against this backdrop, the discovery of 60 graves at the site in January marked a major finding, archaeologists say. That number has swelled to 135.

Rene Elter, a French archaeologist leading the dig, said researchers have studied over 100 of the graves.

“All of these tombs have almost already been excavated and have revealed a huge amount of information about the cultural material and also about the state of health of the population and the pathologies from which this population may have suffered,” said Elter, the head of archaeology for ”Intiqal,” a program managed by the French nonprofit Première Urgence Internationale.

Elter pointed to the sarcophagi made of lead — one featuring ornate grape leaves, the other with images of dolphins — as exceptional finds.

“The discovery of lead sarcophagi here is a first for Gaza,” he said.

Given the rarity of the lead tombs, Palestinian archaeologists like Fadel Al-Otul suspect that social elites are buried there. Al-Otul said the cemetery probably used to be located in a city — Romans used to place cemeteries near city centers.

Alongside the sarcophagi, Elter’s team is restoring unearthed skeletons and piecing together shards of clay jars.

The skeletons discovered at the site will be sent out of Gaza for additional analysis, according to Al-Otul. The remains are set to return to the Hamas-led Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism.

Elter said the territory needs a dedicated team to oversee archaeological activity in Gaza.

“The Gazans deserve to tell their stories,” he said. “Gaza boasts a plethora of potential archaeological sites, but monitoring each one, given the rapid pace of development, is no small feat.”

Archaeologists unearth the largest cemetery ever discovered in Gaza and find rare lead sarcophogi

Quote:A majority of American adults would not be willing to serve in the military were the U.S. to enter into a major war, recent polling has found, while public confidence in the armed forces appears to be waning.

The figures come as all branches of the armed forces have in recent years struggled to meet their recruitment targets, suggesting a growing apathy towards a career of military service. In 2023, the Army and Air Force fell short of their respective goals by around 10,000 recruits, while the Navy was under by 6,000. Since 1987, the number of active-duty personnel has fallen by 39 percent.

Experts say that such shortfalls are worrisome in an increasingly volatile global picture with American leadership unsure when it will next have to bring its full military force to bear.

"We have strike groups, aircraft carriers with a Marine Expeditionary Unit outside Israel now," Justin Henderson, a former transport operator for the U.S. Marines turned military recruiter, told Newsweek. "We're funding two wars, but we're actually boots on the ground, drones above Gaza. So we're already involved in there—and we're not sure what's happening in Taiwan. So this is a very tumultuous time for us, because we don't know what's going to happen."

"How much it matters depends on what kind of people you're talking about and which bit you're not getting," Tom Shugart, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Navy attack submarine commander, told Newsweek.

.....

The military is also facing a high level of unfitness to serve among the general population: as of 2020, it assessed that 77 percent of those aged 17-24 were unqualified due to medical reasons, drug use or criminal records.

But there are signs that the military is adapting to Generation Z. Henderson spoke of a gaming truck designed by the Air Force so young adults could simulate flying drones. "The military is now trying to speak their language," he said.

Quote:When the trailer came out, the TV historian Dan Snow posted a TikTok breakdown of its inaccuracies. (At the Battle of the Pyramids, “Napoleon didn’t shoot at the pyramids”; Marie-Antoinette “famously had very cropped hair for the execution, and, hey, Napoleon wasn’t there.”)

Scott’s response: “Get a life.”

Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” Complex

Quote:This headhunting still went on during WWII, instead of using guns Filipino warriors would hide in the forests and ambush the Japanese. They would bring back their heads to their tribe and do a black magic ceremony with it and put their heads on a spike to ward off future attacks. Even today the Philippines government fears these Northern tribal lands.

Rare Historical Photos

Quote:The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.

Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that is profitable.

The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him a congenial soil—and that is as much as to say that we are dying.

Quote:Belloc's 1937 book The Crusades: the World's Debate, he wrote

    The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved – to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? ... There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine...We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice...Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.

Wiki

Quote:Vladislav Davidzon is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, based in France. Since 2018, he has served as a co-producer for a television series on the effects of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, since 2012, also serves as the European culture correspondent for Tablet Magazine in Paris, France. While working at the magazine, he has been an investigative journalist and researcher with assignments in Russia, Ukraine, England, and Poland. In 2015, Davidzon founded the Odessa Review and served as its chief editor until July 2018. While he was with Odessa Review, Davidzon helped publish 13 quarterly issues over the course of his tenure at the magazine.

