Important Links on Asatru and More!

The following links are from the just-published issue #156 of the free newsletter AFA Update, published by the Asatru Folk Assembly.

AFA Update contains news from the AFA, of course, and also regular links on "folk and freedom, environment and communities, the distant past and the emerging future, the straight and simple and the hard to categorize..." 
You can subscribe by sending an email to AFA_Bearclaw-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Below is the latest collection of links.

Steve McNallen
Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org

OUR FOLK...

Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration

The arguments have gone back and forth over the years as to whether there were actually large migrations of Anglo-Saxons into England, or whether the invasion was a predominately cultural one. This paper presents evidence that there were indeed large movements of Germanic tribesmen from the Jutland peninsula into England.

http://tinyurl.com/743koog

Viking Era Graves in Poland - Norse? Slav?

Sword at his side, the so-called Young Warrior is among the thousand-year-old discoveries in a newfound cemetery in Poland, a new study says.

The burial ground holds not only a hoard of precious objects but also hints of human sacrifice—and several dozen graves of a mysterious people with links to both the Vikings and the rulers of the founding states of eastern Europe.

Ultimately, the Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic peoples are closely intertwined - all descended from the Funnel Beaker Culture.

http://tinyurl.com/c5t8kge

Five Hundred New Fairy Tales Discovered in Germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

http://tinyurl.com/75og824

OUR FREEDOMS...

Strip Searches and the Death of Privacy in the New America

There are two main drivers pushing privacy into the dustbin of history, and both are related to technology. One is the increasing effectiveness of government surveillance. Cameras follow you in most public places in London today, and New York is catching up. Diffusion scanners at the airport already show you essentially naked. The coalition Conservative-Liberal Democratic government in the U.K. is preparing to allow the state to collect, without a warrant or even suspicion, all information on calls or texts except the content. The government’s ability to do all of these things causes many of us to think, irrationally, that it is reasonable for it to do so.

http://tinyurl.com/7wzspwc

AFA COMMUNITIES...

An AFA community begins when two members meet each other for the first time and share a cup of coffee. Community is people, not land. When you have the people, you can think about getting land and all the things that go with it.

I want to see AFA community (people), and communities (land and goodies) all across the country. We need to be working on that, and thinking about it each and every day. That's how we'll make it happen.

What Took 10,000 years to build and only 50 years to destroy?

This excellent post by John Robb explains why your food production plans need to include heirloom and heritage plants and animals, and how you can go about that.
http://tinyurl.com/dxbtkhw

THE ENVIRONMENT...

Weather and Warming: Connecting the Dots

No one can afford to ignore the weather - especially farmers, campers, hunters, self-sufficiency types, “preppers,” or people planning intentional communities. Here are some facts:

Last month was the warmest March in the Unites States since the records began, in 1895. There were 15,272 warmest records broken across the country.

For the year to date, heat records are beating cold records 22 to 1, topping the previous decade's average by more than a factor of 10.

Warmer-than-average conditions across the eastern U.S. also created an environment favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's Storm Prediction Center, there were 223 preliminary tornado reports during March, a month that averages 80 tornadoes annually. (We saw still another extreme tornado event in the first half of April, blanketing much of the central United States.)

For more relevant information, go back to the beginning of this issue of AFA Update and read the stats on Americans who say they have been personally affected by severe weather events.

Weather has always been variable - but we are seeing changes far, far outside the “normal.” All of these changes, whether drought in some areas, record rainfall in other areas, extreme heat, tornadoes, or storms, are what we can expect from a warming planet.

For those who want a scientific take on this, here's a link to a paper by Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, titled “Framing the way to relate climate extremes to climate change.” It appeared in the journal Climatic Change, and you can download it in pdf format at. Read the abstract at the beginning, if nothing else.
http://springerlink.com/content/0008xl84w0743102/fulltext.pdf

THE VERTICAL FRONTIER...

Is Humankind Abandoning a Future in Space?

As the space shuttle Discovery flies to its rest in the Smithsonian, the author of the article linked below wonders if we are not quietly abandoning a future in space - if the conquest of the solar system and beyond has been “canceled for lack of interest.”

The exploration of the cosmos (“Conquest” is pretty presumptuous!) is entirely consistent with the Asatru attitude. Our ancestors were adventurers. The Age of Migrations...the Viking Age...the taming of North America...and now the opening of the space frontier...the dragon ship and the space ship...it's all part of the same thing.

It is our destiny, as Asatru and as Eurofolk, to eventually spread into the Galaxy.

I feel strongly about this, and space-related links will appear in AFA Update regularly, just to keep that meme in play.

http://tinyurl.com/6qkw6xw ​​

What Private Space Flight Looks Like in 2019: 1,000 Launches Per Year!

The government may be losing interest in space, but private companies have not! If I had a billion dollars to play with, I'd start a space corporation and get in on the action myself! Some of these entrepreneurs will be the great captains of industry in the mid-twenty-first century...if we haven't destroyed all higher civilization by then.

American companies launched just five licensed commercial rockets into space in 2011, 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. This would be, as they say, a game-changer.

http://tinyurl.com/83kjob5