Tag: history

There are fashions in medicine just as much as there are fashions in clothes

Badly conceived fashions in clothes may embarrass you, but ill-conceived fashions in medicine may kill you. And the fashions in medicine have, by and large, as much scientific validity as the fashions in the rag trade.

The most obvious fashions in medicine relate to treatments. For example, a couple of centuries ago, enemas, purges and bleedings were all the rage. In 17th century France, Louis XIII had 212 enemas, 215 purges and 47 bleedings in a single year. The Canon of Troyes is reputed to have had a total of 2,190 enemas in a two-year period; how he found time to do anything else is difficult to imagine. By the mid-19th century, enemas were a little last year’s style and bleeding was the in-thing. Patients would totter into their doctor’s surgery, sit down, tuck up their sleeves and ask the doctor to “draw me a pint of blood.” Bleeding was the universal cure, recommended for most symptoms and ailments. Feeling a little under the weather? A little light bleeding should soon put you to rights. Constant headaches? We’ll soon have that sorted for you, sir. Just roll up your sleeve. Bit of trouble down below, madam? Not to worry. Slip off your frock and hold your arm out.

A little later, in the 19th century, doctors put their lancets away and started recommending alcohol as the new panacea. Brandy was the favoured remedy in the doctor’s pharmacopoeia. People took it for almost everything. And when patients developed delirium tremens, the recommended treatment was more alcohol. If things got so bad that the brandy didn’t work, doctors added a little opium. Those were the days to be ill. Hypochondriacs must have had a wonderful time.

In the years from the 1930’s onwards, removing tonsils became the fashionable treatment. Tonsils were removed from between a half and three-quarters of all children in the 1930’s. This often useless and unnecessary (and always potentially hazardous) operation is less commonly performed these days, but in the 1970’s over a million such operations were done every year in Britain alone. Doctors used to rip out tonsils on the kitchen table and toss them to the dog. Between 200 and 300 deaths a year were caused by the operation. One suspects that few, if any, of those unfortunate children would have died from tonsillitis.

Diseases go in cycles, too. In the early 19th century, the fashionable diagnosis was “inflammation.” Then, when patients and doctors tired of that, the new keyword was “debility.” Doctors didn’t know terribly much and so their diagnoses, like their treatments, tended to be rather general.

These days, patients expect more specific diagnoses and doctors are invariably happy to oblige.

One year, everyone will be suffering from asthma. It will be the disease of the moment, just as the mini skirt or ripped jeans may drift mysteriously in and out of fashion. Another year, arthritis will be the fashionable disease as a drug company persuades journalists to write articles extolling the virtues (and disguising the vices) of its latest product. The cycle is a relatively simple one. The drug company with a new and profitable product to sell (usually designed for some long-term – and therefore immensely profitable – disorder) will send teams of well-trained representatives around to talk to family physicians, give them presents and take them out for expensive luncheons. The sales representatives will be equipped with information showing that the disorder in question is rapidly reaching epidemic proportions, lists of warning symptoms for the doctor to watch out for and information about the drug company’s new solution to the problem. Because the product will be new to the market, there will probably be very little evidence available about side effects and the sales representative will be able to accurately describe the drug as extremely “safe.” Older drugs, well-tried, possibly effective and probably safer than the new replacement, will be discarded as out-of-date. After all, their side effects will, over the years, have been well-documented.

There are even non-existent diseases which seem to me, and, I suspect, a growing number of other physicians, to have been originally invented in order to find a use for expensive medicinal compounds (and enthusiastically welcomed by parents who find the fictitious disease to be a handy and enormously useful explanation for bad behaviour).

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Media Melts Down After Entertainer Nick Cannon (Correctly) Calls Democrats the Party of the KKK

Nick Cannon is known for being a rapper, a comedian and television personality. In other words, an entertainer.

There is a clip of him making the rounds in social media that’s getting a lot of attention because in the video he correctly points out that the Democrats are the party of the KKK.

He is right. They are.

But the media is reacting as if he said something shocking or untrue.

This is from Variety:

Nick Cannon Calls the Democratic Party the ‘Party of the KKK’ and Says ‘I F— With Trump’

Nick Cannon let his politics be known on a recent episode of his web talk show “Big Drive” (via TMZ), during which he called the Democratic Party “the party of the KKK.”

