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Home » Open thread 9/12/22

Open thread 9/12/22

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much we don’t know about the past. But it’s also amazing how much we do know about the past:

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Open thread 9/12/22 — 39 Comments

  4. What’s always bothered me about this topic of ancient metal use was who the hell had the idea of taking this blue colored rock they happened to see lying about, putting it in a fire and then observing enough to see a molten metal come out? Was it serendipitous? Was it experimental? How was the fire actually hot enough to melt the ore? etc. How the actual discovery came about is what fascinates me, not so much the after effects of use and mining. I’m sure we’ll probably never know the answer.

  5. More and more evidence that Democrats have fully embraced fascist evil.

    In addition to raiding anyone close to Trump, over 40 lawyers who represented people with Trump ties are being threatened and harassed by their respective Bars with disciplinary ethics investigations. Being a lawyer for MAGA is now worse than being a lawyer for a murderer, traitor, or terrorist. Just one more step in the campaign for persecution of political prisoners.

    Pure evil.

    They want to revoke the constitution and many of the rights in the Bill of Rights. They want to eliminate federalism and the electoral college for presidential elections. They have eliminated bail. They have opened the borders. They are persecuting opponents. They already have political prisoners. They have swept multiple murders of conservatives by their uniformed thugs under the rug.

    I realized something this weekend. Trump is a distraction. Biden’s health and incompetence and corruption are all distractions. Covid, inflation, the border fiasco, global warming — all distractions. Focus on what is really important. And yes, that sounds crazy. It’s scary once we realize that those “distractions” aren’t what’s REALLY important.

    The left is engaged in an effort over the last decade to take power permanently in the US. A dictatorship of a banana republic. This criminal organization has ripped off the mask and made its goal perfectly clear. The civil war is not just a possibility. It’s a reality. If our side doesn’t start fighting back, it will be over soon.

    They are going to steal a lot of elections in November. OBVIOUSLY. After all their criminal actions so far, who could possibly be so naive as to give them any benefit of the doubt? They don’t act in good faith. They haven’t for years. They aren’t about to start now.

    They’ve declared war on us. Just listen to what they say. We don’t even have to read between the lines anymore. Their attempted coup failed in 2016. So they stole 2020. They’ve gotten more and more brazen in their power grabs since. Stealing 2022 is already in the works. After they do, what will stop them?

    Kamala is already taking about permanently ending the filibuster after they secure two more senate seats this fall. They expect to gain senate seats. Contemplate that. They are already banning Republicans from running for office.

    What’s it going to take for good people to see what is happening in plain sight?

  7. We toured the Great Orme Mine around 25 years ago. It was fascinating. At that time we could go fairly far into the mines. It was a warren of exceedingly small tunnels; we are not big people, and could not go as far into the mine as we would have liked. Back then, they had exhibits reviewing information similar to this YouTube. Very interesting.
    A corollary to this that you may find interesting, is David Anthony’s book, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language”

  9. physicsguy and Miguel cervantes,

    I used to wonder about this also, but then I started camping, and eventually got a fire pit for my yard. There is something very primal, compelling and captivating about a fire. We all know this and there are logical theories why this may be hard-wired into our DNA through evolution.

    When I think about how many people spent how much time maintaining fires, tending fires, watching fires… It doesn’t seem that unlikely that people would occasionally notice changes in materials in the aftermath of a fire.

  11. Rufus, it’s one thing to notice changes in materials after a fire, quite another to move to smelting and forging. I suspect there were several individuals at the 2 sigma end of the IQ bell curve who were responsible. U

  12. Rufus
    Many people doing the permanent fire thing, which is to say living by and with it, not as a recreation, use fire rings of stones. Eventually, somebody’s going to get the right ore. Include some well-dried hardwood and a good breeze for fanning the thing and you might have just the right conditions.

    However, the Aubrey massive discovery: Up until then, H. Sap and his antecedents had made tools by breaking stuff and then, depending, putting it together with other stuff. Stone is stone and if you break it up and then push flakes off it and put on the end of a stick, it’s still stone.

    Not until you find liquid metal coming out of what may as well be stone do we have…changing the actual nature of something. Copper and its ore are hugely different. They are differently useful and thus differently useless.

