The New York Times recently published an article that shows archaeological evidence from the Ukraine reveals a network of ancient peoples now referred to simply as Old Europe. Due to the lack of writing, still an invention waiting to be discovered, the civilization is unidentified. Their advancements as a culture, however, make them prime candidates for a major civilization that some believe is the source of the so-called Proto-Indo-European language.

Click here for the NY Times article.

Interestingly, the article claims that most of the archaeological discoveries about Old Europe civilization remained under lock and key because of the Cold War, as most of these findings occurred beyond the Iron Curtain. Glad to see these findings are being brought to light and now introduced to the English speaking population.

Slideshow of artifacts from Old Europe exhibit.

I recently returned from a trip to Italy and Greece and one of the destinations I made a point of visiting while in Athens was the new Acropolis Museum. The museum was opened June 20, 2009 and I was able to visit it on July 2, 2009 – so the paint was still fresh and the gleam was shiny as was the glass in the structure.

Designed by a Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, the structure of the new Acropolis Museum is very modern with a stunning combination of glass and concrete that seems to serve as the perfect silent background to the star of the show – the classical remains from the Acropolis itself.

The museum has three basic levels for the visiting patrons, featuring sculpture dating from the archaic period around the acropolis to the classical period. The museum is littered with korai and kouroi, on the 2nd floor in particular you can see up close the famous “archaic smile” featured on each piece as well as see the paint still lingering. One of the main characteristics throughout the museum is the combination of simply geometric lines and textures with a legion of repeating dots to break up the lines. In fact, on all the glass there are these tiny dots as well as larger ones in the walls making the interior have a domino kind of presence.

An innovative feature, and destined to be the trademark of what is going to be possibly one of the great museums of the world, is the glass flooring. This is a unique experience as it leaves one feeling as if you are floating on air and beneath your feet are the archaeological remains of the area. In fact, the entire museum seems to be more like a giant UFO, with strong symmetry of course, hovering over the site in order to learn more about the area and the slice of time it is framed within. For archaeologists, this is particulary exciting as they can see for themselves the remains and the random museum goers fluttering about can take stabs with their imagination at what they are looking at.

The relationship between the new museum and its environs seems very well thought out as the glass floor not only lets you view the past of the area, but the glass surrounding the building provides a beautiful vista of the present state of the acropolis and the city. It is a place where all time strands meet and interlock into the simplicity of a modern structure but with the grace of a dancer carefully stepping over the precious remains which abound the area.

A thrill for any afficionado of classical sculpture and Greek culture would be the presence of the caryatides from the porch of the Erectheion on the acropolis. The maidens stand tall and proud, vestiges of the past relieved of the burden of supporting the ancient roof from the busy temple that once housed one of the main cult statues of Athena and her peplos. Noticeable still is the empty space of one of the missing sisters, which was taken by Lord Byron and has yet to make its way back home to Athens. Another point of contention between the Greeks and the English.

If you travel to Athens, you must make the time to visit the new Acropolis Museum. It is extremely affordable, only 1 euro, and can bring you up close to classical Athenian civilization in a way you have not experienced. You can tour the remains which lay under your feet and ponder the mastery of the beauty of the sculpture. Also available to you is the simple splendor of modern architecture, focused on quite elegance and pragmatism, it serves as the perfect stage for classical sculpture.

So, the new updated Iphone is here – well, about to be. June 19th, the new Iphone 3G S hits the floor and the world will relive Iphone mania. I almost did it myself. How could you not, the Iphone is a nice piece of equipment for interpersonal communication and staying in touch with your latest social network updates.

Yet, I am holding out for what I think is the next great trend – Android. Google created Android to be an open source mobile operating system which is great because its FREE and it allows anyone to develop “apps” for it. This makes Android instantly competitive with Apple’s Iphone and being backed by Google, the Android OS is going to be trusted by handset developers.

TMobile launched the G1 last year, built by HTC, but I found it to be a little too clunky for my tastes. In fact, the only thing that sells the phone in my opinion is the fact that it is running Android and was the first phone to do so. But guess what? Now there are somewhere around 18 phones slated to hit the market this summer all using Android.

The one that is atop my list is the new TMobile MyTouch 3G – long title, but great looking set so far. Check out some of the stats for this new handset here and take a sneak peak at the box art for the handset. It will be available in white, black and merlot. Pricing is not known yet, but I suspect it will be comparable to the new Iphone and if TMobile is smart, they will release it as close to the Iphone release as possible. A little before that deadline would be shrewd – and I’d appreciate it as I would personally rush out to get a phone before my treck to Europe this summer.

I have always said that the downfall of our society – at least from a nutritional point of view – is when fast food restaurants (feeding troughs, really) instituted the “free refill” policy on soda. Unofficially, of course, you could cite the moment in time when this policy was begun and probably correlate it with the rise of obesity.

With the increase in cancer, diabetes, and other diseases that destroy the quality of life of our bodies, is it any wonder that diet would be the main cause in this? Other countries, it has been shown, do not have the same problems we have and most of it extends from the observation that they eat differently than we do here.

