From 1475 BCE to 1275 BCE, the Mitanni Empire ruled over the northern Euphrates-Tigris region in what is now Iraq. It’s only rival at that time was Egypt, but when the Hittite Empire began gaining power, they joined together against it. That wasn’t enough, and Mitanni was eventually defeated by the Hittite and assimilated so completely that very little is known of the dynasty. That may change with the discovery of a MIttani palace in Iraqi Kurdistan after drought exposed it in a reservoir.

A general view of the Mosul Dam Lake north of Mosul, Iraq, May 2, 2018.

Photo: REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily

“The find is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the region in recent decades and illustrates the success of the Kurdish-German cooperation.”

Cooperation is always a good thing, especially at archeological sites in areas of political strife. Kurdish archaeologist Hasan Ahmed Qasim was working with Dr. Hasan Ahmed Qasim and Dr. Ivana Puljiz on a joint research project between the University of Tübingen and the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization (KAO) in cooperation with the Duhok Directorate of Antiquities after a drought caused the water level of the Mosul Reservoir in northern Iraq to drop unexpectedly and substantially, revealing the remains of a Bronze Age palace which is believed to have once stood on the edge of the Tigris River valley in the Mitanni town of Kemune. The site was first discovered in 2010, but the recent drop in water level was the first change archeologists had to do some serious digging

According to the press release by the University of Tübingen, the palace was a solid structure with two-meters thick mud walls, some standing over two meters high. A number of rooms were identified and those contained items that may finally shed some light on the Mitanni empire. One contained ten cuneiform clay tablets which suggest that Kemune may have once be the ancient city of Zachiku, which was thought to have existed in that area 400 years before. (Photos of the site here.) However, it’s what was on the walls that got the archeologists most excited, according to Puljiz.

“We also found remnants of murals in bright shades of red and blue. Mural paintings may have been a typical feature of palaces in the 2nd millennium BC, but they have seldom been preserved. Therefore, the discovery of murals in Kemune is an archaeological sensation.”

This is yet another important archeological site covered by the waters of a dam – in this case, the Mosul Reservoir of the Mosul Dam, the largest dam in Iraq. Completed in 1986, provides electricity to the 1.7 million residents of Mosul … and also some anxiety. The dam was briefly taken over by ISIS in 2014 and it has required constant maintenance and repairs due to being built on top of gypsum, a soft mineral that dissolves in contact with water. Whose bright idea was this? Saddam Hussein.

Mosul Dam hydro power plant

“The Mittani empire is one of the least-explored ancient Near Eastern empires. So far, information about the palaces of the Mittani period has only been found in Tell Brak in Syria and in the cities of Nuzi and Alalach on the outskirts of the empire.”

Saddam may be gone, but instability remains – both in the dam and the region. This appears to be an important central palace of the Mittani Empire, and could help locate its capital, which has remained a mystery in an empire of mysteries.

Will the researchers be able to uncover the secrets of the Mittani Empire and outrace the instability of the governments and the dam? Cooperation will help. So will luck. And don’t forget the climate change that caused the drought.

Archeology is a complicated science.

On April 30, 2001, the National Security Archive issued a statement that read as follows: “In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS.  This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods.” The release continues: “Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba.”

To say that these “various pretexts” were controversial is an understatement, as the National Security Archive’s press-release shows: “These proposals – part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose – included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake ‘Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),’ faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.  Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods ‘may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.’”

An extract from the highly-classified Operation Northwoods document file states: “The suggested courses of action are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances. World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”

The now-declassified document makes it clear that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were gung-ho for the project: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the attached Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that the proposed memorandum be forwarded as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes. It is assumed that there will be similar submissions from other agencies and that these inputs will be used as a basis for developing a time-phased plan. Individual projects can then be considered on a case-by-case basis.”

There is also this, from the Operation Northwoods dossier: “Further, It is assumed that a single agency will be given the primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the basic plan. It is recommended that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, finally, from the Northwoods file, we have this:  “Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States. The plan would also properly integrate and time phase the courses of action to be pursued. The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.”

Clearly, the idea of one day possibly using false flags to try and ensure that Cuba would be perceived as a “threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere” was a highly popular one.

The octopus is already an impressive creature (and probably knows it) and it certainly doesn’t need any help from humans reinforcing that notion. Yet we keep studying them – possibly to prove to ourselves that we really are superior to them. Good luck with that – especially after a new study found that an octopus’ arms can and do operate independently from their brains, making snap decisions on their own. Who’s the sucker now?

“It’s an alternative model for intelligence. It gives us an understanding as to the diversity of cognition in the world, and perhaps the universe.”

Uh-oh. Is Dominic Sivitilli, a graduate student in behavioral neuroscience and astrobiology at the University of Washington in Seattle who presented the new research at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019) hinting that octopuses are from another part of the universe? Perhaps he’s implying that their arms are.

