The Manifesto of Health Minister Roberto Speranza

An infection, even one as lethal as cancer, often begins with a single wound. Through this wound the pathogen enters the body by way of a single cell, where it pathologically replicates and corrupts those around it until eventually it consumes the entire host.

As goes infection, so goes totalitarianism. And in 2020, totalitarianism found its wound in the free world by way of Lombardy, Italy. More specifically, by way of one Health Minister Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21, 2020, the first lockdown in the modern western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9. By April 2020, more than half the world's population — some 3.9 billion people — had been placed under lockdown.

These lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world and weren't part of any democratic country's pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping's lockdown of Wuhan, China. They failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried, including Italy.

Archaeologists have found butchered bones from a mother mammoth and her calf and signs of controlled fire at the Hartley locality, an open-air site on the Colorado Plateau in northern New Mexico, the United States.

Recognizing early human occupation sites in the Americas traditionally rests on discovery of elaborately worked stone tools.

The origins of this technology trace back to the 'Upper Paleolithic revolution' in Europe approximately 45,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 4,500-year-old temple dedicated to the Egyptian sun god Ra at the site of Abu Ghurab, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cairo.

The temple was built sometime during ancient Egypt's fifth dynasty (circa 2465 B.C. to 2323 B.C.) — a "period in which the cult of the sun reached its apex with the construction of a new type of monument specifically devoted to the sun god, commonly known as 'Sun Temple,'" said Massimiliano Nuzzolo, co-director of the archaeological dig and a researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He co-directs it with Rosanna Pirelli of the University of Naples "L'Orientale" in Italy.

The sun cult was a powerful cult in ancient Egyptian religion. In later times, Ra merged with Amun — the chief god of Thebes (Luxor) — to form Amun-Ra who was regarded, at least by some Egyptians, as being the most powerful of the Egyptian gods. He was worshiped until around 1,500 years ago, the time that Egyptian polytheism became extinct.

The newly uncovered sun temple was made from mud bricks and measured at least 197 feet long and 66 feet wide (60 meters by 20 m). It contained an L-shaped entrance portico, a courtyard, storage rooms and rooms that may have been used for cultic purposes, Nuzzolo told Live Science in an email. "The walls of this building were all plastered in black and white and often also show traces of painting in red and blue," Nuzzolo said. The entrance portico was partially made of white limestone and had two limestone columns.

In Chapter 1, I broached the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, and introduced Francesco Carotta's very weird hypothesis that the historical model underlying the Lamb of God was one Gaius Julius Caesar. I finished with a quick overview of Caesar's character and accomplishments, the purpose of which was to establish, first, that Caesar's memory has been tarnished by his enemies and their fellow-travellers down through the ages; and, second, that his character shares many of the personality traits associated with Jesus - most notably the strong emphasis on mercy, and the over-riding concern with the welfare of the poor.

On its own that doesn't come anywhere near close to establishing the plausibility of the Jesus-Caesar connection. For that, we need to look at some of the specific incidents in Caesar's biography, which is what we're going to do now. Most of what follows is a distillation of Francesco Carotta's work, which goes into a great deal more detail than I'm capable of here; in other words, this is a light gloss that leaves a lot out. With that out of the way, here we go.

Caesar claimed descent from Venus¹, with his divine ancestry by way of the Roman founder Æneas. Similarly, Jesus was said to be descended from the line of David, and to be the literal son of Yahweh. It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

In the lactose intolerant community, it's a bit of a running joke that you often throw caution to the wind and gorge on dairy products on a daily basis, damn the consequences.

A quick search on Twitter, for example, would find you plenty of examples of lactose intolerant users proclaiming that "being lactose intolerant won't ever stop me from tearing up a milkshake or some ice cream" or that "all lactose intolerant people do is eat dairy and tweet about eating dairy".

While sacrificing your bowel's peace for a bite of cheese might seem reckless, and a little bit sadistic, a study has found that humans have actually been eating dairy in the face of lactose intolerance for thousands of years.

Who was Jesus Christ?

There's less agreement on that then you'd expect.

