Tag: history

Voynich Manuscript Breakthrough? The Secret Behind “The Most Mysterious Book in the World” May Involve an Ancient Cipher System

The year was 1637, and Georg Baresch, an alchemist and renowned collector of antiquities based in Prague, had a baffling mystery on his hands. For years now, he had been in possession of a most unusual item: a bizarre manuscript filled with strange imagery of plants, astrological diagrams, curious structures, human figures, and a range of other curiosities.

This “Sphinx,” as Baresch characterized it, was so strange that it prompted him to reach out to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, known for his success in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, with hopes of obtaining information that might lead to a breakthrough in solving the mystery of the puzzling manuscript.

Today, the same bizarre treatise first obtained by Baresch in the seventeenth century is known throughout the world as the Voynich Manuscript, and despite the efforts of many since Baresch’s time who have sought to decode it, the document still refuses to give up its secrets. After more than a century of scrutiny, no one has convincingly explained who wrote it, what it says, or even whether its text carries any real meaning at all.

However, new research may finally offer scholars a fresh perspective on this confounding mystery. According to a recent peer-reviewed study, while the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript endures, a new theory strengthens the possibility that the text in a document often referred to as “the most mysterious book in the world” may have once served as a cipher system.

The hypothesis, detailed by researcher and science journalist Michael A. Greshko in the journal Cryptologia, indicates that the famous manuscript bears qualities that seemingly match the technological capabilities of scholars in the Middle Ages, potentially helping to reframe questions about the manuscript that have long perplexed researchers.

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The FDR Pearl Harbor Question That People Are Afraid to Ask

Did you know that FDR likely had foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor but chose not to stop it resulting in the immediate loss of over 2,400 American lives and, subsequently, the U.S. entering World War II, resulting in over 400,000 more conscripted American deaths?

Declassified documents and testimonies from the time reveal a complex web of intelligence reports and intercepted Japanese communications, suggesting that U.S. officials, including President Roosevelt himself, had significant forewarning of Japan’s intentions.

One of the key pieces of evidence is the McCollum memo, written in October 1940 by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence. This memo outlined a potential strategy for forcing Japan into war with the United States, including actions that could provoke a Japanese attack. Additionally, the U.S. had been monitoring Japanese communications through its ‘Magic’ cryptographic program, which had successfully decrypted numerous Japanese diplomatic cables, including those hinting at a possible strike.

Despite this, no definitive action was taken to bolster defenses at Pearl Harbor, leading to the devastating attack on December 7, 1941. The consequences were catastrophic.

This might sound like a crazy conspiracy to some readers. I know I would have considered it such a thing at one time (albeit many years ago).

But there is a ton of historical evidence to support Allman’s central claim: FDR had plenty of reasons to suspect a Japanese attack was coming—and he wanted an attack to happen.

I first came to this troubling realization more than two decades ago after reading Thomas Fleming’s 2001 book The New Dealers’ War. (If I recall correctly, I bought my father the book for Christmas, partly because I wanted to read it myself.)

Fleming, who died in 2017, provided a page-turning history that makes a convincing case that FDR was angling for a war with Japan and searching for a casus belli.

It’s been years since I read the book, but I recall it’s beginning quite well. Fleming describes in great detail a poorly-equipped Naval vessel from the Spanish-American War trolling around in international waters where Japanese subs and other far more sophisticated war ships were roaming.

The vessel was never attacked, but Fleming used the episode to support his broader thesis: FDR wanted the US in World War II, was preparing for war well before Pearl Harbor, and appeared to be searching for an event that would justify America’s entry into the conflict.

Most Americans don’t know this today, and relatively few would accept it if they did. It strikes too close to the heart of the mythology of America the wish to believe, or too closely to the politician or ideology they revere.

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Heroes, dictators, and the long fight for sovereignty in Latin America before Maduro

Latin America’s most celebrated heroes came from vastly different political traditions. What bound them together was not ideology, but a shared insistence on defending the interests of their people – and, above all, national sovereignty. In the 19th century, that struggle was directed against European colonial powers, primarily Spain. By the 20th, it increasingly meant confronting pressure from the United States, which since at least the late 1800s had openly framed the region – codified in doctrines and policy – as its strategic “backyard.