His work has been featured in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, World Policy Journal, the New York Observer, and the American Interest. Davidzon holds a master’s degree in human rights and democratization from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights in Italy and earned his bachelor’s degree at the City University of New York.
Atlantic Council

(11-15-2023, 04:02 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Kit from 1959. I bet Freija had one of these!

(11-15-2023, 05:20 AM)Freija Wrote: I've also owned 4 air-cooled Beetles and a Karman-Ghia!

In the mid 90's, I owned this '74 crew cab pickup, one of only 2500 imported that year and I wish I still had it - they are worth a fortune now!



By the way, I was 4 years old in 1959 and a bit too young for model kits.

Quote:Walsh, a native of Berkeley, Calif., enlisted in the Navy in 1948 and worked as an aircrewman before he attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He became a submarine officer, commanding USS Bashaw (SSKS-241), and later became the Navy’s first deep submersible pilot.

Walsh was a Navy lieutenant on Jan. 23, 1960, and in command of the bathyscaphe Trieste when he and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard dove deep into the Mariana Trench, intent on reaching and measuring its deepest point.

The secret work was codenamed Project Nekton. They rode in a vessel they mostly built in-house.

“Everything on this had to be designed by us and made by us, because there weren’t any commercial vendors, no catalog that sold parts or qualified for 20,000 or 16,000 psi, eight tons per square inch of pressure and to do the things that we wanted to do. Cameras, lights, samplers, sensors, instrument sensors – all of that we had to design and build, or have built,” Walsh said in a 2020 interview with USNI News. “So we were writing the book for deep ocean operations.”

“It was really mare incognita,” or unknown land, he said.

Walsh and Piccard reached the depth of 35,814 feet in an area called Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, located in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Guam – that is a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower presented the Legion of Merit to Walsh later that year.



Retired Navy Capt. Don Walsh, Deep Sea Submariner and Ocean Explorer, Dies at 92

Quote:In the case of the JFK assassination, I wish to focus on two men who functioned as part of the communications network of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), the agency renamed in 1968 as the Office of Emergency Preparedness (to which McCord was attached), and renamed again in 1982 as the National Program Office (for which Oliver North was the action officer).(11)

The Hidden Government Group Linking JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11

(11-17-2023, 05:20 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

Quote:The Times of Israel: The criticisms you’ve received, being called crazy, weird, or even Nazi — without valid reason — have they made you doubt yourself?

Javier Milei: No. Because none of those criticisms are harsher than my own self-criticism, since I live in a constant process of self-critique.

Let’s talk about the world. You believe Israel and the United States could be Argentina’s top allies. What does Israel mean to you?

What I admire the most about Israel is its culture, its people. It gives me a lot of admiration to see how they manage to combine the spiritual world with the real world. That, to me, is formidable and admirable.

How long have you felt that way?

I’ve always felt a quite pronounced admiration, initially unconsciously and then more consciously. I remember that every Easter, the only movie I never missed was “The Ten Commandments.” Obviously, I already had felt a very strong attraction to the personality of Moses. But later on, as time passed, I had a student at the university who was also studying to become a rabbi, and I was surprised by the kind of questions he asked me. So, I asked him, “Where do you get this way of asking questions? Because this is great.” And he said to me, “No, it’s super easy. Because every morning I study to become a rabbi,” and I thought, “This is awesome.” Later on, I had the pleasure of meeting Axel Wahnish. He is my main rabbi today. He is a truly remarkable person, and obviously, along with my sister, they are my spiritual guides.

Would you really move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?

Yes, of course. I don’t care if I’ll be criticized by world leaders. I truly believe that’s the right thing to do.

Would you convert to Judaism during or after your political career? It’s not easy.

It’s very difficult because I wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the precepts due to the demands I’d have as president. You know if you’re a convert, you have to comply with all of the Jewish religious precepts. I was recently in New York and I even had the privilege of visiting the office of the [late] Lubavitcher Rebbe [Menachem Mendel Schneerson]… The thing is, I’d possibly plan to convert after my political career is finished.

Thank you. Churchill would say that a good statesman is not the one who thinks about the next elections but the next generations.

Well, we have presented a government plan that spans between 35 and 45 years.