First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Alright, what do we have in Mason? There is a new phenomenon, first observed in the 1960ies and with a cycle length of about 28 years months, yielding a grand total of two twenty-four observed cycles so far. Now, in the third twenty-fifth cycle something different happens and, guess what, we have a new shocking consequence of Global Warming, what else?
Correction (2016-10-18)
I have made the very silly mistake of confusing years and months. My original comment above is an obvious nonsense. See also next week’s upcoming list containing the primary article.
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Olsen et al. follow the prevalent tendency of treating model results as data. Caution is warranted when viewing their conclusions.
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I have just managed to get hold of a copy of one book the totalitarian Merkel-state is doing its utmost to keep under wraps.
It is Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind
by Johanna Haarer, first published in 1934. I have not yet found the time to read all of it, but the central tenet can be found on page 171:
The child is to be fed, washed and kept dry but otherwise totally to be left in peace. It is best kept in its own room, where it is to be left alone. […] From the first, the whole family is to abide by the rule never to meddle with the child without a valid reason for doing so. The daily bath, the feeding and swaddling is enough opportunity for showing love and care and talking to the child. […] You can’t avoid the impression, that there are children that cry in spite of perfect care and without good reason just for fun and to pass the time. […] If the dummy doesn’t suffice, then, mother, be hard! On no account may the child be taken from its bed, held, rocked, or least of all taken to the breast. Things become difficult, where the older generation tries to interfere – grandmothers. […] We can’t warn enough against giving in. If possible the child is to be placed in a quiet room and left there until it’s time for the next meal.
This is what my parents’ generation grew up with. At the time it was not limited to one political orientation, it was the general zeitgeist in Germany and elsewhere, held by opponents as well as adherents of the regime. It is exactly what I was subjected to in my early childhood. These are the rules my generation grew up with and, being the baby-boomers, we are not few. The parents of the cohort before our’s, the 68ers, were confronted with these maxims as adults, but our parents sucked them up as impressionable children and accepted them as incontestable truth. For the current generation of young adults, this is how their own parents grew up and it may help them understand a lot.
Keeping a book like this under wraps is a crime against humanity, tantamount to the worst excesses of North Korean and Stalinist censorship. This control over what can and what can not be read is a sign of our times and something we all have to fight to the best of our ability while we still can. Please download, distribute and keep a local copy of this book before the Winston Smiths of our time have managed to find them all. By the way, the damning of all kinds of contraception coupled wih access to abortion – free and easy access in later times – was part and parcel of all Stalinist regimes until their breakdown in 1989. Just like it’s promoted here it is still a main tenet of all their remaining adherents and is gaining hold in our current society again. (As an aside, the presence of the father during birth too is one of the new ideas promoted in this “Nazi”
publication.)
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Millaire et al.’s result about early states is exactly what is predicted by theory. If, as Spencer says (2010), a new form of administration becomes mandatory once a territory is too big to enable a messenger to get from the centre to a peripheral outpost and back in a single day, enforcing the change from chiefdom to state, then the large and expansionist entities will be the first to make the transition. Turning this argument around, we will find all the first and earliest states to display expansionist tendencies, which is exactly what Millaire et al. find here.
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Nessel et al. only provide data for two possible tin sources and those overlap for at least three quarters of their respective ranges. Contrary to what they state, their archaeological bronzes are fully compatible with both. Also the concentration-deltas vary in an exactly linear fashion with atomic weight in all their diagrams, meaning any signal is pure fractioning with no geologic component whatsoever. This is to be expected, all the isotopes in question are stable and none have any long-lived precursors. As Yamazaki et al. have shown in 2014 (list of 2014-11-30), tin gets strongly fractionated in bronze casting anyway and any original signal, that might be present, will irretrievably get lost. The isotopic similarity of Unetice bronzes is solely the result of a standardized casting process. I’m surprised that an expert of Pernicka’s stature can be as unaware of current knowledge as this.