    I suggest that a whole ‘nother kind of thinking began when you got one sort of Stuff changing into another sort of Stuff. A new avenue. Yeah, we moderns who fancy ourselves metallurgists don’t get all mystical about it. Seen it before, yawn. But how about the first guys?

    If this, then what if…..?

  14. For anyone interested in supporting a candidate to try to stop Democrats from adding Senate seats, I suggest Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

    Dems are pulling out all the stops trying to flip the seat by any means necessary, including cheating, which they have a record of doing in the state.

    Johnson seems to be a fairly conservative, down-to-earth guy. His opponent is Mandela Barnes, an unimpressive 35 year old radical, who has never had a job in the private sector.

    The most recent poll I found shows Barnes up by 2 points.
    https://www.ronjohnsonforsenate.com/

  15. What’s always bothered me about this topic of ancient metal use was who the hell had the idea of taking this blue colored rock they happened to see lying about, putting it in a fire and then observing enough to see a molten metal come out? Was it serendipitous? Was it experimental? How was the fire actually hot enough to melt the ore? etc. How the actual discovery came about is what fascinates me, not so much the after effects of use and mining. I’m sure we’ll probably never know the answer.

    The one that amazed me was how some cultures (I think Vikings) figured out you could extract iron from bogs. Not sure how that worked but the idea you cut out some chunks of peat from the local bog and with the right work you get a lump of iron from basically plant.

  16. “What’s it going to take for good people to see what is happening in plain sight?”

    Many, of course, are asleep. Others are taken in by the propaganda.
    Of the dissidents my feeling is that most are silently resisting (“Irish Democracy”). Not taking any action. Not banding together.

  18. stan on September 12, 2022 at 10:52 am
    gets it right–except I would not characterize Trump or Biden as distractions.

    If I remember correctly, it was neo who introduced me to the Gramscian March.

  19. From miguel’s 2:35 pm post on Liquidity for Energy Firms
    “The European Commission plans to propose a mandatory EU target soon to cut power consumption at peak hours.”

    OK. Cut power consumption at peak hours. Mandatory.
    Sounds in principle a lot like a Covid Shutdown only a scheduled power failure instead of confinement to your home.

  20. I’ve thought about ancient metal use now and then. It seems that above all it requires a stable community with a significant population. What good is a discovery if it can’t be discussed with other people who will advance the discovery and think up uses and pass it it on to future generations? It will never happen in a hunter gatherer society since they are transient and don’t stay in one place long enough to develop such an initially esoteric technology. Even the large Aztec and Inca societies of the Americas didn’t develop metal working for whatever reason.

  21. physicsguy, Richard Aubrey et alia,

    There were A LOT of random, observed ad hoc hours of experimentation with fire and earthly materials and A LOT of eyeballs observing them. I agree that when you get to things like the Bessemer process, Damascus steel, nuclear fission… there was purposeful, intentional, methodical and very intelligent and inspired work going on, but lightning strikes, forest fires, volcanic activity… and human made fires. Hundreds of thousands of years of millions of humans.

    Maybe it was a handful of primates on the far right asymptote of the bell curve intuiting molecular structures and how they behave under high temperatures, but it doesn’t seem impossible it was relatively smart primates observing something accidental and improving upon it.
    🙂

    Some woods are better for some purposes when they are forged in fire. And of course there is charcoal. It doesn’t seem unlikely most fire using humans would understand that some “wind” makes a fire hotter (while too much often extinguishes it). So you create a bellows like situation to harden wooden spear tips and eventually some random “special” rock gets in the center of the fire and they notice hardened metal had oozed into the ash once the firepit cools. Find some more rock that looks like the rock with the oozing and see what happens.

  22. It actually amazes me it took the Montgolfier brothers to figure out hot air ballooning. Observing a fire you notice things rising, against gravity. It’s very noticeable because it’s so very unusual. Except in high winds it’s the only time one sees solid objects on Earth rise without a visible impetus. Ash, leaves… Ancients had paper. Aristophanes never crumpled a botched draft of one of his plays and tossed it into a fire?

