laparanoia

In 1897, prior to the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, Frederic Remington, an artist hired by William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, went to Cuba with noted writer Richard Harding Davis to provide illustrations to accompany a series of articles on the Revolution.

Arriving in Havana in January of 1897, Remington soon became bored with seemingly peaceful Cuba and wired Hearst:

"Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return."

Hearst's reply is alleged to have been:

"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

On 24 January, President McKinley sent the second class battleship U.S.S. Maine from Key West to Havana, after clearing the visit with a reluctant government in Madrid. The battleship arrived on 25 January. Spanish authorities in Havana were wary of American intentions, but they afforded Captain Charles Sigsbee and the officers of Maine every courtesy.

At 9:40 on the evening of 15 February, a terrible explosion on board Maine shattered the stillness in Havana Harbor. Most of Maine's crew were sleeping or resting in the enlisted quarters in the forward part of the ship when the explosion occurred. Two hundred and sixty-six men lost their lives as a result of the disaster.

Spanish officials and the crew of the civilian steamer City of Washington acted quickly in rescuing survivors and caring for the wounded. The attitude and actions of the former allayed initial suspicions that hostile action caused the explosion, and led Sigsbee to include at the bottom of his initial telegram: "Public opinion should be suspended until further report."

But that recommendation obviously didn't apply to Hearst's New York Journal. Stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality soon dominated his front page.

The explosion was attributed by Spanish scientists, to an internal and accidental explosion; but an American Naval inquiry concluded that it was caused by submarine mine.

Throughout the spring of 1898 Spain negotiated to prevent war to no avail. On April 25 President William McKinley declared war with Spain. Having clamored for a fight for two years, Hearst took credit for the conflict when it came. A week after the United States declared war on Spain, he ran "How do you like the Journal's war?" on his front page.

Ernest L. Meyer did later define Hearst's character quite accurately:

"Mr. Hearst in his long and not laudable career has inflamed Americans against Spaniards, Americans against Japanese, Americans against Filipinos, Americans against Russians, and in the pursuit of his incendiary campaign he has printed downright lies, forged documents, faked atrocity stories, inflammatory editorials, sensational cartoons and photographs and other devices by which he abetted his jingoistic ends."

Hearst will also be remembered in History for advocating the assassination of President McKinley in an editorial just months before the President was actually killed.

The Spanish–American War, in any case, represented a “splendid little war” according to Secretary of State John Hay. Only 109 days after the outbreak of war, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the conflict, gave the United States ownership of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.

However the US soon made clear that their intentions were not to "liberate" the natives from Spanish brutality, but rather to inflict on them a much worse oppression.
During the the "pacification" of Samar, in the Philippines, US soldiers were ordered to take "no prisoners".
U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith who was in charge, dispatched precise orders to "kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States," as he told Major Littleton W. T. Waller. When Waller asked for clarification, Smith specified that "everyone ten years of age or older should be killed", Hearst's newspaper, the New York Evening Journal, had no trouble to even graphically publish the atrocity.

Nonetheless, the war did mark the American entry into world affairs and over the course of the next century, the United States had a large hand in various conflicts around the world.
The Panic of 1893 was over by this point, and the United States entered a lengthy and prosperous period of high economic growth, population growth, and technological innovation which lasted through the 1920s.

To be fair it wasn't neither the first time nor would be the last time that the US or many other countries around the World used Government sponsored terrorism upon their own countrymen to get their public opinion to agree with their military plans.

The Reichstag fire was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi German.
General Franz Halder stated in an affidavit that Hermann Goering had joked about setting the fire:

"On the occasion of a lunch on the Führer's birthday in 1942, the people around the Führer turned the conversation to the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears how Göring broke into the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I, for I set fire to it."

And there's proof that at least some of the Moscow bombings attributed to Chechenians were in fact organized by the FSB, the Russian domestic intelligence service, the successor of KGB.
The FSB were caught by local police and citizens in the city of Ryazan planting a bomb with a detonator in the basement of an apartment building on the night of September 22, 1999.

Let alone 9/11.
You only have to look at the Twin Towers being knocked down. It is a demolition.


