This is El Caminito del Rey, located in the mountains about an hour from Malaga, Spain. The walker is Daniel Ahnen, who filmed it in 2008. Ahnen died in 2011 while hiking in the Himalayas.
More recently, the path has been tamed to make it safer though it still looks quite intimidating.
For the background on the path, constructed in the early 20th century, read this.
News today that Charles McGonigal was arrested for his ties with a US sanctioned Russian oligarch. What's significant is that, until his retirement in 2018, McGonigal was Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of counterintelligence in the New York field office of the FBI where he worked on the Trump Russia collusion investigation, and the oligarch McGonigal has worked with since then is Oleg Deripaska, tied to Vladimir Putin, and who is intertwined with many threads of the Russia collusion story.
McGonigal was working to get US sanctions, imposed on Deripaska in 2018, lifted, faces money-laundering charges as well as allegations of sanctions violations. McGonigal's name shows up on documents involving the investigation of Carter Page, though the full extent of his involvement in the collusion matter is unknown.
UPDATE: McGonigal was the FBI agent who sent the email to FBI HQ conveying the allegations from a foreign source that triggered the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (Russia collusion) back in July 2016. McGonigal is also the subject of a second indictment alleging he illegally worked for Albanian nationals while still employed by the FBI.
SECOND UPDATE: Haven't seen convincing evidence McGonigal was involved in the Russia investigation, beyond passing on the email mentioned above. It is the Deripaska connection threading through this that is the intriguing part.
Deripaska's name has been mentioned several times in my posts on Russia collusion. Christopher Steele worked for Deripaska from 2012 to 2017, at the same time as he was creating his fake dossier on Donald Trump. Deripaska is also the guy whose dispute with Paul Manafort over whatever they were up to in Ukraine/Russia eventually led to the investigation resulting in Manafort's indictment and conviction.
Deripaska also shows up in connection with Democratic Senator Mark Warner. In 2017, Warner, ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, attempted to reach Deripaska in order to obtain the testimony of Christopher Steele. Warner went to great lengths to keep these communications secret to Republican committee members. Warner's approach to Deripaska went through Adam Waldman. Waldman, a DC lawyer and lobbyist (and Democrat) representing Deripaska in the U.S. from 2009 to 2018. In June 2009, Waldman filed Foreign Agent Registration (FARA) paperwork with DOJ stating he would be representing the oligarch on "legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions". For these services, Waldman's firm was paid $40,000 a month, plus expenses.
In October 2010, Waldman filed FARA papers to represent Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for "gathering information and providing advice and analysis as it relates to the U.S. policy towards the visa status of Oleg Deripaska" (which was ultimately granted by the Obama administration). Lavrov remains in the same position today and is a vocal supporter of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In early 2017, Waldman became involved with Julian Assange, visiting him nine times at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he'd take refuge. In a 2018 article Mother Jones reported:
Many of Waldman’s visits to Assange seem related to his effort to broker a deal between Assange and the US government, under which Assange would be allowed safe passage to the United States if he discussed past and future WikiLeaks releases with senior US officials.
In his 2017 texts to Warner, Waldman indicated that Assange hoped to use a stolen archive of documents detailing CIA hacking operations as leverage to win concessions from the United States. “Just want to underscore my opinion and the reason I got involved – this guy is going to do something catastrophic for the dems, Obama, CIA and national security,” Waldman wrote Warner on February 16, 2017. “I hope someone will consider getting him to the US to ameliorate the damage.” Waldman was hinting at a deal: If the US government played ball with Assange, then maybe this material would stay secret.
But there was no deal. And on March 7, WikiLeaks released the CIA material. After these documents were posted, Waldman, while seeking a meeting with Warner, warned the senator that WikiLeaks had additional material: “There is more to come.” Waldman’s warnings apparently worried Warner. He immediately informed the FBI of the messages, according to a Senate aide.
Via Waldman, Assange offered to come to the U.S. and testify as to what he knew about the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in exchange for dropping existing charges against him. That offer was ultimately refused.
I'm not sure what to make of all this, except that the straight forward narrative regarding the Russia collusion story promoted by the Democrats and media has passed into the realm of satire.
We already knew that FusionGPS, which retained Steele to create the dossier for the Clinton campaign, was, at the same time, working on behalf of yet another Putin-connected oligarch to overturn the Magnitsky Act.
More recently we learned in the course of the Danchenko trial, that Charles Dolan, a DC lobbyist with links to the Clintons, represented the Kremlin on public relations matters in the U.S. and was personally meeting with Putin's spokesperson, while at the same time being a source for the Steele dossier. And that Mueller team rejected an FBI agent recommendation to interview Dolan after she learned he was a source for Danchenko. Turns out that despite Mueller's Congressional testimony that the Steele dossier was "beyond my purview", he had a whole team looking at it.
It's all very curious.
Fascinating article in Antigone, a relatively new Classics journal on Greek and Roman times, about the rediscovery of ancient texts on Greek astronomy. The article, How Lost Secrets of Greek Astronomy Were Rediscovered, by Peter J Williams, describes how this all came about.
Originally the rediscovered text was thought to consist of:
Lines from Aratus' (315-240 BC) poem the Phaenomena, used to teach the constellations.
Drawings of the constellations
Stories from Eratosthenes (276-195 BC), the first person to accurately measure the circumference of the Earth, of how the constellations arose
Listing by Eratosthenes of the stars in each constellation
More recently the researchers have discovered parts of the lost star catalogue of Hipparchus (190-120 BC), regarded as the greatest astronomer of the ancient world.
