Mysterious Origin of the Viking Sword Ulfberht

How does one recreate master craftsmanship derived from millennia of empirical research that has been lost? At least they still make real Samurai swords.

It is this that has made these famous swords almost mystical in reputation. Here we get further hints regarding what went into such craftsmanship.


The sword has at least been replicated and that is a great step.

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A Step Closer to the Mysterious Origin of the Viking Sword Ulfberht

By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times | December 10, 2014

Last Updated: December 10, 2014 4:31 pm

An Ulfberht sword displayed at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany. (Martin Kraft/Wikimedia Commons)

 http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1134288-a-step-closer-to-the-mysterious-origin-of-the-viking-sword-ulfberht/?utm_source=Epoch10&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7

The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.

Ulfberht was like a Medieval luxury brand for swords—but unlike your Gucci purse, the swords were of such high quality they were almost … mystical.

Dozens of these swords—made with metal so strong and pure it’s baffling how any sword maker of that time could have accomplished it—have been found in Europe, along with some knock-offs. They are all marked with the Ulfberht name and two crosses, though some of the imitations are missing a letter here or there.

New research brings us closer to the source of the swords, to the kiln in which these legendary weapons were forged.

A previous theory held that the swords may have their origin in the Middle East or Asia, but surprisingly it seems the materials were sourced closer to where they were found, in Central Europe.

At the time the Ulfberht swords were forged (approximately 800–1000 A.D.), equally perplexing swords made of a substance called Damascus steel were being produced in the Middle East out of a raw material, known as Wootz steel, from Asia. Both Damascus steel and the Ulfbehrt’s so-called “crucible steel” had high amounts of carbon.

Ulfberht’s Perplexing Composition

Carbon can make or break a sword; if it’s not controlled to just the right amount, the sword will be either too soft or too brittle. But with just the right amount, carbon greatly strengthens the blade. The Ulfberht has a carbon content about three times higher than that of other swords of its time. It would have been astoundingly stronger and yet more flexible than other swords, as well as light-weight. It also had almost no impurities, known as slag. This would have allowed for a more even distribution of carbon.

It was thought, before Ulfberht was discovered, that the capability to remove slag to such a degree only became possible during the Industrial Revolution. Iron ore must be heated to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to accomplish this, a feat the Ulfberht makers apparently accomplished 800 years ahead of their time. With great effort and precision, modern blacksmith Richard Furrer of Wisconsin forged a sword of Ulfberht quality using technology that would have been available in the Middle Ages. He said it was the most complicated thing he’d ever made, and he used methods not known to have been used by people of that time.

A sword made of Damascus steel. (NearEMPTiness/Wikimedia Commons)

Damascus Steel’s Perplexing Composition

The secret of making the Middle East’s Damascus Steel has only reemerged under the inspection of scanning electron microscopes in modern laboratories. It was first used around 300 B.C. and the knowledge seems to have been inexplicably lost around the mid-18th century.

Nanotechnology was involved, in the sense that materials were added during the steel’s production to create chemical reactions at the quantum level, explains archaeology expert K. Kris Hirst in an article written for About Education. It was a kind of alchemy.

Hirst cited a study led by Peter Paufler at the University of Dresden and published in the journal Nature in 2006. Paufler and his team hypothesized that the natural properties of the source material from Asia (the Wootz steel), when combined with materials added during the production process in the Middle East, caused a reaction: “The metal developed a microstructure called ‘carbide nanotubes,’ extremely hard tubes of carbon that are expressed on the surface and create the blade’s hardness,” Hirst explained.

Materials added during the production of Damascus steel included Cassia auriculata bark, milkweed, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, and some rare elements, traces of which presumably came from the mines in India.

“What happened in the mid-18th century was that the chemical makeup of the raw material altered—the minute quantities of one or more of the minerals disappeared, perhaps because the particular lode was exhausted,” Hirst wrote.

But, the Ulfberht had nothing to do with the mines of India or the Wootz steel or the milkweed or the forges of the Middle East, according to recent research.

At the Source?

Robert Lehmann, a chemist at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Hannover, told local publication Süd Deutsche in October that the material from which the Ulfberht was forged “certainly does not come from the East.”

He studied an Ulfberht sword found in 2012 on a pile of gravel excavated from the Weser River, which flows through Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany. This sword’s blade has a high manganese content, which signalled to Lehmann that it did not come from the East.

A photo taken in the Taunus region of Germany. (Chris Küm/Wikimedia Commons)

The guard was made of iron with a high arsenic content, which suggests a European deposit. The pommel was covered with a sheet of tin-lead alloy. Lehmann had compiled in previous studies a map of Germany’s lead isotope sources, allowing him to determine that the pommel plate lead had come from a site in the Taunus region, just north of Frankfurt, Germany. The lead would not likely have been mined and transported elsewhere for processing, since the deposit was already largely exploited in Roman times.

