Anglo-Saxon England experienced trade revival, surge in silver coins in 660–750 CE.

Sometime around 660 CE, silver coinage replaced gold as the dominant form of currency in northwest Europe. But what was the source of all that silver? According to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity, silver for the earlier post-Roman coins during this period came from Byzantine silver plate, while silver for the later coins most likely came from mines located in Melle, Aquitaine.

Take a trip down memory lane with our video, "20 Things From The 1960s, Kids Today Will Never Understand!" Explore the charming and amusing aspects of 1960s America that are sure to bring a smile to your face. From classic toys to iconic TV shows, join us as we reminisce about a simpler time that kids today may find puzzling yet endearing.

In Federalist 83, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the plan of the Constitution is that the powers granted to Congress

“shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended.”

This sounds so good. But it appears that he lied to us.

Perhaps Hamilton meant what he wrote at that time. But, once he became Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington, he did everything in his power to violate his own maxim. His scheme for the Bank of the United States is just one example. Where, o’ where does the Constitution provide Congress with the power to create a bank, or for that matter, any business corporation? Naturally, my question is rhetorical. //

And yet Hamilton, once he tasted power, quickly turned to “loose constructionism.” Indeed, his story is that of nearly every person in history who has exercised significant power. Man turns towards evil, and evil men (and women) love power. Many of us are familiar with Lord Acton’s “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” dictum. However, I think Erick von Kuehnelt-Leddin said it best: “A good man will not be corrupted by power, and a bad man will be corrupted with no power at all.” (Leftism Revisited, 317)

Hamilton’s problem is ours today in spades. Nearly all of us having fallen for the trap of loose constructionism, especially those who exercise power over us. We daily practice it- in the way we read our laws and the way we read things like the Bible. In fact, the proliferation of laws and regulations demands that we become loose constructionists, for if we tried to abide by the 4,000 plus new regulations our federal government promulgates each year, we couldn’t even live life. In this manner, the entire culture has been corrupted.

There are many today who support such things as a Convention of the States to redress the train wreck we are about to witness.

But unless we have a revival of strict constructionism, especially regarding higher law in our Constitutions and Scripture, we will merely change cars on the same doomed train.

I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.

“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”

“The Cincinnatus myth was the foundational myth for the American Revolution, specifically for Washington himself,” Oren said. “It is also the most foundational Israeli myth. It is David Ben-Gurion. It is Moshe Dayan. It is Ariel Sharon. These people just wanted to farm. But they were called to pick up arms and defend their country. Israel is the Cincinnatus nation.”

Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus. //

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person.

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem. //

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation. //

And yet before October 7, despite the country’s universal draft, many Israelis say they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.

While Magi sounds like a Persian word, Kenneth E. Bailey in Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels gave evidence that the Wise Men were for Arabia:

According to Matthew 2, the wise men arrived with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Rich people usually possess gold, and gold was mined in Arabia. But more specifically, frankincense and myrrh are harvested from trees that only grow in southern Arabia [Yemen = Sheba].
...
Dr. Bailey pointed out that Justin Martyr identified the Wise Men as from Arabia:
...
In the 1920s a British scholar, E. F. F. Bishop, visited a Bedouin tribe in Jordan. This Muslim tribe bore the Arabic name al-Kokabani. The word kokab means “planet” and al-Kaokabani means “Those who study/follow the planets.” Bishop asked the elders of the tribe why they called themselves by such a name. They replied that it was because their ancestors followed the planets and traveled west to Palestine to show honor to the great prophet Jesus when he was born. //

The wisemen or magi all came from present day Ethiopia. There were at least 12 in total not just three. Three magi or people who understand how to read the stars and three kings with each of them (9 kings). The three gifts mentioned of gold, myrrh & Frankincense are the same gifts that the queen of Sheba (Ethiopia & Yemen) had taken to king Solomon a few centuries before when she returned and introduced Jewish religion in Ethiopia. Being strong Jewish believers and always making pilgrims to Jerusalem to worship it is the Ethiopians outside of Israel who were anticipating the birth of the messiah. Ethiopian kings traveled from different parts of ancient Ethiopia to present the gifts to the Christ child to fulfill the prophecy of their sages. Maṣḥaf Kebur (መጽሐፍ ክቡር), an Amharic source published in 2008/9, lists the names of the three wise men and the kings who accompanied them to Jerusalem.

Luke 3:1 "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" - convention for counting years (NOT what the actual A.D. year was)

This question is NOT what the A.D. year was but about the counting convention for years when mentioning reign of a ruler.