The story of the rediscovery starts with two wealthy Scottish widows and twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920). The sisters were residents at Cambridge University and also traveled widely in the Middle East. While in Egypt they purchased an ancient manuscript, Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which likely originated at St Catherine's Monastery, located at the foot of what was reputedly Mt Sinai. The Monastery has been the source of many ancient manuscripts in the form of palimpsests. A palimpsest is a document on which something has been written over an existing manuscript, a common practice in the first millennium because of the shortage of papyrus and lack of paper.
When brought back to Cambridge it was visibly apparent that writing existed beneath the more recent literary work written in Syriac. Scholars determined that it contained about 100 pages in Aramaic and Greek of biblical and philosophical texts. But nine pages remained indescipherable with the techniques of the time.
This changed in 2010 when the Cambridge college sold the manuscript to the Green family (founders of the Hobby Lobby chain) who donated it to their new Bible museum in Washington DC. In 2012 the author of the Antigone article, who is Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, the UK's largest institute dedicated to the research of the Bible, agreed to assemble a team to work on the undertext. The museum undertook rounds of digital imaging, including multispectral imaging to help the researchers.
Over the next five years, painstaking progress was made in deciphering the text. Then, in 2018, as Williams writes:
" . . . in 2017 the museum commissioned imaging and processing provided by a combination of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. 42 images of each page were captured using different wavelengths and light filters and then programmers processed the images to make particular text more visible to researchers. In 2018 the image-processing specialists joined our textual scholars for a week at Tyndale House and we were able to give real-time feedback on the particular pixels or ink we wanted enhanced. Progress sped up.
One of the programmers, Vasilis Kasotakis, using Principal Components Analysis and Independent Components Analysis struck on exactly the right formula, so that suddenly a creature like a fish appeared on his screen where nothing significant had previously been visible. He let out an exclamation and everyone in the room crowded round to see his discovery."
The researchers began to understand they were reading an integrated text in which when the Aratus poem mentioned a constellation, Erathosthenes text about that constellation was inserted.
But it was not until 2021 that Williams was able to decipher key passages which turned out to be previously unknown text from the work of Hipparchus - the oldest known astronomical measurements!
Who knows what else awaits discovery? Williams writes:
There may also be more parts of the manuscript still in St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where there are at least 160 palimpsests, most of which have not been studied.
Two photos I've taken in recent years. The top one is in Monument Valley, on Navajo land along the Utah-Arizona line, about a five hour drive from our house. It was along the 17 mile drive you can take on an unpaved, very bumpy road through the valley. Definitely worth a visit. We'll be returning.
The photo on the bottom is taken on Great Cranberry Island in Maine, which is only a few hundred yards off of Mount Desert Island. It looks across the channel connecting the Atlantic with Southwest Harbor. On the far side is Seal Harbor. The mountains, all in Acadia National Park are, starting on the far left, Norumbega, Park, Sargeant, Penobscot, the Bubbles, Pemetic, and Cadillac.
From a young age, I enjoyed following politics and mom brought me to some meetings, including in the legendary smoke-filled rooms of the times, was a member of Youth for Kennedy as a 9 year old, and present at JFK's November 6, 1960 campaign rally at the Bridgeport railroad station which I wrote about in A Cruel and Shocking Act.
The most common buttons are for Abe Ribicoff who served as governor and senator from the state in that era. You can also see a button for Adlai Stevenson. The Ella button is for Ella Grasso, governor during the 1970s. Kowalski was a Democratic congressional candidate from our district. The Jackson Means Jobs button was for Scoop Jackson, the senator from Washington who was a candidate for the 1976 presidential nomination and, of whom, mom was a fan. And, in the interests of political diversity, you can see her buttons for Nixon and Reagan.
Today's news of the passing of guitarist Jeff Beck reminds me of the pivotal role he played, while in The Yardbirds, in creating the new sounds that so influenced pop and rock music in the mid-60s and specifically during 1966.
The British Invasion of 1964 brought a new sound and spirit into popular music and the next set of changes in '66 turned the music in a new direction. Below are 6 songs from that year, arranged in chronological order of release, of which three are from The Yardbirds and Jeff Beck. Five of the six were singles, but none were smash hits in the U.S., although four reached the top 20 on the charts.
February 1966 marks the release of Shapes Of Things by The Yardbirds. Which reminds me, I need to check the 45s I have in storage as I think I still have the three Yardbirds singles. Shapes was unlike anything I heard before, with the crazy guitar solo in the middle, the way they hit reverberating chord at solo's end, and the guitar sputtering out at the end.
The next month saw Eight Miles High by The Byrds. This was a very heavy song for the time with the bass and rhythm guitar recorded loud, the odd, enigmatic lyrics, and the dissonant jazz-tinged lead guitar by Roger McGuinn.
The Yardbird's next single, Over Under Sideways Down, was released in July, with its unique sinewy guitar threading throughout.
That same month 7 And 7 Is was released by Love, an L.A. band. Another first of a kind sound and ending.
In August, The Beatles released Revolver. The last song on the second side, and the strangest on the entire album, was Tomorrow Never Knows, which was actually the first song recorded for the album back in April. Things would never be the same.
And finally, in October, came Happenings Ten Years Time Ago from The Yardbirds, lyrically and sonically distinctive. A word on Yardbirds guitarists is appropriate here. The band's first guitarist was Eric Clapton, who quit in 1964 because he thought the band was becoming too commercial. His replacement was Jeff Beck. In the spring of '66, Jimmy Page joined the band and, until the fall, both Beck and Page served as guitarists. Over Under and Happenings feature both. That fall, Beck quit the band, leaving Page to carry on until Jimmy left to form a new band which became Led Zeppelin.