This suggests that the sword was forged close to the source, bringing researchers perhaps a step closer to the elusive Ulfberht—if that is indeed the name of a swordmaker or other personage connected to the sword. While some monasteries in the Taunus region are known to have produced weapons at that time, the name of Ulfberht has not been found in their records.

My Strangest Abduction Case with Brad Steiger

 

Curiously,  I no longer find this report bizarre at all.  It conforms wonderfully with my rapidly expanding understanding of our natural physics with only a small but probable additon to my knowledge base.  Yet as little as several months ago I set aside all abjuction cases as unexplanable at the least.  I had already reached the point that hallucination was failing miserably.

The key here is understanding the paramountcy of the spirit body itself and that with assistance, this spirit body is extremely capable.  It thus appears from this report and a goodly number of conforming reports, to be able to transition its material body through space at its convenience and then is also able on return as demonstrated here, able to also put back in place its original physical situation.  I am more disturbed that they did not simply heal this person as well.  That happens to be the one thing missing in all such abduction reports.  It is not like it is much of a secret anymore. 

Rather tellingly, the patient has the ability to not bother with physical transitioning at all and promises to not do it again.  The witness is excellent and is checking as best as he can.   If i had not already had a clear explanation, this report alone would have forced my hand regarding the whole abduction narrative. 

Conjecture: A large part of the UFO phenomena is substantially from the spirit world with scant involvement of the physical at all and represents an ongoing monitoring of our physical condition.  How else might they get the data?

MY STRANGEST UFO ABDUCTION CASE

By Brad Steiger - 2 days 5 hours ago

http://ufodigest.com/article/ufo-abduction-1216

Those readers familiar with my work know that I am quite skeptical about the vast majority of abductee reports.  Listening to abductees tell about their having been taken up through ceilings, out through walls, levitated out windows and taken to an alien spaceship or medical laboratory seem more to me like bizarre visionary or hallucinatory experiences.  I have no doubt that something unusual, something very special, happened to these experiencers--but what?

I first began interviewing UFO contactees and abductees in 1966 and have included their accounts in a number of books beginning with New UFO Breakthrough (with Joan Whritenour) 1968 and continuing to the present with Real Encounters, Different Dimensions, and Otherworldly Beings (with Sherry Steiger.  I have tried to consider the accounts of abductees in an objective manner, while, at the same time, wondering if the occurrences that they report might not really be personal mystical experiences that have taken place in dreams, visions, or out-of-body experiences.  My extensive study of the paranormal has convinced me that it is possible for the human soul/spirit to soar free of the normally accepted limitations of time and physical space.  An abductee’s account of being taken aboard a UFO might actually be descriptions of a spiritual/nonmaterial experience rather than an actual physical/material one.

With those introductory remarks, I have in my files the most incredible case of abduction which I have ever encountered--and there was physical proof of a most tangible kind.  This is a remarkable account of an individual who had either discovered a doorway to other dimensions of reality, along with the ability to dematerialize his physical body, or he had been granted these unique talents through his interaction with UFO entities. If the following report were not attested to by a very matter-of-fact physician associated with one of the largest, most prestigious hospitals in the Midwest, I would be extremely hesitant about sharing it with the public. 

I made contact with “Dr. William” through a correspondent who had taken a course in medicine with him. According to my correspondent, Mrs. E., William had not mentioned the experience during the several weeks' duration of the course, but one day after a class session he had mentioned it over a cup of coffee. According to William, the following occurrence took place in a hospital in Hawaii in 1968. William was then about nineteen years old, serving in the medical corps and assigned to the military section of the hospital. 

For obvious reasons I will not mention the name of the hospital in Hawaii.  Neither will I give William's full name. He is a quiet, sincere man who wishes to continue his medical career and cannot see that hisassociation with such an account would enhance his reputation as a doctor. Briefly, this is what happened: 

A bedridden patient who was in traction and totally unable to move, with pins through his tibiae and femurs, told William that he would be gone that night for one hour to join his friends in a UFO. He said that William might accompany him if  he truly believed in UFO's. 

William indulgently told the patient that he would be unable to join him that night, as he would be busy. 

Later, at bedcheck, true to his word, the patient had disappeared, leaving the metal pins on the bed. An extensive search of the hospital and the surrounding grounds by military policemen failed to produce any trace of the medically immobile man.

Here follows my questioning of Dr. William over the bizarre occurrence:

How old was this man, and why had he been brought to the military section of the hospital? 

He was about sixty, a veteran of World War II. He was kind of a sixty-year-old hippie. He had been on an LSD trip when he walked in front of a semitruck and broke both of his legs in several places. 

