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Christoph posted:The wax sculpture is a pretty bad propaganda piece. I think you're right and it was only one site where any remains looked to have been stripped of flesh via stone tool. I mean when you have a tiny sample size and one bone that looks like it was scraped in a way that reminds you of other instances of cannibalism, go ahead and say they were cannibals until you get more evidence. It will all be updated when more stuff is found, and it helps you remember them. I went to a talk once that was about Neanderthals and the guy said that while the bones they had found could have been stripped for food, that there was also some evidence that a lot of early human cultures burned or carved away someones flesh as part of a burying ritual.
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Jan 1, 2013 11:13
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General Panic posted:This is actually news to me, although from what I remember of the case the girls had a rich fantasy life, so perhaps it's not that weird that one should end up as a writer. I study a lot of Asian history, it's a hobby of mine, and what always shocks me is how no one involved in Israel/Palestine ever has looked at this conflict. It turns out that when you push a group of people with a very strongly held religious/social belief up against the wall for hundreds of years and explicitly destroy, mischaracterize and barbarize everything they hold dear that they eventually lose it. Just like in Palestine Authority the Boxers had roots in legitimate forms of protest and resistance to the occupying government, their secret Tong is one of if not THE oldest Tong operating in Asia right now and at the time. But over time all the people who supported the previous pattern of using economic and political means to advance their agenda died out and the newer people got to a point where they felt that the old ways were useless. They struck out against their oppressors and committed genocide and horrible acts but in return they were slaughtered by a ruthless coalition force made up of all the big baddies of colonialism. This was even after the US and Britain had sent in filibusters who had personally trained the army of China in western tactics, so they saw their countrymen as mindless pawns of western powers (which is what lead to their adherence to the use of many traditional Chinese weapons). And what did we get for it? Sure we quelled a rebellion, but it dicked us hard in the long run. Firstly the very people who made up the Boxers were exactly the kind of people who would have fought against the rise of Mao, and had we not treated them like dicks and then killed them the democratic army might have actually beaten the reds, or at least managed to keep part of China. And second their dissolution and exile lead to the creation of the worlds most far reaching and powerful crime syndicate. The triads, who are a direct descendant of the Boxers, are so pervasive that they touch pretty much every level of modern China and have basically spent the last hundred years creating a number of huge problems that South East Asia and the West have had to suffer through. And they have a huge gently caress-off chip on their shoulder against all the people who invaded China and the Communists, so thats always nice as well. I just see this as the eventual outcome of the Palestine issue, if Israel keeps supporting such far right political platforms. They might crush the Authority but all those people and guns are just going to become a mafia that will infest and trouble every facet of mid eastern society for the coming century. There is a lot to learn if you are educated in the US school system about China, The Four Tigers and the Delta that has a lot of interesting parallels to our history. Their thousands of years of ethnic conflict and genocides honestly makes our current problems in the mideast seem almost trivial in scope. But I guess thats what happens when you obsessively record all your history for a very long period of time. To tie this in to the thread theme, examine the White Lotus Society. To contemplate what their existence means in western history terms, imagine if the conspiracy theories about the Illuminati were true. They were born from the idea of converting Buddhism into a Dualist religion similar to Wicca or Gnosticism. They believed in essentially a creator goddess and the eminent coming of her son, the Buddha Matrea, who is the Buddhist equivalent of the Muslim Madhi or the Christian Second Coming. Somehow through their struggles to maintain their worship in a country that outlawed traditional "Semitic" style religions (they were classified in with China's Jews, Christians and Muslims) they became the main focal point of resistance against the current dynasty. For a long time they plotted to overthrow the king and restore the rule to the family that they though would support them. They went underground and in order to generate money they began to commit crimes, first just against the crown but eventually against everyone who didnt support them. This criminal element evolved into the Heaven and Earth movement, which was like old China's equivalent of the IRA crossed with the Woodworkers of the World, and from there became the Boxers and the Triads (some of the current Triad still use the term Heaven and Earth Society to refer to themselves or their Tongs). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triad_(underground_society) In the modern day they are totally divorced from their religious past, which lives on in the form of organizations like the Lord of Universe Church and the Li-ism sects.