After his guest, model Amber Rose, said that Democrats “don’t care about people of color and the Republicans do,” Cannon replied, “I agree with you 100%. People don’t know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK. People don’t know that the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves. I mean, both of you and I have some conservative views. You’re just a little bit more outspoken than I am. And honestly, I don’t subscribe to either party. I rock with W. E. B. Du Bois, when he said there’s no such thing as two parties. It’s just one evil party with two different names.”

When discussing Donald Trump’s second term, Cannon enthusiastically said “motherfucker’s cleaning house” and is “doing what he said he was gonna do.”

“We got the Gulf of America now,” Cannon added. “He’s like the club. He’s charging a $5 million bottle service fee to get into the country.”

While factions of the Democratic Party were responsible for the rise of the KKK right after the Civil War, it’s not widely believed that the entirety of the party endorsed the formation of the white supremacist group.

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The Senator Who Saved America From FDR’s Court-Packing Scheme

Americans can be thankful that the cynical effort to corrupt the Court in 1937 was defeated by principled legislators like Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, a member of FDR’s own party.

“When you don’t like the message,” the old saying goes, “shoot the messenger.”

In the wake of Supreme Court rulings they don’t like, leading Democrats in Washington renewed calls last year to “pack” the Court with more liberal justices. Were that to happen, it would surely set off “tit for tat” fights the next time a Republican sits in the White House.

Democrats control the Senate today and could conceivably muster the votes to fill a vacancy if one occurs in the next two years. But a plan spearheaded by Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) to change the Court’s composition from nine to 13 has no chance to pass both houses of Congress, at least for the moment. Boosting the number of justices for purely ideological advantage is the very definition of court-packing.

Reducing the size of a court can also be seen as a form of court packing (or “unpacking”), depending on the intent. Ten years ago, then-Congressman (now Senator) Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the ironically named Stop Court Packing Act. It would have reduced the number of judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from eleven to eight. Clearly meant to thwart President Obama’s nominees to the court, it went nowhere.

When Democrat Franklin Roosevelt attempted court-packing in 1937, a prominent member of his own party helped lead the successful fight to defeat it. That would be none other than Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who put country ahead of party when he declared,

Create now a political court to echo the ideas of the Executive and you have created a weapon. A weapon which, in the hands of another President in times of war or other hysteria, could well be an instrument of destruction. A weapon that can cut down those guarantees of liberty written into your great document by the blood of your forefathers and that can extinguish your right of liberty, of speech, of thought, of action, and of religion. A weapon whose use is only dictated by the conscience of the wielder.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Wheeler earned his law degree from the University of Michigan before heading for Seattle. He never made it. His train stopped in Butte, where he lost almost everything he had in a poker game. He decided to recoup by building a law practice in Montana.

His political career began in 1910 when, at age 28, he was elected to the Montana legislature. After running unsuccessfully for Governor in 1920, he won a US Senate seat two years later. Wheeler was a staunch ally of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but he courageously broke with FDR over the court-packing plot.

Fresh from a landslide reelection to a second term in 1936, Roosevelt was determined to crush the independence of the Supreme Court by turning it into a rubber stamp for the White House. He was so rattled by rulings against his dubious New Deal policies that he publicly smeared the Court as “those nine old men.” Nobody had tampered with the size of the Court since 1869, when Congress established that the highest judicial body would consist of nine justices.

FDR asked lawmakers to approve a plan whereby the President could nominate a new justice every time a sitting one reached the age of 70 and failed to voluntarily retire. Roosevelt already controlled the executive branch and held sway over the legislative branch, with big Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. For Wheeler, a grab for the judicial branch was a bridge too far.

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Rewriting Revolutionary History: Is Jamie Raskin Even Capable of Honesty?

The late Scott Adams had a way of describing a certain group of Democratic operatives and lawmakers that seemed fitting as I watched and rewatched an exchange between Representatives Jim Jordan and Jamie Raskin.

Adams said that while all Democrats lie, there is a small group of them who seem to assume the mantle of tier-one fibbers. These are the ones who are capable of saying the most verifiably dishonest things, and do so with a straight face that makes it look like even they believe what they are saying. 

