My husband and I had a conversation in bed last night that I'm going to share with you. Don't be shocked! You should have figured out by now that pillow-talk between a mathematical physicist and a historian is probably not what you would call a racy conversation! But I guess that depends on what you think is "racy." Anyway, I was telling him about some things that were weighing on my mind as a result of the book I am currently reading: The Origin of Comets by Clube, Bailey and Napier. The topics covered in the book include the more-than-dismal record of science in the fields of astronomy and cosmology. I was bemoaning how incredibly backwards our Science of today truly is because of all the great ideas that have been quashed by governments and religions in the interests of control of the masses and that has led to the dire state of our world and so-called 'civilization'.

As I wrote in "Dark Ages and Inquisitions":

Science took a serious wrong turn in the middle of the nineteenth century, about the time Darwin published his Origin of Species and that is why we do, indeed, live in a Dark Age as a consequence. It wasn't that Natural Selection was wrong, per se, but the way the principles have been applied has been disastrous. Natural Selection was seized upon as the one and only underlying law of the Universe - and this seizing was done by individuals with a very particular psychological make-up as we will see. The same kinds of people that become uber-religious and kill people in the name of their god, can - and often do - become adherents of the religion of science. [...]

[I]n the nineteenth century, certain discoveries led to economic and political considerations, and that is when Science took the wrong turn because those folks who tend to black and white thinking also have other character traits that include a need to dominate others, as well as a strong tendency to greed. The pursuit of science became a career rather than a hobby, and an army of scientific workers was sought to serve the agendas of what was to become known as the Military-Industrial Complex.

My husband, as some of you know, is currently working on a book about the corruption of science in modern times, (to be released in late Spring/early Summer) and he had a story to tell me during our bedtime chat. Apparently, back in the 1930s, a man named Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer working at CalTech, came up with the idea of Dark Matter. Zwicky used mathematics to infer the average mass of galaxies and obtained a value about 160 times greater than expected from their luminosity, and proposed that most of the matter was dark. So, what's my point? Zwicky was correct, but nobody believed him since he had a reputation of being "eccentric".

Now, what is wrong with that last sentence? Did you catch it? Nobody BELIEVED Zwicky. What that means is, BELIEF blocked all of the scientific community from doing one, simple, scientific thing: check the math! And so, for over 30 years, science was ignorant of Dark Matter and all the work - entire careers - of hundreds, if not thousands or millions, of individuals, was lacking a key piece of data.

Because nobody believed Zwicky.

They didn't bother to check his math because he was "eccentric." That is to say, he was not an authoritarian follower.

Authoritarian followers have the psychological characteristic known as right-wing authoritarianism. This personality trait consists of authoritarian submission, a high degree of submission to the established authorities in one's society; authoritarian aggression, aggression directed against various persons in the name of those authorities; and conventionalism, a strong adherence to the social conventions endorsed by those authorities. Why do psychologists call authoritarian followers "right-wing" authoritarians? Are they all members of a conservative political party? No. Right-wing is used here in a psychological sense, meaning wanting to please established authority. One of the original meanings of the adjective right (riht in Old English) was "lawful, proper, correct," which in those long ago days meant doing what your local lord and the king wanted.

- Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology

Over and over again it is seen, in retrospect, of course, that irrational beliefs that are promulgated by authorities who desire to maintain control, and believed by the followers who want to be 'good', trump True Science; and here I mean the mode of Scientific Cognition, not just 'science' since the so-called Enlightenment. Over and over again, throughout history, going back even to ancient times, you can note that there were a few really intelligent free thinkers who made observations, drew useful inferences from those observations, and suggested solutions that were ignored, ridiculed, reviled, buried; and often, the thinker who dared to voice his ideas was destroyed by one means or another because Authoritarian Followers are also aggressive against anything that is not pronounced to be 'okay' by their leaders. Most often this destruction was - and is even today - due to power considerations: the individual has an idea that, in some way, threatens the political/social power structure.

Why is it, one has to ask, that truth is so threatening to power?

In 130 BC, a ship fashioned from the wood of walnut trees, bulging with medicines and Syrian glassware, sank off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. Archaeologists found its precious load 20 years ago and now, for the first time, archaeobotanists have been able to examine and analyse pills that were prepared by the physicians of ancient Greece.

DNA analyses show that each millennia-old tablet is a mixture of more than 10 different plant extracts, from hibiscus to celery.

"Medicinal plants have been identified before, but not a compound medicine, so this is really something new," says Alain Touwaide, director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, which has the world's largest digital database of medical manuscripts.

The pills, which researchers believe were diluted with vinegar or water to make them easier to ingest, were preserved inside tin boxes and were the size of coins.

"What is remarkable is that we have written evidence [from the ancient Greeks] of what plants were used for which disorders," says Alisa Machalek, a science writer for the National Institute of Health, one of the world's leading research centres.

"This research is interesting, especially for medical historians, because it confirms that what we eat affects our bodies."

