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Study Suggests Bronze Age Ice Skates Discovered In China Were Imported From Europe

A 3,500-year-old pair of ice skates were discovered in a mountainous area of China, archaeologists claimed in late February.

Researchers investigating the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region discovered the oldest-known skates in a tomb in the Gaotai Ruins, according LiveScience. The skates are made out of the bones of oxen and horse, but it is unclear whether they were used for sport, hunting, or regular travel throughout the region.

The design is unique, made of a very flat blade that forms a cutting edge allowing users to glide over ice, LiveScience continued. Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology researcher Ruan Qiurong said the newly-discovered skates are almost exactly the same as some found in prehistoric Europe.

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Why These Popular Chocolate Easter Eggs Are Banned in the US, despite Being Legal Almost Everywhere Else

In January 2011, Manitoba resident Lind Bird was stopped at the US border in northern Minnesota and selected for a random search of her vehicle. During the search, US border officials found and seized a small piece of contraband. Bird was unaware that the item was illegal to bring into the US, but she was informed that she could face a $300 fine if she was caught with it in the country.

Bird was allowed to continue her trip, but a few days later she received a seven-page letter from the US government asking her to formally authorize the destruction of the item that was seized or pay $250 for them to store the item if she wished to contest the seizure.

The item in question was a small chocolate egg with a toy inside, called a Kinder Surprise.

Understandably, Bird found the entire ordeal quite bizarre.

“It’s just a chocolate egg,” Bird said. “And they were making a big deal…It’s ridiculous. It’s so ridiculous.”

When she got the letter, she had trouble taking it seriously. “I thought it was a joke,” she said. “I had to read it twice. But they are serious.”

A similar incident took place in June 2012, when two Seattle men were driving back into the US after a visit to Vancouver. After border officials discovered six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car, the men were detained for two hours and told by a border guard that they could be fined $2,500 per egg.

“I thought [the American border guard] had done his search and hadn’t found anything, and he was joking with us,” said Chris Sweeney, one of the men detained.

“He wasn’t joking.”

“We really didn’t know what was going to happen,” Sweeney continued. “I didn’t know if maybe this was some really important thing that I just wasn’t aware of and they were going to actually give us the fine of $15,000.”

After waiting for 2 hours, the men were allowed to carry on with their trip and take the eggs with them.

“If it was so important that we be stopped and scolded and threatened with thousands of dollars in fines, you’d think it would at least be important enough for them to take [the Kinder eggs], but they didn’t,” Sweeney said.

“Keeping the border secure is obviously important,” he continued, “but somebody needs to take a common sense look at this rule and probably just get rid of it.”

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NewsGuard denies being government funded after Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files expose

Matt Taibbi appeared before the new congressional Weaponization of Government Committee on Thursday and said the for-profit organization NewsGuard, an organization aimed at “combating misinformation,” according to their website, was “US government funded.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “In a lengthy email to @mtaibbi on Friday morning, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz refuted that the purported disinformation tracker is ‘U.S. government funded.’ In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded $749,387 to Newsguard.”

Taibbi also tweeted out another round of the Twitter files on Thursday, detailing what he dubbed a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” moving within Twitter, government agencies, establishment media, and mostly non-profit organizations all of whom ideologically align in censorship efforts and named NewsGuard as funded by the Department of Defense.

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YouTube CEO: Our monetization policies are oriented towards making advertisers feel “safe,” “comfortable”

New YouTube CEO Neal Mohan discussed how advertisers are the focus of its monetization policies during an interview with tech and travel creator iJustine and said the intention of monetization policy changes is to make advertisers feel “safe” and “more comfortable.”

Mohan discussed “putting yourself in the shoes of the advertisers” and said, “you have to make it so that it feels to the advertiser not just safe but relatively clear in terms of where their advertising is going to run.”

He continued: “They don’t want to inadvertently damage their brand in any particular way and so our policies are really oriented towards that when I say…one of the best ways to increase creator monetization is to make advertisers more comfortable with the content and that is the goal of our policy changes.”

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The 10 Rules Of Propaganda

Lord Arthur Ponsonby was a British diplomat and politician, dates 1871–1946.

This keen and cagey fellow pinpointed 10 rules of propaganda.

They are these:

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.

4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.

5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.

6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.

8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.

9. Our cause is sacred.

10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Just Look at the News

A daily scan of the newswires calls to mind three or more of these propaganda rules. On some days, six or seven. On others still, all 10.

We refer specifically to the conflict presently arage in the eastern European nation of Ukraine.

Let us now consider these rules. We will not take up each of them since some rules relate closely to others. We will instead weld these together. To proceed…

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

On how many occasions have you read or heard condemnations of Mr. Putin’s “unprovoked” act of aggression?

To phrase it differently, when has it not been described as unprovoked?

Yet a man can argue very persuasively that Mr. Putin’s war was indeed provoked.

The Russian autocrat warned on several occasions that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a “red line.”

Russia would not abide the NATO dagger pressing against its vitals (parts of Ukraine actually lie east of Moscow).

Yet the NATO alliance had announced its intentions to incorporate Ukraine — despite Vladimir’s moans and grimaces.

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Corporatism Will Kill Us All

One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.

Nowhere is that more blatant than in pharmaceutical corporations and their vaccines where deadly viruses are created with the excuse that “if we don’t create them nature or an enemy will and we need to develop a vaccine.”

The vaccines for COVID 19 have proven obscenely profitable for the vaccine producers who have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves, despite tens of thousands of deaths following vaccination and a cover up of deaths and abortions in vaccine trials (not disclosed until long after millions were vaccinated). See this.

The 1918-1920 flu pandemic killed millions. It was over within two years and no vaccine was developed. Now scientists in the USA and Canada have created by “reverse engineering” an even more deadly version of that flu “in order to create a vaccine for it”: see this.

But we know that COVID emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan China which was doing dangerous “gain of function” work in collaboration with America scientists – who had been forbidden by law to carry out that research in the USA. There is no reason why this new recreation of the 1918 flu should not bring the same disaster.

These dangerous projects are totally out of the control of democratic representatives and are classic corporatist collaborations between ignorant governments who have access to the public’s pocket and corporations whose main incentive is profit seeking.

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Secretive “Wearable Camera” Startup With Ex-Apple Execs Secures $100 Million, Partners With OpenAI

WSJ reports that a new investment round of $100 million has been secured by a secretive startup called Humane Inc., founded by ex-Apple executives, along with a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Although the startup’s device is shrouded in mystery, it seems to be developing a wearable camera powered by artificial intelligence.

“This Series C round presented an opportunity to raise money through equity, and to bring on board great VCs and strategic partners who would like to participate in equity as the company grows,” founder Chaudhri Bongiorno told TechCrunch in an email interview.

“At Humane, we’re building a first-of-its-kind device and services platform — we’re growing fast, and we’ve been focused on innovation, research and development,” he said. 

According to The Verge, the startup is developing a wearable camera device that would allow the user to have access to AI technology at all times. It sounds like this is ChatGPT on steroids…

A leaked investor pitch deck from 2021 revealed by tech blog Daring Fireball describes the device as a camera that “captures moments you didn’t think to capture” or “moments you want to recall.”

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