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Feb 26, 2013 21:17
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Association_of_Specialty_Programs_and_Schools Basic summary: Crazy mormons start a series of military style schools for troubled youth. It turns out they are all run by people with zero experience in child development, welfare or education and essentially Pavlovian torture compounds. I became aware of them because my cousins sister in law was present when they raided the one located in Mexico and she said it was horrible. There had been one kid who had been forced to lay face down on a cement platform for six hours at a time in the desert sun simply because he complained about the quality of food they were being served. She said his face looked like he'd been attacked with a potato peeler. The umbrella company has been closed down, but much like a lot of organizations run by religiously linked communities a bunch of them still exist doing the same poo poo they were doing under ownership of one of the previous owners good friends, family members or former employees. And even though there have been numerous publicly available allegations against them, parents still send their kids to these people because they want to torture the bad out of them and dont care when they return a broken person barely capable of life as long as they love jesus and dont act out. The saddest were the people who sent their kids to these places who didn't understand what they were getting them into. Many of the promo materials made them seem like wilderness programs set in idyllic locations with a strong focus on faith and community (nothing wrong with that kind of setup IMHO). And they didn't understand the BF Skinner/L Ron Hubbard style psychological conditioning and torture they were involved in.
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Mar 17, 2013 14:54
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Dyatlov is one of those things that's not actually very surprising, uncommon, or mysterious. It's been blown out of proportion by conspiracy people. Not that freezing to death isn't scary or anything, but the whole "DEEP MYSTERY" angle isn't really credible, everything they did is totally in step with people suffering from hypothermia.
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Apr 7, 2013 19:29
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Not searching for survivors is crazy to me, building collapses are really non-fatal. Hell, when the provos blew a loving hole in the side of a hotel to kill Thatcher she got up and changed out of her PJ's into normal clothes and then walked out of the building.
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Apr 9, 2013 21:19
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SheepNameKiller posted:I dunno if it's fair to say that they're all non-fatal. It probably depends on whether it was a symmetrical collapse and how many stories the building has, and we are talking about a 5 story building. It does seem weird that they were so quick to call off the rescue efforts though, especially since someone was found alive after 17 days under the rubble. I meant compared to things like mudslides, building fires and other similar style accidents involving large amounts of people being trapped by dangerous stuff.
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Apr 10, 2013 01:03
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jalopybrown posted:Catacombs, especially uncharted, look like they'd be cool as poo poo to explore as part of a group but I'd probably curl up and cry if I was lost & alone in them. Does anyone know if the purported 'recovered video' where the guy runs of at the end is confirmed real or fake? I'm pretty sure I remember it was traced to some performance art people on one of those big forums that follow ARGs but I cant find a link right now, so maybe they were wrong.
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Apr 10, 2013 21:52
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I was in Rome during the Taxi and Transportation union strikes. Did a loooooooot of walking those couple of days.
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Apr 13, 2013 01:40
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The Stanford prison experiment is mostly Bullshit though. A lot of the popular conceptions of it have been proven to be false or at least inaccurate in their nature. Basically the people involved acted the way they did most likely because they were imitating movies and books about what a hard core prison was supposed to be like. The guy who did it actively recruited people who wanted to role play a prison scenario and the guy who is the most infamous came out and said he was pretending to be a character in a movie. You can even watch most of the footage from it and its pretty clear that most of the people are just joking around.
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May 3, 2013 23:39
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I was just reading Under the Banner of Heaven for a second time, and what creeped me out is that due to the presence of Google Earth/Maps unlike when the book was originally published you can view most of the places they talk about which are still there doin' their creepy abusive polygamist stuff.