The shift toward synthetic chemical medicines occurred in the 20th Century, but according to Mark Blumenthal, the founder and executive director of the American Botanical Council, there is renewed interest in the medicinal benefits of natural foods - including those found in the pills.

She always called him "Mr. President" - not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy's bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.

In her explosive new tell-all, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore.

In the summer of 1962, Alford was a slender, golden-haired 19-year-old debutante whose finishing-school polish and blueblood connections had landed her a job in the White House press office.

Four days into her internship, she was invited by an aide to go for a midday swim in the White House pool, where the handsome, 45-year-old president swam daily to ease chronic back pain. JFK slid into the pool and floated up to her.

Reading "Columnist Calls for Internet "Quality Control" to Quash Dissent sent absolute shivers up my spine. As I posted on my Facebook Wall: "Is it just me noticing the increasing lock-down, the increasing propaganda FOR lockdown and abrogation of human rights, and the masses seem to be sleep-walking through it all?"

But what is happening has happened before in many times and places; it's just that now it seems to be spread over the entire globe. Just so you know, I'm not one of those who is taken in by the saber-rattling war propaganda. That too, has happened before and before and before. It's a ruse, a drama played out between ostensible adversaries to keep the masses afraid and loaded with stress so that they will welcome draconian controls everywhere.

Another thing that has happened before is the end result of such dramas: mass death and destruction AKA "collateral damage". A few comments on my FB wall indicate that I am not alone in what I see. One poster wrote: "Not just sleep-walking, but sycophantically justifying their own abuse and mindlessly trying the same failed methods to "solve" it over and over. It's been said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different." (HB)

That's it, exactly. Psychopaths in power never seem to be able to get it that the end result is always and ever the same: the germs do not realize that they will be burned alive in the fire to which the body they have infected and killed will be consigned.

Another comment was: "This is the long-planned and meticulously coordinated recrudescence, on a global scale, of Nazism." (DST)

Exactly. And that is why I am resurrecting this topic which I wrote about back in 2008, back when Bush - remember Bush, the guy who was the puppet who got all this mess started? - was still president of the U.S. The article was focused mainly on Bush and the U.S., but since then, so many other world leaders and nations have gotten on the Totalitarian/Fascist/Nazi bandwagon that I have done a little re-working of the piece to bring it up to date.

Back then I wrote: Reading Robert Parry's When a Great Power Goes Mad gave me the shivers especially when I read:

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what's transpired. [...]

In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS "Frontline" two-parter on "Bush's War" which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration's good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution - a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking. [...]

Remaining outside the frame of mainstream U.S. debate was any serious examination of the [Iraq] war's fundamental illegality.

During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Yet, "Frontline" and other mainstream U.S. news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people "the accumulated evil of the whole" - and committed the "supreme" war crime.

An obvious reason why the mainstream U.S. press can't handle this truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other U.S. officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals.

To accept that reality would, in turn, create a moral imperative to take action. And that would require a great disruption in the existing U.S. power structure, which hasn't changed much since Bush won authorization from Congress in October 2002 to use force and then invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Not only are Bush and Cheney still in office - and two of the three remaining presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, voted for the war - but the roster of top Washington journalists remains remarkably intact from five years ago.

We realize, of course, since the above was written, that even Barack Obama - supposed to be the NKOTB who was not part of the insiders was, in fact, very much an insider and selected to carry on the Bush/Neocon/Fascist legacy. The only "change" that Obama has brought has been more of the same and worse.

It is obvious to many, though certainly not to everyone, that the World Body Social, following the Pied Pipers of the Body Politic have increasingly lost their ability to think rationally and perceive psychological reality with even a modicum of common sense. Almost the whole planet has descended into half-wittedness with its growing intellectual deficiencies and moral failings. Any group of people that can sit down and discuss the Iraq War as though it were anything other than a War Crime of the highest order, or debate whether or not waterboarding is torture, or whether or not torture is acceptable in this or that situation, has lost not only their moral compass, but their qualification as sentient beings on the evolutionary scale.

Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the Vitruvian Man, illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo's friend.

Another illustration of a divinely proportioned man - the subject is Christ-like, but the setting is strikingly similar to Leonardo's - has been discovered in a forgotten manuscript in Ferrara, Italy. Both drawings are depictions of a passage written 1,500 years earlier by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect, in which he describes a man's body fitting perfectly inside a circle (the divine symbol) and inside a square (the earthly symbol). It was a geometric interpretation of the ancient belief that man is a "microcosm": a miniature embodiment of the whole universe. Leonardo and other scholars revived this vainglorious notion during the Italian Renaissance.