“The octopus’ arms have a neural ring that bypasses the brain, and so the arms can send information to each other without the brain being aware of it. So while the brain isn’t quite sure where the arms are in space, the arms know where each other are and this allows the arms to coordinate during actions like crawling locomotion.”

In a press release for the conference, Sivitilli describes how he watched the Giant Pacific octopus, the world’s largest, and East Pacific red octopuses captured in the Puget Sound off Seattle’s coast as he gave them objects such as cinder blocks, textured rocks, Legos and maze puzzles containing food. with food inside. After recording the arm movements on video, he used a computer program to analyze them. What he found was suckers picking up information from their environment and coordinating movements directly with other suckers, which then worked collectively to create arm movement.

Did he say “collective”?

“What we’re looking at, more than what’s been looked at in the past, is how sensory information is being integrated in this network while the animal is making complicated decisions.”

In other words, while the octopus’s brain is away, the suckers will play. Will they make decisions contrary to what the brain might make given the same data but more time? Good question. Ask an octopus.

It was just a year ago that a different scientific paper proposed that the first octopus on Earth came from “cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs” carried on-board a vessel sent here from another planet 270 million years ago. We know that octopuses can edit their own RNA. Now we know their suckers act in a coordinated collective without needing instructions from the Borg Queen brain.

What next? These researchers were having giant Pacific octopuses lift cinder blocks. They’re already smarter than us … do they need to be stronger than us too?

Bottom line … if a talking octopus head comes to your door and says he’s unarmed, check the back door – the Ocean’s Eight appendages are probably breaking in.

In April 1997, William S. Cohen, who was then the U.S. Secretary of Defense when Bill Clinton held the position of President of the United States, made an amazing and controversial statement to a packed audience at the University of Georgia, which is located in Athens. The conference at which the Secretary of Defense was speaking was The Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy. Cohen came straight to the point and told the audience that certain bodies and people – who he elected not to name, which is intriguing – were then presently “…engaging in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of Electro-Magnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It’s real.” Yes, it is real. We know that thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. We now have in our possession an amazing – almost sci-fi like – document that details where the U.S. Air Force hopes to be in 2025, on the matter of weather modification and control – and with respect to multiple additional technologies, too. The document was written in 1996 and is amazing enough in content – even though it was written more than two decades ago.  The document is entitled USAF 2025.

Researched and written by the 2025 Support Office at the Air University, Air Education and Training Command, and developed by the Air University Press, Educational Services Directorate, College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, the document was “designed to comply with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future.” The section of the document that we need to focus our attentions upon is titled: Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. Yes, “owning the weather.”

The U.S. Air Force offered the following, thought-provoking words: “In 2025, US aerospace forces can ‘own the weather’ by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. Weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.” The USAF 2025 document adds: “The desirability to modify storms to support military objectives is the most aggressive and controversial type of weather-modification. While offensive weather-modification efforts would certainly be undertaken by U.S. forces with great caution and trepidation, it is clear that we cannot afford to allow an adversary to obtain an exclusive weather-modification capability.”

The Air Force presented a fictional scenario which goes some way towards explaining how, and under what specific circumstances, the weather may become the next weapon of conflict: “Imagine that in 2025 the U.S. is fighting a rich, but now consolidated, politically powerful drug cartel in South America. The cartel has purchased hundreds of Russian-and Chinese-built fighters that have successfully thwarted our attempts to attack their production facilities. With their local numerical superiority and interior lines, the cartel is launching more than 10 aircraft for every one of ours. In addition, the cartel is using the French system probatoire d’ observation de la terre (SPOT) positioning and tracking imagery systems, which in 2025 are capable of transmitting near-real-time, multispectral imagery with 1 meter resolution. The U.S. wishes to engage the enemy on an uneven playing field in order to exploit the full potential of our aircraft and munitions.”

So, steps are taken to engage that same enemy, but in a very strange fashion: “Meteorological analysis reveals that equatorial South America typically has afternoon thunderstorms on a daily basis throughout the year. Our intelligence has confirmed that cartel pilots are reluctant to fly in or near thunderstorms. Therefore, our Weather Force Support Element (WFSE), which is a part of the commander in chief’s (CINC) air operations center (AOC), is tasked to forecast storm paths and trigger or intensify thunderstorm cells over critical target areas that the enemy must defend with their aircraft. Since our aircraft in 2025 have all-weather capability, the thunderstorm threat is minimal to our forces, and we can effectively and decisively control the sky over the target.”

