Month: July 2017

This is a really big deal.

This is a really big deal. Proof of something that we have suspected for a long time but had difficulty proving. Human settlement in Australia, it can now be said scientifically, dates to at least 65,000 years ago. In geological time scales, that’s not really very long after modern humans left Africa. What they arrived with was the full kit of stone age technology as well as sophisticated cultural forms, rituals, art making etc.

The reason why the traditional dating of human settlement in Australia is often quoted as around 40,000 years is because that is the practical upper limit to dates found using carbon dating techniques. You simply can’t date anything older that way.

These new earlier dates have been found using a combination of techniques, chief among them being optionally stimulated luminescent dating. This technique has no theoretical upper limit and works by looking at how long a stone artifact has been buried in the ground by measuring the amount of stored radiation in the crystalline structure. The longer the object has been away from sunlight the more charge it has stored. https://www.thoughtco.com/luminescence-dating-cosmic-method-171538

http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-07-20/aboriginal-shelter-pushes-human-history-back-to-65,000-years/8719314

“If you talk here about mainstream liberal media in America, which speak a lot about Putin, I think it’s just a…

Originally shared by Jeff Zahari

“If you talk here about mainstream liberal media in America, which speak a lot about Putin, I think it’s just a trick, which is not easy to see… They don’t really want to talk about internal American problems.”

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/pussy-riot-founder-says-american-liberals-scapegoat-putin-distract-democrats

Whatever you do don’t read the comments on this article, they’re much too coherent and sensible.

Whatever you do don’t read the comments on this article, they’re much too coherent and sensible. They almost make me hopeful.

One thing I do agree with Chait about though, the term neoliberalism is a nonsense. There’s nothing new about liberalism, it’s been terrible for a couple of centuries.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html