The creation of false opposites has been a long-standing obstacle to human progress.

From the ancient pleasure-seeking Epicureans who argued against the logic-heavy Stoics of ancient Rome to the war of "salvation through faith vs works" that schismed western Christianity, to the chaotic emotional energy driving the Jacobin mobs of France whose passions were only matched by the radical Cartesian logic of their Girondin enemies; humanity has long been manipulated by oligarchs who knew how to set the species to war against itself. Although these operations have taken many forms, the desired effect has always been the same: divide-to-conquer bloodbaths which drowned out the saner voices of Cicero (executed in 44 BCE), Thomas More (executed in 1535 CE), or Jean Sylvain Bailly (executed in 1793 CE).

Today's polarization across the Trans-Atlantic world has reached a fevered pitch with the "right wing conservatives" shouting for liberty and less government while left wing liberals call for more government and top-down reforms of the system (with Great Reset technocrats laughing in the background).

Everyone with half a brain should be able to sense that the danger of civil war and economic meltdown hang over our destinies like a sword of Damocles, but instead of hearing calls for restoring the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN traditions of American System banking that author Ellen Brown recently documented in her powerful new essay, we find only feuding sects that assert we must EITHER have top-down centralized planning OR bottom-up free markets laissez faire policies devoid of any government intervention.

I was recently asked by someone reading my forthcoming book with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, if I would explain the relationship between Marxism and the Critical Social Justice ideology we trace a partial history of in that book. The reason for the question is that Cynical Theories obviously focuses upon the postmodern elements of Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, and yet many people, particularly among conservatives, identify obvious relationships to Marxism within that scholarship and activism that seems poorly accounted for by talking about postmodernism. This confusion makes sense because postmodernism was always explicitly critical of Marxism, naming it among the grand, sweeping universalizing explanations of reality that it called "metanarratives," of which it advised us to be radically skeptical.

The goal of Cynical Theories is to add clarity to this admittedly complicated discussion and lay out how postmodernism is of central importance to the development of what we now call "Critical Social Justice" or "Woke" scholarship and ideology. This is actually only one part in a far broader history that certainly draws upon Marx (and thus all the German idealists he drew upon), though in a very peculiar way and through a number of fascinating and, themselves, complex historical and philosophical twists.

One of these is the development of postmodernism, upon which we write, and another is the development of "neo-Marxism," which is sometimes referred to as "Cultural Marxism." This is a development of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and it too was explicitly highly critical of Marxism in its economic particulars, though it retained the underlying ethos and ambition of overthrowing the ruling classes and establishing some variation on communism. Clearly, a third line of thought that bears some relevance is the long and, again, complex history of "social justice" thought, which can be approached in any number of ways, including religious, liberal, communist, and, as we explain in the book, "Woke," which must be understood to be its own thing in its own context, whatever its intellectual history.

Archaeologists say the remains of a stone vessel found in a mausoleum in China's Henan Province offer near-definitive evidence that second-century A.D. emperor Liu Zhi, known posthumously as Huan, was buried there.

"Together with the previous documents about the location of the emperor's tomb, the discovery makes us almost certain that it is the tomb of emperor Liu Zhi," Wang Xianqiu, who led the excavation project, tells Lyu Qiuping, Gui Juan and Shi Linjing of state-run news agency Xinhua.

Researchers had previously guessed that the tomb, located in the city of Luoyang, belonged to the Han dynasty emperor. An inscription on the vessel dating its year of manufacture to 180 A.D. appears to confirm this suspicion. Wang, a scholar at the Luoyang City Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, says the vessel was produced around the time when Liu Zhi's successor, Liu Hong, or Ling, was building a mausoleum for the deceased emperor. The artifact is shaped like a basin and stands about ten inches tall, with a circumference of more than two feet.

Like the benchmark of Egyptology Jean-François Champollion, he is French. And like him, he managed to decipher a language that has kept its mystery for millennia. François Desset is an archaeologist. He has just decoded linear elamite. A phonetic writing, cuneiform type, found on multiple clay tablets, precisely in the ruins of the ancient city of Susa, in Iran. The country was formerly called Persia and even earlier, 4,500 years ago, kingdom of Elam, hence the name of the writing in question, linear Elamite.

This is no small discovery: it was more than a century, in other words since the discovery in 1901 of the first tablets, that this writing system was known. But no one, despite all the attempts in 119 years, has ever found the key. No one, until François Desset, 38, associate researcher at CNRS Archaeorient from Lyon and specialist in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic in Iran.

Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine's December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the "worst year ever." You're joking, right? In history's immense tapestry of human misery, it's not even in the top 100 worst years.

Consider 1177 B.C., when many of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea and Mideast collapsed, and the survivors struggled through a pre-modern Dark Ages. This book assembles what is known about this catastrophic era: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Then there's 1644 A.D., when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchu invasion, a series of self-reinforcing misfortunes stemming from extremes of climate (a.k.a. The Little Ice Age) that left millions hungry and vulnerable to disease and the predation of roving bandit armies.