What was his name? 

It was a Spanish-sounding kind of name, something like "Espinia." He had bushy eyebrows, shoulder-length blondish hair, very large eyes. He had a round face, a flattened nose. His height was about five-foot-six and he was a bit chubby. 

Did you often engage Espinia in conversation? 

It was difficult not to. He was always talking about his weird techniques for meditation. 

Espinia had a strange accent. By the time I was assigned to that hospital, I had already been around the world a couple of times, and I'm a bug on accents anyway; but I simply could not place Espinia's. And he always seemed to have marijuana, or at least he seemed to be high a lot. We couldn't figure out where he was getting it. He had some pretty farout friends who came to visit him, but we always tried to search them carefully. 

 Was there anything particularly unusual about his friends? 

They were just young hippie types. Espinia was always talking about peace, love, brothethood. You know, how we should get out of the war in Vietnam. 

The night he disappeated, I was working the 11 [P.M.] to 7 [A.M.] shift. When I made the bed check, Espinia told me that he would be gone for about an hour, and he reminded me that I could come along if I wanted to. I chuckled and walked on to see about the rest of the patients. 

Espinia was in a six-man room, but that night he was alone. My post was almost right across from his room. When I sat at my desk, I could survey the entire corridor. No one could get on or off the floor without my seeing them. And, of course, there were nurses, doctors, interns, and MP's walking around. 

When I checked Espinia's room a bit later--maybe out of curiosity--he was gone. The traction weights were hanging there; the pins were on the bed; bur Espinia was gone. 

I put out an alarm, and MP's and other hospital personnel searched the place thoroughly. 

Espinia was gone. No one had seen anything. 

Oh, just a minute!  Some other patients said that they had seen a bright light, a very bright light, on that side of the building, and that would have been just before Espinia's disappearance. 

Is there any way that Espinia could have somehow removed the pins and the traction bars himself and crawled away? 

Well, first of all, a man would faint from the pain if he tried to pull those pins out. I mean, this guy was lying in that bed with both legs up, his femurs broken. Think of the terrible pain of trying to crawl under such conditions. It would be impossible! 
\

After searching the hospital--and even the grounds--for an hour, somebody looked in Espinia's room, and there he was again, back in traction, pins in place. The patient had been gone for one hour. He told his interrogators that he had been with his "friends." 

 Every pin was in its place. A doctor on the floor said that while it might be possible for a man to pull the pins out, it would be impossible for anyone to shove them back in by himself. 

Four MP's grilled him for hours, but Espinia wouldn't even reply to their questions. When they finally left him, he looked at me and told me that I could have come along with him, but his UFO friends knew that I didn't really believe in them. He said that he and his friends had spent a delightful hour flying over the Hawaiian Islands and chatting about metaphysics. 

When I chastised him for having caused such a disturbance in the hospital, Espinia became a bit sheepish and said that the next time  he went flying with his friends, he would leave his body there and just go with them in his mind. 

William swears that this iucident really happened. As I listened to him tell the story in his apartment, William's wife of a few months expressed her amazement. William had never mentioned the experience to her, and she said that she was hearing it for the first time that evening.

McDonald's Breaks Down The McNugget

 

 

 

The food industry absorbs a lot of disinformation on many of its products which i find annoying because there is plenty of red flags out there without every fool promoting pure nonsense.  We really do not need the help.  What we have here is reassurance that chicken Mcnuggets are formed strictly from white meat and using a coarse chop to maintain texture.  It really is a good product and that really is not the issue.

 

The issue i have is the poor living conditions experienced by factory raised birds when it happens to be rather unnecessary. The diet is not augmented and we have inferior meat using protocols that beg plenty of questions.  I would really like to have superior meat used and it is not impossible either.

The truth is that every square mile of farm land is improved by the managemnt of a flock of pastured birds who are tasked with processing the soils.  It would not even take land out of cultivation.  It would put land back into cultivation faster.

Set up properly we can have a chicken surplus and no factory farms at all.

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McDonald's Breaks Down The McNugget

By BGR | Yahoo Health – Tue, 9 Dec, 2014 3:33 PM EST


https://ca.shine.yahoo.com/mcdonald-s-breaks-down-the-mcnugget-203312512.html


McDonald’s is really getting sensitive to accusations the quality of its food because it’s just put out its second video in recent weeks explaining to us how its meat-based food products are actually made from real meat. This time, McDonald’s takes us on a tour of a Tyson plant in Tennessee to reveal the magic behind its famous deep-fried meat globules.


“We’ve been asking consumers for their questions about McDonald’s food,” explains the McDonald’s tour guide at the start of the video. “And the No. 1 category, by far [is] Chicken McNuggets, specifically what’s in the Chicken McNuggets.”


