Growing up Southern means that taking a meal to others in need is as natural as breathing; it’s just something we do.

Scientific American Editor in Chief, Laura Helmuth Resigns - Science Saved

An excavation in a children’s playground adjacent to the Roman military camp at Haltern am See, northern Germany, has uncovered the remains of a hobnailed boot, a glass game piece and evidence of the camp’s wood-earth defensive wall. Archaeologists with the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) began excavating the site this summer accompanying construction work on the playground. Its proximity to the fortifications of the 1st century Roman camp of Aliso made it likely that archaeological materials were to be found at the location. Aliso was built during the reign of the emperor Augustus as part of his aim to establish the province of Magna Germania, a much larger territory in northwestern Europe that would stretch from the Rhine in the west to the Vistula in the east and the Danube in the south. Augustus’ ambition was dashed to bloody pieces at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. Arminius, leader of the Cherusci tribe and former ally of Rome who was responsible for the resounding defeat of three legions and the permanent derailment of all hopes of imperial expansion into Germany, besieged Aliso after his victory over the winter of 9/10 A.D. The garrison put up a great fight, and ultimately managed to escape destruction, but Aliso would be the last of the six military camps built by Augustus during his Germanic campaigns to be held by Rome after Teutoburg. The camp was occupied until 16 A.D. Archaeological evidence of the siege — lead and stone slingshot balls, arrowheads, mass graves — and remains of the camp’s south, west and east gates have been found in previous excavations. The playground is located on the wood-earth wall, and the excavation found well-preserved post holes from the wall. It also uncovered two bread-baking pit ovens and several waste pits. The boot was found in one of the waste pits. LWL archaeologist Dr. Bettina Tremmel said: “A legionnaire threw his worn-out caliga into one of these waste pits and disposed of it that way. The shoe leather has now completely decomposed in the sandy soil of Haltern. However, the shoe nails that were under the sole of the shoe remained in place.” The archaeologists tracked these down with the help of a so-called pinpointer, a compact mini metal detector. “In one place we found shoe nails lying close together and used the pinpointer to continue the search. This hit an area of ​​20 by 20 centimeters,” says Tremmel. The archaeologists then recovered the entire block of earth in order not to change the position of the small metal finds in the ground and to ensure that they could be transported without breakage. “The shoe must have been relatively small and turned over in the heel area. There is a 90-degree bend there,” says LWL restorer Andreas Weisgerber. “We also looked at whether organic matter might have been preserved on the iron oxides. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Judging by the length of the nail thorn, the sole was about 0.8 centimeters thick.” “The soles of the Caligae shoes consisted of three layers of leather, which were held together by small, hand-forged nails. The tips of the nails were folded over on the top of the sole,” adds Tremmel. “As the legionaries did not wear socks, walking on the 60 nails hammered into each sole must have been almost like a massage,” she believes.

In 2018, more than 37,000 visa applications from Muslim countries were turned down, a huge increase from 2017, when around 1,000 were rejected. The Muslim Travel Ban went through several appeals in the…

Anas Said, 28, admitted to planning the terror attack from his far west Houston apartment, FBI officials said. He’s also accused of attempting to provide “material support” to the Islamic State…

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The following article, Fired Anti-Trump FEMA Supervisor Speaks Out: “It’s Agency Policy” To Discriminate Against Trump Supporters (Video), was first published…

At some point in the 2010s, the media and popular culture thought it would be a good move to get political and stake out a place between the left and far-left. Late night entertainment, movies, comics,…

One handy medication.

A great bass player. The post Grateful Grooves: Three isolated bass tracks that prove Phil Lesh was a genius first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream By Timothy S. Goeglein (Fidelis Publishing, 192 pages, $23) Every once in a while, there is a book that, even for the conservative movement, is nothing less than brave. Stumbling Toward Utopia by Tim Goeglein is one of those books. If we are going to solve the problems of the present and future, we need to take a look back at the road that created those problems to begin with. In the case of current political and cultural morass, that road was paved by the utopian activists of the 1960s, who in their efforts to create what they believed would be a “perfect society,” instead cut a swath of social and economic destruction that has resulted in a rapidly decaying and divided nation. Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short book but says what it means clearly and concisely, namely that most of the internal issues facing the United States today are a result of the President Lyndon Johnson’s failed Great Society policies of the 1960s and their continuation under President Richard Nixon and other presidents/congresses. Additionally, the counterculture that came from the 1960s and entered the mainstream is to blame for many of the social and economic ills that currently challenge the United States. During a time when it is fashionable for many to discard at least some social issues in the name of economic expediency, Goeglein is not afraid to tackle social issues in a manner that invokes the late 1970s founders of the New Right such as Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Jerry Falwell. Further, Goeglein establishes the link between social and economic policy and how they intertwine, as clear as the law of physics, on everything from personal happiness, abortion, immigration, marriage, cohabitation, suicide, and the commitment to traditional, fundamental, religious life. Billions of dollars have been thrown at many of these issues by the federal government, conceived and guided almost exclusively by leftist theory. Yet the problems only get worse. Perhaps most pointedly, Goeglein illustrates how federal interference in the free market has hurt African Americans and made poverty and illegitimacy, already a huge problem in the black community in the early 1960s, far worse. Perhaps without intending to, anti-poverty programs effectively decimated the place of the father in family life, leading to 70 percent of black youngsters being born into fatherless families, a situation that is now painfully familiar to impoverished white and Hispanic communities as well. In that spirit, those churches that are thriving are those that most closely resemble biblical orthodoxy, while the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church, among others, are still bleeding members and are largely kept afloat by their large real estate holdings. Stumbling Towards Utopia is not filled with policy proposals for the future, but it certainly shows us what has not worked in the past and, indeed, what has made the problems of unemployment, poverty, crime, and other pathologies even worse. It is a most cautionary tale about the 1960s, a decade lionized by the American Left and even many middle-of-the-road Americans. In today’s conservative movement, there are those who believe we must face these harsh realities and work to, at best, slow the inevitable decline of our civilization. Goeglein disagrees. He doesn’t seek only to slow the decay of society but to reverse it. This he does by showing what America was like when things were generally better for most people; that is, before the time when the Left threw out many of the social values that made America what it was. Stumbling Toward Utopia describes in detail the contents of the Left’s playbook, delving deep into the writings of the radical Saul Alinksy, Norman Lear, the racist abortionist Margaret Sanger, and others. These are names that the New Right warned about but many on the right today do not study, to the country’s great detriment. No words are wasted in the book, and while Stumbling Toward Utopia is a short read, it is an effective one. It is, in many ways, a reminder of the primers that were used in the American school system before its takeover by the Left. Sometimes people need a refresher on why they are fighting the good fight, even while in the midst of war. Stumbling Toward Utopia provides this reminder and attempts to illuminate a more hopeful road that will allow us to throw off the shackles of the 1960s. Goeglein is a critic unafraid to discuss the social problems that so many conservatives seem uncomfortable with, and to locate those problems at the center of our ills rather than on the periphery. Ronald Reagan would have been pleased with Goeglein’s work, and I think the rest of us will as well when studying Stumbling Toward Utopia. The post Tracing Our Problems to the 1960s appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.