Maya archaeologists unearth new 2012 monument

(Phys.org) -- Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300 year-old year-old Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called “end date” for the Maya calendar on December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic find in decades, was announced today at the National Palace in Guatemala.

“This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy,” says Marcello A. Canuto, Director of Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at the Maya ruins of La Corona. “This new evidence suggests that the 13 Bak’tun date was an important calendrical event that would have been celebrated by the ancient Maya; however, they make no apocalyptic prophecies whatsoever regarding the date," says Canuto.

La Corona for many decades has been known as the enigmatic “Site Q,” the source of many looted sculptures whose whereabouts had remained a mystery until its rediscovery only fifteen years ago. For the past five years, Marcello A. Canuto and Tomás Barrientos Q. (Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Antropológicas at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala) have directed the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project (PRALC) which has been investigating this intriguing Classic Maya city and its jungle environs.

In 2012, Canuto and Barrientos decided to excavate in front of a building that had been heavily damaged nearly 40 years ago by looters looking for carved stones and tombs. “Last year, we realized that looters of a particular building had discarded some carved stones because they were too eroded to sell on the antiquities black market,” said co-director Barrientos, “so we knew they found something important, but we also thought they might have missed something.” In fact, in 2012, excavations not only recovered 10 more discarded hieroglyphic stones but also something that the looters missed entirely—an untouched step with a set of 12 exquisitely carved stones still in their original location (in total, 22 carved stones were recovered). Combined with the known looted blocks, the original staircase had a total of no less than 264 hieroglyphs, making it one of the longest ancient Maya texts known, and the longest in Guatemala.

While the archaeological team investigated when and how this particular staircase was built, Dr. David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center of the University of Texas at Austin undertook the decipherment of the many new hieroglyphic texts. Stuart was part of the first archaeological expedition to La Corona in 1997, and has been reading and reconstructing the site’s history ever since. The stairway inscription relates 200-years’ worth of political history of La Corona, its allies, and its enemies. Consistent with these themes, some of these stones portray rulers in various poses accepting tribute, dancing, and preparing to play the Maya ballgame.

Another entirely unexpected discovery was made on another stairway block bearing 56 delicately carved hieroglyphs. Stuart recognized that it commemorated a royal visit to La Corona in AD 696 by the most powerful Maya ruler of that time, Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ of Calakmul (located in modern Campeche, Mexico), also known as Fire Claw or Jaguar Paw. Calakmul had been an immensely powerful kingdom for centuries until its king was defeated in battle by his longstanding rival Tikal (located in modern Peten, Guatemala) on August 3, 695. “Scholars had assumed that the Calakmul king died or was captured in this engagement” says Stuart, “but this new extraordinary text from La Corona text tells us otherwise.”

It turns out that the defeated Calakmul king was neither killed nor captured; in fact, in the wake of his inglorious defeat, he was visiting La Corona and perhaps other trusted allies to allay their fears after his defeat. Why the reference to the year 2012? Does it provide a prophecy of what is to come? No, the reference to this important date has much more to do with events in the 7th rather than 21st century.

The key to understanding the reference to 2012 is a unique title that this Calakmul king gives himself. In the text, he calls himself the “13 K’atun lord”—that is, the king who presided over and celebrated an important calendar ending, the 13th K’atun cycle (9.13.0.0.0). This event had occurred just a few years before in AD 692. In order to vaunt himself even further and place his reign and accomplishments into an eternal setting, he connects himself forward in time to when the next higher period of the Maya calendar would reach the same 13 number—that is, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0).

Rather than prophesy, the 2012 reference served to place this king’s troubled reign and accomplishments into a larger cosmological framework. “This was a time of great political turmoil in the Maya region and this king felt compelled to allude to a larger cycle of time that happens to end in 2012,” says Stuart. This evidence is consistent with the only other reference to the 2012 date in ancient Maya inscriptions—Monument 6 from Tortuguero, Mexico. “What this text shows us is that in times of crisis, the ancient Maya used their calendar to promote continuity and stability rather than predict apocalypse,” says Canuto.

The project continues to study and record these newly carved stones, others of which record other important episodes of ancient Maya history. Furthermore, the project plans to continue to fieldwork at La Corona, directed by Tulane University and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, supported by the Ministry of Culture of Guatemala

Source: Phys.org

Government orders youtube to censor protest videos

In a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.< /p>

The latest example is You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group Lawful Rebellion protest,  during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.

Peake was ruling on a case involving Roger Hayes, former member of UKIP, who has refused to pay council tax, both as a protest against the government’s treasonous activities in sacrificing Britain to globalist interests and as a result of Hayes clearly proving that council tax is illegal.

Hayes has embarked on an effort to legally prove that the enforced collection of council tax by government is unlawful  because no contract has been agreed between the individual and the state. His argument is based on the sound legal principle that just like the council, Hayes can represent himself as a third party in court and that “Roger Hayes” is a corporation and must be treated as one in the eyes of the law.

The British government doesn’t want this kind of information going viral in the public domain because it is scared stiff of a repeat of the infamous poll tax riots of 1990, a massive tax revolt in the UK that forced the Thatcher government to scrap the poll tax altogether because of mass civil disobedience and refusal to pay.

