Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

According to Greek scholar and rhetorician from Naucratis, professor of rhetoric in Athens, Julius Pollux's legend of the Greek hero Heracles (Hercules) was walking with his dog on the Levantine coast near Tyre when the dog bit a Murex sea snail, staining its snout a vivid, lasting purple.

A nearby nymph (named Tyro) demands a garment in that same color, thus “inventing” the famous royal dye. In the Roman world, Tyrian purple (derived from murex snails) became a symbol of authority, wealth, and legitimacy.

Purple was regulated by sumptuary laws. Certain shades and quantities were restricted by rank. Enforcement varied by period, but by the late Empire the rule was strict enough that “born in the purple” literally meant born to the throne. Legend has it that millennia later, the same color was chosen for "The Roman Empire" collection.


Royal Purple Fabric Items from Biblical Era Discovered in Israel

Where all this purple came from has long been a mystery. Just a few locations along the Levant’s southern coast and in Cyprus show evidence of dye-making at the start of the period, and all were on a modest scale. But a new study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel suggests that through most of the Iron Age biblical era, from roughly 1150 B.C. to 600 B.C., a small promontory called Tel Shiqmona on Israel’s Carmel coast was not a residential settlement, as previously supposed, but a major purple-dyeing factory.

“Tel Shiqmona fills in this gap with continuous production, most of the time in massive quantities,” said Golan Shalvi, a postdoctoral student in archaeology at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the paper. “For the majority of the Iron Age, it is the only site where manufacturing can be demonstrated with certainty.”

The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv, proposes that during the first half of the ninth century B.C., the Israelites took over Tel Shiqmona and set about cornering the lucrative purple-dye market by converting the small dye installation into a fortified manufacturing plant surrounded by a casemate wall. (This was at about the same time that Ahab ruled the Kingdom of Israel.)

The new operation was more or less a joint venture, run by the Israelites and staffed by skilled Phoenician workers who held the secrets to making the dye, Dr. Shalvi said. Whether the locals had continued the operation by coercion or cooperation is unclear.

In theory, the goods assembled at Tel Shiqmona, mainly purple-dyed wool or textiles, were distributed to the elite and temples across the area, including Israel, Phoenicia, Philistia, Aram, Judea and Cyprus. Dr. Shalvi said the dye probably created both the argaman (purple) and techelet (azure) mentioned dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. Techelet was used for dyeing tzitzit (tassels) on tallits (prayer shawls) used in Jewish religious rituals, and inspired the blue of the Israeli flag.

“The purple manufacture at Tel Shiqmona overlapped with the existence of the First Temple in Jerusalem,” Dr. Shalvi said, referring to the house of worship that, according to Jewish tradition, was built by King Solomon on the spot where God created Adam. “For most of that time, it was the only place known to make the dye. Therefore, it is the only candidate to provide the color for the scarlet and sapphire hues of the temple’s robes and tabernacle curtains.”

It took guts

Tyrian purple was the sole colorfast dye known to the ancients; fabric tinted in the color grew brighter with weathering and sunlight. Shades ranged from bluish-green to a purplish red, depending on how the dye was prepared and fixed in textiles. The most vibrant tone was the deep crimson of “clotted blood” tinged with black, the Roman historian Pliny reported.

In imperial Rome, sumptuary laws restricted the buying and wearing of purple-dyed fabrics to the emperor (purple silk was to be used only at his direction under penalty of death) and, to a lesser extent, senators and consuls, who were allowed to wear broad bands of purple at the edges of their togas.

The name and provenance of Tyrian purple were inventions of the Romans. As far back as 1900 B.C., the Minoans of Crete were already preparing a purple dye from marine snails, spawning an industry that then caught on and flourished throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The center of production is thought to have moved to the port of Tyre, although Dr. Schmitt said it could not be corroborated by primary sources, either textual or archaeological. At the port, the snails were gathered from shallow waters and left to rot in large vats before being distilled into the purified dye. (Phoinike, the area’s corresponding Greek name, is related to phoinix, meaning “reddish purple,” leading some scholars to speculate that Phoenicia was “the land of purple.”)

Julius Pollux, a Greek scholar and grammarian from the second century A.D., attributed the discovery of the color to Tyrian Hercules, known to the Phoenicians as Melqart, guardian deity of Tyre. In his “Onomasticon,” a 10-volume thesaurus, Pollux relates that a nymph named Tyrus was walking along the beach when her dog bit into a sea snail, staining the dog’s mouth an intense purple. Tyrus was enthralled by the brilliance and told Hercules, her lover, that she wanted a robe of the same color. Hercules complied and purple became a royal rage.

