WTF Is It Now?!?

QUOTES
“No politician hoping for re-election will dare to say it, but the administration’s new motto seems to be ‘Leave no defense contractor behind.’” - Paul Krugman, in the New York Times.

'"I believe people have taken a step back and asked, ‘What’s important in life?’" said the nation’s chief executive Thursday. "You know, the bottom line and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself?" These shards of clueless verbiage bring to mind his father’s brief but beautiful poem about economic distress, "Message: I care."'- Smokin' Joe Conason, in Salon.




TODAY IN HISTORY: 1917
The first appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three young shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. A later apparition that year was witnessed by 70,000 people in some manner of mass hallucination. The Virgin entrusted the children with three prophecies of the coming apocalypse, the third of which the Vatican retains in a locked wooden box, refusing to reveal it.




DESERT YIELDS RUINS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PORT
South of Suez, the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea used to be sprinkled with ports that throbbed with life and commerce in antiquity, especially the heyday of the Roman Empire. But long ago, the relentless desert buried their remains so completely that it was almost beyond imagination that these places once were pivotal links in a maritime trade route that rivaled the better-known overland Silk Road.

Perhaps the greatest of these ports in the India trade was Berenike, near Egypt's border with Sudan. Historians knew of it from written records. Yet nothing remained on the surface at the sere and forlorn site except some lines of coral and scattered potsherds.
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But archaeologists, who in their own way can be as unrelenting as the desert, have now completed eight years of excavations under harsh conditions at Berenike and found what they say are the most extensive remains so far from the ancient world's sea trade between East and West. Their spades uncovered building ruins, teak and metal from ships, sail cloth, sapphires and beads, wine and stores of peppercorns. Some of the goods show that Berenike was trading, at least indirectly, with places as far away as Thailand and Java. Inscriptions and other written materials in 11 different languages, including Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, Coptic and Sanskrit, attest to the cosmopolitan mix of people who lived in or passed through the town. - Read more here.