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The Battle of Kosovo, also known as the Battle of Kosovo Field or the Battle of Blackbird's Field (Serbian: Косовска битка, Бој на Косову; Kosovska bitka; Boj na Kosovu; Turkish: Kosova Meydan Savaşı), took place on St. Vitus' Day, June 15,[A] 1389, between the army led by Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, and the invading army of the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of Sultan Murad I. The army under Prince Lazar consisted of his own troops, a contingent led by Serbian nobleman Vuk Branković, and a contingent sent from Bosnia by King Tvrtko I, commanded by Vlatko Vuković.[1][3] Prince Lazar was the ruler of Moravian Serbia, and the most powerful among the Serbian regional lords of the time, while Vuk Branković ruled a part of Kosovo and other areas, recognizing Lazar as his overlord. The Battle of Kosovo took place in the Kosovo Field, about 5 kilometers northwest of modern-day Priština.

Reliable historical accounts of the battle are scarce; however, a critical comparison with historically contemporaneous battles (such as Angora or Nikopolis) enables reliable reconstruction.[2] The bulk of both armies was wiped out in the battle;[1] both Lazar and Murad lost their lives in it. Although Ottomans managed to annihilate the Serbian army, they also suffered high casualties which delayed their progress. Serbs were left with too few men to effectively defend their lands, while the Turks had many more troops in the east. Consequently, the Serbian principalities that were not already Ottoman vassals, one after the other became so in the following years.[1]

The Battle of Kosovo is particularly important to Serbian history, tradition, and national identity.[4]

More at Wiki...

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One of the projects I’ve been working on for several years is the issue of counterfeit drugs in Africa and other under-developed worlds. A couple of years ago, I met with a former VP for Africa from GSK, who related one of GSK’s sting operations in Kenya: They followed a large shipment of AIDS meds that were unloaded at the airport in Nairobi, where bad guys exchanged them for counterfeit meds at a hangar at the airport, and the very same airplane went back to Europe with the real AIDS meds, to be sold on “the black market”. After the meeting, I thought of a question that hadn’t occurred to me in real time:

Why would there be a “black market” in Europe, which has socialized medicine?

European governments provide free health care to everybody… don’t they?

At a recent meeting, I received a tiny little hint of a Clue from a friend who is a senior executive with a large European pharmaceutical company… and who journalists would certainly describe as a reliable source.

The Clue: his company is owed about €900M from Italy and Spain and hasn’t been paid in 3 ½ years; Greece has been “paying” with Greek Bonds. Evidently there’s a law requiring this company to continue to supply these medicines, even though these governments have long since stopped paying for the goods.
So … how has society responded to this situation?

Given that companies are required to provide product w/o getting paid, are they likely to fill every “order” in a timely manner? Would you think some shipments might get delayed… perhaps not keep up w/ growing demand? The first law of Milton Friedman Economics would predict that when a government forces product to be sold unprofitably, after some period of time, shortages will be created.

What happens when the government induces a shortage of medicines?

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Dogs may have helped Humans beat the Neanderthals

Posted by TANNAnthropology, Breakingnews, Early Humans 2:00 PM

One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.

They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.

What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans?

The cause, some theories go, may have been environmental, with Neanderthals' decline a byproduct of -- yikes -- climate change. It may have been social as humans developed the ability to cooperate and avail themselves of the evolutionary benefits of social cohesion. It may have been technological, with humans simply developing more advanced tools and hunting weapons that allowed them to snare food while their less-skilled counterparts starved away.

The Cambridge researchers Paul Mellars and Jennifer French have another theory, though. In a paper in the journal Science, they concluded that "numerical supremacy alone may have been a critical factor" in human dominance -- with humans simply crowding out the Neanderthals. Now, with an analysis in American Scientist, the anthropologist Pat Shipman is building on their work. After analyzing the Mellars and French paper and comparing it with the extant literature, Shipman has come to an intriguing conclusion: that humans' comparative evolutionary fitness owes itself to the domestication of dogs.

Yep. Man's best friend, Shipman suggests, might also be humanity's best friend. Dogs might have been the technology that allowed early humans to flourish.