Everything is mixed, processed, over-flavored and designed to be cheap and non-sustainable. Why wouldn’t our bodies reflect this? After all, you are what you eat.

Let’s take a look at this problem under a microscope; let’s consider the culprit of soda and its abundance. I remember as a kid we used to drink soda every now and then but it was usually for a special occasion. Of course, the association of having a good time is what the marketing departments seized upon and now its the opposite – we are drinking soda to have a good time.

But the honeymoon is over. Do you realize what the 2nd ingredient is in, say, Coca-Cola? High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). It’s water, then HFCS.

Studies are starting to show the adverse effects of HFCS. For example, in 2007 an article cited research that the use of HFCS may contribute to the development of diabetes in children.

In the current study, Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found “astonishingly high” levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages.

Carbonyls are undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, said Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are “bound” and chemically stable, the researcher noted.

Reactive carbonyls also are elevated in the blood of individuals with diabetes and linked to the complications of that disease. Based on the study data, Ho estimates that a single can of soda contains about five times the concentration of reactive carbonyls than the concentration found in the blood of an adult person with diabetes.

It would seem that a consideration, for the rest of the public which does not have diabetes, would be to avoid artificial sweetners of all kinds. I have already brought up the issue of aspartame and its dangers – not just for diabetics but for all who consume aspartame – and HFCS is just another industrial product we need to avoid. I would go as far to say that perhaps regular sugar (cane sugar) could be used by diabetics as long as its fructose and glucose components are bound. In other words, if it is natural, it should be fine for limited use.

There is another consideration: a diet deficient in certain minerals will also contribute to complications of diabetes. Read the following excerpt which discusses the misconception of HFCS as a natural and non-harmful product:

But there’s another reason to avoid HFCS. Consumers may think that because it contains fructose–which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food–that it is healthier than sugar. A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered that this just ain’t so.

Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy–that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.

“The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar,” says Dr. Field, “but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”

HFCS contains more fructose than sugar and this fructose is more immediately available because it is not bound up in sucrose. Since the effects of fructose are most severe in the growing organism, we need to think carefully about what kind of sweeteners we give to our children. Fruit juices should be strictly avoided–they are very high in fructose–but so should anything with HFCS.

So, avoiding artificial sweetners, such as HFCS, is not merely enough if you are going to consume sugar. You need to also make sure you are getting the correct amount of certain minerals (copper) in order to properly absorb the sugars.

Fructose occurs naturally in fruits and the article is right – people assume because it contains fructose it is a natural product. This is a fallacy, however. For starters, HFCS is artificially created in a complicated process. This process takes the raw material of corn (a genetically modified product, by the way – see the documentary “King Corn“), makes it into corn starch and by way of adding several enzymes and a distillation process finally arrives at the completed product of HFCS.

Discovered by Japanese scientists back in the 1970’s, HFCS was preferred as a sweetner since the importation of sugar became more expensive. Even though the production of HFCS is laborious and expensive, the tariffs on cane sugar may it a more cost effective ingredient that benefits corn production and producers of food products like Coca Cola and Pepsi.

If you are against genetically modified foods then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are against industrial production of food and do not trust it, then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are a diabetic, or perhaps quickly on your way to becoming one, then you need to avoid HFCS. If you are obese, you need to avoid HFCS.

Pretty much everyone needs to avoid this product and the fact that it is widely available means that this poison is being sold to the world at a drastic cost. The world would be better off without it.

This is a concept that will take some time to develop. This post, of course, will be an evolutionary creature in that I will need time to grab various ideas and cobble them together. Yet, from the outset, this discussion must be built upon this simple argument: a federal bank, or a centralized bank, serves only to destroy the greater interests of the United States and its economy.

At its heart, at best well-intentioned, a centralized bank creates several issues. Here is the gist of why Andrew Jackson worked hard as president to destroy the Second Bank of the United States during his term:

• It concentrates the nation’s finances in a single institution
• This institution could be more easily manipulated, which made the government much more susceptible to foreign interests
• It was a vessel used only to make the rich richer
• It had great influence over the politicians as it was used to supply their interests
• At the time, it favored northern states over the southern and western states

Jackson’s distaste of the centralized bank was not unfounded. After all, Thomas Jefferson said:

The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution. I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin. If the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Greenspan comments on the existence of the Federal Reserve

Here is something else to consider – a documentary on what the Federal Reserve is. It has a biased message so consider it carefully. Then again, it coincides with the message of this post.

Part 1/5

Part 2/5

Part 3/5

Part 4/5

Part 5/5

Yet, there are discussions out there that can save us from this mess. In fact, there was a politician running in the general election for president that was running under a major party’s ticket. That politician is Ron Paul and as a Republican, he holds values that are closer to Libertarian ideals.

There are others fighting to raise awareness. For instance, what if there was no law that enforced the payment of the federal income tax? What if this product of the IRS was unconstitutional?