The Little Ice Age and the famine, conflicts, civil wars, coups, revolts and rebellions it launched killed between a quarter and a third of Eurasia's population. Entire villages melted away as starvation drove the survivors to desperation. The misery stretched from western Europe to China, and lasted for decades.

After 21 years of research, archaeologists have succeeded in piecing together the extraordinary story of an ultra-high-status Roman aristocrat who was buried in London, more than 16 centuries ago.

The remarkable evidence, published today, suggests that she may well have been a member of the senatorial elite which presided over the final years of Roman Britain.

"It's conceivable that she was the wife of one of Britain's last Roman rulers," said Dr Roger Tomlin, a leading authority on Roman Britain and author of a major study on its people and social history, Britannia Romana.

In The Time Machine, society one million years in the future has evolved into two separate species called Morlocks and Eloi. The Morlocks represent the ugly dirty producers who by this future age, all live under ground and run the world's manufacturing. The Eloi are the effect of the inbreeding of the elite, who by this time are simple-minded, Aryan, above-ground dwellers living in idleness and consuming only what the Morlocks produce. What was the trade off?

The Morlocks periodically rise above ground in hunting parties to kidnap and eat unsuspecting Eloi in this symbiotically vicious circle of life.

This famous story was written by a young British writer in 1893 whose ideas and pioneering work in shaping new techniques of cultural warfare which profoundly affected the next 130 years of human history. These ideas led to the innovation of novel techniques of "predictive programming", and to mass psychological warfare. In contrast to the optimistic views of mankind and the future potential envisioned by the great science fiction writer Jules Verne earlier, Wells' misanthropic tales had the intended effect of reducing the creative potential and love of humanity that Verne's work awoke.

To restate the technique more clearly: By shaping society's imagination of the future, and embedding existential/nihilistic outcomes within his plotlines, Wells realized that the entire zeitgeist of humanity could be affected on a profound level than simple conscious reason would permit. Since he robed his poison in the cloth of "fiction" the minds of those receiving his stories would find their critical thinking faculties disengaged and would simply take in all trojan horses embedded in the stories into their unconsciousness. This has been an insight used for over a century by social engineers and intelligence agencies whose aim has always been the willing enslavement of all people of the earth.

"Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defences, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong, the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion's getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves." - James Fenimore Cooper (The American Democrat 1838)

I think it is evident to most by now that the United States is presently undergoing a crisis that could become a full-blown second civil war.

Some might be wondering, is it really so bad that the U.S. could possibly collapse in the not-so-distant future? After all, isn't it acting like the worst of empires? Isn't it wreaking havoc on the world today? Is it not a good thing that it collapse internally and spare the world from further wars?

It is true that the U.S. is presently acting more like a terrible empire than a republic based on liberty and freedom. It may even be the case that the world is spared for a time from further war and tyranny, if the U.S. were to collapse. However, this is unlikely and it most certainly would be only temporary, since the U.S. is not the source of such monstrosities but rather is merely its instrument.

This paper will go not only go through why this is the case and but will also analyze Russia's historical relationship to the U.S. in context to its recognition of this very fact.

Tehran - Jelogir Mound, a prehistorical hill situated northward of the UNESCO-tagged Persepolis, may be home to a ruined Achaemenid-era castle, an Iranian archaeologist suggests.

"Based on the archaeological evidence that is currently being studied, it can be hypothesized that Jelogir Mound was once home to an Achaemenid castle, which was probably existed in the [subsequent] Sassanid era," CHTN quoted senior archaeologist Vahid Younesi as saying on Sunday.

Younesi, who leads an archaeological survey on the mount, believes pottery fragments scattered at the site are a rich source of information that could shed a new light on ancient life on Jelogir Mound and its surroundings.

"Recognition of relative chronology and introduction of pottery features of various historical periods (Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid) of this area in Fars region will pave the way for us to access valuable information and findings of cultural heritage," he explained.

Situated northwest of Marvdasht plain, Dorudzan district, Jelogir mound is registered first by Andrea Williamson, then by William Samner through archaeological surveys at the southern Iranian pain, but regarding to its strategic location and it demands comprehensive investigation around the site to recognize peripheral settlements to understand the site position in Marvdasht Plain.

In the present paper, it is attempted to estimate the mound chronology, and the site role within the plain according to a comprehensive survey and analyzing the collected data.

He was the first Roman emperor, who took over from Julius Caesar and built an empire that would eventually stretch from the UK to Egypt, boasting on his death bed that "I found Rome built of bricks, and left it marble."

But the emperor Augustus didn't exactly get paid in kind when he died in 14CE.

His tomb -- a huge, circular mausoleum, which was the largest in the city when it was built -- was abandoned for centuries. With its roof fallen in and the cypresses planted around it left to grow wild, it has long been a far cry from the carefully preserved Colosseum and Roman Forum.

In fact, for much of the past 80 years, it has been closed to the public, with brief openings in the year 2000 to celebrate the city's Jubilee year, and then again, before being closed in 2007 for archaeological investigations.