I believe Jamie Raskin may have been among them (I’m not 100% sure), along with Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, James Clapper, and John Brennan, and perhaps others. 

The reason such a group exists, Adams theorized, was that, in order for Democrats and the legacy media to make some of their most outlandish hoaxes stick, they needed a special group of people who can convincingly say something that is completely untrue and just keep repeating it until the public starts to think it is true.

Adams observed that you never hear from these people all at once, but when it’s their turn, they step in like a designated hitter and slug away with their fabrications. 

I thought of Adams’ comments when I saw Raskin in action at a hearing conducted by the House’s Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government on March 18. That’s when he claimed that Thomas Paine, the founding father and author of “Common Sense,” was an “undocumented immigrant.” 

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Is “Taxation Without Representation” Occurring in 2026? Massive School District Bond Fraud Uncovered Across the US

Perhaps no phrase is used more to describe the grievances of the colonists in the lead-up to the American Revolution than “No taxation without representation!”

Mark Maloy, a historian wrote “While the exact phrase did not appear until 1768, the principle of having consent from the people on issues of taxation can be traced all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

The Magna Carta was one of the first steps in limiting the power of the king and transferring that power to the legislative body in England, the Parliament. Parliament had the power to levy taxes. When King Charles I attempted to impose taxes on the English people by himself in 1627, the Parliament passed the Petition of Right the following year, which stated that the subjects of the king “should not be compelled to contribute to any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent, in parliament.”

The Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights from 1689 helped to form the basis of the British constitution (which is not a single document, but a combination of written and unwritten agreements). The British constitution protected the rights of Englishmen. English colonists in North America believed that they had the same rights as Englishmen. In North America, colonists formed their own colonial governments under charters from the king and regulated their own forms of taxation through their colonial legislatures. For many decades, these colonies enjoyed an extended period of benign neglect as the English parliament let them handle taxation on their own.

In Great Britain in the eighteenth century, there were no income taxes because it was viewed as too much of a government intrusion into the lives of the people. Instead, taxes were placed on property and on imported and exported goods. Money from these taxes helped to pay for public goods and services and supported the government’s military for defense.

In North America, the British colonies regulated their own tax system in each individual colony. These taxes, though, were exceedingly low, and the colonies did not have a professional military to support. Instead, they used a volunteer militia system to defend their towns and homes from attacks along the frontier.

In 1754, the French and Indian War broke out in North America. During the war, the British sent their military to help defend the colonies. The war spread across the globe and became known as the Seven Years’ War. Following Britain’s victory in 1763, the British national debt greatly increased. They now had a larger empire that needed to be defended. In light of this tenuous situation, and since the North American colonists benefited directly from the British military during the war, Great Britain looked to levy taxes on the colonists to raise revenue for the Crown.

In Massachusetts in 1764, James Otis published a pamphlet titled “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” which argued that man’s rights come from God and that governments should only exist to protect those natural rights. He believed that any attempt to tax the colonists without their consent violated the British constitution. Here, Otis made a compelling argument for the need for representation in any taxation on the colonies: “no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature; that the refusal of this would seem to be a contradiction in practice to the theory of the constitution.”

Colonists wrote pamphlets protesting taxes and explaining their views. Daniel Dulaney the Younger from Maryland wrote this one in 1765.

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Historians Will Say World War III Already Began

For years, the press has insisted that every conflict must be viewed in isolation: Ukraine is separate from the Middle East, China is separate from Russia, and Iran is simply another regional crisis. But history rarely works that way. When historians look back at major wars, they rarely begin them on the date politicians announce them. World War I did not suddenly begin with a single shot in Sarajevo, and World War II was not simply the invasion of Poland. The causes were decades in the making. The uncomfortable reality is that when historians eventually write about this period, many will likely conclude that what we are witnessing today is the early phases of a world war.

One of the greatest mistakes made after the Cold War was the assumption that the ideological struggle had been permanently resolved. The collapse of the Soviet Union was treated as a final victory rather than the end of a phase. Yet no durable geopolitical framework was created to integrate the defeated power structure into a stable international system. After World War II, the United States and its allies invested enormous resources into rebuilding Europe and Japan through the Marshall Plan and establishing institutions such as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods financial order. Those efforts created stability and prevented the reemergence of the same ideological conflict that produced two world wars. After the Cold War, nothing comparable was built.