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Jun 23, 2013 04:50
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It makes researching my family tree almost impossible since the records of the Canadian portion of my tribe date to about the mid 1980's when there actually existed people who were both educated and also hadn't had their culture brainwashed out of them. And even then it's mostly based on secondhand recollections by older First Nations members because in many cases the government just didn't bother recording First Nations children, and for example my great grandfather's exact year of birth could be off by as much as five years since there was no formal record of his birth made until he entered the school system. Zeroisanumber posted:The Antiziganism that runs rampant in Europe is fascinating to me because the US just doesn't have any significant cultural history with the Romany people, either positive or negative. It's such a weird cultural pathology in Europe that half of the Europeans that I've met have asked whether or not we have Romany in the States. A similar group of people in the US might be Carnies. Who are, for the most part, odd and eccentric but normal people working hard labor jobs with a lot of travel involved. On the other hand no one has ever had anything positive to say about carnies and their depictions in shows like Carnivale haven't helped much (Carnivale is a really awesome show tho). In fact the last time I can think of a mainstream thing having a positive depiction of carnival folk was Queer Eye.
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Aug 6, 2013 08:00
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RNG posted:I'd heard of Mengele escaping to South America after WWII but never realized that there was an entire organized system to shunt Nazis from Europe to points unknown, (supposedly) with the aid of the Vatican: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_%28World_War_II%29 There is a good book called Hunting Eichmann that's about how Eichmann (arguably, the architect of the Holocaust) escaped Germany during the fall and made it to the Americas. But despite what you may think about Boys from Brazil style supervillain lairs and Nazi's living out comfortable lives it was far from that. Despite being a very high ranking member of the Reich, Eichmann lived in squalor in a house he built himself with no electricity or hot water. It's pretty depressing poo poo about a guy living in poverty clinging to despicable ideology but then it's also peppered with some real life James Bond spy stuff.
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Oct 12, 2013 00:22
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into the void posted:So, lesson to be learned, I guess, is if you are stranded out in the wilderness, start drinking your own urine before you start eating the wildlife? Anyone know how long it takes before you start experiencing negative health effects from consuming your own urine? I know urine is relatively sterile, but more from the perspective of no new fluid is coming in; it's just getting recycled over and over. Well, generally you don't actually drink your own pee. You use the liquid from your urine to condense new liquid out of the air which you then drink (so says the worst case survival handbook I read as a child).
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Oct 12, 2013 22:49
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MKZODIAC is a pretty hilariously bizarre website to check into all the Zodiac theories on.
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Nov 18, 2013 10:04
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Doctor Chaxtical posted:Update for Fairview: A good friend of mine works for the Salem historical society, and she's gonna pull some strings and try to get me permission to snap some pictures on the property, inside the buildings, etc. I'll have to go in full nerd gear (helmet, respirator, etc) but it's totally worth it. I'll keep you all updated. I was inside it in the mid 2000's. You really do need a respirator since the whole drat place is crawling with Asbestos. The whole thing is coated in awesome graffiti and stuff. It was a pretty popular place to go Urbexing along with that abandoned middle school that was near Salem for a while until they really beefed up security.
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Feb 22, 2014 03:12
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Doctor Chaxtical posted:The school still around? I think it got flattened in around 2010 or so. But if you like abandoned towns Oregon is your kinda place. We have the most ghost towns of any state and a lot of them are easy to find. Sure once you get there you have to do some searching because its Oregon and any place thats been abandoned more than a decade is covered in moss and trees but a lot of them are still in really good condition. There's a good one called Malheur City I went to as a kid but I haven't been there in probably a decade so I have no idea what it's like now.
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Feb 22, 2014 08:38
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chthonic bell posted:Mercury poisoning (hell, all heavy metal poisoning) is some freaky poo poo. The worst part is that, due to several sources, we know the Romans knew lead was poisonous and was a bad thing to use to make utensils and dishes out of. What we cant figure out is WHY THEY DID IT ANYWAYS.
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Mar 8, 2014 00:16
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Aum was also a huge influence on 20th Century Boys which is by far one of the best comics to ever come out of Japan. It uses an Aum like cult as a sort of physical manifestation of the problems Japan suffered post war. It's a very good read but extremely long.
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Mar 14, 2014 04:00
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