In the 17th century, the artist Peter Paul Rubens recreated the yarn in the oil painting “Hercules’ Dog Discovers Purple Dye.” Alas, he got the shell wrong, depicting a spiral nautilus snail instead of a prickly murex.

Shell game

Tyre is 30 miles north of Tel Shiqmona, where the purple pigment was created from the dried and boiled guts of three species of predatory sea snails: the spiny dye-murex (Bolinus brandaris), the banded dye-murex (Hexaplex trunculus) and the red-mouthed rock shell (Stramonita haemastoma). Each added a slightly different cast to the mix.

Tel Shiqmona had long confounded archaeologists, who wondered why what looked to be some kind of fort had been erected far from agricultural lands on a rocky stretch of shoreline that didn’t offer safe harbor to ships.

From 1963-77, the eight-acre site was excavated extensively by Yosef Elgavish, an Israeli archaeologist. Working on behalf of the Haifa Museum, he unearthed weaving and spinning equipment, large purple-stained ceramic vats and evidence of human habitation dating to around 1500 B.C. Although some archaeological layers harbored Phoenician pottery, Dr. Elgavish also found a four-room house and olive presses, which he identified as typical of the 10th-century B.C. settlements of the Israelites.

“Dr. Elgavish had a hunch that Tel Shiqmona had some role in the production of the purple dye, but he didn’t delve into the amount of production or who ran the dye process,” Dr. Shalvi said.

For the next four decades, the site was almost completely ignored for academic research. “The results and finds of the early expeditions were neither researched nor published,” Dr. Shalvi said. In 2016, he and Ayelet Gilboa, his doctoral adviser at the University of Haifa, began a project to save what they called the “cultural and intellectual assets” hidden in the forgotten finds.

Dr. Shalvi soon realized that defining Tel Shiqmona’s as exclusively Israelite did not reflect the region’s complexity. He divided the site’s Iron Age chronology into four main episodes: a Phoenician village (1100 B.C. to 900 B.C.); a walled enclosure controlled by the Israelites (900 B.C. to 740 B.C.); an ephemeral resettlement after the destruction of the kingdom and the facility (740 B.C. to 700 B.C.), and an unfortified industrial compound under Assyrian domination that survived until the Babylonian takeover of the territory (700 B.C. to 600 B.C.)

Three years ago, after carefully reviewing the thousands of finds from Dr. Elgavish’s excavation, Dr. Shalvi had an epiphany. ”I discovered purple traces that no one else had observed,” he said. “As soon as my eyes were opened to the purple staining pattern, I noticed it everywhere.”

That afternoon he called Dr. Gilboa and told her about his revelation. “We discussed whether it might be a good idea for me to see a psychiatrist,” Dr. Shalvi said with a dry chuckle. “Fortunately, chemical analysis demonstrated that in every case the purple was real.”

Where Purple Ruled

Bubonic plague down under. Curse of "Epstein" from 126 years ago?

February 7, 1900: A Chinese immigrant in San Francisco Chinatown falls ill to bubonic plague in the first plague epidemic in the continental United States. Around the same time the plague hit Hawaii and prior (late December-January) it was reported in Australia..."Epstein" curse follows.



Why does that "Epstein" name insist on popping up in my searches from 126 years ago!!!

On February 7, 1900, a Chinese American named Chick Gin, Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King became the first official plague victim in California. The 41-year-old man, born in China and a San Francisco resident for 16 years, was a bachelor living in the basement of the Globe Hotel in Chinatown, at the intersection of the streets now called Grant and Jackson. The Globe Hotel was built in 1857, with the appearance of an Italian palazzo. However, by the mid-1870s it was a squalid tenement crowded with Chinese residents. Just outside, Jackson Street was the Chinese red-light district, where unmarried men could visit "hundred-men's-wives".

Wong’s death began a 4-year epidemic (1900–1904) in San Francisco, with the disease eventually spreading throughout the area via rats, challenging the racist, and incorrect beliefs of the era.






The black death in Chinatown; Plague and Politics in San Francisco 1900-1904

1900–1904 San Francisco plague

Plagues may come & go, but politics & corruption remains forever...