When viewers in the UK  attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are met with the message, “This content is not available in your country due to a government removal request.”

We then click through to learn  that, “YouTube occasionally receives requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site, and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries.”

You can also search by country  to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of “data requests,” meaning demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to governments is “needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether these “data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the company.

“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil,” reports PC World. “The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries.”

With regard to search terms, one struggles to understand how a specific combination of words in a Google search can be considered a violation of any law. This is about government and Google working hand in hand to manipulate search results in order to censor inconvenient information, something which Google now freely admits to doing.

You Tube’s behavior is more despicable than the Communist Chinese, who are at least open about their censorship policies, whereas You Tube hides behind a blanket excuse and doesn’t even say what law has been broken.

Anyone who swallows the explanation that the videos were censored in this case because the government was justifiably enforcing a law that says scenes from inside a court room cannot be filmed is beyond naive. Court was not even in session in the protest footage that was removed, and the judge had already left the courtroom.

The real reason for the removal is the fact that the British government is obviously petrified of seeing a group of focused and educated citizens, black, white, old and young, male and female, go head to head with the corrupt system on its own stomping ground.

In their efforts to keep a lid on the growing populist fury that has arrived in response to rampant and growing financial and political tyranny in every sector of society, governments in the west are now mimicking Communist Chinese-style Internet censorship policies in a bid to neutralize protest movements, while hypocritically lecturing the rest of the world on maintaining web freedom.

Via a combination of cybersecurity legislation and policy that is hastily introduced with no real oversight, governments and large Internet corporations are crafting an environment where the state can simply demand information be removed on a whim with total disregard for freedom of speech protections.

This was underscored last year at the height of the Wikileaks issue, when Amazon axed Wikileaks from its servers following a phone call made by Senator Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee  demanding the website be deleted.

Lieberman has been at the forefront of a push to purge the Internet of all dissent by empowering Obama with a figurative Internet kill switch that he would use to shut down parts of the Internet or terminate websites under the guise of national security. Lieberman spilled the beans on the true reason for the move during a CNN interview when he stated “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”

Except that China doesn’t disconnect the Internet “in case of war,” it only ever does so to censor and intimidate people who express dissent against government atrocities or corruption, as we have documented.  This is precisely the kind of online environment the British and American governments are trying to replicate as they attempt to put a stranglehold on the last bastion of true free speech – the world wide web.

Source: World Truth TV

GMO Farming, Glyphosate Significant Causes of Water Pollution

Water pollution and air pollution has been and continues to be a serious issue in many nations. Both of these pollution types are successfully bringing down the health of not only humans, but also animals, plant life, and the ecosystem as a whole. While the causes of water pollution and causes of air pollution are many, research is actually pointing a straight finger at GMO farming and chemicals like glyphosate for being important culprits.

Causes of Water Pollution – GMO Farming, Glyphosate Big Contributors

One groundbreaking study found that glyphosate, the active ingredient residing in the ever-so-popular Roundup product from Monsanto, is making its way into groundwater across the nation through widespread contamination of aquifers, wells, and springs. The explosive study that confirmed the contamination effect of Monsanto’s Roundup was published in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry in late 2011, where researchers discovered that 41% of the 140 groundwater samples taken from Catalonia Spain were actually above the limit of quantification.

The findings indicate that glyphosate actually doesn’t break down rapidly in the environment, and is continuously building up in concerning quantities. With glyphosate growing among the causes of water pollution, it is becoming more and more apparent that the chemical is polluting groundwater in alarming quantities, enough to pose a significant threat to the purity of drinking water wherever it is used.

How prevalent is this issue, really? One study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of glyphosate in all urine samples tested. The amount of the chemical found in the urine was quite alarming, with each sample containing concentrations of 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t clearly say how many samples were tested for, and needs to be translated using one of the many translators available.

In addition, the issue of water contamination is only part of the pollution problem. Other findings, published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, came across glyphosate in 60-100% of all air and rain samples tested for. This shows that glyphosate is not only among causes of water pollution, but also resides in the air due to massive overuse.

While GMO farmers and other individuals using Roundup are the heavy contributors, biotechnology giant Monsanto is ultimately fueling water pollution surrounding glyphosate involvement. Monsanto is the world’s largest provider and producer of glyphosate, and dominates the genetically modified crops market. With many of Monsanto’s GM crops being resistant to glyphosate-containing Roundup, glyphosate is sprayed in massive amounts in order to function properly against the resistant crops. In fact, 88,000 tons were used in the US in 2007 alone.

Regarding glyphosate being found in rain and streams in the Mississippi River Basin, Paul Capel, USGS chemist and author of one study has this to say:

“Though glyphosate is the mostly widely used herbicide in the world, we know very little about its long term effects to the environment. This study is one of the first to document the consistent occurrence of this chemical in streams, rain and air throughout the growing season. This is crucial information for understanding where management efforts for this chemical would best be focused.”

With glyphosate becoming more of an issue and player in the causes of water pollution, it is becoming more apparent that the massive use of this chemical needs to cease.

Source: Natural Society

Overcoming the Victim Mentality