After decades of study, Claudio Sgarbi, an Italian architectural historian who discovered the lesser known illustration of the Vitruvian Man in 1986, now believes it to be the work of Giacomo Andrea de Ferrara, a Renaissance architect, expert on Vitruvius, and close friend of Leonardo's. What's more, Sgarbi believes Giacomo Andrea probably drew his Vitruvian man first, though the two men are likely to have discussed their mutual efforts. Sgarbi will lay out his arguments in a volume of academic papers to be published this winter, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

A treasure hunter said Wednesday he has located the wreck of a British merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Cod during World War II while carrying what he claims was a load of platinum bars now worth more than $3 billion.

If the claim proves true, it could be one of the richest sunken treasures ever discovered.

But an attorney for the British government expressed doubt the vessel was carrying platinum. And if it was, in fact, laden with precious metals, who owns the hoard could become a matter of international dispute.

Treasure hunter Greg Brooks of Sub Sea Research in Gorham, Maine, announced that a wreck found sitting in 700 feet of water 50 miles offshore is that of the S.S. Port Nicholson, sunk in 1942.

He said he and his crew identified it via the hull number using an underwater camera, and he hopes to begin raising the treasure later this month or in early March with the help of a remotely operated underwater vessel.

"I'm going to get it, one way or another, even if I have to lift the ship out of the water," Brooks said.

The oldest known species of crocodile had an armor-plated head and a body half the length of a subway car, according to research released Tuesday by US scientists who identified the now-extinct creature.

Nicknamed "Shieldcroc" for its impressive head plate, the aquatic reptile swam in the waters of Africa some 95 million years ago and is the newest discovery of an ancient crocodile species, said the study in the journal PLoS ONE.

University of Missouri anatomy professor Casey Holliday identified the croc, Aegisuchus witmeri, by studying a fossilized partial skull specimen that was first discovered in Morocco.

The croc's shield was likely used as a way to intimidate foes, attract mates and even control its head temperature, researchers said. Its head was considerably flatter than other known species of crocodile.

A painting thought to be the earliest replica of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been discovered at Madrid's Prado Museum. Experts say the painting was completed at the same time as Leonardo's original

A copy of the Mona Lisa has been discovered in the Prado which was painted in Leonardo's studio - created side by side with the original that now hangs in the Louvre. This sensational find will transform our understanding of the world's most famous picture.

Conservators at the Prado in Madrid recently made an astonishing discovery, hidden beneath black overpaint. What was assumed to be a replica of the Mona Lisa made after Leonardo's death had actually been painted by one of his key pupils, working alongside the master. The picture is more than just a studio copy - it changed as Leonardo developed his original composition.

The final traces of overpaint are now being removed by Prado conservators, revealing the fine details of the delicate Tuscan landscape, which mirrors the background of Leonardo's masterpiece. Darkened varnish is also being painstakingly stripped away from the face of the Mona Lisa, giving a much more vivid impression of her enticing eyes and enigmatic smile.

In the Louvre's original, which will not be cleaned in the foreseeable future, Lisa's face is obscured by old, cracked varnish, making her appear almost middle aged. In the Prado copy we see her as she would have looked at the time - as a radiant young woman in her early 20s.

Let's not jump to conclusions about ritual significance, but this site is clearly immensely important to ancient British history

Archaeologists are notoriously nervous of attributing ritual significance to anything (the old joke used to be that if you found an artefact and couldn't identify it, it had to have ritual significance), yet they still like to do so whenever possible. I used to work on a site in the mid-1980s - a hill fort in Gloucestershire - where items of potential religious note occasionally turned up (a horse skull buried at the entrance, for example) and this was always cause for some excitement, and also some gnashing of teeth at the prospect of other people who weren't archaeologists getting excited about it ("And now I suppose we'll have druids turning up").

The Brodgar complex has, however, got everyone excited. It ticks all the boxes that make archaeologists, other academics, lay historians and pagans jump up and down. Its age is significant: it's around 800 years older than Stonehenge (although lately, having had to do some research into ancient Britain, I've been exercised by just how widely dates for sites vary, so perhaps some caution is called for). Pottery found at Stonehenge apparently originated in Orkney, or was modeled on pottery that did.

New images of an uncontacted Peruvian tribe reveal a small band of people, clad in little more than beads and bands of fabric, sitting by a river in the southeastern part of the country.

The photographs, released by advocacy group Survival International, are the closest-ever glimpse of uncontacted Indians ever caught on camera, according to the organization. They provide considerably more detail than earlier images taken from aircraft over settlements.

The people in the photograph belong to the Mashco-Piro tribe. This tribe likely descends from a group that was attacked and displaced in 1894, when rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald encroached on their ancestral lands. Surviving members of the tribe maintain voluntary separation from the outside world, though oil exploration may be encroaching on their solitude, according to Survival International.

The dangers inherent in contacting tribes who'd rather be uncontacted came to the forefront this November, when a local Peruvian man of the Matsigenka tribe, Nicolas Shaco Flores, was found shot through the heart by a Mashco-Piro arrow. Flores had long been in touch with the tribe, albeit at a distance, wrote anthropologist and friend Glenn Shepard on his blog "Notes from the Ethnoground."