Greek Reporter claims that a new on-line database created by Dr. Ester Salgarella, a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge, aspires to be the Rosetta Stone that will make possible the decipherment of Linear A.

The Minoan language known as “Linear A” may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet, which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language, which developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

Understanding the link between them and decoding the secrets of Linear A would allow experts to paint a much more complete picture of Minoan civilization going back as far as 1,800 BC.

Linear A, which was used by the Minoans during the Bronze Age, exists on at least 1,400 known inscriptions made on clay tablets. The language has baffled the world’s top archaeologists and linguistic experts for many years.

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Cantankerous Old Mule tells us:

[T]he village of La Haye-de-Routot in Normandy…, just south of the Forêt de Brotonne, would probably have been founded some time around the 10th century by Anglo-Scandinavian settlers. It is likely that the two yew trees, which grow in the church cemetery, were part of the original forest in the area.

The two yews in question, one at 14 metres tall and the other at 16 metres, are estimated to be over 1400 years old and have diameters of over 10 metres each. The church was built in the 13th century, with several reasons given for the yews being retained in what would become the cemetery. One is that the male yews (which both of these are) are extremely toxic to humans and animals. Local farmers would, therefore, have been loathe to graze their livestock on the church grounds. The other was a more spiritual reason. For centuries, dating back to the times of the druids, the yew was a sacred tree used in pagan practices. It is said that the early church often incorporated them in order to assimilate non-believers.

Many old yews are actually hollow inside, as their cores often rot and fall away. In the 19th century, the cavities of our yews became so large that the clergy decided to turn them into places of worship. First, in 1866, the “Chapel of St. Anne” was installed in the eastern yew, followed by the “Oratory of Our Lady of Lourdes,” in the western yew in 1897. Sadly, in 2013, the eastern yew (the one with the chapel) was sprayed with glyphosate herbicide and is now half dead.

Boom!

Fox News has before-and-after photos of the Gaza high-rise building targeted by Israel which formerly housed Hamas and such other villainous organizations as Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

Hamas and other militant groups have fired some 2,900 rockets into Israel. The military said 450 of the rockets had fallen short or misfired, while Israeli air defenses intercepted 1,150.

The interception rate appeared to have significantly dropped since the start of the conflict, when Israel said 90% were intercepted. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. …

Israel has leveled a number of Gaza City’s tallest office and residential buildings, alleging they contain Hamas military infrastructure. On Saturday, Israel bombed the 12-story al-Jalaa Building, where the office of The Associated Press was located. The building also housed the TV network Al-Jazeera and other media outlets, along with several floors of apartments.

“The campaign will continue as long as it is required,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. He alleged that Hamas military intelligence was operating inside the building.

Israel routinely cites a Hamas presence as a reason for targeting certain locations in airstrikes, including residential buildings. The military also has accused the militant group of using journalists as human shields, but provided no evidence to back up the claims.

The AP has operated from the building for 15 years, including through three previous wars between Israel and Hamas. During those conflicts as well as the current one, the news agency’s cameras from its top floor office and roof terrace offered 24-hour live shots as militants’ rockets arched toward Israel and Israeli airstrikes hammered the city and its surroundings.

“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

In the afternoon, the military called the building’s owner and warned a strike would come within an hour. AP staffers and other occupants evacuated safely. Soon after, three missiles hit the building and destroyed it, bringing it crashing down in a giant cloud of dust.

After.

HT: Vanderleun.

Sean Flynn, in LithHub, discusses the perfectly natural human need for some peafowl strutting about the property, perching in one’s trees, lending the desmesne a bit of exoticism and tone, and –of course– screaming their heads off.

My wife Louise had spontaneously volunteered to take a peacock from our friend Danielle because a peacock, in a fundamental sense, is not a bird that one possesses so much as experiences; as with an especially moving work of art, the simple act of looking at it will stir emotions. A peacock, she imagined, would patrol the yard like a sentry in dress uniform, high-stepping through the irises and roosting on the low branches of the cedars or the high peak of the barn. Every so often he would throw up a fabulous spray of feathers for no other reason than to remind us that such a spectacle is possible. It would be inevitable and yet somehow a surprise every time.

That is what one peacock would do, but only one.

Louise did not want Flannery O’Connor’s multitudes. She wanted a single peacock, a manageable number proportional to our small phony farm. The property was suitable for a pair of chickens, not a flock, after all, and the paddock was properly sized for a miniature horse, not a Thoroughbred. We were scaled for a solitary peacock, Louise insisted. Three was another matter altogether. A part-time job, she said. A petting zoo.

“You can’t have one peacock,” I told her on the drive home. “He’d be lonely.”

From: Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird.

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“Cedarhurst,” our Southern future retirement home. Ten acres is surely enough to keep the peafowl happy.

Paul Levy, in the Spectator, reviews Norman Kolpas’s Foie Gras: A Global History, which defends the rich delicacy and its creation via the practice of gavage (the fattening of geese and ducks by tubular feeding) against a recent wave of Puritanism and snobbish morality posing that got the product banned in California and removed from the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in Britain.

[T]he main opposition claim is that the production of the hyper-fatty livers of ducks and geese is physically cruel and therefore immoral.

The factual argument is just plain wrong, and so is the ethical judgment that depends on it. I have witnessed the ‘force-feeding’ of ducks, and it is not a case of animal abuse. What actually happens is that the nicely behaved ducks (imprinted à la Konrad Lorenz) form an orderly line to take their turn swallowing a flexible tube that in seconds whooshes pellets of maize or mash of cereal down their gullets. They appear to relish this, and are, in my experience, fussed about and petted affectionately by the farming women of the south-west of France who perform what is called the gavage.