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2,000-year-old artifact may be evidence that Romans found New World — a thousand years before Columbus

Was there a New World order we didn’t know about?

The discovery of a 2,000-year-old Roman artifact in Mexico could upend our understanding of the New World, raising the possibility that Italians arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.

Dubbed the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head, this terracotta sculpture of a bearded man was exhumed by Mexican archaeologist José García Payón in 1933 from its eponymous repository near Mexico City, Arkeonews reported.

The figure was buried in a sealed tomb beneath three intact floor layers of the pyramidal structure, alongside pottery shards, gold ornaments, bone artifacts, and pieces of rock crystal.

While these materials were typical of the time period and region, the noggin was anything but, boasting striking features that skewed more ancient Mediterranean than Mesoamerica.

Then, in 1990, German archaeologist Bernard Andreae suggested that the bust was “without any doubt, Roman,” claiming its hairstyle and beard shape harked back to that of the emperors from the Severan period (193–235 BC).

This was more than just a passing resemblance, too. Through thermoluminescence dating — heating an object and measuring the light it emits from energy stored over time — researchers were able to determine that the relic dated back to between the 9th century BC and the 13th century AD, long before Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492.

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SHOCKING: Even Mt Vernon Staff Unfamiliar With Genocidal Nazi Duke’s History & Tour Of America In Spring 1940; He’s Listed As A “Famous” Visitor On Their Website!

At Armed Forces Press, we just ran a feature last month aiming to raise awareness about the historically buried and shocking British royal / Nazi duke trip across the US in Spring 1940, with hundreds of American elites visiting him at events, while the US was still neutral in WWII. That article links to a documentation webpage with seized and declassified US and Nazi German intelligence. Awfully, it was put forth that after WWII, it was not only that the Duke of Saxe Coburg and Gotha was a big Nazi, but he was also associated with the policy to exterminate the mentally ill and physically disabled.

Shockingly, over the weekend in a web search, I stumbled upon that Mt. Vernon, the treasured home of George Washington in Virginia south of DC, listed this genocidal duke among their selected “famous” visitors, with no further text.

A number of people around me also found this deeply disturbing.

I sent these two emails to a number of their senior staff members including their historian CEO, SVP of fundraising (development), library director, chief curator, VP of education, and VP of media / comm, to make sure this would receive administrative attention.

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Will Washington Betray the Kurds Yet Again?

The Trump administration has enlisted the support of Kurdish activists in Syria, Iraq, and Iran to join the U.S.-led war to unseat Iran’s clerical regime.  CNN reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is already arming Iranian Kurds. CNN and other outlets also report that President Trump spoke with Kurdish leaders in Iraq on March 8, 2026, about having their forces join the fight.

Washington’s motives for this move are easy to discern. The Kurdish minority concentrated along Iran’s western border has long sought to break away from Tehran’s control.  U.S. and Israeli leaders understand that such disruptive secessionist efforts could further damage the incumbent government’s already weakened position.

There is a major problem with that strategy, however.  Secessionist-minded Iranian Kurds do not merely want to undermine their oppressors in Tehran; many of them want to join their equally restless ethnic brethren in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey to establish a new, independent Kurdish homeland.  The incumbent governments in those volatile countries feud about a wide array of issues.  One objective all these governments have in common, though, is a determination to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish nation state, since that development would threaten the internal unity – and perhaps the continued viability–of multiple neighbors.

Previous U.S. administrations have encouraged and even actively supported Kurdish clients when it advanced Washington’s short-term goals.  Such initiatives invariably have been followed by cynical betrayals of those clients when the U.S. government concluded that support for parochial Kurdish objectives endangered higher priority U.S. regional objectives.

This cycle of support and betrayal has occurred repeatedly.  Most recently, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations used Syrian Kurds as armed proxies in a long campaign to seize oil-rich territory in northern Syria and help unseat Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad.  A small contingent of U.S. ground troops deployed in northern Syria aided that effort. The Kurdish fighters were remarkably successful despite strong opposition from both Assad and Turkey.

