"They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late." — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I have never known any government to put the best interests of its people first, and this COVID-19 pandemic is no exception.

Now this isn't intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. Such crises can — and are — manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers. As such, it is possible for the virus to be both a genuine menace to public health and a menace to freedom.

Yet we can't afford to overlook the fact that governments the world over, including the U.S. government, have unleashed untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

While the U.S. government is currently looking into the possibility that the novel coronavirus spread from a Chinese laboratory rather than a market, the virus could just as easily have been created by the U.S. government or one of its allies.

After all, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and his longtime companion Eva Braun took their own lives in a Berlin bunker, as the Red Army approached within a few hundred meters of their position. The remaining Nazi leadership attempted to destroy their bodies, but thanks to the efforts of Soviet military counterintelligence, the Fuhrer's demise was confirmed.

Sunday marks the 77th anniversary of the creation of SMERSH, the umbrella organization of counter-intelligence bodies, a portmanteau of the Russian language phrase 'SMERt Shpionam' ('Death to Spies'), formed on April 19, 1943.

It was SMERSH's job in Berlin in the chaotic first few days of May 1945 to reliably establish that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had indeed killed himself and been cremated outside his Reich Chancellery bunker, and they accomplished their mission with flying colours, FSB Lt. Gen. (ret.) Alexander Zdanovich says.

Every child knows what a pirate looks like: a swashbuckler with an eye patch and a parrot perching on his sholder. This perception of pirates and piracy, which still deeply influences modern culture, was shaped by authors writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

These highly fanciful notions were inspired by the privateers and buccaneers of the "golden age" of piracy, which lasted roughly between 1650 and 1730. But pirates and piracy are much older than this era, and maritime banditry has been around for nearly as long as seafaring itself.

The origins of the modern term "piracy" can be traced back to the ancient Greek word peiráomai, meaning attempt (i.e., "attempt to steal"). Gradually this term morphed into a similar sounding term in Greek meaning "brigand," and from that to the Latin term pirata.

Ancient archaeological sites across the Northern Hemisphere have been littered with a mystery. Where there were hominins, there too could often be found roughly rounded spheres of stone. Some have been dated back to over 2 million years ago, with marks suggesting that the balls had been deliberately shaped.

New research has discovered a plausible purpose for these strange tools: Our ancestors could have been using them to smash open bones - to get to the nutritious marrow inside.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Ella Assaf of Tel-Aviv University in Israel made a close examination of ten such stones found at Qesem Cave, a Lower Paleolithic site occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

We have found a precedent for the WHO's declaration of a 'pandemic' that was widely criticized in the recent past. In 2010, Forbes.com printed an opinion piece by opinion contributor Michael Fumento. He writes about the World Health Organization's apparently strange and unethical behaviour. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had a problem with the way that the WHO falsely declared that there was a swine flu pandemic in 2009.

The retreat of a Norwegian mountain ice patch, which is melting because of climate change, has revealed a lost Viking-era mountain pass scattered with "spectacular" and perfectly preserved artefacts that had been dropped by the side of the road.


The pass, at Lendbreen in Norway's mountainous central region, first came to the attention of local archaeologists in 2011, after a woollen tunic was discovered that was later dated to the third or fourth century AD. The ice has retreated significantly in the years since, exposing a wealth of artefacts including knitted mittens, leather shoes and arrows still with their feathers attached.

Though carbon dating of the finds reveals the pass was in use by farmers and travellers for a thousand years, from the Nordic iron age, around AD200-300, until it fell out of use after the Black Death in the 14th century, the bulk of the finds date from the period around AD1000, during the Viking era, when trade and mobility in the region were at their zenith.

Modern fluoroscopy identifies sheep bones inside the Tagar culture death mask.

The discovery of the magnificent clay likeness of a young man in the Shestakovsky burial mound No 6 has long intrigued Russian archeologists.

Among cremated people this elegant mask of, perhaps, a handsome warrior immediately stood out as a remarkable find when it was first unearthed in Khakassia in 1968 by Professor Anatoly Martynov.

X-ray technology of the period indicated something was unusual about the bones inside the clay head - but could not reveal more.

When you pour a bowl of cereal, you probably aren't considering how humans came to enjoy milk in the first place. But animal milk was essential to east African herders at least 5,000 years ago, according to a new study that uncovers the consumption habits in what is now Kenya and Tanzania — and sheds a light on human evolution.

Katherine M. Grillo, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and a 2012 PhD graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, teamed up with researchers, including Washington University's Fiona Marshall, the James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor in Arts & Sciences, for the study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Julie Dunne at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom is co-first author on the paper with Grillo.

After excavating pottery at sites throughout east Africa, team members analyzed organic lipid residues left in the pottery and were able to see evidence of milk, meat and plant processing.

"(This is) the first direct evidence we've ever had for milk or plant processing by ancient pastoralist societies in eastern Africa," Grillo said.

"The milk traces in ancient pots confirms the story that bones have been telling us about how pastoralists lived in eastern Africa 5,000 to 3,000 years ago — an area still famous for cattle herding and the historic way of life of people such as Maasai and Turkana," Marshall said.

One of the major exemplars of the philosophical movement known as Stoicism almost 2000 years ago, Epictetus, a former slave, had much to say about taking the right approach to life. Through his teachings, which culminated in the dictated works of his Discourses and Enchiridion, Epictetus expounded on what virtuous living meant and what it should look like - not through theory, but through actual examples drawn from real life and the psychological attitudes one can adopt to make for a more trouble-free life and a 'tranquil' existence.

On this week's MindMatters, we take a look at the very influential teachings of Epictetus. Much like Gurdjieff (and perhaps even an inspiration to him?) we see how even centuries after his description of the 'art of living', his wisdom and insights into the human condition could not be more relevant for our own thinking and ways of living today.


Running Time: 00:53:32

Download: MP3 — 49 MB

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary" — H.L. Mencken

As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was the release of a final report of an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event of international significance. On March 25th, the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was published which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire. The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization composed of more than 3,000 building architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group's formal appeal calling for a new investigation into the three — not two — WTC skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11. The researchers infer that the collapse of Building 7 was actually the result of a controlled demolition:

"The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building."

With or without a pandemic, it is likely corporate media would have ignored the study anyway, just as they have anything that contradicts the official story of 9/11. However, it is notable that many have drawn parallels between the COVID-19 outbreak and the 9/11 attacks based on the widespread changes to daily life as a result of the crisis going forward. Already there is talk of nationwide lockdowns as a "new normal" with many rightly expressing concerns over civil liberties, press freedoms, the surveillance state, and other issues just as there were following 9/11. By the same measure, a false dichotomy is being established by political gatekeepers in order to silence those who dare challenge the official account as to how the coronavirus began. It is a stigmatization that is all too familiar to those who have never believed the conventional narrative that 19 Arab hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden armed only with box-cutters were solely responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that fateful day.