There are three basic camps on the subject. The largest are those who assume, without giving the matter a great deal of thought, that two thousand years ago there was some Jewish rabbi, first name Jesus, surname Christ, who wandered around the Middle East preaching peace and love, thereby irritating the local religious and political authorities until they solved the problem with some judicious flesh carpentry. This camp figures all the stuff about water turning into wine and walking on water is embellishment made up after the fact, tall tales that grew in the telling from one credulous illiterate peasant to the next, until eventually being written down and formalized by more literate but no less superstitious priests. However, they figure the basic outlines of the story are more or less accurate, and anyhow the moral lessons it encodes are generally pretty good, so who cares? This camp embraces most atheists and agnostics, as well as a surprising number of nominal Christians, typically of the Easter-Christmas-weddings-and-funerals variety.

If you're in that camp you probably don't think you're going to care about the rest of this essay. I urge you to keep reading.

The next camp, also quite large, are the scriptural literalists. They insist that everything in the Bible is true, being the divinely inspired Word of God, and this most certainly includes everything in the New Testament's gospels. For them, Jesus Christ was an actual historical figure¹, whose life was exactly as presented by the apostles: he was literally born of a virgin mother impregnated by God himself, he really cast out demons and healed with a touch, he actually danced on water, caused storms to calm themselves with a wave of his hand, was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again.

If you're in that camp, you're probably going to get very annoyed by this essay. I especially urge you to keep reading.

"Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without ... a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States...not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relationship between our military advisers". — Winston Churchill, 'Iron Curtain Speech', 1946

This will sound like an outrageous statement to many. How could the British have reconquered the United States?! They never won any war against her and by the 20th century had always fought alongside the United States as a trusted ally. And isn't it rather the opposite, doesn't the United States dictate British foreign policy at this point?

It is true, Britain never won a war against the United States, and it was understood by the mid-19th century that the British would never succeed in conquering the United States externally. Rather, if they were to be successful, she would need to be conquered from within, to which this paper is dedicated to telling the story of.

A new study explains how the ancient solar calendar may have worked at Stonehenge — and why it was constructed in the first place.
Stonehenge has always been shrouded in mystery. The ancient monument and burial site in southern England has been around for more than 5,000 years — but its purpose isn't completely clear. Researchers have long speculated the enormous stones were erected in the shape of an ancient calendar, but no one could explain how it worked.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and with it a chance for Stonehenge expert Timothy Darvill to visit the site during the day when the sun was shining and tourists were scarce. He had more time than he ever thought possible to contemplate a possible calendar design. Then one day it came to him.

Turkish and Mongolian scientists may have found the remains of a long-lost Khan palace in eastern Turkey that they believe was built by Genghis Khan's grandson, Hulagu Khan. Hulagu Khan was the ruler of the short-lived Ilkhanid state in the 1260s AD. A report in Live Science stated that archaeologists working at the Van Province excavation site near Çaldıran probably found the historically documented Khan palace, which was constructed between 1260-1265.

The Turkish Hulagu Khan Palace and the Ilkhanate State

Hulagu Khan (reigned 1256-1265) is notoriously associated with the brutal sacking of Baghdad in 1258, which destroyed much of the city and its rich historical heritage. The Khan's wrath on the city resulted in the destruction of the Grand Library of Baghdad, which contained countless manuscripts and books on mathematics, astronomy, physics, philosophy from the Islamic Golden Age (8th century onward). After Baghdad was sacked, the city's leader, Caliph Al-Musta'sim Billah, was executed.

The attack occurred during the Iran-Iraq war, which had begun in 1980 with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. The US government backed Saddam, and sent warships to the Persian Gulf to support the Iraqi war effort.

One of those warships was the USS Vincennes which, on 3 July 1988, fired two missiles at Iran Air Flight 655 while it was making a routine trip to Dubai.

Washington claimed the US Navy had acted in self-defence, but this wasn't true. The plane had not, as the Pentagon claimed, moved "outside the prescribed commercial air route", nor had it been "descending" towards USS Vincennes at "high speed".

The US thus shot down a civilian airliner, and haphazardly tried to cover it up. Some 66 children were among the 290 civilians killed.