MARCO LANGBROEK
If you’ve looked up at the night sky recently, you might have been surprised to see a train of bright lights moving across from one side to the other. What’s going on?
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/4150791611882849430/7171646752758455869
The War of the League of Cambrai (1508-1510) was fought between Venice and an alliance that included the Emperor Maximilian, Pope Julius II, Louis XII of France and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and that despite never coordinating its attacks managed to conquer large parts of the Venetian mainland empire before falling apart (Italian Wars, 1494-1559).
At the end of the Second Italian War
Louis XII had agreed two treaties at Blois. The first, in September
1504, was between Louis and the Emperor Maximilian. Maximilian agreed
to invest Louis as Duke of Milan in return for cash, while Louis then
allocated Milan, Genoa, Asti, the duchy of Burgundy, Macon and Auxerre
to the dowry of his daughter, after her proposed marriage to the
future Emperor Charles V (Maximilian's grandson). In the second, agreed
in October 1505 between Louis and Ferdinand II of Aragon, Louis
surrendered his claim to Naples by making it the dowry of his niece
Germaine of Foix after she married Ferdinand (the marriage took place
in March 1506).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Venice
Version:0.9 StartHTML:00000205 EndHTML:00000275 StartFragment:00000239 EndFragment:00000239 SourceURL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Venice#/media/File:Republik_Venedig.png
The Republic of Venice (Venetian: Repùblica Vèneta; Italian: Repubblica di Venezia), traditionally known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice (Venetian: Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta; Italian: Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia), was a sovereign state and maritime republic in northeastern Italy, which existed for a millennium between the 8th century and 1797.
Mikhail Lesin died from a heart attack aged 57 in a Washington DC hotel
Police officers were called to the Dupont Circle Hotel on Thursday morning
Was Putin's press secretary and worked in government from 1999 to 2009
Lesin founded state TV network and 'propaganda bullhorn' Russia Today
Owned property worth $28m in LA arousing suspicion of money laundering
A millionaire former aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin has been found dead in a Washington DC hotel room.
Mikhail Lesin, who was Putin's press secretary during his first stint as president and founded state television network Russia Today, died aged 57 from a suspected heart attack.
Police were called to the upmarket Dupont Circle Hotel at about 11.30am on Thursday and found him dead. The Russian Embassy confirmed Lesin had died.
A police spokesman would only confirmed that a 'death investigation' had been launched.
Photo by mnn/Adobe Stock
This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance—Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime's political standing at home and abroad. Some of the options examined are clearly more promising than others, but any would need to be evaluated in terms of the overall U.S. strategy for dealing with Russia, which neither the report nor this brief has attempted to do.
The maxim that “Russia is never so strong nor so weak as it appears” remains as true in the current century as it was in the 19th and 20th.
Share on TwitterToday’s Russia suffers from many vulnerabilities—oil and gas prices well below peak that have caused a drop in living standards, economic sanctions that have furthered that decline, an aging and soon-to-be-declining population, and increasing authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin’s now-continued rule. Such vulnerabilities are coupled with deep-seated (if exaggerated) anxieties about the possibility of Western-inspired regime change, loss of great power status, and even military attack.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/us-path-war-china-what-be-done
Unwilling to accept China’s rise, the US puts its lie machine on full blast and moves towards war.
“The US ruling classes are desperate to erase China and its example.”
It was gripping, stunning testimony . Before congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.
Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way[1]. All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and congress were in a total uproar.
There was only problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts, designed to manufacture consent for a US war on Iraq.
At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurd—Kuwait had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its birthrate, would have had a few hun
Reliable sources have informed the Syrian Observatory that more bodies of Ankara-backed mercenaries, who have been killed in the “Nagorno-Karabakh” battles, arrived in Syrian territory with a batch of fighters who have returned from Azerbaijan. The death toll of those factions has risen, since the Turkish government sent them to frontlines, to at least 119 dead, including 78 fighters whose bodies were brought to Syria while the rest of bodies remained in Azerbaijan.
https://meditatingworks.com/hooponopono-meditation/
The practice of Ho’oponopono meditation is fulfilled through the silent repetition of a mantra. You can learn specifically about mantra meditation through our Beginner’s Meditation Handbook to obtain a deeper understanding of the practice. The basic idea is to find positive, healthy words that you repeat in your mind while meditating. It is simply called Ho’oponopono meditation when you use the Ho’oponopono mantra during meditation.