Those who chose accommodation over resistance left a far murkier legacy. Under intense external pressure, many leaders accepted limits on sovereignty in exchange for stability, investment, or political survival. Over time, this produced a familiar historical pattern: figures who aligned with foreign power were readily replaced when they ceased to be useful, while those who resisted – often at great personal cost – were absorbed into national memory as symbols of dignity, defiance, and unfinished struggle.

In this piece, we revisit the heroes and the betrayers who came to embody these opposing paths in Latin America’s modern history.

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How Britain entrenched Zionist impunity in Palestine

Are we seeing the final dismemberment of Palestine and the end of the Palestinian struggle for freedom? It is a distinct possibility, and if it happens it will be the culmination of a long and cruel colonial journey that was imposed on the Palestinians from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until today.

That pernicious and ill-advised decision to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine led inexorably to the current genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s multiple human rights abuses against the Palestinians, ongoing since Israel’s establishment.

Balfour’s great crime in 1917 was not just to cede control of Palestine (which Britain did not own) to foreign colonists, but to do so specifically and, of all people, to a group of tormented, complex Jewish European Zionists with an acute sense of grievance about their historic persecution. The deep animus they held against a world, which had allowed it to happen, fed their belief that the world owed them recompense for their sufferings, and Britain’s offer of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was only their due.

It gave them a sense of entitlement to the country which bred an arrogant conviction that it belonged exclusively to them.

Such ideas, never questioned or rejected by Israel’s western supporters, but on the contrary indulged and accepted as valid, have led to the systematic depredations of Palestine and its people.

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Ken Burns’ “The American Revolution” as Cultural Marxist Revisionism

As Donald E. Vandergriff, a lifelong defender of American exceptionalism and unapologetic supporter of President Donald J. Trump and the MAGA movement, I’ve watched with growing alarm as the radical left infiltrates every corner of our shared history. The so-called “new” Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution—a bloated 12-hour PBS snoozefest that premiered on November 16, 2025—just proves how far the elites will go to rewrite our founding story.

This isn’t history; it’s propaganda, a slick hit job designed to undermine the heroic narrative of our forefathers and replace it with the victimhood gospel of Cultural Marxism. Trump warned us about this: fake news and leftist indoctrination masquerading as education. And here it is, straight from the swamp of public broadcasting, defunded under Trump’s wise leadership yet still spewing its bile.

Burns, that self-appointed oracle of the past, has built a career on slow pans over sepia-toned images and folksy narration that lulls you into complacency before slipping in the knife. Remember his Vietnam War series? It humanized the commies while downplaying American resolve.

Or his Civil War update, where he couldn’t resist injecting modern woke commentary? This Revolution doc is more of the same—only now, timed for the 250th anniversary, it’s a deliberate assault on the very ideals that made America great.

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On This Day in 1865: Democrats Pass Nation’s First ‘Black Codes’ to Impose Near Slavery on African Americans

The more things change – the more they stay the same.

On November 22, 1865, Mississippi Democrats passed black codes to impose near slavery on African Americans in the state.

Democrats didn’t want those blacks to see any success in life. Today Democrats do that by “representing” blacks in political office but doing nothing to improve their lives in the hood.

Grand Old Partisan reported:

According to these Democrat laws, African-Americans could not:

 • vote

 • serve on juries

 • testify against white people

 • own guns

 • travel without permission

 • assemble for political purposes

 • own farmland

 • be outdoors at night

 • change jobs without permission

Democrats decreed that all African-Americans had to:

 •sign annual labor contracts with white masters

 • be deferential to all white people

 • be apprenticed (in practice, enslaved) to white masters until adulthood

 • work only in agriculture and a few other occupations

Fortunately, after winning a two-thirds majority in Congress, Republicans swept away these black codes.

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The Case for World War II Revisionism

To briefly summarize the anti-war position:

  1. The costs of warfare are extremely high.
  2. The high costs are often imposed on unwilling participants.
  3. The outcomes of warfare are highly uncertain.
  4. The primary decision makers -politicians- face little incentive to produce beneficial results since they often have access to the involuntary labor of conscripts and can fund their operations involuntarily through taxation.