McDonald’s goes on to explain that its chicken nuggets contain no “pink slime,” which is a nickname for the meat-based goo that has been banned for human consumption by the European Union. McDonald’s also wants to make sure you know that there are no beaks or feet in its nuggets and that the meat only comes from the chicken breasts, thighs and other parts of the chicken that people normally eat.


The video also interviews a chicken nugget quality control tester who eats McDonald’s nuggets at least once an hour and who is still somehow alive.


Watch the full video above, although whether it will make you feel better about eating McNuggets is open for debate.

 

 

Serpent Mound as Old as Aristotle

 

 

  Another important date has fallen.  As my readers perhaps understand, Many of our so called dates are proving to be terribly wrong.  Add in the burgeoning reality of  Atlantean Bronze Age Culture in the Mississippi Valley from 2500 BC through 1159BC at least with signs of both earlier and later influences and we have to conclude m0st of our dates are telling us mostly how late the site was occupied.

This makes a lot of sense.  A dense population will recycle everything, leaving mostly the last remnants of their presence in place.  I wish archeologists paid attention to just that.  Our best sign is to date soil pollens as much as we can and hope erosion has not destroyed the base continuously.  Where that is not possible we get the last bone thrown down on the way out.

Bone and stone was always valuable and likely retrieved from trash pits after all organics had rotted out.  The better bet is a long term cemetery if that practice is maintained.

History Got it Wrong: Scientists Now Say Serpent Mound as Old as Aristotle

Geoffrey Sea

8/7/14

 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/07/rethinking-ohios-history-serpent-mound-older-some-its-dirt-156268

Serpent Mound in rural Adams County, Ohio, is one of the premier Native American earthworks in the hemisphere. Its pristine flowing form was enhanced by major reconstruction in the 1880s. That reconstruction now appears to have been the second time in its long life that Serpent Mound has shed some of its skin.


Estimates of the age of the earthwork are now radically revised as the result of a new radiocarbon analysis, suggesting that the mound is about 1,400 years older than conventionally thought. The new date of construction is estimated at approximately 321 BCE, one year after the death of Aristotle in Greece.

New data puts Serpent Mound's construction date around 321 BCE, one year after the death of Aristotle in Greece. This marble bust of Aristotle is a copy of a Greek bronze by Lysippos from 330 BC. (Wikipedia)

Signs and other interpretive material have been made obsolete virtually overnight, along with ideas about the indigenous culture responsible for the astounding artwork. A paper by an eight-member team led by archaeologist William Romain has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science with a free-access summary available on Romain’s website.


The new data alters thinking about three things: the culture responsible for the mound; the Native groups that are direct descendants of those builders; and the purpose and iconography of the work. Dispatching other theories about Serpent Mound’s origin, Romain’s summary concludes: “Both the consensus of opinion and radiocarbon evidence suggest an Adena construction.”


Traditionally, Serpent Mound was attributed to the Adena Culture or Civilization, based on an adjacent conical Adena burial mound, and the similarity of style of the effigy with many other Adena earthworks of the Ohio Valley. Just 30 miles southeast of Serpent Mound were the Portsmouth Works, with only a few surviving remnants, interpreted by the pioneering archaeoastronomer Stansbury Hagar as representing the effigy of a rattlesnake 50 times larger than Serpent Mound, both with species identification features indicative of the timber rattlesnake.


However, an investigation in the 1990s found two charcoal samples in Serpent Mound that dated to the later time of about 1070 CE. Site managers then attributed construction to the Late Woodland “Fort Ancient Culture,” even though the so-called “Fort Ancient Culture” has been disassociated from the Fort Ancient earthwork in Warren County, Ohio, and is not known to have built large earthworks. Indeed it has been misnamed a “culture” and is now understood more as an interaction phenomenon involving multiple ethnolinguistic groups that came together in the Ohio Valley in the Late Woodland Period, between 500 CE and 1200 CE.


“Fort Ancient Culture” is neither a fort, nor ancient, nor a culture. Yet it has been identified as the author of Serpent Mound, except in those circles where the mound has been attributed to giants or space aliens or giant space aliens.

The “Fort Ancient” designation has been problematic, because as an unreal entity, the so-called culture has no clear descendants. Adena, on the contrary, is strongly identified from archaeology, genetics, and historical linguistics as Algonquian, its descendants being the Anishinaabeg, the Miami-Illinois, the Shawnee, the Kickapoo, the Meskwaki, and the Asakiwaki.


