The ruling caste of Saudi Arabia present the most striking example in world history of the extreme combination of avarice and personal cowardice. They are gagging for a war with Iran so long as somebody else fights it for them.

Due to a dispute over who ought to have been Caliph 1400 years ago they are absolutely chomping at the bit for somebody to massacre the Shia in the Shia heartland, provided they don't have to do the massacring. It is not that they object to blood on their pure white robes, they often get that when executing a bound prisoner or raping the housemaid. But the thought of their own blood being spilled is an abomination. Let some helpful young Israelis or Americans risk fighting the Iranians, while the Saudi rulers sniff cocaine in their London penthouses.

It is not that Saudi does not have its own military - bombing civilian Shia Houthis from a great height with no chance of retaliation is great sport. And there were some actual Saudis in some of the tanks sent in to massacre the unarmed democracy demonstrators of Bahrain. But the world's greatest spender per capita on weapons systems has no intention that its own elite should do any fighting.

There is a great debate going on at the moment about Darwinism, especially after Yale professor David Gelernter published an article in which he basically agreed with the devastating criticism leveled at the theory by the scholars associated with the Discovery Institute. It is true: the creed of Darwinism is under attack, the foundation of materialist atheism is shaking, the worldview held by most people today - including many religious people - is crumbling. It is a beautiful sight for those of us who know that Darwinism is wrong, dead wrong and couldn't be any more wrong.

At the same time, people are confused. It's no secret that many critics of Darwinism - brilliant as they are in their scientific rigor - are also religious, mostly Christians. Some even try to smuggle in Jesus in their otherwise flawless books. If Darwinism is wrong, which it is without a shred of a doubt, should we all go back to the bible? Should we 'accept the Lord Jesus'?

Well, not so fast. For all the faults of the atheists (both old and new), their critique of religion is too powerful for any rational mind to ignore. And for all that Christianity has going for it, it is notoriously plagued by the blind acceptance of a ridiculous doctrine cobbled together by an unknown number of scribes throughout the ages.

Just to give a prominent example: what thinking mind could possibly accept the physical resurrection of Jesus? It is something that has never been observed by anyone; it flies in the face of what we know happens to an organism once the life force holding it together is withdrawn; it clearly sounds like a fairy-tale only a child could take literally. And yet, it is one of the most unshakable doctrines of the various Christian denominations. Tell a Christian believer that this is obvious nonsense and watch the reaction.

How will history remember us? As Americans, we like to think that we are a light to the world and that other countries should be using us as a model for how to properly do things. But the truth is that we have become unspeakably evil, and after reading this entire article I doubt that there will be anyone that will disagree with me. And while it is certainly true that there are quite a few other nations that are also tremendously evil, none have fallen harder or faster then we have. At one time America truly was "the hope of the world", but now just about every form of wickedness that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us, and very few of our national leaders seem to care.

The first example that I would like to discuss is something that came out in court on Thursday...

The CEO of StemExpress essentially admitted in court Thursday that her biotech company supplies beating fetal hearts and intact fetal heads to medical researchers.

She also admitted at the preliminary hearing of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress that the baby's head could be procured attached to the baby's body or "could be torn away."

This is Nazi-level evil, and it is happening all across the United States every single day.

Of course the mainstream media is completely avoiding this story, because they fully approve of what is happening and they don't want to cause any sort of an uproar. And most "conservative" media outlets are avoiding this story as well, because the truth is that they aren't actually very "conservative" at all.

Companies such as StemExpress are making a tremendous amount of money selling baby body parts to medical researchers, and the "research" that is being conducted is incredibly sick and disgusting.

Leaked documents including scanned passports of US, Saudi and UAE arms dealers and government officials expose for the first time an international weapons shipment network for arming militants in Yemen, including Islamic State terrorists in Yemen.

Recently I anonymously received explosive documents from the Serbian state-owned arms manufacturer Krusik, including e-mails, internal memos, contracts, photos, delivery schedules, and packing lists with lot numbers of weapons and their buyers. Among the leaked documents I also received scanned passports of arms dealers and government officials from the US, Saudi Arabia and UAE. They visited the Serbian arms factory to purchase weapons (mortar shells and rockets) on behalf of the US Government, Saudi Defence Ministry and UAE Army. Some of these weapons, however, have ended up with terrorists in Yemen.

Tracing Islamic State weapons in Yemen back to their suppliers

Serbian mortar shells manufactured by the Serbian state-owned arms factory Krusik can often be seen in the hands of Islamic State terrorists in their propaganda videos in Yemen.

Around 12,800 years ago, North America suffered a massive cataclysm of cometary bombardment, alternately burning and freezing much of the continent. Not much survived. But what of what came before? In his latest book, Before America, Graham Hancock provides a journalistic account of the latest research into the pre-Columbian history of the Americas - North and South. Hancock catalogues the academic back-and-forths, the controversies and intellectual battles, and the widening acceptance that there was a lot more going on in the Americas back then than researchers had previously thought possible. Archaeology, genetics, mounds and henges, myths and migrations - it's a story that is only beginning to emerge after years of bad theories dominating the various fields.