There were Means, Motive, and Opportunity.
Vice President Richard Cheney was not only a planner in the attacks, but also on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superseding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room.


Marvin P. Bush, the president's younger brother, was on the board of directors of the company providing electronic security for the World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines.
A number of suspicious security operations took place in the days leading up to September 11, including the lifting of a high-security alert despite heavy warnings at the complex. Furthermore, bomb-sniffing dogs were removed on September 6th and a
power-down took place the weekend before 9/11 (September 8 and 9) in the South Tower (WTC 2). Reportedly, the power-down affected a large number of security cameras and door locks throughout the complex while a number of "engineers" went back and forth between the towers.


Firemen, Police and reporters heard the explosions and they have even been recorded on audio and video.


There's only one reputable publication in the whole of the US today that dares to defend the ridiculous theory put forward by the Bush Administration and that is Popular Mechanics.
And guess who owns Popular Mechanics? Hearst Corporation.

OK, so they did it. It was an inside job. One of many in History inflicted by Governments on their own folk in order to get a reaction that will back up their military plans.
So what? Some people died, but surely they took into account that it will benefit more people than it actually harmed, some difficult decision that those privileged minds had to make at some point in order to preserve the American Way of Life, which happens to be the Right Way of Life.
Same kind of dilemma, like the one that the crew of the Enola Gay were put through when asked to drop a bomb that was to kill more than 100.000 people, by pointing out that "it was done to save more lives than if the war with Japan had continued on", or at least that's what they say in the movie, so it must be true.
What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal, or rather the global deal, is that by letting those privileged minds of the Bush Administration get away with that blatant act of terrorism, that was preceded by a blatant election rip-off and a subsequent blatantly illegal and unjust invasion of Iraq, the World veered away from the Kyoto agreements that had been endorsed by the Clinton Administration and instead, resources were wasted in a war whose only objective was to loot the petrol out of one of the biggest world providers, so we can keep on polluting even more and aggravate global warming in an irreversible manner.


What all this means is that those "privileged minds" are not so smart after all, because when the effects of global warming start to get real nasty, we ALL be affected, even them, dumb asses who regarded themselves as more intelligent that everyone in the scientific community and instead of paying attention chose to conveniently ignore their warnings in order to fill their pockets with the excuse that in the end, it'd be a positive action for everybody (except the inevitable and not so important victims involved in these kind of megalomaniac schemes, that is).

Something went terribly wrong when Al Gore (who happened to be the man that has got more votes in the History of the USA, ever) let that election be stolen away from him.

And now it's too late. I am totally convinced that we're far beyond the Point of No Return.

Otherwise, I would had not written this post.

Three flint tools dated from 40,000 years ago confirms that the Nerja Cave (Málaga province in Spain) was inhabited by the Neanderthal man.

A group of Spanish anthropologists have been looking at items removed from the famous tourist attraction some 20 years ago, and affirmed that there is no doubt about the evidence.

The tools date from the middle Palaeolithic period and are part of 151,588 items which have been newly classified.

Neanderthal fossils and associated materials have been found all over Spain, such as at Bañolas (Girona) and Cova Negra (Valencia).
Fully developed Neanderthals, some represented by well-preserved skulls, come from more than 10 different localities throughout Spain, including Los Casares, Carigüela, Gabasa, and Zafarraya, with a cluster in Gibraltar (Forbe's Quarry, Gorham's Cave, and La Genista).
Mountainous ranges South of Spain provided with natural caves, many of which were at times occupied by Neanderthals during the Late Pleistocene Epoch (approximately 130,000 to 10,000 years ago).

Nerja Cave Website

Neandertal Learning Materials:

• Neandertal Genome Fact Sheet
• A Quick Guide to Neandertal Biology
• How Genome Sequencing is Done
• From the Genome to the Proteome
• Glossary of Terms

Scholarly articles on Neandertal:

• Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Susan E. Ptak, Adrian W. Briggs, Michael T. Ronan, Jan F. Simons, Lei Du, Michael Egholm, Jonathan M. Rothberg, Maja Paunovic and Svante Paabo
  Nature, 2006 November 16; vol. (7117), 444 330-336
• Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal Genomic DNA James P. Noonan, Graham Coop, Sridhar Kudaravalli, Doug Smith,Johannes Krause, Joe Alessi, Feng Chen, Darren Platt, Svante Pääbo,Jonathan K. Pritchard, and Edward M. Rubin
  Science, 2006 November 17 ; vol. 314, 1113-1118
• Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans. Matthias Krings, Anne Stone, Ralf W. Schmitz, Heike Krainitzki, Mark Stoneking, and Svante Paabo. Cell, Vol. 90, 19–30, July 11, 1997
• No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans. David Serre, Andre Langaney, Mario Chech, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Maja Paunovic, Philippe Mennecier, Michael Hofreiter, Goran Possnert, Svante Paabo PLOS Biology. March 2004, Volume 2, Issue 3, Page 0314.
• Genetic Analysis from Ancient DNA. Svante Paabo,Hendrik Poinar, David Serre, Viviane Jaenicke-Despres, Juliane Hebler, Nadin Rohland,Melanie Kuch, Johannes Krause, Linda Vigilant, and Michael Hofreiter. Annu. Rev. Genet. 2004. 38:645–79
• Publications by Dr. Svante Paabo

A BBC documentary:
The Trap, directed by Adam Curtis.

Game Theory studies strategic interactions between agents. In strategic games, agents choose strategies which will maximize their return, given the strategies the other agents choose.
The essential feature is that it provides a formal modeling approach to social situations in which decision makers interact with other agents.

Game theory has played, and continues to play a large role in the social sciences, and is now also used in many diverse academic fields. Beginning in the 1970s, game theory has been applied to animal behavior, including evolutionary theory.

Many games, especially the prisoner's dilemma, are used to illustrate ideas in political science and ethics. Game theory has recently drawn attention from computer scientists because of its use in artificial intelligence and cybernetics.

Although some game theoretic analyses appear similar to decision theory, game theory studies decisions made in an environment in which players interact. In other words, game theory studies choice of optimal behavior when costs and benefits of each option depend upon the choices of other individuals.

But bear in mind that John Forbes, whose works on the theory were later applied to many social and political schemes was a schizophrenic.

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"Liberty? Why, it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages."

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Source:
Rafa Minuesa

Estamos en el año 25.000 antes de Jesucristo.
Toda Europa está ocupada por los Cro-Mañones ...
¿Toda? !No!
Varias aldeas pobladas por irreductibles Neandertales resiste, invicta siempre al invasor.

La invasión se ha producido de una forma insidiosa,pero altamente efectiva.
Los Homínidos que un día aparecieron a las puertas orientales del territorio Neandertal y que atrajeron la curiosidad de los Neandros, por su elevada estatura y carencia de pelo, comenzaron a despertar desde bien pronto todo tipo de recelos.
Por alguna razón misteriosa, todos aquellos Neandros que mantenían relaciones cercanas con los recién llegados, morían tras una rápida e incurable enfermedad.

Eran unos tipos raros estos Cro-Magnones.
Aunque mucho más avanzados que los Neandros en cuestiones de Agricultura y Vivienda, su organización social consistía de núcleos familiares, con parejas ocupando su propia tierra y casa junto a otras parejas en el mismo estado, algo que a los Neandertales se les antojaba harto estúpido y poco práctico.

Pero a pesar con una estructura unifamiliar, los recién llegados también tenían la repudiable costumbre de practicar sexo con todo tipo de animales, incluidos los propios Neandros.
Para la Sociedad Neandertal, este tipo de relaciones eran totalmente inaceptables y cuando los miembros del clan que habían sucumbido a los encantos Cro-Mañones comenzaron a morir, víctimas de un virus proveniente del Macaco Rhesus, los druidas Neandertales inmediatamente lo achacaron a un Castigo de los Dioses.

La Sociedad Neandertal, que tan abierta y tolerante en temas sexuales había sido hasta entonces, cayó en una época de oscurantismo, una especie de Edad Media Paleolítica, donde se impusieron normas estrictas para evitar sucesivos contagios.
La mejor forma de evitar encuentros con los Cromaños era huir a las montañas, donde aún existían algunas poblaciones de Neandros no contaminados.