With these general metrics in mind, I want to make the case that Britain and the United States should not have entered into the second world war.

Consider the war from the German point of view:

Their Eastern Enemy, the Bolshevik regime, kept engaging in acts of aggression.

In 1917, they staged a coup against Czar Nicholas II and conquered Russia, leading to a four year civil war killing millions of people.

In 1918, the Bolsheviks assisted Rosa Luxemburg in the November Revolution attempting to annex Germany. In 1919, the Bolsheviks invaded Poland killing hundreds of thousands of people, and set up a puppet state in Hungary with Béla Kun.

In 1920, the Bolsheviks occupied Azerbaijan, the same year they occupied Armenia. In 1921, they invaded Georgia.

In 1932, they starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor. In 1934, the Bolsheviks invaded Xinjiang, China. In 1935 Germans found themselves encircled by the Franco-Soviet Pact followed by the Czech-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. In 1939 the Bolsheviks invaded Finland, and Poland.

In 1940, the Bolshevik regime occupied and annexed Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bessarabia (Today, Moldova), and Bukovina (today, Ukraine/Romania).

By 1941, the German National Socialists fought the Russian International Socialists under the guise of opposing the Bolshevik “international, worldwide conspiracy” as [Adolf] Hitler called it in his June 22, 1941 speech.

[Winston] Churchill understood the Soviet menace, saying in a 1920 article titled Zionism Versus Bolshevism, that Bolshevism is a “system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent…[and a]…world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.”

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History Will Not Be Kind to Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney died this week. He leaves behind a wretched legacy.

Cheney reached the pinnacle of his influence as George W. Bush’s vice president, a position from which he orchestrated the Iraq War and helped bring about one of the most intrusive pieces of legislation ever to have been leveled against the American people.

Democrats reflexively abhorred Cheney as veep, but as GOP voters became more averse to foreign intervention, he became a symbol of everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. As Jack Kenny said in 2011, “[Cheney’s] impact on and, to a large extent, direction of foreign policy during the Bush presidency suggests that if he was and is a conservative, his is the kind of conservatism George Will described as believing that ‘government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.’”

Iraq Intervention: Why?

As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be “made anew.” “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s — “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.

“Agency of the President”

Cheney once said, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” This is related to the common perception that he was more powerful than the president. “At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history,” renowned left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote. Kenny pointed out that one of the nicknames Cheney acquired as veep was “’Management,’ as in ‘Better check with management first.’” He wrote:

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) described the free hand Cheney appeared to have in his dealings with Congress. “Dick could make a deal,” Gramm told [Barton Gellman], author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. “He didn’t have to check with the president, not as far as I could tell. I’m sure at the end of the day, he would fill the president in on what happened. But Dick had the agency of the president.”

CFR Ties

While Cheney is rightly recognized, even by mainstream standards, as a negative influence on American policies, one important element that’s been widely overlooked in his ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a subversive foreign-policy think tank that we like to refer to as the “Deep State nervous system.” Cheney was a CFR life member. He served on its board of directors from 1987 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1995, and was also its director at one point. Interestingly, he mentioned none of this in his 500-plus-page memoir, In My Time. In 2011, the former Wyoming lawmaker admitted during a visit to CFR headquarters that he had intentionally kept his ties to the organization a secret:

It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve been a member for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming, but it stood me in good stead.

After his death, the CFR posted a warm tribute to him:

A steadfast steward of the Council, Cheney brought to our community the same seriousness of purpose, strategic insight, and commitment to public service that defined his distinguished career in government and the private sector. Cheney’s decades of leadership — as vice president of the United States, secretary of defense, member of Congress, and senior White House official — reflected a lifetime devoted to strengthening the United States’ national security and its role in the world. The Council is grateful to have counted Cheney as a member, director, and friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Many would disagree with the CFR’s characterization. It’s difficult to see how sacrificing thousands of American lives and racking up debt to pay for overseas wars and fueling legislation that allows the government to spy on Americans have made the country stronger. Cheney was a key architect of the post-9/11 response. And as such, he helped finagle congressional approval for the PATRIOT Act, a wholly un-American piece of legislation that has greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil Americans. He coordinated amendments with administration officials and reconciled the House and Senate versions. His chief of staff,  Scooter Libby, was also involved in high-level meetings about the act.

