Silver Coins

 From Live Science:

A handful of Arabian silver coins found in New England may be the last surviving relics of history's most notorious act of piracy — and perhaps one of the most famous pirates who ever lived. Evidence suggests the distinctive coins were spent as common silver in the American colonies in the late 1690s by the fugitive pirate crew of Henry Every, also known as John Avery, who had fled there after plundering the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-sawai as it was returning pilgrims from the Muslim Hajj.

Researchers aren't certain that the coins are from the Ganj-i-sawai, but their origin, their dates and their discovery in such a distant region suggest they were seized by the pirates and spent in the Americas. The coins may have been handled by Every himself, who disappeared a few years later but who came to be portrayed as an almost heroic figure from what some have called the "Golden Age of Piracy." (Read more.)

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Booleying

From RTÉ Brainstorm:

On many hillsides in Ireland today, one can still see the physical remains of this extraordinary way of life. The herders would sleep in groups of two to five in small one-roomed huts.

Typically these structures had stone walls with ‘scraws’ of peat (from the Irish scraitheacha) placed on top of them and then more scraws and/or heather used as roofing. Some older huts were probably built largely of wattle or wickerwork, especially before the 1700s when trees were more common in our uplands.

Fascinatingly, by the 1800s, it was mostly young people and teenage girls especially who had the job of looking after cows at these seasonal ‘boolies’.

This gave rise to a vibrant but now largely forgotten cultural scene in Ireland’s uplands. Oral history collected in the 1930s and 1940s in Connemara, Mayo, Donegal, and the Galtee Mountains makes clear that booleying facilitated the transmission of a lot of important cultural knowledge.

One man from Cloch Cheannaola in Donegal states that his mother had learned her songs from other dairymaids in the hills, while another account from Iorras Aintheach in Galway outlines how the girls not only sang but played musical instruments and danced as well.

But there could be danger too. Several folk stories in Irish from south Connemara and west Mayo portray upland booley sites as places where weird things were more likely to happen, especially at night. Hags or cailleacha frequently appear, cursing people or taking the form of a hare in order to steal milk from the cows. (Read more.)

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How Depression and Trauma Cast Multigenerational Shadows

 From Lit Hub:

Like thick curly hair, mental illness runs in my family. Psychosis and mood disorders, the two major groups of psychiatric classification, can both be found in the last three generations. Rumors and realities of institutionalization have been passed down my maternal line. My mum remembers the day when my grandmother, Renee, was taken away to a mental institution in the 1970s.

“That is one of my worst memories,” she told me over the phone in August 2017. “We didn’t know whether she was going to come back.”

Called High Royds, it was just one so-called asylum within a short van drive from their home in Thornton, a village just outside of Bradford in northwest England. But this memory is blurred in its details and may not have even happened. She was a child then and memories can be manufactured like nightmares. There’s no doubt that Renee struggled with depression, especially after her husband, Eric, my grandfather, died of lung cancer in 1975.

At a time when SSRIs like sertraline hadn’t yet been put into prescriptions, she was given diazepam (Valium) to calm her anxiety and dampen her grief. When at her worst, she described her mental anguish as “tearing down the wallpaper.” But no one else in the family remembers Renee being taken away for any period of time. The patient reports from High Royds, although incomplete with whole years missing, hold no trace of her. (Read more.)

 

The seed of suffering. From Aeon:

Since the publication of the DSM-III in 1980, psychiatric diagnosis has helped to select the right treatment for a person’s symptoms. It’s also made the tracking of diagnoses over time and space possible, a field known as ‘psychiatric epidemiology’. However, while these diagnostic guides might be useful for doctors who must make daily decisions about care and treatment, some critics argue that diagnostic systems have actually stymied the progress of psychiatry. While other specialities of medicine have drastically reduced mortality rates from heart disease, cancer and stroke, there haven’t been similar successes in mental healthcare. As a paper from 2013 put it, ‘mortality has not decreased for any mental illness, prevalence rates are similarly unchanged, there are no clinical tests for diagnosis, detection of disorders is delayed well beyond generally accepted onset of pathology, and there are no well-developed preventive interventions.’ In short, psychiatry appears stuck.

Perhaps it’s because the diagnostic system is faulty. Indeed, the fact that around half of patients with one mental disorder also fulfil the requirement for a second disorder has been well documented since the 1990s: major depression and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), substance use disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Either mental disorders really do tend to aggregate or, perhaps more likely and more worryingly, our classification system is drawing lines in unnatural places, carving nature far from its joints.

There’s an alternative approach. A growing troupe of scientists think that focusing on one or two diagnoses in a study – as is common in psychiatric research – has meant that the true nature of mental disorders remains hidden. To understand what are essentially brain disorders, they argue you have to zoom out. Considering the whole spectra of psychiatric possibility reveals similarities in symptoms, brain circuitry and genetics. Shaking off the shackles of diagnostic classification, there is growing evidence that all mental disorders are actually the product of a single underlying dimension, a common liability for psychopathology. Known as the ‘p-factor’, this theoretical concept brings the potential for important new ways to treat and prevent psychiatric disorders.

The p-factor also raises the question of whether Oliver and I are far more similar than a cursory glance at our symptoms might suggest. Perhaps we share the same underlying vulnerability, but certain life experiences have influenced the way it manifests. If my experiences had been different, perhaps the depression of my mid-20s could have emerged as psychosis in my late teens. And if all this is true, is it possible that Oliver’s and my experiences will merge in the future? (Read more.)