Plague Loves Corruption

In addition to the identification of an easy scapegoat for plague, the corrupt political sphere of San Francisco would provide a perfect breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disease. At the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco was the richest and most prominent Pacific port due to trade with Asia as well as the rest of the United States. It was considered the cultural and financial capital of California and was well on its way to becoming one of the most important cities in the nation. However, the city’s Gold Rush history had cemented a strike-it-rich mentality—or a belief in fate rather than hard work and in greed rather than generosity—into local politics (13). The local government was known by San Francisco residents to have a history of corruption. Government officials, coerced by local elites and businessmen, did not invest time nor resources into improving living conditions for the general public. The city was notoriously dirty and overcrowded; officials were not willing to spend money on sanitation or medical care at the expense of private wealth. In fact, public health-related spending fell significantly as the population grew (14).

With the arrival of the bubonic plague, these ties between the political and economic worlds were exposed: city- and state-level politicians, in collusion with business leaders and the press, worked to deny the plague’s existence in order to protect commerce and tourism. With a reputation to uphold, business leaders feared embargoes by neighboring states and other countries. San Francisco was in the middle of an economic boom, so diverting trade to developing cities like Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver could hurt expansion. In the words of one historian, “business and capital, always timid and jumpy, were fearful of sick rats and Chinamen” (15). Newspaper editors were persuaded to keep a blackout on reports of plague, denouncing rumors as fake and drawing on existing mistrust of public officials. Newspapers ran stories claiming that the plague either did not exist or did not pose a risk to the general public. For example, The Bulletin claimed that the plague was dangerous only to the economy, as it diverted tourists and cargo from the port (16). On March 8, 1900, The San Francisco Call published a front-page story called “Plague Fake is Part of a Plot to Plunder,” beginning with the decisive statement “there is no bubonic plague in San Francisco” (17). These articles echoed the public’s suspicion that reports of the plague were being used as a way to acquire financial assistance for the underfunded health department; the Call article also described how the plague was a way to “plunder the funds of the taxpayers” (18).

To Contain or to Conceal: San Francisco’s Plague Epidemic, 1900

This excerpt reminds me of Dr. Fauci's virus hunters that scoured the caves of China looking for that special bat to weaponize.

Kinyoun had predicted plague’s eventual arrival in the United States as early as 1895, and had begun a plague research program in 1896, which he pursued even more energetically after receiving a strain obtained from China via the U.S. Navy in 1897 (18). Since 1897, Wyman had been writing and speaking about plague as an ultimate test for the MHS. Sending his top scientist to the front lines may have appeared necessary. Subsequent events, however, led Kinyoun to doubt Wyman’s motives, and the issue is clouded by other ambiguities in the puzzling relationship between Kinyoun and Wyman. The prevailing belief among historians is that a troubled relationship between the two men led Wyman to demote his top scientist, a belief consistent with Kinyoun’s later criticism of Wyman and Wyman’s reluctance to ever again mention him by name. But the full facts surrounding Kinyoun’s reassignment and subsequent MHS career remain unknown.

Plague in San Francisco—1900, the Year of the Rat

Which is more filthier (a bane to humanity), rats, bats or common human behavior among various parasitical elites?


"Tragedy of the Commons" is probably the best explanation for the paralysis of the masses...

The reason that the majority of people don't try to overthrow and challenge the small minority of oppressive elites is because of three reasons. First is tragedy of the commons. In theory everyone wants to overthrow the elites and everyone knows others want it too. But no one wants to move first. People fear being the only one to act while others stay silent. So, instead of risking punishment they choose safety and nothing changes.

Second, the elites have built complex socio-economic systems designed to be difficult to understand. Laws, financial structures and institutions are layered so deeply that most people cannot navigate them, let alone dismantle them. Confusion becomes control. And third, is psychological conditioning through media and education the population is trained to fight each other instead of those in power. White versus black, Left versus Right, men versus women while the masses stay divided the elites remain untouched. This is not chaos, it is design.
―Popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The concept dates back to Aristotle and was earlier described by economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833.


Illustrations from science fiction horror story, SANDKINGS by George R.R. Martin, first published in OMNI, August 1979. Art by Rowena Morrill, Chris Moore, Enrique Breccia, Mark Nelson.




It was the first modem released by Commodore in 1982.
It supports zipping fast 300 baud duplex connections.
It connected to an existing telephone's handset connector, rather than directly to the phone line, to keep the price down.
It was the first modem to cost under $100 and the first to sell over a million units, helping to popularize online services and BBSes.

1982: Every time I fired this up...


...this went through my mind...




According to Grok, the chant translates to:


https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2019898787318432187

The world is entangled in the Epstein scandal. Wonder how long it'll last?[/size]