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The War on (Some) Drugs: Why Are We Still Talking About This?

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we’re for it.

— “Prohibition” by Franklin P. Adams, 1931.

William Stewart Halsted is known as the “father of modern surgery.” He was one of the four founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1886, and he is credited with surgical innovations including promoting antiseptic practices and the discovery that cocaine, when injected into the skin, could be used as a local anesthetic. He was also a drug addict.

Halsted’s drug use began with cocaine, and after a few failed attempts at kicking the habit, he switched to morphine. He spent more than 40 years addicted to the drug, all while maintaining one of the most distinguished careers in the history of surgery. According to Sir William Osler, one of the co-founders of Johns Hopkins, Halsted could not get through the day without a minimum of 180 milligrams of morphine. “On this,” said Osler, “he could do his work comfortably, and maintain his physical vigor.”

Halsted’s story illustrates the reality that—while perhaps not desirable—it is possible to both be addicted to narcotics and still function very well in society. Imagine if America had been in the throes of the War on (Some) Drugs in the 19th century, and instead of doing groundbreaking work as a surgeon and helping to build one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, Halsted had been thrown into a prison cell. Who would have benefited from that outcome?

More to the point: How many Halsteds are rotting away in prison today, and what gifts are we all missing out on as a result?

In Halsted’s day, drug addiction looked very different from what it looks like today. Federal control of narcotics only came about in 1914, with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act.

Before that, anyone could walk into a drug store and purchase medicines—and even soft drinks—that contained opium or cocaine. And some did become addicted.

But, as Mike Gray writes in Drug Crazy:

“It was not until the late 1800s that the public began to realize that some of their favorite medicines could be highly addictive. … At that time, the highest credible estimates put the number of U.S. addicts at about three people in a thousand. Others thought it was half that.” (Note: Some estimates put the number as high as one in two hundred.)

“All the leading authorities now agree,” he writes, “that addiction peaked around 1900, followed by a steady drop. The reason was simple common sense coupled with growing awareness.”

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The Myth of the “Robber Barons”: James Hill versus the Crony Competitors

Whether we like it or not, the Progressive Era and its mainstream historical interpretation—even when fictional—has virtually defined our last century. The dominant, though false, narrative is basically that unfettered free market capitalism led to negative outcomes, “robber barons” monopolized the market to their benefit, and that disinterested federal regulation brought discipline to this system, keeping its benefits while curbing its excesses. For that reason, among others, entrepreneurs and businesses have been maligned, even as society enjoyed their benefits.

Thankfully, important historical work has been done to attempt to correct the dominant narrative. One such work is Burton Fulsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America. This work—rather than relying on popular, but inaccurate, historical narratives—examines the contributions of several key American entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, rather than learning positively from real-life examples of successful entrepreneurs and the dangers of government interventions and cronyism, “many historians have been teaching the opposite lesson for years” (p. 121). Fulsom continues,

They have been saying that entrepreneurs, not the state, created the problem. Entrepreneurs, according to these historians, were often “robber barons” who corrupted politics and made fortunes bilking the public. In this view, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the public from greedy businessmen. This view, with some modifications, still dominates in college textbooks in American history. (pp. 121-122)

Crucially, Fulsom makes the useful distinctions between “political entrepreneurs” and “market entrepreneurs” (p. 1):

Those who tried to succeed in [business] through federal aid, pools, vote buying, or stock speculation we will classify as political entrepreneurs. Those who tried to succeed in [business] primarily by creating and marketing a superior product at a low cost we will classify as market entrepreneurs.

This distinction is critical because it qualitatively differentiates those who succeed through the production-and-exchange mechanism and those who use the political means and cronyism to gain wealth at the expense of the public. One example, though imperfect, is the main subject of this article—James J. Hill and his Great Northern transcontinental railroad.

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