The Weather Force Support Element, the USAF 2025 document reveals, “has the necessary sensor and communication capabilities to observe, detect, and act on weather-modification requirements to support US military objectives. These capabilities, we are told “are part of an advanced battle area system that supports the war-fighting CINC. In our scenario, the CINC tasks the WFSE to conduct storm intensification and concealment operations. The WFSE models the atmospheric conditions to forecast, with 90 percent confidence, the likelihood of successful modification using airborne cloud generation and seeding.” Things then become even more science-fiction-like: “According to USAF 2025, by 2025 uninhabited aerospace vehicles (UAV) are routinely used for weather-modification operations. By cross-referencing desired attack times with wind and thunderstorm forecasts and the SPOT satellite’s projected orbit, the WFSE generates mission profiles for each UAV. The WFSE guides each UAV using near-real-time information from a networked sensor array.

“Prior to the attack, which is coordinated with forecasted weather conditions, the UAVs begin cloud generation and seeding operations. UAVs disperse a cirrus shield to deny enemy visual and infrared (IR) surveillance. Simultaneously, microwave heaters create localized scintillation to disrupt active sensing via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems such as the commercially available Canadian search and rescue satellite-aided tracking (SARSAT) that will be widely available in 2025. Other cloud seeding operations cause a developing thunderstorm to intensify over the target, severely limiting the enemy’s capability to defend. The WFSE monitors the entire operation in real-time and notes the successful completion of another very important but routine weather-modification mission.”

While the military stated that this scenario might be viewed by some as being “far-fetched,” it was as sure as it could be that “technological advances in meteorology and the demand for more precise weather information by global businesses will lead to the successful identification and parameterization of the major variables that affect weather.” The USAF 2025 peoplethen did a bit of digging into the future, which, one suspects, will not be too far off of the mark: “By 2025, advances in computational capability, modeling techniques, and atmospheric information tracking will produce a highly accurate and reliable weather prediction capability, validated against real-world weather. In the following decade, population densities put pressure on the worldwide availability and cost of food and usable water. Massive life and property losses associated with natural weather disasters become increasingly unacceptable.

“These pressures prompt governments and/or other organizations who are able to capitalize on the technological advances of the previous 20 years to pursue a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability. The increasing urgency to realize the benefits of this capability stimulates laws and treaties, and some unilateral actions, making the risks required to validate and refine it acceptable.” Less than a decade from now, we can suggest, our planet may not resemble the world in which we live today. After all, consider the following from the Air Force, who are confident that they will be able to “shape local weather patterns by influencing the factors that affect climate, precipitation, storms and their effects, fog, and near space. These highly accurate and reasonably precise civil applications of weather-modification technology have obvious military implications. This is particularly true for aerospace forces, for while weather may affect all mediums of operation, it operates in ours.”

The military recommended that, “the DOD explore the many opportunities (and also the ramifications) resulting from development of a capability to influence precipitation or conducting ‘selective precipitation modification.’ Although the capability to influence precipitation over the long term (i.e., for more than several days) is still not fully understood. By 2025 we will certainly be capable of increasing or decreasing precipitation over the short term in a localized area.” Perhaps most important and relevant of all is the way in which the United States was guaranteed to benefit, strategically, from the deployment of such technologies in areas of hostility:  “Before discussing research in this area, it is important to describe the benefits of such a capability. While many military operations may be influenced by precipitation, ground mobility is most affected. Influencing precipitation could prove useful in two ways. First, enhancing precipitation could decrease the enemy’s trafficability by muddying terrain, while also affecting their morale. Second, suppressing precipitation could increase friendly trafficability by drying out an otherwise muddied area.”

As for the matter of not just creating storms – but definitive super-storms – that might decimate entire landscapes, and without even a bullet or a missile fired, the Air Force’s report makes things acutely obvious that it is this area, perhaps more than any other, which presents the biggest strategic gains: “The desirability to modify storms to support military objectives is the most aggressive and controversial type of weather-modification. The damage caused by storms is indeed horrendous. For instance, a tropical storm has an energy equal to 10,000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs, and in 1992 Hurricane Andrew totally destroyed Homestead AFB, Florida, caused the evacuation of most military aircraft in the southeastern US, and resulted in $15.5 billion of damage.”

On the matter of manufactured storms, we are also told: “At any instant there are approximately 2,000 thunderstorms taking place. In fact 45,000 thunderstorms, which contain heavy rain, hail, microbursts, wind shear, and lightning form daily. Anyone who has flown frequently on commercial aircraft has probably noticed the extremes that pilots will go to avoid thunderstorms. The danger of thunderstorms was clearly shown in August 1985 when a jumbo jet crashed killing 137 people after encountering microburst wind shears during a rain squall. These forces of nature impact all aircraft and even the most advanced fighters of 1996 make every attempt to avoid a thunderstorm.”