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Medieval Jewish Homes in Oxford

 From Haaretz:

Kashrut, the body of Jewish dietary laws, wasn’t born like Venus, neither fully formed and perfect nor from a clamshell. The rules evolved gradually over more than two thousand years and only took the shape familiar to today’s Jewry in early modern Europe. By the time of the medieval period in Europe, the practices were firm, leaving aside discrepancies in precise observances among the Jewish communities around the world such as whether chicken could be cooked in milk since they don’t lactate anyway.

Now, archaeologists from Bristol University report identifying two Jewish households in early medieval Oxford, based in large part on the missing oink.

Absent dedicatory plaques or Jewish symbols, identifying Jewish communities in archaeology starts with what isn’t there: a sign of the swine. In Israeli archaeological circles, ancient settlements are often categorized as “Jewish” or “other”: Canaanite, Philistine, etc. by the presence or absence of pig. It’s hardly categorical but there it is.

In the case of the study published Wednesday in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, there was quite a wealth of evidence that two of the medieval homes discovered in a salvage excavation, done ahead of development works in central Oxford, were Jewish. Julie Dunne, the lead author on the study, confirms that no Jewish symbology was found in the site of the two house, but in fact, they were part of a Jewish neighborhood, as records indicate. (Read more.)

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Joyeuse: The Sword of Charlemagne

Couronne du sacre des rois de France

Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, was worn by the Kings of France at their coronations. From Ancient Origins:

The story begins in the year 802 AD.  Legend states that the sword of Joyeuse, meaning “joyful” in French, was forged by the famous blacksmith Galas, and took three years to complete.  The sword was described as having magical powers associated with it.  It was said to have been so bright that it could outshine the sun and blind its wielder's enemies in battle, and any person who wielded the legendary sword could not be poisoned.  The Emperor Charlemagne, coming back from Spain was said to have set up camp in the region and acquired the sword. 

 Charlemagne (742-814 AD), who was also known as Charles the Great, was king of the Franks and Christian emperor of the West. He did much to define the shape and character of medieval Europe and presided over the Carolingian Renaissance.  After the fall of the Roman Empire, he was the first to reunite Western Europe. He ruled a vast kingdom that encompassed what is now France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and the Low Countries, consolidating Christianity through his vast empire through forced conversions. His military ‘accomplishments’ frequently involved extreme brutality, such as the beheading of more than 2,500 Frankish and Saxon village chiefs. (Read more.)

Louis XIV wearing Joyeuse

Currently at Versailles, MORE HERE.

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Meghan’s Covid Claims

 From The Spectator:

To start with gender-based violence, this claim has been widely made, and may well be true. It would certainly make sense if unemployment and lockdowns, forcing couples to spend more time under the same roof in stressful circumstances, had led to an increase in domestic violence. 

There is not a lot of good data on this, however. The best the UN can do is cite data from France showing a 30 per cent increase in domestic violence since lockdown, and increases of 25 per cent, 30 per cent and 33 per cent in calls to domestic violence helplines in Argentina, Cyprus and Singapore respectively.

It isn’t clear where Meghan sourced her claim that women ‘have seen a generation of economic gain wiped out', nor exactly what she meant by it. Did she mean that women are back to where they were in the early 1990s in terms of absolute wealth, or that the gap between male and female wealth is back to where it was then? 

The claim that 47 million women 'are expected' to fall into extreme poverty is, on the other hand, easy to trace: it comes from a study prepared for UN Women and the UN Development Programme by the Pardee Center at the University of Denver last September. (Read more.)

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French Warship Sunk in West Cork

 From Cork Beo:

She fought the British navy off the coast of America to help free the States - but her final mission to aid Irish freedom ended at the bottom of Bantry Bay. The French frigate La Surveillante was lost and forgotten for almost 200 years until another major event in the bay, the Whiddy Island Disaster in 1979 led to her discovery. And now, stunning new images have revealed the final resting place of this French warship, lying in 35 metres on the bottom of the bay with her cannons still on board. The high-resolution images show La Surveillante, a 32-gun, three-masted frigate, largely intact and resting on her keel, with many of her iron cannon still at their fighting stations. (Read more.)

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In An Olive Grove

From Dwell:

Mar Plus Ask’s Olive Houses—a set of micro homes that function as a year-round retreat for architects, artists, and writers in Mallorca, Spain—are no exception. The tiny, 260-square-foot homes aren’t just tied to the natural landscape—they look like they’re part of it.

"High up in the Tramuntana Mountains with views overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the off-grid houses are surrounded in all directions by thousand-year-old olive trees that stand on man-made terraces of dry stacked stone, where only the wind and bells tied to grazing sheep can be heard," Aistrup says. (Read more.)

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Iran’s Propaganda Video

 From Gregg Jarrett:

State-controlled Iranian TV released a video Sunday before its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech. The horrifying fake footage shows a theoretical attack of a missile fired as Washington DC’s Capitol building becomes engulfed in flames.
The U.S. Sun reports:

Biden is now under mounting pressure not to surrender to Iran’s threats by Republicans as tensions between both countries continue to simmer.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Khamenei praised the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), who have repeatedly launched operations against the United States, in his address.

The head of the IRGC, Qassem Soleimani, was killed during a drone strike conducted on Donald Trump‘s orders.

“The Americans have been for years deeply saddened by the Islamic republic’s influence, and they were angry with General Soleimani for this reason and martyred him for this reason,” Khamenei raged.

(Read more.)

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