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THE DESTROYER

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In considering the cause of particular wars (or causes of war in general) the available options can probably be distilled down to three ― Man, Machine, Moment. The decision to go to war (or stumble into it) usually involves a madman with grandiose ideas, or the arrival of a military weapon that changes the odds of winning, or the emergence of an obvious power imbalance between populations, (and most likely, elements of all three). As the historian Geoffrey Blainey has noted, the actual ignition of conflict requires someone, somewhere, to think they hold the advantage in one of these areas, sufficient to get away with aggression and be victorious, and BIFFO! its on. Such was the case in 1453 with the Sultan Mehmet II, Conqueror of Constantinople, and his super cannon Basilik . 1.  The Madman Alexander Christie-Millar, 2024, To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul , William Collins, London, p. 43, 49-50       "On that winter's day in Edirne, the...
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Islamic Dissensions : A Domestic source

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Little seems to have really changed   in the past 1400 years of Islamic experience in the Middle East. Such is their attachment to the intimate intrigues of their religious beginning, that subsequent generations of Muslims appear compelled to re-enact the original resentments and betrayals. There is something almost de terministic about those early divisions, a personalised enmity that has endured, with destructive impact on the contemporary Arab world. This thread of argument, along with the multiple ethnic and imperial nationalisms (Arabian, Turkic, Persian) that have populated and contested the region since, are the subject of a challenging book by Barnaby Rogerson ― THE HOUSE DIVIDED : Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East  (2024, Profile Books, London). It is a tragedy that the author suggests may have been foreseen by the Prophet Muhammad shortly before his death in 632 AD (632 CE or 'Common Era', 10 AH or 'After Hijrah'):          "Once ...
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Our Lake Turkana ANCESTORS

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  "Today Lake Turkana lies in the midst of a dry, hostile desert environment. But this was not always the case. About two million years ago, the lake was much larger and the surrounding area was greener, Since then, rapid changes to the climate have periodically caused the lake to shrink, and occasionally it has disappeared altogether. During the wetter times, it was an ideal place for early humans to live, and when they died it was a perfect place for their remains to fossilise. That is because Lake Turkana lies in a volcanic area, where tectonic activity can move earth's crust and create new layers. It is within these layers that fossils from different time periods are found." TURKANA BASIN ― CLIMATIC TIMELINE (mya = million years ago,  kya = thousand years ago) c. 4.5 mya    One of the earliest paleoenvironments of the Turkana basin was the Apak floodplain of the Pliocene epoch. Around 4.5 million years ago the ancestral Omo, Turkwell, and Keiro rivers were joined...
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Ride of the VALKYRIES

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  ... the English called them wælwulfas ,  'slaughter-wolves' ... "Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence , not the contact ." The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  for the year 789 AD:       ' Here [King] Beorhtric  [of Wessex] took [Mercian] King Offa's daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. ' Some corrective notes are required for the chronicler's account. This occasion was probably not the first 'visit' of the th...
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