Sin embargo, los retoños nacidos de la unión entre ambas especies, al igual que sus padres Cro-Mañones, si eran inmunes a dicho virus.
Además, como siempre ocurre en la Naturaleza con los híbridos fértiles, estaban dotados con lo mejor de ambas especies, lo que les hacía superiores en fuerza e inteligencia a ambas especies, además de resistentes a un mayor número de enfermedades.

Y pronto se dieron cuenta de que era muy fácil combatir, ganar y saquear a los otros homínidos "puros", a quienes en menos de 5.000 años habían totalmente desbancado o asimilado.

Los Neandros huidos a la montaña permanecieron allí durante unos cuantos miles de años, hasta que el último empujón Híbrido les obligó a integrarse definitivamente.
Pero no a todos.
Un pequeño contingente se echo a la mar y consiguió llegar a costas británicas, aún impolutas de Cro-Mañones.
Otros pequeños grupúsculos permanecieron aislados y escondidos en Palestina, Croacia, Serranía de Ronda y montañas Bizcainas.
Fue en este último lugar donde más arraigo la creencia de que los invasores eran en realidad un cruce de mono y simio, y por lo tanto carentes de valores humanos.
Creencia que sirvió para fundar las bases del Partido Político que gobierna en la actualidad el País Vasco y que aún hoy día se enseña solapadamente en las escuelas vascas.

A new study by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Chicago shows strong evidence of how interbreeding between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals have introduced a gene variant into the human population that enhanced human brain function,

The research was published online during the week of November 6, 2006, in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and suggests that human evolution was not just a matter of spontaneous advantageous mutations arising within the human lineage.
Human evolution may also have been influenced by interbreeding with other Homo species, which introduced gene variants, known as alleles, that are beneficial to human reproductive fitness.

Bruce T. Lahn, study's senior author, at Howard Hughes Medical Institute said that:

“By no means do these findings constitute definitive proof that a Neanderthal was the source of the original copy of the D allele. However, our evidence shows that it is one of the best candidates.”

The scientists said they have developed the most robust genetic evidence to date that suggests humans and Neanderthals interbred when they existed together thousands of years ago. The interbreeding hypothesis contrasts with at least one prominent theory that posits that no interbreeding occurred when the two species encountered one another.

In their studies performed a detailed statistical analysis of the DNA sequence structure of the gene microcephalin, which is known to play a role in regulating brain size in humans. Mutations in the human gene cause development of a much smaller brain, a condition called microcephaly.

Previous work by Lahn’s team has shown that there are two distinct groups of microcephalin alleles (versions of the gene), called the D alleles and the non-D alleles. The genes in the D alleles group have very similar DNA sequences, and arose from the amplification of a single ancestral gene approximately 37,000 years ago, which then increased in frequency rapidly and are now present in about 70 percent of the world's population. This rapid rise in frequency indicates that the D alleles underwent positive selection in the recent history of humans.
This means that these alleles conferred a fitness advantage on those who possessed one of them such that these people had slightly higher reproductive success than people who didn't possess the alleles, said Lahn.

The estimate that all modern copies of the D alleles descended from a single progenitor copy about 37,000 years ago is based on the measurement of sequence difference between different copies of the D alleles. As a copy of a gene is passed from one generation to the next, mutations are introduced at a steady rate, such that a certain number of generations later, the descendant copies of the gene would on average vary from one another in DNA sequence by a certain amount. The greater the number of the generations, the more DNA sequence difference there would be between two descendant copies.
The amount of sequence difference between different copies of a gene can therefore be used to estimate the amount of evolutionary time that has elapsed since the two copies descended from their common progenitor.

In the new studies reported in PNAS, the researchers performed detailed sequence comparisons between the D alleles and the non-D alleles of microcephalin. The scientists determined that these two classes of alleles have likely evolved in two separate lineages for about 1.1 million years — with the non-D alleles having evolved in the Homo sapiens lineage and the D alleles having evolved in an archaic, and now extinct, Homo lineage. Then, about 37,000 years ago, a copy of the D allele crossed from the archaic Homo lineage into humans, possibly by interbreeding between members of the two populations. This copy subsequently spread in humans from a single copy when it first crossed into humans to an allele that is now present in an estimated 70 percent of the population worldwide today.