The tendency toward political centralization that has characterized the western world for many centuries, first under monarchical rule and then under democratic auspices, must be reversed.
-- Hans Herman Hoppe //

The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies…

No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.

A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:

If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?

….Well that’s kinda the point.

(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)

For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period… Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.

Gavin
5d
Occasionally, one comes across something that just stops one in one’s track and messes up the day’s schedule. This long (I mean … long) article by Anarchonomicon fits the bill.

After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization

The article is too long to summarize, but the basic idea is that history has seen long periods of centralized political control, and much longer periods of de-centralized control. The author predicts that the inevitable collapse of modern states will lead to “Neo-Medievalism” in which small political units will proliferate.

".… What you may have noticed is there’s really just two great centralizing eras in the history of western civilization… the 300-350 years from the start of Alexander’s conquests til the final centralization of the Roman empire under the Caesars… And the 250-300 year history of modern empire: From approximately 1700-1945. …

… The total number of autonomous Greek city states, which prevailed from the Bronze age collapse to the first conquests of Alexander, and only truly ended with the final roman conquest of all of Greece, numbered over 1000. …

… In the past 3200 years we’ve had only 600-800 years of truly centralizing eras where power concentrated, or merely continued without disintegration, when power didn’t dilute… But 2400-2600 years of Decentralizing eras where polities where shrinking and the ability to exert power across distance was eternally shrinking. …

… The Roman empire ended when all of its tech advantages were adopted by the Germanic tribes its was fighting… because those Germanic tribes had been trained in them while employed as roman mercenaries. Likewise the age of imperialism ended shortly after WW2 ended, because at that point every colony had a generation of young men who’d just been trained in western fighting styles. A process that began with the Irish declaring independence after WW1 and reached a fever pitch after WW2 when even the colonial white settler states set up by the British (who you’d think would be the apex of dependence, what with minority rule) declared independence. …

… Federal Authority, legitimacy, and even Seeing Like a State style legibility and intelligibility to the central government is collapsing in real time before our eyes… and far from panicking and trying to rescue their control over the body of the American Nation… the US Federal Government is accelerating the collapse of their own power through petty bureaucratic interests and short term political considerations. …"

Optimistically, the author concludes:

“… whatever successor institutions, aristocracies, and duchies devour the modern welfare states in a orgy of map redrawing and private fortune making will probably find that there is a great deal of economic and technological low hanging fruit just lying about. …”

It really is worth reading the whole thing.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson

By Frank Hawkins

Young Bill Ayers
America has undergone enormous change during the nearly eight decades of my life. Today, America is a bitterly divided, poorly educated and morally fragile society with so-called mainstream politicians pushing cynical identity politics, socialism and open borders. The president of the United States is threatened with impeachment because the other side doesn’t like him. The once reasonably unbiased American media has evolved into a hysterical left wing mob. How could the stable and reasonably cohesive America of the 1950s have reached this point in just one lifetime? Who are the main culprits? Here’s my list of the 10 most destructive Americans of the last 80 years.

James Madison is the Father of our Constitution, and the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at Madison’s Montpelier provides educational programming for teachers, law enforcement officers, and others.

That seems appropriate. After all, not only did Madison—our country’s fourth president—help draft the Constitution, but he also served as a key delegate at the Constitutional Convention, authored the Bill of Rights, and urged ratification of the Constitution through his practical and philosophical arguments in The Federalist Papers.

But these accomplishments are, at best, downplayed at his historic home. Montpelier has no exhibits dedicated to Madison and his contributions.

Worse still, Montpelier is equipping educators to teach Marxist-based theories to elementary, middle, and high school students. And the programs doing this are, in part, funded by the state of Virginia. //

It’s sad that Montpelier has chosen to focus on a Marxist-motivated movement fueled by critical race theory, instead of on the many astounding achievements of the home’s former owner and the Father of our Constitution, James Madison.

It’s a disservice to the public, teachers, and students.

The SBC6120 Model 2 is a conventional single board computer with the typical complement of EPROM, RAM, a RS232 serial port, an IDE disk interface, and an optional non-volatile RAM disk memory card. What makes it unique is that the CPU is the Harris HD-6120 PDP-8 on a chip. The 6120 is the second generation of single chip PDP-8 compatible microprocessors and was used in Digital's DECmate-I, II, III and III+ "personal" computers.

The SBC6120 can run all standard DEC paper tape software, such as FOCAL-69, with no changes. Simply use the ROM firmware on the SBC6120 to download FOCAL69.BIN from a PC connected to the console port (or use a real ASR-33 and read the real FOCAL-69 paper tape, if you’re so inclined!), start at 2008, and you’re running.