  23. BREAKING – Headline at OAN “400 Doctors Declare Crisis Over COVID Vaccines, Recommend Immediate Stop To Programs”

    https://www.oann.com/400-doctors-declare-medical-crisis-over-covid-vaccines-recommend-an-immediate-stop-to-all-programs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=400-doctors-declare-medical-crisis-over-covid-vaccines-recommend-an-immediate-stop-to-all-programs

    It’s short but with video added.
    The close is also news to me: “The declaration comes after research from specialists at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University found vaccines could be up to 98 times as dangerous for children compared to COVID-19 itself.”

  24. TJ:

    I have never understood the push for young children to be vaccinated. They are at extremely low risk to begin with when they get COVID. I think vaccines for children can only be justified for very high risk children, for example with immune deficiencies or other illnesses that predispose them to problems with COVID itself, and only if the risk from the vaccine is lower for such children than the risks from COVID.

    As for the rest, I posted a rebuttal yesterday about the claim regarding heart problems. In the general adult population, I have yet to see anything that convinces me that vaccines are more of a problem than COVID itself. You can get 400 doctors around the world to claim just about anything, by the way. There is COVID hysteria and there is also COVID vaccine hysteria, in my opinion. That doesn’t mean that COVID doesn’t kill some people – of course it does – or that vaccines have no bad side effects (including death) for some people. Of course they do.

    I am tired of writing the same things over and over. For example, regarding adverse events from vaccines, people are reporting everything bad that happens to them after they get a vaccine as being due to the vaccines, but of course it is not. Also, the population that gets vaccinated tends to be older and sicker than the general population, which would predispose them to various problems in the first place.

    That article you linked gives very little information except the problem with vaccines for children, something I happen to think really is a problem.

  25. The copper mines of Europe exported their mined, refined copper to the great Middle Eastern civilizations. Europe’s copper mines were excavated by large local tribes. As civilizations are defined, Europe didn’t see civilization arise until many centuries after the Bronze Age.

  26. physicsguy,

    “What’s always bothered me about this topic of ancient metal use was who the hell had the idea of taking this blue colored rock they happened to see lying about, putting it in a fire and then observing enough to see a molten metal come out?”

    Prometheus… was probably involved.

    stan,

    “What’s it going to take for good people to see what is happening in plain sight?”

    They’ll awaken when it gets personal enough. A great awakening that the left is doing its damnest to bring about.

    miguel cervantes,

    Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is an ideological fanatic, a true believer. As a former constitutional law professor and arrogant leftist ‘intellectual’… he’s decided that he can do much better than the founders.

    As for “Europe’s Central Bank Rules Out Liquidity Support For Energy Firms”

    Its too stupid NOT to be intentional.

    “TJ:

    I have never understood the push for young children to be vaccinated.” neo

    Your difficulty is in contemplating the horrific. Which is all that remains, your having failed to imagine a rational explanation. Not that you’re alone in that ‘failing’. As there is no rational explanation. It being an irrational edict given the data, of which the ‘authorities’ are certainly aware of…

    It’s easy to understand once you accept that it’s being implemented with full knowledge and intent of the consequences.

    ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ …
    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle elucidating a useful principle through his memorable fictional character Sherlock Holmes.

  29. @ Tina > “We toured the Great Orme Mine around 25 years ago.”

    We went through the mine in 2019. Very cramped, twisted, narrow passages, all below ground level in a maze of connecting tunnels.
    Fascinating.
    The best part of the story is that they were leveling the ground to make a parking lot for the tourist attraction at the top of the hill called the Great Orme, and accidentally uncovered a huge hole in the ground that no one was expecting.
    Apparently, the mine had been long forgotten.

    https://www.greatormemines.info/
    “Uncovered in 1987 during a scheme to landscape an area of the Great Orme, the copper mines discovered represent one of the most astounding archaeological discoveries of recent times. Dating back 4,000 years to the Bronze Age they change our views about the ancient people of Britain and their civilized and structured society 2,000 years before the Roman invasion.

    Over the past 28 years mining engineers, cavers and archaeologists have been slowly uncovering more tunnels and large areas of the surface landscape to reveal what is now thought to be the largest prehistoric mine, so far discovered in the world.

    Come and see for yourself and explore tunnels mined over 3,500 years ago.”

    There are a few pictures at the Gallery tab, not nearly enough to get a real sense of the place.