The estimate of 1.1 million years that separates the two lineages is based on the amount of sequence difference between the D and the non-D alleles. Although the identity of this archaic Homo lineage is yet to be determined, the researchers argue that a likely candidate is the Neanderthals. The 1.1 million year separation between humans and this archaic Homo species is roughly consistent with previous estimates of the amount of evolutionary time separating the Homo sapiens lineage and the Neanderthal lineage, said Lahn. Furthermore, the time of introgression of the D allele into humans — about 37,000 years ago — is when humans and Neanderthals coexisted in many parts of the world.

Lahn said the group's data suggest that the interbreeding was unlikely to be a thorough genetic mixing, but rather a rare - and perhaps even a single — event that introduced the ancestral D allele previously present in this other Homo species into the human line.

“By no means do these findings constitute definitive proof that a Neanderthal was the source of the original copy of the D allele. However, our evidence shows that it is one of the best candidates. The timeline, including the introgression of the allele into humans 37,000 years ago and its origin in a lineage that separated with the human line 1.1 million years ago, agrees with the contact between, and the evolutionary history of, Neanderthals and humans.

“And a third line of evidence, albeit weaker, is that the D alleles are much more prevalent in Eurasia and lower in sub-Saharan Africa, which is consistent with an origin in the former area. And we know that Neanderthals evolved outside of Africa,”

said Lahn.

Lahn also said that although the disruption of the microcephalin gene in humans leads to smaller brains, the role of the D alleles in brain evolution remains unknown.

“The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function. For example, someone inheriting the D allele may have only a slightly more efficient brain on average. While that enhancement might confer only a subtle evolutionary advantage on that person, when that effect is propagated over a thousand generations of natural selection, the result will be to drive the D alleles to a very high prevalence.”

Lahn and his colleagues believe that other genes might well show similar telltale signs of an origin in archaic Homo lineages such as Neanderthals. They are currently using their analytical tool to search for evidence of that origin for other genes in the human genome.

Such findings may have broader implications for understanding human evolution than just revealing the possibility of human-Neanderthal interbreeding, he said.

“In addition to being perhaps the most robust genetic evidence for introgression of genes from archaic Homo species into humans, I think this finding demonstrates that the evolution of our species has been profoundly impacted by gene flow from our relative species. Finding evidence of mixing is not all that surprising. But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread. This implies that the evolution of human biology has been affected by the contribution of advantageous genetic variants from archaic relatives that we have replaced or even killed off,”

Until now, said Lahn, the scientific debate over genetic exchange between humans and other Homo species has led to two prominent competing theories. One holds that anatomically modern humans replaced archaic species, with no interbreeding. And the other states that extensive interbreeding did take place and that modern humans evolved from that interbreeding in many regions of the world.

The multiregional hypothesis for the human species holds that the evolution of humanity throughout the Pleistocene has been within a single widespread human species, Homo sapiens, in response to the normal forces of evolution: selection, mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow. Genetic and fossil evidence for this theory has been inconclusive, so that the theory has been largely discredited.
However, the newer evidence of gene exchange — as well as other genetic evidence that might follow — could give rise to a more moderate version holding that some genetic exchange did take place, and however interbreeding between the two lineages species may have been rare, might have been enough to transfer a copy of the microcephalin gene to Homo sapiens, which then became widespread throughout the human population and continued to evolve.

Dramatic increase in brain size and complexity during human evolution The foreground shows brain images of human, macaque monkey, rat, and mouse (from top to bottom), as well as the phylogenetic relationship among these four taxa. The background shows DNA sequences. Brain complexity has increased dramatically in primates relative to rodents, and the increase is particularly pronounced in the lineage leading to humans. At the molecular level, genes involved in nervous system function also show accelerated rates of evolution in primates, especially in the lineage leading to humans. Thus, the dramatic phenotypic evolution of the brain in the origin of Homo sapiens is correlated with salient molecular evolution.

Source:
Howard Hughes Medical Institute

External Links:
Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage
Neanderthals & humans may have interbred
Neanderthal Introgression
Neanderthal Brains: mp3 lecture by Bruce Lahn
Microcephalin