The new investigation by Romain and others found much older charcoal samples in less-damaged sections of the mound. The investigators conjecture that the mound was originally built between 381 BCE and 44 BCE, with a mean date of 321 BCE. They explain the more recent charcoal found in the 1990s as likely the result of a “repair” effort by Indians around 1070 CE, when the mound would already have been suffering from natural degradation. Late Woodland Period graves at the site suggest the earthwork continued to serve a mortuary function, and that this was the principal nature of the site, directing spirits of the dead from burial mounds and subsurface graves northward, not a place to conduct large ceremonial gatherings as has been suggested by tourism/promotion interests.


Without Serpent Mound as a “ceremonial center” at its geographic core, the notion of a “Fort Ancient Culture” has literally been gutted.

That the new date adds a very sophisticated earthwork to the corpus of the Adena, whom some had considered “primitive,” lends new weight to reconsideration of the non-distinction between “Adena” and “Hopewell” and the need for a general revision of the naming conventions for prehistoric cultures of the Ohio Valley. A simplified revised chronology would see the Adena Civilization leading straight to the historic Central Algonquian tribes in the heartland of the Ohio Valley.


The new study comes just as Serpent Mound is being advanced for addition to the UNESCO World Heritage List, a nomination that will have to be rethought as a result of the new date and its implications. Members of the Central Algonquian tribes now have scientific claim to be considered the heirs of Serpent Mound, raising questions about the structure of site management, now conducted by the Ohio History Connection and Arc of Appalachia Preserve System.


What is certain is that ancient Ohioans were not only building extremely sophisticated geometric works that rivalled or surpassed those of contemporary classical Greece, but they were also repairing or renovating them over millennia.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/07/rethinking-ohios-history-serpent-mound-older-some-its-dirt-156268

Stanford Researchers May have Found the Cure to Alzheimer’s Disease?

This is good news i can take as we have been so far without a hint. It also looks to be the royal road to simple therapies and test protocols that determine if someone is at risk.  

We all suffer physical degeneration yet Alzheimer's appeared to have its own independent sub class besides simple age.  Thus causation appeared a likely prospect.  Now we may be looking in the right place.  It also reminds us that first expectations are dangerous in biology when that may well be generated by any of several different activities that will need to be weeded out.

Hopefully we now see brisk improvement of therapy.   It will be very welcome. . 

 .  

Stanford researchers may have found the cure to Alzheimer’s disease

By Andrew Fazekas

Weather and Science writer

A staff member at the Alzheimer Society of Sudbury-Manitoulin leads seniors in a class called Ageless Grace. (CBC …

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/geekquinox/stanford-researchers-may-have-found-the-cure-to-213653167.html

Could the cure for Alzheimer’s be found in something as simple as boosting our brain’s own immune system? New research suggests that may just be the case.

A team of neuroscientists working out of Stanford University has discovered that the key to preserving normal brain function and preventing the onset of neurodegeneration may not lie with the nerve cells of the brain as many have thought until now. Instead, it may centre on keeping immune-like cells in the brain functioning at top speeds.

Called microglia, these specialized brain cells act like patrolling sentries that monitor their environment for suspicious activities and serving a number of vital functions, including neutralizing toxic debris and healing inflammation before it gets out of hand. They even neutralize invading bacteria and viruses before they can get a foothold.

During the aging process, microglia activity appears to go downhill thanks to a specific protein, called EP2, that coats all cell surfaces.

Now the Standford team has found – in their experiments with mice at least – that by blocking the action of this protein, it actually reinvigorates the microglia so that they can again seek out and destroy all the nerve-damaging substances it used to when the body was younger. So by clamping down on EP2, the researchers noticed that the IQ of their laboratory-based, Alzheimer-prone mice rose dramatically.

It turns out that the promise of developing a specific, immune-boosting drug that targets the EP2 protein molecule may offer new hope for not only warding off the onset this mind-robbing disease, but that it may even reverse memory loss and other associated conditions.

Alzheimer’s is a degenerative disease causing lesions to form in the brain. It affects a variety of mental capacities, emotions, behaviours, and even physical skills. The exact causes of the disease remain a mystery and there has been no cure. Some drugs, however, can help stabilize certain symptoms and improve the quality of life of patients.

Alzheimer’s can exact a terrible psychological and financial toll on victims and their families. And the future looks sobering if nothing is done. 

There are currently about 747,000 dementia patients across the country. That number is expected to double to 1.4 million by 2031. 

If nothing is done, these numbers may even look more frightening further down the road, as the baby boom generation continues to age and balloon the over-65 population. 

According to a 2013 study, the consequence may become a global epidemic. The number of cases of Alzheimer’s disease in North America alone might triple in the next four decades. For Canada, this would mean as many as 2.8 million cases by 2050.

Viewing Russia From the Inside

 

 

Insightful as always and very helpful.  The solution is simply to try to do nothing.  That really suits both parties.  However, it does not make the path of the Ukraine any easier.