USAF 2025 then asked an important question, one which has a bearing everyone who flies – regularly or occasionally: “Will bad weather remain an aviation hazard in 2025?” In answering its very own question, the Air Force said: “The answer, unfortunately, is ‘yes,’ but projected advances in technology over the next 30 years will diminish the hazard potential. Computer-controlled flight systems will be able to ‘autopilot’ aircraft through rapidly changing winds. Aircraft will also have highly accurate, onboard sensing systems that can instantaneously ‘map’ and automatically guide the aircraft through the safest portion of a storm cell. Aircraft are envisioned to have hardened electronics that can withstand the effects of lightning strikes and may also have the capability to generate a surrounding electropotential field that will neutralize or repel lightning strikes. Assuming that the U.S. achieves some or all of the above outlined aircraft technical advances and    maintains the technological ‘weather edge’ over its potential adversaries, we can next look at how we could modify the battlespace weather to make the best use of our technical advantage.”

The technology and science surrounding the issue of turning weather into weapons was further explored: “Weather-modification technologies might involve techniques that would increase latent heat release in the atmosphere, provide additional water vapor for cloud cell development, and provide additional surface and lower atmospheric heating to increase atmospheric instability.” Paramount to the success of any attempt to ignite a storm cell, noted the authors, “…is the pre-existing atmospheric conditions locally and regionally.”

In essence, that means the Earth’s atmosphere must be deemed “conditionally unstable and the large-scale dynamics must be supportive of vertical cloud development. The focus of the weather-modification effort would be to provide additional ‘conditions’ that would make the atmosphere unstable enough to generate cloud and eventually storm cell development. The path of storm cells once developed or enhanced is dependent not only on the mesoscale dynamics of the storm but the regional and synoptic (global) scale atmospheric wind flow patterns in the area which are currently not subject to human control.”

The Air Force admitted that “the technical hurdles for storm development in support of military operations are obviously greater than enhancing precipitation or dispersing fog as described earlier. One area of storm research that would significantly benefit military operations is lightning modification. Most research efforts are being conducted to develop techniques to lessen the occurrence or hazards associated with lightning. This is important research for military operations and resource protection, but some offensive military benefit could be obtained by doing research on increasing the potential and intensity of lightning.”

Let’s now take a look at the final words on this particular issue: “The lessons of history indicate a real weather-modification capability will eventually exist despite the risk. The drive exists. People have always wanted to control the weather and their desire will compel them to collectively and continuously pursue their goal. The motivation exists. The potential benefits and power are extremely lucrative and alluring for those who have the resources to develop it. This combination of drive, motivation, and resources will eventually produce the technology. History also teaches that we cannot afford to be without a weather-modification capability once the technology is developed and used by others. Even if we have no intention of using it, others will. To call upon the atomic weapon analogy again, we need to be able to deter or counter their capability with our own. Therefore, the weather and intelligence communities must keep abreast of the actions of others.

“Weather-modification is a force multiplier with tremendous power that could be exploited across the full spectrum of war-fighting environments. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counter-space control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. But, while offensive weather-modification efforts would certainly be undertaken by US forces with great caution and trepidation, it is clear that we cannot afford to allow an adversary to obtain an exclusive weather-modification capability.”

2025 is not that far way at all. It will be interesting to see if by that year we will have perfected weather-based weaponry to a highly significant degree.

Based on a new study (which can be read here), NASA announced that they found evidence of sodium chloride – which is a huge component found in sea salt and table salt – located on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. This means that the subsurface ocean on Europa is quite similar to the oceans found right here on Earth.

Even though Europa’s ocean is underneath an icy crust, the sodium chloride can still be found on the surface of the moon because of cracks or even potential geysers. Although it was previously thought that magnesium sulfates were present on the moon’s surface, scientists used a visible-wavelength spectroscopy to detect the sodium chloride.

In order to prove that what they viewed was in fact sodium chloride, testing was conducted on similar ocean salts from here on Earth. The ocean salts were introduced to the same airless atmosphere that’s on Europa, as well as the same amount of radiation. What happened was that the salt changed to a yellowish color – the same color that was found on an area of Europa called Tara Regio.

There is another possible explanation and it’s that the sodium chloride could be part of different layers that were formed on the moon’s surface, meaning that it didn’t come from the subsurface ocean. More studies will have to be conducted in order to find out for sure where the sodium chloride came from. If it did in fact come from the subsurface ocean that would mean that the ocean floor remains hydrothermally active. And if it is hydrothermally active, there could possibly be living organisms there.

Europa

NASA’s Cassini mission collected data from Saturn’s moon Enceladus and it is believed that it also has hydrothermal vents on the ocean’s floor. In fact, based on water vapor samples collected by the spacecraft, they found salts and several organic molecules in Enceladus’ ocean. Future space missions will focus on possibly finding life on Enceladus as well as Europa.

It’s incredible to think that moons so far away from us could have oceans that are very similar to our own. Not to mention that there could be a tiny possibility that living organisms could be present on those moons.