On today's MindMatters we review Hancock's book, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, and tying in some of his speculations with Witzel's work on world mythology, covered on previous episodes of MindMatters.


Running Time: 01:03:20

Download: MP3 — 58 MB

While finalizing the writing of the article titled "Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes", I encountered an unexpected anomaly.

The time of the demise of the mammoths is also known as the Younger Dryas, a period of global cooling that lasted from 12,900 to 11,700 years ago (10,900 B.C. to 9,700 B.C.) during which surface temperatures dropped by approximately 7°C.

In theory, such a severe cooling should increase the volume of polar ice and, as a result, reduce sea level. However, during the Younger Dryas, sea levels rose 17 meters over more than a millennium, as illustrated by the graph below.
If the sea level rose while ice caps were building up, it's possible that the source of the water was external. But where could this water have come from?

Coincidentally or not, most of Mars' Northern hemisphere was once covered with water, and this ocean has mysteriously disappeared. So where did the Martian water go?

Of all the issues that divide us, none seems as inimical to reasoned discussion as identity politics. Conservatives excoriate such politics as politically opportunistic theater, the acting out of coddled "snowflake" students. Liberals and progressives put forth an opposing grievance-first narrative, arguing that identity politics emanates from authentic wounds.

But what if both contenders have a piece of the truth? What if many identity-firsters today are claiming to be victims because they and their societies are victims — only not so much of the abstract "isms" they denounce, but of something else that till now has eluded description?

Let's try a new theory: Our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what happened during the decades in which identity politics went from being a phrase in an obscure quasi-radical document to a way of being that has gone on to transform academia, law, media, culture and government.

After years of reporting on the Great War on Terror, many questions behind the US attacks remain unresolved

Afghanistan was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before 9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of the Panjshir," who told me about an "unholy alliance" of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).

Back in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir source, only stating, "the commander has been shot." Two days later, 9/11 happened.

And yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at 11am on 9/11 - with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and "bring him to justice."

The events of 9/11, and the wars they unleashed, were the work of a ruthless cabal seeking to 'shape reality' in US society and beyond. Serving as a catalyst, 9/11 artificially introduced an 'us versus them' mentality upon everyone, ultimately affecting every fracture line - every social, ethnic and religious division - in society. Quite how much of what has followed since that fateful day was intended by the perpetrators is difficult to gauge, but they certainly had their reasons, and those reasons were informed by megalomaniac visions of world domination and mass social engineering.

Those of us who lived through 9/11 watched in horror as it triggered the 'Clash of Civilizations', embroiling the Western world in a 'clash' of values with the Muslim world, 'justifying' torture, terrorism, wars of aggression, the pillaging of government treasuries, and massive state surveillance. Some of us thought, if we just expose the hand behind 9/11 and the subsequent 'war on terror', we can stave off calamity.

But this endeavor, it turns out, is beyond us. The full horror of 9/11 has since 'progressed' to cause profound economic malaise in the West, and most recently encompass (and devour) the broader 'Culture Wars'. Those who reacted to 9/11 by taking refuge in 'our Western values' believed that at least from here, we can defend the West from the Rest. But those values - reflected in what was once 'common sense' - have been hijacked and corrupted from within, then turned against everyone and everything.

John Bolton is out as President Trump's National Security Advisor. Trump says he fired Bolton, Bolton says he offered to resign first. Both suggested that the departure was due to disagreements over foreign policy, which independent reports seem to confirm.

Personally, I do not care. I don't care if Trump fired Bolton over an argument about which Sesame Street characters would win in a bare knuckle boxing match. I don't care if Bolton was carried bodily out of the White House by a strong gust of wind. Trying to sort out the specifics of the drama in an administration packed with lying sociopaths is always an exercise in futility, and in this case it's even more pointless, because all that matters is that John Bolton is gone now. That is an intrinsically good thing, by itself, regardless of what events led up to it.

Trump says he's going to name a new National Security Advisor next week, and the good news is that it is literally impossible for whoever he ends up picking to be worse than John Bolton. They might not be any better, but there's no way they can be more of a bloodthirsty psychopathic monster than their predecessor, because Bolton is without exaggeration as bad as it gets in terms of sheer drive to start World War Three. Right now Bolton's acting replacement is a neocon ghoul named Charles Kupperman, who analyst Jeffrey Kaye describes as "a Reaganite neanderthal Islamophobe, a creature of the defense industry, and a very close associate of Bolton himself," and there are rumors that another vile neoconservative Bolton ally, former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, is among the top possible picks. So we can't be confident that Bolton's replacement will be any better, but we can absolutely be confident that they won't be any worse.


It is an indisputably positive thing that the former PNAC director who is so psychopathic that he once threatened to murder the children of an OPCW official for inconveniencing his attempts to engineer the Iraq invasion is no longer in the most powerful foreign policy advisory position on planet Earth. That is clearly and obviously an intrinsically beneficial thing for all of humanity. So of course the leaders of the Democratic Party are objecting to it.