OS/278, OS/78 and, yes - OS/8 V3D or V3S - can all be booted on the SBC6120 using either RAM disk or IDE disk as mass storage devices. Since the console interface in the SBC6120 is KL8E compatible and does not use a HD-6121, there is no particular need to use OS/278 and real OS/8 V3D runs perfectly well.

The SBC6120 measures just 4.2 inches by 6.2 inches, or roughly the same size and shape as a standard 3½" disk drive. A four layer PC board with internal power planes was needed to fit all the parts in this space. A complete SBC6120 requires just 175mA at 5V to operate, and this requirement can easily be cut in half by omitting the LED POST code display. Imagine - you can have an entire PDP-8, running OS/8 from a RAM disk, that’s the size of a paperback book and runs on less than half a watt!

Celebrating the world's first minicomputer, and
the machine that taught me assembly language.

The 12-bit PDP-8 contained a single 12-bit accumulator (AC),
a 1-bit "Link" (L), and a 12-bit program counter (PC):

Original photo credit: Gerhard Kreuzer
Later models (the /e, /f, /m & /a) added a 12-bit multiplier quotient (MQ) register.

The term “minicomputer” was not coined to mean miniature, it
was originally meant to mean minimal, which is a term that,
more than anything else, accurately describes the PDP-8.

Whereas today's machines group their binary digits (bits) into sets of four in a system called “hexadecimal”, the PDP-8, like most computers of its era, used “octal” notation, grouping its bits into sets of three. This meant that the PDP-8's 12-bit words were written as four octal digits ranging from 0 through 7.

The first 3 bits of the machine's 12-bit word (its first octal digit) is the operation code (OpCode). This equipped the machine with just eight basic instructions:

Dad was a quiet, friendly sort, almost shy in public. Sometimes, I’d be next to him when he’d mutter some observation that just broke me up. He was funnier than Jack Benny. //

Dad had occasional advice. “When you have something to do, do it now. Then, you’ll have time for fun stuff later.” I probably should have thought about that the past few days when I could have been writing this.

I realized later his parenting style was very Socratic. One Sunday, no matter how many times I yanked the cord, the stupid lawnmower defied my efforts to start it. Dad happened to walk by, “I’m sure you checked the gas tank.”

I hadn’t, of course. It was bone dry. So, he passed on that lesson in privacy without confronting me with my own stupidity.

Dad had a phrase, “Minus to a plus.” It was okay to make a mistake, as long as you learned something, anything, from it every time so you’d never make the same error again.

“Think of how far ahead of everyone else you’ll be when you grow up and avoid all these early mistakes.”

This isn’t just any old dead white guy who is bleeding out at the center of this piece, however. This is Cato the Younger or, as his contemporaries knew him, Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, a Stoic, scion of the late Roman Republic, a famously incorruptible statesman, and an advocate for liberty (or at least what passed for it in those days.) He set a standard for statesmanship that is no longer seen; I can think of no one practicing politics today who is fit to stand in Cato’s shadow. //

houdini1984
7 hours ago
We need a Cato. We need a Cicero as well, an orator and philosopher who can lend eloquent words to the cause of saving our republic, but Cicero’s is a story for another day. From where will come our incorruptible Stoic? From where will come the statesman who will confront those who will drag our republic to ruin and tell them, “No, no further; this ends now”?

I’m concerned by the apparent fact that men like him no longer exist.

Sigh. No one is coming to save you. Hell, Cato couldn't even save Rome. By the time he was at his peak, the rot had already grown too deep and the people had largely given up on the idea of liberty. Eventually, that happens to all "free" societies. And why? Well, part of it has to do with the very idea that we need a Cato to save us.

That's one of the main weaknesses of the American experiment in self-rule. Too many people are looking for a superman to save them, rather than rallying behind the mortal men who are already in the field. DeSantis is a great advocate for liberty and sound government. So is Rand Paul. Ted Cruz. My own governor here in Iowa, whose response to Covid involved little more than confirming that she trusted us to make the best decisions about our health.

Unfortunately, that superman myth has overtaken our national psyche -- at least on the Republican side of the political aisle. That's the whole appeal of Trump. It's not that anyone believes that he understands the constitution, the idea of God-given rights, or the true burden that government places on liberty and individualism. Instead, it's that he's made himself larger than life, through decades of forcing himself into the spotlight and building a reputation as a winner. It's myth, but myth is an easy sell to the average person.