  30. PS there is a short video at the Exploration tab that does show how narrow some of the tunnels are, having been filled over the centuries with stalactites and mining debris.

  31. @ miguel > https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/09/12/desantis-under-fire-from-the-right-for-big-business-comments-n626139

    Bonchie points out that the complaints are coming primarily from libertarians, who are resolutely refusing to see how many businesses are now functioning as enforcers of Democrat / Leftist policies.
    They may be nominally on the right, but they are not conservatives, as the headline might seem to imply.

    One writer from Reason (Stephanie Slade) made a series of posts that were cited by other accounts to condemn DeSantis.
    …
    To be clear, the above paraphrases of DeSantis’ comments aren’t wholly accurate. The governor is not just, out of the blue, suggesting that large businesses aren’t private and don’t have First Amendment rights. What he’s referring to is the disturbing trend of mega-corporations being influenced by the federal government (often through back-channel means) to take actions to suppress rights that otherwise can’t gain popular support.

    Contrary to the gnashing of teeth, that is actually illegal. Private corporations are not allowed to act as proxies for actions sought by the federal government. Exploring the depth of such collusion would be necessary, but DeSantis is not wrong or crazy for putting the option on the table.

    For example, how gullible must a person be to believe this recent move by major credit card companies is just a coincidence?

    open collusion between democrats and credit card companies restricting gun rights. no reason to pass laws if financial institutions carry out your agenda for you.

    Do you know what it’s called when private companies are influenced and tacitly controlled by the federal government? That’s called fascism, and last I checked, fascism is bad. It is no more acceptable for rights to be crushed by major corporations working hand in hand with Democrats than it is for rights to be crushed directly by the government.

    Of course, there are many other examples, including the collusion between the government and private businesses to push vaccine mandates. DeSantis mentioned that as well, again drawing criticism.
    …
    Wrapping up, libertarians may be content to make drug legalization their top priority, but DeSantis knows what time it is, and he sees where all this is going. If that’s unacceptable to our libertarian friends, then I have a suggestion: Go vote for Libertarians.

    For our part, conservatives are not going to sit idly by while oligarchic corporations ally with far-left officials to create a society where you can’t walk into a Wal-Mart without having a vaccine that has no effect on other people (i.e. transmission). We also aren’t going to watch our Second Amendment rights crushed by credit card companies taking their cues from Elizabeth Warren. If that’s too icky for libertarians, then they’ve got other options. Feel free to take them.

  32. @ miguel > “his father headed a soviet front group, ips,”

    What’s up with these “constitutional law professors” who have no respect for the Founding Document they presume to teach about?
    PS Some law schools don’t even require the students read The Constitution itself, just the Supreme Court cases.
    Raskin must have come from one of those.

    Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) took issue on Friday with the constitutionally-mandated manner in which presidents are elected, calling the Electoral College “an accident waiting to happen.”

    Raskin, who was a constitutional law professor prior to his time in Congress, told MSNBC host Chris Hayes that the system as a whole was “vulnerable” and that the Electoral College had allowed room for “strategic bad faith actors” like former President Donald Trump.

    Is “ips” this one?
    Independent Party, Seattle
    from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_historically_described_as_Communist_fronts_by_the_United_States_federal_government
    1948 Attorney General’s list & 1961 HUAC guide

    There are well over 100 organization names on those lists of Un-American Activists!

  34. ‘…calling the Electoral College “an accident waiting to happen.”…’

    Congressman Raskal and his like-minded colleagues might as well trash the Constitution while they’re at it…
    Oh, wait…

    (But at least we KNOW their rationalization regarding the utterly MORAL necessity for stealing the 2020 election….)

  35. re Covid and Vaccines, here is a biostatistician who analyzes both vaccine efficacy and side effects. He seems to be an individual with a lot of intellectual integrity:

    https://www.covid-datascience.com/

    Don’t miss his piece on how watching the original version of ‘Ghostbusters’ can kill you…a conclusion one could easily arrive at using simplistic data-analysis methods:

    https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/is-watching-the-1984-ghostbusters-movie-killing-people-a-statistician-s-perspective

  38. UFOs hiding in Mar A Lago! Threatening “our democracy”™! Nuclear secrets, I tell you (Wa Post).

    Nevermind …

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