The problem, says Norman Kolpas, is that our celebrities and anti-foie gras activists ‘immediately and understandably tend to anthropomorphize the birds, imagining how it might feel for a human to have a feeding tube jammed down the throat’. This image of oral rape comes from an ignorance of bird physiology. The human esophagus is a more rigid structure of muscle, cartilage and bone, and inserting a tube down it means getting past the epiglottis, which triggers the human gag reflex. These waterfowl species do not have a gag reflex.

The gavage, in fact, mimics the birds’ natural pre-migratory behavior; following the seasons, they gorge themselves with food in preparation for their long flights. This had been remarked at least as early as 400 BC, when, says Kolpas, ‘well-fattened geese were deemed sufficiently worthy to be presented as a gift when Agesilaus, king of Sparta, visited Egypt’. The Greeks and Romans force-fed geese with figs rather than grain, a practice later adapted for rich pork liver, as recommended by Apicius. Foie gras found its way to south-western France with the conquest of Gaul (121-51 BC), and then Jewish slaves, cooks and farmers spread it east across Europe. Though goose makes the most appreciated fat liver, the amount of goose foie gras now produced globally has become minuscule (about 5 percent) compared with duck foie gras, mostly from (pond-shunning) hybrid male Moulard ducks, whose meat is also succulent and valued.

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Outline link

“A jug of rice wine infused with two hundred baby rodents; a dessert made of millions of crushed flies. Jiayang Fan spoke with the creator of the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, which is located in a shopping mall and is designed with an eye for Instagram. But the playful surroundings belie the museum’s more serious messages about who gets to decide which foods are “disgusting,” and how, if we want to live more lightly on the planet, we need to broaden our palates. Just maybe don’t start out with cans of surströmming, a fermented herring. The museum director informed Fan that these fish have induced more vomiting than any other item at the museum.”

Rebecca Mead serves up the traditional expansive New Yorker essay on the Cerne Abbas Giant in response to recent dating efforts making the news.

The Cerne Giant is so imposing that he is best viewed from the opposite crest of the valley, or from the air. He is a hundred and eighty feet tall, about as high as a twenty-story apartment building. Held aloft in his right hand is a large, knobby club; his left arm stretches across the slope. Drawn in an outline formed by trenches packed with chalk, he has primitive but expressive facial features, with a line for a mouth and circles for eyes. His raised eyebrows were perhaps intended to indicate ferocity, but they might equally be taken for a look of confusion. His torso is well defined, with lines for ribs and circles for nipples; a line across his waist has been understood to represent a belt. Most well defined of all is his penis, which is erect, and measures twenty-six feet in length. Were the giant not protectively fenced off, a visitor could comfortably lie down within the member and take in the idyllic vista beyond.

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Outline version (outside paywall).

Zero HP Lovecraft refuses to be assimilated.

We have watched each click of the ratchet, as mindless pod people tell us that each new change isn’t really happening, it’s a crazy conspiracy, and also it’s good that it’s happening.

Have you ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Don’t waste your time on any version but the original from 1956. It’s a truly chilling film, one of the great classics of sci fi horror, and also a political allegory, as poignant today as it was then.

In the story, alien seed pods grow exact replicas of the people all around you, and when you fall asleep, an alien consciousness grown from your pod takes over your body. At first it seems like a mass hysteria of Capgras delusion, but the aliens and pods turn out to be real.

“I will not eat the bugs, I will not live in the pod” – this far right hate slogan exists because we know the people in charge want to make us eat insects and house us in bug hives. But Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers us a different way to imagine pod life.

Progressives feel a salacious thrill when they imagine what common, ordinary things will be prohibited in the future. This is the sacrifice that the god “progress” demands – each generation gives up a slice of humanity – and they call this “humane.”

We’ve all heard them say it, that perverted thrill they feel when they imagine their own futureshock. “one day, people will see meat-eating as cruel and barbaric” – These cancerous prohibitions are always latent in the progressive mind, then one day they metastasize.

The first time I was politically awake for it was the normalization of homosexuality. Public opinion flipped over night. One day, Obama himself was against it (lie) and the next day your very own friends were taking you aside in private to tell you to stop calling things gay.

Since then it’s happened two more times in rapid succession: first with transsexuality, and second with Bowels Loose Movement. In 2014 they were a minor nuisance, in 2020 everyone spontaneously bent the knee. They did that because people instinctively submit to power.

Watching my friends and coworkers install the latest kernel updates for progressivism makes me feel like everyone around me is being replaced by Alien pod people. For some, the feeling is mutual, but these are people whose slogan is “Change”, who insist WE are the radical ones.

Whether you can be body-snatched by a rapid norm reversal is pretty much the criteria for whether you are fully human or just some kind of animal. True nihilism isn’t hopelessness, it’s having no anchor.

People who believe in nothing also believe in everything, it’s why cults proliferate in times of social collapse, which is what you are living through. Physical collapse isn’t here yet, but cultural collapse, meta-political collapse, has arrived.

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HT: Vanderleun.

The CIA:

Actual quotes from this new CIA recruitment ad:

"I am a woman of color"

"I am a cisgender millennial"

"I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder"

"I am intersectional"

I think it's safe to say the contemporary American left has failed.pic.twitter.com/ruUzWSeIur

— Aisha Ahmad (@aishaismad) May 2, 2021

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The US Army:

Wow.

First it was the woke CIA ad, now it is a super-woke woke animated army recruitment ad featuring a lesbian wedding, an LGBT rights parade and women "shattering stereotypes" by joining the world's largest killing machine. pic.twitter.com/xDqP39EQei

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) May 12, 2021

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Russia:

Russian Military Recruitment Video from NORSKK on Vimeo.

Which side do you think would do better in a life-or-death armed conflict?