“I love you. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
You will begin by sitting in your preferred meditation position, either sitting or lying down. It is good to first focus on your breathing and develop a synchronized vibration with the “spirit realm” if you will. Most teachers recommend spending about 5 minutes in this space so we will talk about the steps to bring your mental state into this calm space. However, in shamanism, shamans will spend about 20 minutes working towards this space before they begin in any ceremony or practice.
The Supreme Court of the U.S. finds John Rockefeller and his Trust guilty of corruption, illegal business practices and racketeering. As a result of this decision, the entire Rockefeller Standard Oil-Trust, the world’s largest corporation of its time, was sentenced to be dismantled. But Rockefeller was already above the Supreme Court and did not care about this decision.
In order to disperse public and political pressure on him and other robber-barons, Rockefeller uses a trick called “philanthropy”, whereby the illegal gains from his robber-practices in the oil business are used to launch the Rockefeller Foundation. This tax haven was used to strategically take over the health care sector in the U.S..
The Rockefeller Foundation was the front organization for a new global business venture of Rockefeller and his accomplices. This new venture was called the pharmaceutical investment business. Donations from the Rockefeller Foundation went only to medical schools and hospitals. These institutions had become missionaries of a new breed of companies: the manufacturers of patented, synthetic drugs.
This was also the time when the first vitamins were discovered. It soon became clear however that these natural molecules had live-saving health benefits and that they were able to prevent many chr
For many Americans right now, the scale of the coronavirus crisis calls to mind 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis—events that reshaped society in lasting ways, from how we travel and buy homes, to the level of security and surveillance we’re accustomed to, and even to the language we use.
"New Age" is a catch-all term for a wide range of spiritual and social movements, most of which developed from the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Characteristic of the so-called New Age movement is the focus on spiritual matters, with an emphasis on individuality. Those with an interest in such matters often tend to attribute New-Age beliefs to real or alleged Asian mystics, particularly Indian and Tibetan ones, and many New-Age type beliefs draw heavily from Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism.
The New-Age movement lacks intellectual rigor and shuns scientific approaches to reality, ostensibly due to the perceived separation between science and spirituality, but also under the pretense of a vague postmodernism. New-Age believers typically take a pick-and-mix approach to spirituality, adapting beliefs and practices from a wide variety of sources such as Hinduism, neopaganism, ufology, Zen Buddhism, and any other weird concept that may appeal to them.
The key concepts in practice are a form of vitalism, and - of course - money.
https://www.uua.org/ga/past/2005/ware-pagels
General Assembly 2005 Event 4073
Speaker: Dr. Elaine Pagels, Professor of History, Princeton University
For the first time, the same person was selected as the awardee for the Melcher Book Award and as the Ware lecturer. The program opened with the book award, as the Rev. Phyllis O'Connell read from the book award, citing how Dr. Elaine Pagels has "given clarion voice to long-lost and long-suppressed expressions of earliest Christianity" and has planted "whole new gardens of theological possibilities."
President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Rev. Dr. William G. Sinkford, introduced the evening's Ware lecture, which, he said, is a way to "provide a kind of outside view to our faith community," to be "outside our comfort zone" as Unitarian Universalists, but thereby to deepen our own faith understandings.
Referring to the discussions over the last two years responding to his call for a "language of reverence" for Unitarian Universalists, Sinkford suggested that he himself was "looking for some help from this Ware lecture."
China's 'October surprise' presages a tectonic shift in party's power structure
Katsuji Nakazawa is a Tokyo-based senior staff writer and editorial writer at Nikkei. He has spent seven years in China as a correspondent and later as China bureau chief. He is the 2014 recipient of the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist prize for international reporting.
TOKYO -- Smack in the middle of its National Day holidays, China unwrapped its own "October surprise."
It was not the news of U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife Melania testing positive for the novel coronavirus.
