From BlondMisanthrope.

Justin Gillis, in the magisterial New York Times, explains that climate science predictions of dramatic warming were wrong and climate scientists do not know why, but the failures of their theory don’t really matter. “More than a century of research thoroughly” proves that they are right.

It must be “natural variability” and the felicitous intervention of “deep ocean” cooling or the blocking of sunlight by air pollution in China or any of half a dozen explanations recently invented. But the basic science remains certain and established and agreed upon, even if none of its predictions have actually come through. One of these days, Gillis assures us, whatever is stopping the correct theory from working will just stop, and Sha-zam!, we will get: “an extremely rapid warming of the planet.”

Just keep believing.

As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming.

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.

As you might imagine, those dismissive of climate-change concerns have made much of this warming plateau. They typically argue that “global warming stopped 15 years ago” or some similar statement, and then assert that this disproves the whole notion that greenhouse gases are causing warming.

Read the whole thing, and hold on to your chair as you laugh.

Reputedly: “106-year-old Armenian woman sitting in front of her home guarding it with an AK-47 in the village of Degh, near the border of Azerbaijan.” But the photo is several years old, is all over the web, and appears on a number of Russian-language motivation posters. I was not able to find a reliable source or attribution.

Late Bronze Age sacrificial pit: three murdered people and the head of a cow

Scienceblogs:

From British Archaeology #131 (July/August): [There was] a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we’re dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants. …

[It went] on for 800 years, well into the Middle Iron Age about 200 cal BC. A three-century hiatus during the Early Iron Age, I speculate, may be covered by the part of the feature that hasn’t been excavated.

At least 24 people end[ed] up in sacrificial pits between 1000 and 800: males and females, ages 6 to 55. One large pit sees the following sequence (image above):

1. Redeposited human bones and two new-born lambs
2. Woman over 50, killed by sword blows to the back of the head
3. Another pair of lambs
4. Cow’s head, two children and a teenage girl
5. Cattle foot and bag containing dismembered man, 30-35
6. More redeposited bones from people who died before the pit was dug …

Iron Age practices in the sacrificial pit complex are less intense and intricate: over a period of three centuries, eight people get buried whole and seven disarticulated bone bundles are deposited. One young man is buried on top of half a horse. The bone bundles bear signs of scavenging by dogs.

Who were these people then? Could anybody at Cliffs End get roped in for sacrifice and be denied respectful burial at the whim of the local druid? …

Andrew Millard of Durham University analysed all suitable teeth from 25 individuals. Here’s the geographical breakdown of the sacrificial victims’ area of origin:

36% local
32% southern Norway or Sweden
20% western Mediterranean
12% indeterminate

The reason that you do more than one tooth from the same individual is that teeth form in sequence during gestation, childhood and adolescence. If you move or change your diet during that period, this shows up in the isotope ratios of whatever tooth your body is making at the time. This gave particularly interesting results in the case of an old woman whose disarticulated skull was redeposited in the Late Bronze Age charnel pit discussed above. She was born in Scandinavia, moved to northern Britain as a child, lived a long life and finally ended up as a prop in a religious ritual on Thanet.

More than half of the victims are foreigners. And though more than a third are locals, we don’t know if their parents were locals as DNA hasn’t been done yet. Who travels like this in the 1st millennium BC? Certainly not tourists. Traders do travel, but for a community dependent on long-distance bronze deliveries, it would not be a sustainable strategy to ambush and kill the traders – never mind that these were in all likelihood well organised and armed. My guess is that we’re dealing with slave raiding and slave trade. Goods travelled, and one valuable commodity was slaves. All valuable commodities were appropriate as sacrifices to the gods when that time came.

In the case of the well-travelled old woman, I imagine her being taken from her tribe in southern Norway by Scottish slave raiders, growing up in Scotland, and then being traded on maturity to a Kentish tribe with odd religious practices. She probably gives birth to more slaves there (perhaps a few of the recovered individuals with local isotope signatures) and lives most of her adult life at Cliffs End. Not as a member of the clan, but as property of a clan member. And then comes that final Beltane feast out by the barrows.

F.X. Mozart (1791-1844) was the youngest son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Canadian pianist Julie Holtzman has specialized in the study and performance of the works of F.X. Mozart for more than three decades.

Hat tip to Homilius, via Madame Scherzo and Vanderleun, who writes:

I wonder if anyone on my followers list would respond to this prompt: write a short poem on the work—character—life of Franz Xaver Mozart. Karl, the older son, became a financial clerk and translator, but F.X. Mozart ended his career as a piano teacher and as the Kapellmeister of the Salzburg Mozarteum. (He died of stomach cancer in 1844, at the age of 53.)

For reasons that don’t need to be given, it should be easier to write and speak about Franz than Wolfgang. Dead clay that did me kindness, I can do none to you…

Via Madame Scherzo.

Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, 1982

Mihai:

[T]he postmodern individual is the most conditioned and the most chained human type that ever existed in our recorded history. Not only a complete slave to any whim or impulse that presents itself as ‘the next best thing’, but also the perfect puppet to even the most gross and evident manipulation. Since he can mold himself into anything he ‘wants’, the postmodernist can, thus, also be molded, from the outside, into anything that the technocratic ‘elites’ of our days desire. He can be subjected to all manners of social engineering, without even the least possibility of resistance, for he can never discern between his desire and the desire of another — in the absence of any absolute, stable point of reference, external circumstances become the only considerations, and circumstances can always be easily manipulated. …

[T]he postmodern world is quickly losing all touch with even a minimally stable reality. Even seemingly rationalist types, with an apparently materialist and limited horizon, such as Richard Dawkins are no exception to this. Dawkins ridicules any mention of God, Spirit, Transcendence- everything vertical really- but has no problem in believing that there are no limits to our power on the horizontal plane, nor does he even doubt for a single moment the significance or quality of any new discovery or “zeitgeist”.

Via Madame Scherzo.

Thousands of Dutch were awaiting the arrival of the liberators in Dam Square in Amsterdam on May 7, 1945, two days after the capitulation of Germany. Officers of the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) watched from the balconies of the Grote Club how the crowd grew and grew, dancing and cheering. Finally, the Germans placed a machine gun on the balcony and began to shoot people in the square. The picture shows how members of the outdoor crowd sought protection aligning themselves with the “shadow” of the lamp posts, the only obstacle between them and German fire. 22 people died and 120 were seriously injured.

The shooting finally ceased when a member of the resistance climbed the tower of the royal palace and opened fire on the Germans. It was then that a German officer together with a Resistance commander, managed to make their way into the club and convinced the Germans to surrender.

Via Push the Movement.