Forget Cato. We need tens of millions of normal Americans to commit to saying no to the ongoing Marxist revolution. We need a counter-revolution that restores our national identity. We need to get aggressive in our opposition to the would-be authoritarians and their statist agenda. Because that is the only thing that can possibly reverse our slide toward tyranny.

For you Millenials, Gen Zs, and whatever, I'd recommend putting aside your anime for a couple of hours and watching a real movie.
While the breakout from Stalag Luft III is the most famous prison break, it was nowhere near the biggest or most successful. It occurred at Stalag 315 in Epinal, France, on May 11, 1944. Stalag 315 housed over 3,000 Indian, Sikh, and Gurkha soldiers, mostly captured in Dunkirk and North Africa. On May 11, the Eighth Air Force carried out a 67 bomber raid on Epinal, and some of the collateral damage was the prison. About 70 prisoners were killed, but over 1,000 prisoners made a break for it, and about 500 made it to Switzerland. Unfortunately, their story hasn't received the attention of the Stalag Luft III escape. As with the Great Escape, some of the prisoners were summarily executed upon recapture.

Here are some of the other major prison breaks.

Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques

(SITA) Neuilly France

INTRODUCTION

1.1. SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautique), a cooperative company founded in 1949, embraces the majority of the international air carriers (more than 160). It provides to its members a worldwide message switching network.

1.2. Initially the network consisted of manual (torn-tape) centres, interconnected by low speed circuits (50, 75 Bauds, 60, 30, 15 words per minute, asynchronous). The Airline terminal equipment (teleprinters. Telex) was connected to the SITA manual centres, thus enabling airline messages to be exchanged via nodes of the SITA network, with consequent reduction in costs to the airlines by their sharing of communications facilities.

1.3. With the rapid development of the Air Transport Industry, the airline communications needs became increasingly important and thus the SITA network expanded very quickly, by 1963 covering the world. Network development was not, however, restricted to geographic extension; in 1963 a number of the busiest manual centres were replaced by semi-automatic systems, and three years later, due to the continuing steady increase of traffic volumes, SITA equipped the Frankfurt centre with its first computer system to perform the message switching functions. Then, in 1969, SITA began replacing the other most heavily loaded centres (Western Europe and New York) with computer systems and established a computer communication data network by interconnecting these centres with voice grade circuits (medium speed). This network, called the High Level Network, performing the task of block switching, was interfaced at that time with the rest of the network composed of manual centres. This step was soon followed by the automation of other manual centres using what are in SITA terminology called satellite processors. These stand-alone computers act as concentrators of airline teleprinter traffic and controllers of airline CRT terminals, each of them connected to one High Level Centre by medium speed circuits. By mid-1973, the SITA network comprised 150 centres including 8 high level centres and 21 satellite processors. The 29 automated centres will be referred to as the SITA medium speed network (see figure 1).

James Madison’s list of achievements did not happen by accident. We have much to learn from him.

The following is adapted from the book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.

Happy 273rd birthday to James Madison, the most egregiously underappreciated, sadly uncelebrated, and unfairly unsung American in the history of the United States.

Consider the list of his towering achievements: Father of the American Constitution, formulator of American federalism, collaborator of The Federalist Papers, de facto doula of the Bill of Rights, and the fourth president of the United States.

Yet there is no significant monument in Washington, D.C., celebrating Madison’s titanic contributions to the American self-government experiment. No American temple featuring quotes chiseled in marble, no miniaturized version of his home, no statue strategically placed on the National Mall, no allusion to membership in the American Mount Olympus. //

1. Be the Most Prepared Person in the Room

2. Be Willing to Change Your Mind

3. Be Generous — Don’t Worry About Who Gets the Credit

But nowhere is Madison’s propensity for stepping aside or working behind the scenes more pronounced than in his friendship with Jefferson. While Jefferson is perhaps the most celebrated American to have ever lived, behind much of this success is the genius of Madison. They drafted the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions together in opposition to John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts. Most significantly, Madison worked steadily behind the scenes to help forge the new Democratic-Republican Party. When the party successfully defeated Adams in 1800, the first president representing the new party was Jefferson, not Madison.

Madison’s significance in our history and the lessons his life provides to Americans today should be both loud and large. In an era of potent political turmoil and personal strife, we ignore them to our and the nation’s detriment.

THE HISTORY OF

THE STANDARD
OIL COMPANY

BY

IDA M. TARBELL

AUTHOR OF
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE,
AND MADAME ROLAND: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

PICTURES AND DIAGRAMS

A lady asked Dr. Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”