A copy of a 600-year-old map found in a second-hand book shop is the key to proving that the Chinese, not Christopher Columbus, were the first to discover the New World, a controversial British historian claims.
The document is purportedly an 18th century copy of a 1418 map charted by Chinese Admiral Zheng He, which appears to show the New World in some detail.
This purported evidence that a Chinese sailor mapped the Western Hemisphere more than seven decades befor... (more)
In naval warfare, a "false flag" refers to an attack where a vessel flies a flag other than their true battle flag before engaging their enemy. It is a trick, designed to deceive the enemy about the true nature and origin of an attack.
In the democratic era, where governments require at least a plausible pretext before sending their nation to war, it has been... (more)
John Pilger's 'The War You Don't See' (2011) is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.... (more)
Abby Martin speaks about the blatant hypocrisy regarding Obama's "red line" of chemical attacks as the motivating factor to intervene militarily in Syria, citing the top four chemical weapons attacks that the US military does not want you to know about.
Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event's reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah's ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year.
But it has taken almost six decades for the U... (more)
An article linked to on Drudge is reporting that the US actually considered nuking the moon to intimidate the Russians at the height of the Cold War.
It instantly reminded me of a hilarious skit from the 90s comedy series “Mr Show” in which the American people are whipped up into a patriotic frenzy (complete with a country music anthem) over NASA nuking... (more)
"Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever ‘freed,’ they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life."... (more)
A college professor from St. Louis, Missouri has released research claiming that the U.S. Army conducted secret Cold War tests by spraying toxic radioactive chemicals on cities like St. Louis and Corpus Christi.
St. Louis Community College-Meramec sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor told The Associated Press that her research showed that the Army may have sprayed radioactive particles with z... (more)
Today, we are constantly being told, the United States faces a health care crisis. Medical costs are too high, and health insurance is out of reach of the poor. The cause of this crisis is never made very clear, but the cure is obvious to nearly everybody: government must step in to solve the problem.
Eighty years ago, Americans were also told that their... (more)
In recent days, the Buffett name has become synonymous with support for higher taxes, but a long time ago, it was associated with fierce opposition to federal taxation and big government.
Warren Buffett may be a committed liberal Democrat, but his father, Howard Buffett, was a four-term Republican member of Congress (1943-49 and 51-53), a John Bircher who fought FDR and warned that the expansion of gove... (more)
Being a U.S. war criminal means never having to say sorry. Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and destroyed Hiroshima, lived to the impressive age of 92 without publicly expressing guilt for what he had done. He had even reenacted his infamous mission at a 1976 Texas air show, complete with a mushroom cloud, and later said he never meant this to be offensive. In contrast, he called it a "damn big insult" when the Smithsonian planned an exhibit in 1995 showing some of the damag... (more)
I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
In 2008, Alvin Rabushka's book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (Pri... (more)
Many people think life without the welfare state would be chaos. In their minds, nobody would help support the less fortunate, and there would be riots in the streets. Little do they know that people found innovative ways of supporting each other before the welfare state existed. One of the most important of these ways was the mutual-aid society.
Mutual aid, also known as fraternalism, refers to social organizations that gathered dues and paid benefits to members facing hardship. ... (more)
