Asatru Links from the AFA Update

There are quite a few Asatru-related links in the latest AFA Update. Some are more obviously connected than others, but all relate to our concerns in one way or another.

OUR FOLK AND OUR CULTURE -

Across Atlantic Ice by Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley

This is an important new book on the peopling of the Americas, by a top scientist and a specialist on ancient tool making! Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian, and paleo-point expert Bruce A. Bradley, argue that early Europeans came to America long before the Indians came across the Bering Land Bridge. They accomplished this feat by traveling along the ice crescent which connected Europe to North America during the ice age. This book is the definitive one on this subject. If Kennewick Man or any of the other related controversies interest you, you must have this volume!

Here is the description from the Amazon page -

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional--and often subjective--approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

If you order it from the AFA site, at http://runestone.org, the AFA will get a cut at no cost to you!

“Wyrd, Causality, and Providence: A Speculative Essay” by Ian McNish

Available as a free PDF (halfway down the list of free downloads). Here's the first paragraph:

The arrival of Middle Eastern monotheism in Europe replaced a prior proto-scientific belief in causality with the teleological concept of Divine Providence, or the Will of God. Ancient Greek philosophy was supplanted by a demand that men should stop seeking to understand the nature of the causal forces at work around them, and accept these simply as the work of an all-powerful monotheistic God. A new, organized priestly class demanded that men must accept the “revealed” word of their God without question. The academy founded by Plato was ordered closed, and as Bertha Phillpotts first showed us, even among the Germanic nations the concept of Wyrd, which postulated an all-pervasive causal force, was replaced by the concept of Divine intervention or Providence. Europe entered the Dark Ages, and remained there until the rediscovery of the empirical character of the pagan classical scholarship made possible the Renaissance and the rise of modern science.

http://tinyurl.com/8224df6

ENVIRONMENT AND YOU

Keystone XL pipeline opposition unites Tea Partiers and environmentalists

TransCanada has threatened to use disputed eminent domain powers to condemn privately held land, over the owners’ objections. And that’s creating unusual allies — Occupiers, Tea Partiers, environmentalists, individualists — united to stop TransCanada from threatening water supplies, ancient artifacts, and people’s basic property rights.

http://tinyurl.com/87dw4ao

Keystone XL pipeline for export, not domestic use - will not reduce cost of gasoline

“The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don’t want you to know is the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market, selling it to buyers in Europe, Latin America and China — not to you and me.

The pipeline and the toxic crude it’ll carry across six states would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.

Already, U.S. refineries are exporting records amounts of the gasoline they make. For the first time in 62 years, America is now a net petroleum exporter. Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. exporter of refined petroleum products, is a major lobbyist for Keystone XL. Along with Motiva (an oil refiner jointly owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco) and Total (a French refinery), Valero has signed secret, long-term contracts with Keystone’s owner (TransCanada Corp.) and several tar sands oil producers to bring this crude to Port Arthur. All three have upgraded their refineries there to process diesel for export.”

Links: http://tinyurl.com/7782zv9

http://tinyurl.com/768zpq8

COMMUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE...AND NOW -

John Robb has started a new blog site dedicated to “resilient communities.” You can find it at http://resilientcommunities.com .

Some samples of his stuff: What is a Resilient Community? -

A resilient community is the path to a safe, prosperous, and vibrant future for us, our kids, and our neighbors — despite an increasingly chaotic world...

It’s pretty clear that our situation is going to get very ugly over the next decade and that isn’t even taking into account the global pandemics and environmental catastrophes that are lurking on the horizon...

So, what do we do? What can we do?

We take control of our future. We implement the only solution that can give us the a safe, secure, and prosperous future. We become resilient. We find ways to help local people, businesses, and municipalities to PRODUCE, and that’s and important word, more of what we rely upon.

Fortunately, we now have the technology and the insights required to produce with quality and efficiency at the local level like never before. In fact, the changes are so dramatic, they could almost qualify as a revolution in local production.

http://tinyurl.com/77dmaup .

And this one -

Rebuilding Rich Soil with HugelKultur - http://tinyurl.com/6qjs2bm

We have a problem. Most of the land we live on (even in rural communities) is barren. Dead. What does this mean? It means the soil can’t support life without perpetual and massive injections of imported petro-chemical fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanical labor. Worse, it takes years to reclaim dead soil and turn it into something productive.

A home or community with dead soil, won’t help you survive an economic winter or supply disruptions. So, here’s a trick that may help out, but you need to start earlier than latter. Living soil has a lead time.

It’s a technique called Hugelkultur ...

SPACE...because there will be an Asatru of the 25^th century

A thousand private spacecraft launches a year by 2019?

U.S. companies launched just five licensed commercial rockets into space last year, but they might be able to loft nearly that many every day by the end of the decade, a federal space official contends.

George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, thinks it’s possible to double the number of permit-holding private launches every year for the rest of the decade. That exponential increase would lead to 1,280 liftoffs in 2019 — an average of 3 1/2 per day.

http://tinyurl.com/85noteb

Private space industry rushes to fill job openings

The burgeoning private space industry continues to grow and based on hiring needs, there is more growth on the horizon. Three of the leaders representing both commercial orbital and sub-orbital missions have busy human resource departments trying fill dozens of openings.

Scaled Composites, the company designing, building and testing Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship Two even produced a recruiting video trying to lure engineers to the Mojave Desert. Another southern California company, SpaceX has pages of hiring needs as the company prepares to begin a busy launch schedule over the next several years. And industry veteran Orbital continues to add plenty of engineers to its ranks every month.

Amateur rocketry

Comprehensive online resource for amateur rocketry -

http://www.rocketry.org

Steve McNallen

Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org