Their best option would be to declare neutrality but then promote a vigorous trade relationship with both the EU and Russia while postponing EU membership until Russia itself is also ready to join.  This even gives it leadership options.  The important thing is to announce these policies to allow everyone to stand down.

Doing sometyhing may be to establish a boundary commission along with the trade commission obviously needed.  All this cools things down.

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Viewing Russia From the Inside

December 16, 2014 | 09:02 GMT 

 http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/viewing-russia-inside#axzz3M6MAmfZ8

By George Friedman

Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn't rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year — the so-called Black Days versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is unsettling. It is the first sign that you are not only in a foreign country, which I am used to, but also in a foreign environment. Yet as we drove toward downtown Moscow, well over an hour away, the traffic, the road work, were all commonplace. Moscow has three airports, and we flew into the farthest one from downtown, Domodedovo — the primary international airport. There is endless renovation going on in Moscow, and while it holds up traffic, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital.

Our host met us and we quickly went to work getting a sense of each other and talking about the events of the day. He had spent a great deal of time in the United States and was far more familiar with the nuances of American life than I was with Russian. In that he was the perfect host, translating his country to me, always with the spin of a Russian patriot, which he surely was. We talked as we drove into Moscow, managing to dive deep into the subject.

From him, and from conversations with Russian experts on most of the regions of the world — students at the Institute of International Relations — and with a handful of what I took to be ordinary citizens (not employed by government agencies engaged in managing Russia's foreign and economic affairs), I gained a sense of Russia's concerns. The concerns are what you might expect. The emphasis and order of those concerns were not.

Russians' Economic Expectations

I thought the economic problems of Russia would be foremost on people's minds. The plunge of the ruble, the decline in oil prices, a general slowdown in the economy and the effect of Western sanctions all appear in the West to be hammering the Russian economy. Yet this was not the conversation I was having. The decline in the ruble has affected foreign travel plans, but the public has only recently begun feeling the real impact of these factors, particularly through inflation.

But there was another reason given for the relative calm over the financial situation, and it came not only from government officials but also from private individuals and should be considered very seriously. The Russians pointed out that economic shambles was the norm for Russia, and prosperity the exception. There is always the expectation that prosperity will end and the normal constrictions of Russian poverty return.

The Russians suffered terribly during the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin but also under previous governments stretching back to the czars. In spite of this, several pointed out, they had won the wars they needed to win and had managed to live lives worth living. The golden age of the previous 10 years was coming to an end. That was to be expected, and it would be endured. The government officials meant this as a warning, and I do not think it was a bluff. The pivot of the conversation was about sanctions, and the intent was to show that they would not cause Russia to change its policy toward Ukraine.

Russians' strength is that they can endure things that would break other nations. It was also pointed out that they tend to support the government regardless of competence when Russia feels threatened. Therefore, the Russians argued, no one should expect that sanctions, no matter how harsh, would cause Moscow to capitulate. Instead the Russians would respond with their own sanctions, which were not specified but which I assume would mean seizing the assets of Western companies in Russia and curtailing agricultural imports from Europe. There was no talk of cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe.

If this is so, then the Americans and Europeans are deluding themselves on the effects of sanctions. In general, I personally have little confidence in the use of sanctions. That being said, the Russians gave me another prism to look through. Sanctions reflect European and American thresholds of pain. They are designed to cause pain that the West could not withstand. Applied to others, the effects may vary.
My sense is that the Russians were serious. It would explain why the increased sanctions, plus oil price drops, economic downturns and the rest simply have not caused the erosion of confidence that would be expected. Reliable polling numbers show that President Vladimir Putin is still enormously popular. Whether he remains popular as the decline sets in, and whether the elite being hurt financially are equally sanguine, is another matter. But for me the most important lesson I might have learned in Russia — "might" being the operative term — is that Russians don't respond to economic pressure as Westerners do, and that the idea made famous in a presidential campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," may not apply the same way in Russia.

The Ukrainian Issue

There was much more toughness on Ukraine. There is acceptance that events in Ukraine were a reversal for Russia and resentment that the Obama administration mounted what Russians regard as a propaganda campaign to try to make it appear that Russia was the aggressor. Two points were regularly made. The first was that Crimea was historically part of Russia and that it was already dominated by the Russian military under treaty. There was no invasion but merely the assertion of reality. Second, there was heated insistence that eastern Ukraine is populated by Russians and that as in other countries, those Russians must be given a high degree of autonomy. One scholar pointed to the Canadian model and Quebec to show that the West normally has no problem with regional autonomy for ethnically different regions but is shocked that the Russians might want to practice a form of regionalism commonplace in the West.

The case of Kosovo is extremely important to the Russians both because they feel that their wishes were disregarded there and because it set a precedent. Years after the fall of the Serbian government that had threatened the Albanians in Kosovo, the West granted Kosovo independence. The Russians argued that the borders were redrawn although no danger to Kosovo existed. Russia didn't want it to happen, but the West did it because it could. In the Russian view, having redrawn the map of Serbia, the West has no right to object to redrawing the map of Ukraine.

I try not to be drawn into matters of right and wrong, not because I don't believe there is a difference but because history is rarely decided by moral principles. I have understood the Russians' view of Ukraine as a necessary strategic buffer and the idea that without it they would face a significant threat, if not now, then someday. They point to Napoleon and Hitler as examples of enemies defeated by depth.

I tried to provide a strategic American perspective. The United States has spent the past century pursuing a single objective: avoiding the rise of any single hegemon that might be able to exploit Western European technology and capital and Russian resources and manpower. The United States intervened in World War I in 1917 to block German hegemony, and again in World War II. In the Cold War the goal was to prevent Russian hegemony. U.S. strategic policy has been consistent for a century.

The United States has been conditioned to be cautious of any rising hegemon. In this case the fear of a resurgent Russia is a recollection of the Cold War, but not an unreasonable one. As some pointed out to me, economic weakness has rarely meant military weakness or political disunity. I agreed with them on this and pointed out that this is precisely why the United States has a legitimate fear of Russia in Ukraine. If Russia manages to reassert its power in Ukraine, then what will come next? Russia has military and political power that could begin to impinge on Europe. Therefore, it is not irrational for the United States, and at least some European countries, to want to assert their power in Ukraine.

When I laid out this argument to a very senior official from the Russian Foreign Ministry, he basically said he had no idea what I was trying to say. While I think he fully understood the geopolitical imperatives guiding Russia in Ukraine, to him the century long imperatives guiding the United States are far too vast to apply to the Ukrainian issue. It is not a question of him only seeing his side of the issue. Rather, it is that for Russia, Ukraine is an immediate issue, and the picture I draw of American strategy is so abstract that it doesn't seem to connect with the immediate reality. There is an automatic American response to what it sees as Russian assertiveness; however, the Russians feel they have been far from offensive and have been on the defense. For the official, American fears of Russian hegemony were simply too far-fetched to contemplate.

In other gatherings, with the senior staff of the Institute of International Relations, I tried a different tack, trying to explain that the Russians had embarrassed U.S. President Barack Obama in Syria. Obama had not wanted to attack when poison gas was used in Syria because it was militarily difficult and because if he toppled Syrian President Bashar al Assad, it would leave Sunni jihadists in charge of the country. The United States and Russia had identical interests, I asserted, and the Russian attempt to embarrass the president by making it appear that Putin had forced him to back down triggered the U.S. response in Ukraine. Frankly, I thought my geopolitical explanation was a lot more coherent than this argument, but I tried it out. The discussion was over lunch, but my time was spent explaining and arguing, not eating. I found that I could hold my own geopolitically but that they had mastered the intricacies of the Obama administration in ways I never will.

The Future for Russia and the West

The more important question was what will come next. The obvious question is whether the Ukrainian crisis will spread to the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus. I raised this with the Foreign Ministry official. He was emphatic, making the point several times that this crisis would not spread. I took that to mean that there would be no Russian riots in the Baltics, no unrest in Moldova and no military action in the Caucasus. I think he was sincere. The Russians are stretched as it is. They must deal with Ukraine, and they must cope with the existing sanctions, however much they can endure economic problems. The West has the resources to deal with multiple crises. Russia needs to contain this crisis in Ukraine.

The Russians will settle for a degree of autonomy for Russians within parts of eastern Ukraine. How much autonomy, I do not know. They need a significant gesture to protect their interests and to affirm their significance. Their point that regional autonomy exists in many countries is persuasive. But history is about power, and the West is using its power to press Russia hard. But obviously, nothing is more dangerous than wounding a bear. Killing him is better, but killing Russia has not proved easy.

I came away with two senses. One was that Putin was more secure than I thought. In the scheme of things, that does not mean much. Presidents come and go. But it is a reminder that things that would bring down a Western leader may leave a Russian leader untouched. Second, the Russians do not plan a campaign of aggression. Here I am more troubled — not because they want to invade anyone, but because nations frequently are not aware of what is about to happen, and they might react in ways that will surprise them. That is the most dangerous thing about the situation. It is not what is intended, which seems genuinely benign. What is dangerous is the action that is unanticipated, both by others and by Russia.

At the same time, my general analysis remains intact. Whatever Russia might do elsewhere, Ukraine is of fundamental strategic importance to Russia. Even if the east received a degree of autonomy, Russia would remain deeply concerned about the relationship of the rest of Ukraine to the West. As difficult as this is for Westerners to fathom, Russian history is a tale of buffers. Buffer states save Russia from Western invaders. Russia wants an arrangement that leaves Ukraine at least neutral.

For the United States, any rising power in Eurasia triggers an automatic response born of a century of history. As difficult as it is for Russians to understand, nearly half a century of a Cold War left the United States hypersensitive to the possible re-emergence of Russia. The United States spent the past century blocking the unification of Europe under a single, hostile power. What Russia intends and what America fears are very different things.

The United States and Europe have trouble understanding Russia's fears. Russia has trouble understanding particularly American fears. The fears of both are real and legitimate. This is not a matter of misunderstanding between countries but of incompatible imperatives. All of the good will in the world — and there is precious little of that — cannot solve the problem of two major countries that are compelled to protect their interests and in doing so must make the other feel threatened. I learned much in my visit. I did not learn how to solve this problem, save that at the very least each must understand the fears of the other, even if they can't calm them.

Read more: Viewing Russia From the Inside | Stratfor

Russian Scientist Spies Mountain-sized Asteroid Heading our Way

What this emphasizes is that any relatively small object that tracks an orbit conforming to that of Earth itself and close enough at hand is a prime candidate for an impact however distant that may be. Worse though that same object is been constantly disturbed in ways that make orbital prediction almost impossible.

It is not well understood that we need to monitor our own satelites constantly to ensure they do not get lost and that is almost an easy problem.  Thus these objects all need to be located and placed inside a probability equation that needs to be updated every century or so.


It will be quite a while yet before we are able to properly do this although it generally entails putting out sensing platforms to scan the space all along Earth Orbit.  This will identify those in the window.  It will  not easily identify erratics coming in from the Kuiper belt but may also be helpful in that as well.

We really need a full  space station at both Lagrange Points on Earth's orbit.
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Russian scientist spies mountain-sized asteroid heading our way

In a video posted online Sunday, astrophysicist Vladimir Lipunov says the newly discovered asteroid could collide with Earth during its three-year orbital cycle. A giant meteor exploded over a Russian city in 2013.

By Fred Weir | Christian Science Monitor – Mon, 8 Dec, 2014

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/russian-scientist-spies-mountain-sized-asteroid-heading-way-170022867.html

• Reuters - Image courtesy of NASA shows an artist's concept of a broken-up asteroid. Scientists think that a giant asteroid, which broke up long ago in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, eventually …more 

A Russian astrophysicist says his team has located a huge, mountain-sized asteroid whose orbit crosses the Earth's every three years.

Even though experts say the giant object, known as 2014 UR116, poses no immediate threat of collision, its unexpected discovery underscores how little is still known about asteroids and their unpredictable orbits.

Vladimir Lipunov, a professor at Moscow State University, announced the find in a short documentary, "Asteroid Attack," posted on the website of the Russian Space Agency on Sunday. Mr. Lipunov says the asteroid, which he calculates is 370 meters in diameter, could hit the Earth with an explosion 1,000 times greater than the surprise 2013 impact of a bus-sized meteor in Russia. That object entered Earth’s atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, resulting in a series of ferocious blasts that blew out windows and damaged buildings for miles around.

In the film, Lipunov says it's difficult to calculate the orbit of big objects like 2014 UR116 because, as they hurtle through the solar system, their trajectories are constantly being altered by the gravitational pull of nearby planets. "We need to permanently track this asteroid, because even a small mistake in calculations could have serious consequences," he said.

There is little indication that this particular asteroid could hit the Earth in the next few decades, though over a much longer period a collision looks quite likely, says Natan Esmant, an expert with the official Space Research Institute in Moscow. A more serious issue, he says, is the estimated 100,000 near-Earth objects, such as asteroids and comets, which can cross our planet's orbit and are large enough to be dangerous. Only about 11,000 have so far been tracked and cataloged.

"Every couple of days new ones are being discovered," he says. "Scientists have increasingly powerful tools to do this work, but there's a lot still to be done. Every object that crosses the Earth's path can be a potential threat."

Since the Chelyabinsk meteor, which came as a complete surprise to experts, scientists have been warning about the danger and trying to pool their data in order to get a clearer picture of the swarms of debris that are lurking in space. Scientists use conventional telescopes, radar and infrared detectors to hunt asteroids. The first satellite specifically designed to identify asteroids was launched last year. 

A movement of scientists, astronauts, musicians, and businesspeople have launched a campaign to dramatize the danger and seek ways of protecting Earth from what seems like an inevitable destructive collision. They declared June 30, 2015, the world's first Asteroid Day.