Tag Archives | History

A History Of Speculation

By on March 20, 2013 in News 0

Can the future truly be changed, or are we on a predetermined path? Chris Woebken and Sascha Pohflepp on grasping at the fabric of reality:

Hermann Minkowski’s light cones gave us a visual idea of how the possible may be situated within relations of causality. Then, in the mid-20th century, those ideas were carried into the realm of geopolitics by the threat of nuclear war.

With a flight time of 30 minutes between the Soviet Union and the United States, rocket technology shrank the future to a point where speculation became a key asset in the arsenals of the superpowers. Big think tanks like the Californian RAND Corporation, scientists, and engineers were systematically mapping out possibility spaces.

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How Pope Francis Collaborated With Argentina’s Brutal Military Dictatorship

By on March 18, 2013 in News 14

Is it really so difficult to find someone qualified to be pope who isn’t connected with mass murderers? Digital Journal writes:

From 1976 until 1983, Argentina was governed by a series of U.S.-backed military dictators who ruled with iron fists and crushed the regime’s opponents. As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during this horrific era, and many children and babies were stolen from parents imprisoned in concentration camps or murdered by the regime.

During this harrowing period, the Argentine Catholic church was shamefully silent in the face of atrocities. Worse, leading church figures were complicit in the regime’s abuses. One priest, Father Christian von Wernich, was a former police chaplain later sentenced to life in prison for involvement in seven murders, 42 kidnappings and 31 cases of torture during the ‘Dirty War.’

So exactly what role did Jorge Bergoglio play in his country’s brutal seven-year military dictatorship?
A 1995 lawsuit filed by a human rights lawyer alleges that Bergoglio, who was leading the local Jesuit community by the time the military junta seized power, was involved in the kidnapping of two of his fellow Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were tortured by navy personnel before being dumped in a field, drugged and semi-naked, five months later.

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The Forgotten Mystic Secrets Of Athanasius Kircher

By on March 13, 2013 in News, stories 0

Writers No One Reads on the incredible genius of Athanasius Kircher, a sort of bizarro-da-Vinci who created jaw-dropping inventions and surreal, lavishly illustrated science books covering topics such as the people who live inside the earth:

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) [was] a Jesuit priest and polymath who wrote more than thirty big books on everything from optics, acoustics, linguistics, and mathematics to cryptology, Egyptology, numerology, and Sinology.

Kircher wasn’t just a writer. He was an inventor of speaking statues, eavesdropping devices, and musical machines. (He is alleged to have invented an instrument called the cat piano.) He was the curator of an early modern museum — a cabinet of curiosities featuring the tailbones of a mermaid and a brick from the Tower of Babel — at the Jesuit college in Rome. He pursued his interest in geological matters by climbing down inside the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius. And he was perhaps the first to use a microscope to examine human blood.

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An Insane Brochure For The Ku Klux Klan Texas Summer Camp

By on March 11, 2013 in News 15

Via the Duke University Libraries collection, in the 1920s in Rockport, TX, the Ku Klux Klan offered a beachfront getaway resort dubbed the Kool Koast Kamp, hosted by “the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Texas,” which offered “family recreation under high-class moral conditions” for both Klansmen and their non-Klansmen friends, who were encouraged to attend for recruiting purposes.

The Rockport beach is “shaded for complexion protection,” the camp guide explains, promising “the Healthiest road to the Koolest Summer”. No word is given on what would become of any nonwhites that showed up with towels and beach umbrella in tow.

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Mythic Viking Navigation Crystal May Have Been Found In Shipwreck

By on March 10, 2013 in News 17

The first ever found remnant of a sunstone, a crystal which legend says was behind the Vikings’ incredible feats of oceanic navigation? Via CBS News:

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say.

In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal – a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel – worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud or fog, or below the horizon.

Icelandic legend appears to refers to such a crystal [but] few other medieval references to sunstones have been found, and no such crystals have ever been recovered from Viking tombs or ships.

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400-Year-Old Masonic Secret Chamber Uncovered In Historic British Manor

By on February 28, 2013 in News 7

Do the rituals of freemasonry go back further than anyone has realized? The BBC reports:

A secret chamber, hidden for 400 years and with possible links to early freemasonry, has been discovered.

The entrance to the room, which has plastered walls, was found inside a cupboard at the National Trust-owned house Canons Ashby, near Daventry. It is a paneled room with walls showing crests of local families and enigmatic symbols.

Laura Malpas, community manager of the trust, said there was “speculation” the room had been an early masonic lodge. Ms. Malpas said it was “a fascinating and puzzling space” with walls that include “frankly odd Latin texts.” She added: “There has been speculation that this room was used as an early form of Masonic lodge before Freemasonry was established in England some 130 years later in 1717.”

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The Hidden Geography Of Optical Calibration Targets

By on February 27, 2013 in News 0

The Center for Land Use Interpretation on symbols strewn across the American landscape which make sense only to airborne machines:

There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA, curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts made mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and many are still in use, though their history is obscure.

Most of them follow the same form established by the Air Force and NASA. The pattern painted on the targets is sets of parallel and perpendicular bars that function like an eye chart at the optometrist. For aerial photography and satellites, it provides a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes.

Many of these resolution test targets are found in the Mojave desert of California, one of the principal development and test areas for surveillance aircraft. The largest concentration in one place is on the grounds of Edwards Air Force Base, where calibration targets run for 20 miles.

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Back When Valentines Cards Were Brutally Cruel

By on February 14, 2013 in News 2

Slate writes that vindictive Valentine’s cards, mailed anonymously, were once as popular as romantic ones. Is it time to bring back the tradition?

These “vinegar valentines” were produced between the middle of the 19th century and middle of the 20th. The tradition was quite popular. Some historians argue that comic valentines—of which vinegar valentines were one type—made up half of all U.S. valentine sales in the middle of the 19th century.

Vinegar valentines were a socially sanctioned chance to criticize, reject, and insult. They were often sent without a signature, enabling the sender to speak without fear. These cards were sent not just to significant others, friends, and family but to a larger social circle. People might post a vinegar card to a store clerk, a teacher, or a neighbor.

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The Evangelical Political Movement’s Racist Origins

By on February 10, 2013 in News 89

Religion Dispatches explains the actual galvanization of the modern evangelical conservative movement:

The right-wing evangelical movement was not an immediate backlash to Roe v. Wade. The evangelical community, unlike Roman Catholicism, showed little interest in combating abortion until almost 1980.

Although evangelicals were mostly silent on abortion after Roe v. Wade, they were not silent on other political issues. Paul Weyrich, one of the evangelical right’s most influential founders, recalls that the movement initially emerged to defend racially segregated Christian schools from government intrusion:

What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.

In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.” Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion.

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FBI Believed Nazi Monks Had A Secret Base In The Amazon Rainforest During World War II

By on February 8, 2013 in News 4

Another thing to worry about while hiking through the jungle. The Smithsonian writes:

In October 1941, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a strange bit of war intelligence in a classified document, warning that a secret German airbase had gone up deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Particularly concerned about an attack on the Panama Canal, the FBI began collaborating with Brazil’s secret police.

In December, another worrying message came: the suspected culprits behind the scheme were a colony of German monks, [possibly] preparing for a secret base for the Luftwaffe, the airborne arm of the German military. The following July, large amounts of fuel were spotted traveling upriver in Bolivia. The FBI worried that the fuel could be headed to the secret jungle airbase, still yet to be discovered.

In the end, military leaders concluded that stockpiling enough supplies deep within the jungle would not be possible. The would-be Nazi monks were left to live their own quiet, solitary lives in nature.

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