Instead, it was a one-line statement that appeared on the screens of hundreds of millions of Chinese smartphones on Oct. 2.
It said that Dong Hong, a former vice ministerial-level official of the central inspection team, was under investigation on suspicion of "serious disciplinary violations."
https://journal-neo.org/2020/10/07/is-great-britain-returning-to-the-region-toward-the-east-of-suez/
On September 11th, Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi and UK Secretary of State for International Trade Elizabeth Mary Truss announced during a video conference that they had successfully wrapped up three months of talks on signing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which will enter into force in the beginning of next year.
This does not mean an immediate, one-time repeal of tariffs in bilateral trade, although this is stipulated for a number of goods and services. Generally speaking, starting on January 1st, 2021, a procedure will be initiated for the gradual (over a period of up to 6 years, for example, for Japanese cars imported by the UK), abolition of tariff barriers.
This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance—Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime's political standing at home and abroad. Some of the options examined are clearly more promising than others, but any would need to be evaluated in terms of the overall U.S. strategy for dealing with Russia, which neither the report nor this brief has attempted to do.
https://kratommasters.com/how-to-potentiate-kratom/
All Kratom users can agree that potent Kratom powder is the best way to consume the benefits. Whether you are just getting started in using this herbal extract for your health and wellbeing or if you have been down this road before, using potentiated Kratom powder is certain to offer you more benefits.
We know them by many names: witches’ flying ointment, unguentum sabbati, unguentum lamiarum, and other times they are simply referred to as the diabolical potions or oils of witches. A flying ointment is a salve made with rendered animal fat or vegetable oil which has been infused with poisonous, psychoactive herbs. These substances were purportedly used by witches to fly to their sabbath rites, to shape-shift into animals, to cause people to fall asleep, to cast love spells, or to curse people with madness. Although most documentation and recipes of flying ointments are found in the early modern period during the height of the witch hunts in Europe, their mention can be found in ancient mythology and literature. Flying ointments are mentioned in Apollonius Rhodius’ The Argonautica from 200 BCE, Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass from around 160 CE, and the oldest possible reference is in Homer’s The Iliad from around 800 BCE where the goddess Hera uses an oil of ambrosia to fly to Olympus, while never touching the earth.
Many of the plants traditionally found in flying ointment recipes are deadly poisons and well known hallucinogens associated with witchcraft, lycanthropy, and madness. It is enough to stop even a seasoned herbalist or botanist from experimenting with them. Other than containing poisonous herbs, one thing the differing flying ointment recipes have in common is they all contain at least one nightshade and sometimes several nightshade herbs including belladonna, datura, henbane, and mandrake.http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/carlos_datura.html
When it comes to the use of drugs and hallucinogens most people associate Carlos Castaneda with Peyote. However, it wasn't Peyote but actually the plant Sacred Datura --- known throughout the desert southwest as jimsonweed --- that played the primary role in his early experiences into other realities --- including, it must be said, his most famous and most oft cited experience where he turned into a crow and flew.
As opposed to the general reading public however, the majority of Castaneda critics, that is, those who are considered --- at least in the judgement of their own exaulted opinions --- specialists in the area or "in the know," usually strike their emphasis on Castaneda's use or non-use of Datura rather than on any comments regarding Peyote. Examples of same might be Jane Holden Kelley and Edward H. Spicer --- along with various seasoned anthropologists and others. Spicer, speaking of Castaneda specifically, is even on record as saying "I know of no information or reference concerning Yaquis using Datura." Which, by the way, is most likely a fair and accurate assessment on Spicer's part --- but Spicer's statement isn't really being put forth to be an accurate assessment, but to demean Castaneda's credibility and inturn, undercut anything related to Don Juan Matus.
However, whatever Spicer's motivation may be, in relation to Castaneda, such a criticism can easily be resolved in one of two ways or possibly even two out of two ways. First, Castaneda's use of Datura was NOT learned initially under the ausipices of Don Juan, but the informant, who was neither Indian nor Yaqui. Secondly, as found in DON JUAN MATUS: Real or Imagined?, any concern is rendered almost moot because:
