>DOUGH
https://twitter.com/SarahJindra/status/1622585435372367872
Huge fire in Chicago Heights at 11th and Washington. Appears to be a shipping facility.
Add filter >ID + all of the replies
>Hollywood’s demonic praise of Satan brought to you by Pfizer
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26809309
Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital
An archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.
A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.
Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at Astrakhan State University, said his nine-year excavation near the Caspian Sea has finally unearthed the foundations of a triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with modest yurt-shaped dwellings, and he believes these are part of what was once Itil, the Khazar capital.
By law Khazars could use flamed bricks only in the capital, Vasilyev said. The general location of the city on the Silk Road was confirmed in medieval chronicles by Arab, Jewish and European authors.
"The discovery of the capital of Eastern Europe's first feudal state is of great significance," he told The Associated Press. "We should view it as part of Russian history."
Kevin Brook, the American author of "The Jews of Khazaria," e-mailed Wednesday that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even though it has yielded no Jewish artifacts, "Now I'm as confident as the archaeological team is that they've truly found the long-lost city."
Ruling nomadic tribe
The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern China to the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they conquered huge swaths of what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea.
Itil, about 800 miles south of Moscow, had a population of up to 60,000 and occupied 0.8 square miles of marshy plains southwest of the Russian Caspian Sea port of Astrakhan, Vasilyev said.
It lay at a major junction of the Silk Road, the trade route between Europe and China, which "helped Khazars amass giant profits," he said.
The Khazar empire was once a regional superpower, and Vasilyev said his team has found "luxurious collections" of well-preserved ceramics that help identify cultural ties of the Khazar state with Europe, the Byzantine Empire and even Northern Africa. They also found armor, wooden kitchenware, glass lamps and cups, jewelry and vessels for transporting precious balms dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries, he said.
>Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital
'We know almost nothing'
But a scholar in Israel, while calling the excavations interesting, said the challenge was to find Khazar inscriptions.
"If they found a few buildings, or remains of buildings, that's interesting but does not make a big difference," said Dr. Simon Kraiz, an expert on Eastern European Jewry at Haifa University. "If they found Khazar writings, that would be very important."
Vasilyev says no Jewish artifacts have been found at the site, and in general, most of what is known about the Khazars comes from chroniclers from other, sometimes competing cultures and empires.
"We know a lot about them, and yet we know almost nothing: Jews wrote about them, and so did Russians, Georgians, and Armenians, to name a few," said Kraiz. "But from the Khazars themselves we have nearly nothing."
'Russia is a successor'
The Khazars' ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime in the 8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of Jewish religious artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at other Khazar sites prove that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional beliefs such as shamanism, or newly introduced religions including Islam.
Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the Middle Eastern Institute in Moscow, said he believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of political expediency — to remain independent of neighboring Muslim and Christian states. "They embraced Judaism because they wanted to remain neutral, like Switzerland these days," he said.
In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the Caucasus Mountains and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push toward eastern Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to that of the French knights who defeated Arab forces at the Battle of Tours in France in 732.
The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding Russian state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late 10th century. Medieval Russian epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting the "Jewish Giant."
"In many ways, Russia is a successor of the Khazar state," Vasilyev said.
Traces of conquest
He said his dig revealed traces of a large fire that was probably caused by the Russian conquest. He said Itil was rebuilt following the fall of the Khazar empire, when ethnic Khazars were slowly assimilated by Turkic-speaking tribes, Tatars and Mongols, who inhabited the city until it was flooded by the rising Caspian Sea around the 14th century.
The study of the Khazar empire was discouraged in the Soviet Union. The dictator Josef Stalin, in particular, detested the idea that a Jewish empire had come before Russia's own. He ordered references to Khazar history removed from textbooks because they "disproved his theory of Russian statehood," Satanovsky said.
Only now are Russian scholars free to explore Khazar culture. The Itil excavations have been sponsored by the Russian-Jewish Congress, a nonprofit organization that supports cultural projects in Russia.
"Khazar studies are just beginning," Satanovsky said.
keyboard click clacking
3.8 magnitude earthquake strikes Buffalo area, New York
https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1622579967967076352
Colombian military spotted a balloon in country’s airspace
Chinese diplomat Zhang Meifang says “perhaps China was simply giving the US a balloon. Much like one would give a child to make them feel better!”
https://www.barrons.com/articles/ftx-bankman-fried-donations-crypto-politicians-washington-51675684189
FTX Wants Politicians to Return Sam Bankman-Fried Donations. It’s a Long List.
The new management of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX—which collapsed last year amid allegations of widespread fraud—has called on politicians to return donations from the company or its founder Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s a long, long list.
FTX and its debtors said Sunday they were sending confidential messages to politicians, political action funds, and other groups that received payments from or at the direction of FTX, its executives, or former CEO Bankman-Fried. FTX said it is asking recipients of donations to return funds to the company by Feb. 28 as the group continues to wind through what it has called an “unprecedented” bankruptcy process involving potentially up to a million creditors.
A formal call to politicians over the weekend to return donations comes after a request from the company in December asking for recipients of FTX money to return funds voluntarily. “To the extent such payments are not returned voluntarily, the FTX debtors reserve the right to commence actions before the Bankruptcy Court to require the return of such payments, with interest accruing from the date any action is commenced,” FTX said in a press release.
The collapse of FTX in November—amid allegations that billions of dollars in customer funds were mishandled and lost—came as a shock to crypto markets, the industry, investors, and politicians.
In no small part, that was because Bankman-Fried built a reputation as a reliable, pro-regulation figure in an industry known as the “Wild West” of finance, courting influence in Washington, D.C., and becoming a fixture of Capitol Hill crypto lobbying.
Bankman-Fried and members of his team quickly rose to be among the biggest political donors in the U.S., contributing more than $70 million to election campaigns in the 18 months prior to FTX’s bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal has reported. That included $40 million Bankman-Fried personally gave to politicians and political-action committees—mostly linked to the Democratic Party—according to the Journal.
With FTX looking to recoup possibly billions of dollars in funds to pay creditors, clawbacks like these are likely to continue.
If the bankruptcy court has reason to believe funds used by FTX or its executives to make loans of investments—let alone donations—actually belonged to customers, the court could order the money be returned. It’s a dark cloud that is likely to continue hanging over the beaten-down crypto industry in particular, since FTX and its associated companies, including trading firm Alameda Research, played a crucial role in the interconnected digital asset space.
>School district apologizes for calling muddy snowman ‘diverse’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/19/cia-william-burns-zelensky-ukraine-russia/
Director Burns traveled to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian intelligence counterparts as well as President Zelensky and reinforced our continued support for Ukraine and its defense against Russian aggression
https://nypost.com/2023/01/10/prince-harry-says-he-was-bred-for-spare-parts-for-william/
Prince Harry says he was bred to offer spare organs to heir William
Prince Harry bitterly believes he was only bred to offer literal spare parts for his brother in case the heir apparent ever needed new organs.
“Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare,” the exiled prince wrote in explaining the title of his memoir, “Spare,” which was officially released Tuesday.
“I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he wrote of his 40-year-old brother and current heir to the throne, William.
He said he understood his role was to be a “diversion” and “distraction” from his brother — or to provide, “if necessary, a spare part” to him.
“Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow,” he added in morose detail.
He also noted how his dad, now King Charles III, could never be on a plane with his elder son, William, “because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out.”
“But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with; the Spare could always be spared,” Harry claimed.
“This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter,” he claimed of his apparent throwaway standing in the family.
Harry complained that the heir and spare clarification “wasn’t merely how the press referred to us,” but was also “the shorthand used by” his royal family, including “Mummy,” the late Princess Diana, “and even Granny,” the since-deceased Queen Elizabeth II.
He says he was 20 when he was first told that his dad had greeted his birth by quipping: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare — my work is done.”
“A joke. Presumably,” Harry wrote, continuing the ruthless dig at the king by claiming that “minutes after delivering this bit of high comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend.”
Despite naming his memoir “Spare” — and using his clear distaste for his role in life to justify his ultimate split from his family — Harry maintains that he was initially accepting of it.
“I took no offense, I felt nothing about it, any of it,” he wrote — initially acknowledging his incredibly privileged life.
“Every boy and girl, at least once, imagines themselves as a prince or a princess. Therefore, Spare or no Spare, it wasn’t half bad to actually be one,” he conceded.
That soon changed, however, with Harry feeling there was a “public sacrifice of the Spare” to help elevate other royals, starting with 2002 headlines damning his druggy lifestyle — which he now admits had been mostly true anyway.
It grew worse when William and his wife, Princess of Wales Catherine, had two kids, according to Harry — who reckons he was told that as fifth in line for the throne, he was “no longer even the Spare of the Spare.”
Still, his supposed role in life was largely blamed for one of the most dramatic moments in the book, when Harry claims his brother knocked him to the floor during a fight.
That, Harry wrote, came because William “was in full Heir mode, and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the Spare.”
The royal family has yet to comment on Harry’s book or his seemingly endless tour of TV and magazine interviews.
>that's a masterpiece