[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
…The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story. But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
What happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down the Mueller investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart, and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.
And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this piece. They will be worse because of this piece…
What would be better?
Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.
Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, anti-democratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.
If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s
I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.
added bonus is that concrete now taste good
Sugar does not really do that.
What you need is citric acid (you get that to get the hard water residues out of your pots/water boiler/washing machine), looks like sugar granules.
Or concentrated vinegar.
Cement needs a high ph to bind properly. So if you add acid, it won’t properly set and/or needs 3-4 times longer.
Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.
If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing – say, for instance, a giant wall – they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic – that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.
So if, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to completely shit up a wannabe dictator’s enormous unfeasible poured concrete vanity project, you could literally just randomly hassle and delay every concrete truck on its way there. Dude’s gonna end up with a giant worthless pile of shitty crumbling concrete and exposed reinforcing steel, and an army of pissed-off contractors to boot.
reblogging for purely educational purposes nothing more
People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.
Your kind aren’t welcome here.
Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!
I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.
What the fuck is wrong with you.
??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!
*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing*
Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this
to white supremacist minds.
Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys.
Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS.
The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.
Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom.
*artist’s rendition
Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936.
Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.
“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis
Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere.
A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.
Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x)
Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No.
This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had.
Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.
This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.
Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts.
September 15 will mark the tenth anniversary
of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and near
meltdown of Wall Street, followed by the Great Recession.
Since hitting bottom in 2009, the economy has grown steadily, the stock market has soared, and corporate profits have ballooned.
But most Americans are still living in the shadow
of the Great Recession. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise
in their wages, adjusted for inflation.
Many are worse off due to the soaring costs of
housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets
they own is less than in 2007.
Last year, about 40 percent of American families
struggled to meet at least one basic need – food, health care, housing or
utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey.
All of which suggests we’re
careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.
Clear away the financial rubble from
those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could
produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.
The same imbalance has
been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of nation’s wealth.
These are nearly the same
peaks as in 1928 and 2007.
The U.S. economy crashes
when it becomes too top heavy because the economy depends on consumer spending
to keep it going, yet the rich don’t spend nearly as much of their income as
the middle class and the poor.
For a time, the middle
class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst.
We’re getting dangerously
close. By the first
quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion.
Almost 80
percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. In a recent Federal
Reserve survey, 40 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t be able to pay their
bills if faced with a $400 emergency.
They’ve
managed their debts because interest rates have remained low. But the days of low rates are coming to an end.
The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their
means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to
the top.
It was similar
in the years leading up to the crash of 2008. Between 1983 and 2007, household
debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. Had the majority of households
taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.
Similarly,
between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national
economy nearly doubled. As Mariner
Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1934 to 1948, explained: “As
in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the
other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing.”
Eventually
there were “no more poker chips to be loaned on credit,” Eccles said, and “when
… credit ran out, the game stopped.”
After the
1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security,
unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers
bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World
War II.
After the
2008 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into
the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing
was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.
Trump and
his Republican enablers are now rolling back regulations put in place to stop
Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.
But Trump’s real contributions to
the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime
pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the
wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and
Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most
Americans.
Ten years after Lehman Brothers collapsed,
it’s important to understand that the real root of the Great Recession wasn’t a
banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and
total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.
During World War II, 600,000 African-American women entered the wartime
workforce. Previously, black women’s work in the United States was
largely limited to domestic service and agricultural work, and wartime
industries meant new and better-paying opportunities – if they made it
through the hiring process, that is. White women were the targets of the
U.S. government’s propaganda efforts, as embodied in the lasting and
lauded image of Rosie the Riveter.Though largely ignored in America’s
popular history of World War II, black women’s important contributions
in World War II factories, which weren’t always so welcoming, are
stunningly captured in these comparably rare snapshots of black Rosie
the Riveters.
Reblogging because I’ve never seen these before, and I bet a lot of people haven’t.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
Remember when you talk about the #prisonstrike to talk about what prisoners are striking for.
It is about prison slavery, but it is also about more than that. It is a
comprehensive human rights platform which identifies key injustices in
the system
The list of demands was crafted to raise this platform into US and
international consciousness and we do a disservice to prisoners when we
don’t center it
Hearseeno 