Shipman analyzed the results of excavations of fossilized canid bones -- from Europe, during the time when humans and Neanderthals overlapped. Put together, they furnish some compelling evidence that early humans, first of all, engaged in ritualistic dog worship. Canid skeletons found at a 27,000-year-old site in Předmostí, of the Czech Republic, displayed the poses of early ritual burial. Drill marks in canid teeth found at the same site suggest that early humans used those teeth as jewelry -- and Paleolithic people, Shipman notes, rarely made adornments out of animals they simply used for food. There's also the more outlying fact that, like humans, dogs are rarely depicted in cave art -- a suggestion that cave painters might have regarded dogs not as the game animals they tended to depict, but as fellow-travelers.

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Meat's macho image keeps guys away from veggies
Study participants routinely linked more masculine people and behaviors with men, while women were more associated with vegetables and sushi.
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScienceFri, May 18 2012 at 10:54 AM EST 4


Photo: Stephen Ausmus
A bloody steak or char-grilled burger may be just what evolution ordered to bulk up a man's muscles in preparation for a big-game hunt. But even today, when meat is more likely to come cut and packaged than bloodied on the forest floor, both men and women tend to view the protein as masculine and macho, finds a new study.

The results, detailed in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, may explain why men are less likely than women to eat vegetables and instead choose foods that seem to jive more with their macho self-image, the researchers said.

"To the strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, all-American male, red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, all-American food," write the researchers.

The research also offers some advice for nudging men to eat more veggies. "For a wife or company trying to get guys to eat more plant-based protein instead of meat, one of the things [this research] indicates is that you probably need to make that protein appear to be more meatlike," said study researcher Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. "So you need to take that soy burger and put grill marks on it," added Wansink, author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" (Bantam, 2007).

Manly meat
In a number of experiments, most of which included individuals from the United States and Great Britain, the researchers looked at so-called consumption metaphors. They found that people rated meat as more masculine than other foods, such as vegetables, which were rated as more feminine. Participants also viewed meat-eaters as more masculine than people who do not eat meat. [7 Foods Your Heart Will Hate]

In one of their studies, university students were asked to read a vignette describing the habits of a guy or girl, including their food preferences. Students judged the fictitious characters who ate meat as significantly more masculine than those described as fish- or vegetable-eaters; they also rated vegetable-eaters as significantly more feminine than meat-eaters.

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Hidden in Plain View: FDA Murders 100,000 a Year

FDA-APPROVED DRUGS KILL A MILLION AMERICANS PER DECADE!
THE FDA IS A ROGUE CRIMINAL AGENCY
Jon Rappoport

Infowars.com
May 18, 2012

The day of the Smoking Gun has arrived.

The discovery of a page, on the FDA’s own website, proves the FDA is fully aware that:
the drugs it certifies as safe have been killing Americans, at the rate of 100,000 per year.
The FDA website page is currently available under the heading, “Why Learn About Adverse Drug Reactions,” and it can be Googled. (Click here to go directly to the FDA page.)

The implications of this Smoking Gun are hard to grasp in any rational way. The FDA takes no blame, no responsibility for its actions, and yet it admits the death statistics are accurate.

As an investigative reporter, I have been tracking and writing about pharmaceutically-caused deaths for 10 years. I have, on numerous occasions, cited Dr. Barbara Starfield’s report in the July 26th, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association, in which she presents the figure of 106,000 deaths per year, in America, as a result of these drugs. I have claimed that the federal government and, in particular, the FDA, are aware of these numbers.
And now the page on the FDA’s own website confirms the death toll. Yet, nowhere do we see the FDA taking one shred of responsibility for this ongoing holocaust.

Holocaust? Add up the figures. Medical drugs cause 100,000 deaths in America every year: that means a million Americans are killed every decade.

Understand this very clearly. No medical drug in America can be released for public use until and unless the FDA states it is safe. The FDA is the agency responsible for every such decision on every drug. The buck stops there.
Yes, the FDA has a “special relationship” with the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, the FDA utilizes doctors on their drug-approval panels that have ties to the pharmaceutical industry. But, in the end, it is the FDA official seal that opens the gate and permits a drug to be prescribed by doctors and sold in the US.

In all my research on this medical-drug holocaust, I have never found a case in which any FDA employee was censured, fired, or criminally prosecuted for the killing effects of these drugs.

That is a track record Organized Crime would be proud of, and the comparison is not frivolous. On this FDA website page that has just come to light, the FDA also readily admits that deaths from medical drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in America, ahead of pulmonary disease, diabetes, AIDS, pneumonia, accidents, and automobile fatalities.

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