But when anti-Assad insurgent forces dominated by Arab Sunni Islamists finally overthrew his secular government in December 2024, the usefulness to Washington of Kurdish fighters and Kurdish control over northern Syria evaporated quickly.  In late 2025, the Trump administration terminated its support for the Kurdish faction and warned Syrian Kurdish leaders to end their opposition to the new Islamist regime in Baghdad.

That latest move was at least the fourth example of a U.S. policy reversal and outright betrayal of the Kurds in less than three generations.  In 1973, President Richard Nixon made a secret agreement with the Shah of Iran to provide the covert financial and military support to the Kurdish minority in Iraq who had launched an insurgency against Iraq’s young dictator, Saddam Hussein. Those Kurdish insurgents were seeking to establish an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq.  (Saddam had irritated U.S. leaders earlier that year by signing a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow.) Kurdish officials conducted planning sessions in Washington with the CIA, and CIA agents assisted Kurdish Peshmerga militia units to harass Saddam’s forces.

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‘Every Arab is to be killed’: New evidence confirms Zionist terror campaign fueled 1948 expulsion of Palestinians

New Israeli documents have emerged confirming that Zionist militias used massacres, rapes, and expulsions to ethnically cleanse some 800,000 Palestinians to create the state of Israel in 1948.

Haaretz reported on 27 February that the documents contain first-hand accounts of the 1948 war (known by Palestinians as the Nakba) written by commanders in the Zionist militias, which formed the core of the Israeli military.

The documents were discovered after someone left boxes containing thousands of documents next to a dumpster in a Tel Aviv neighborhood two years ago.

According to the Israeli newspaper, the discovery of the documents “completely dispels the Israeli narrative according to which the country’s Arab inhabitants fled of their own volition at the behest of their own leaders.”

The documents include an account of the war written by Yitzhak Broshi, commander of Golani’s 12th Battalion. Broshi explains that he gave the order to raze the village of Arab a-Zabah, a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee, and kill every person found there. “Every Arab among the Zabahim is to be killed,” his order stated.

In another case, Broshi ordered his troops to search for Arabs hiding in the Mount Turan area of the Lower Galilee after it had already been conquered. “Kill anyone who is hiding,” Broshi’s order read.

Haaretz notes that although nearly 80 years have passed since the Nakba, which Israelis call the “War of Independence,” much material in Israel’s archives remains classified. As a result, “historical memory in Israel is a deception.”

“It can now be confirmed, on the basis of an impressive range of evidence, that the IDF [Israeli army] expelled Arabs systematically and violently during the War of Independence. The expulsion was effected by massacres, murder, and a variety of moves aimed at terrorizing this civilian population and expediting its flight,” Haaretz concluded.

“How do you expel a village?” asked Maxim Cohen, a commander of the Carmeli Brigade. “You lop off the ear of one of the Arabs before everyone else’s eyes, and they all flee. In practice, no village was evacuated without stabbing someone in the stomach or by means of similar methods. We won thanks only to the fear of the Arabs, and they were fearful only of deeds that were not in accordance with the law.”

Haim Ben-David, who later obtained the rank of major general and became former prime minister David Ben Gurion’s military secretary, explained that orders to kill and expel Palestinian civilians during the 1948 war were given verbally rather than written down.

“In our operative orders, we were careful not to mention killing. The orders relating to conduct were orally conveyed to the battalion commanders,” Ben-David explained.

Yisrael Carmi, a battalion commander in the 7th Brigade, stated that during the conquest of Beersheba in October 1948, he gave the order that any Palestinian who resisted expulsion was to be executed.

“I conquered the city,” Carmi testified. “In mopping up that area, I gave an order to annihilate anyone who appeared in the street, whether they resisted or did not resist. An order was given to destroy everything. After the conquest of the police station – after the surrender – the murder stopped. Until then, everyone was killed – women and children and everyone. Then an order was given to the people to go to Hebron. Anyone who didn’t go was ‘removed.’”

Mordechai Maklef, an operations officer, explained, “The intention was to expel.”

“It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived [in the Galilee] without terror. There had to have been an element of initial terror for them to leave.”

In an effort to conceal this history, Israel has released to the public only a million files out of 17 million in the Israel State Archives and the Army and Defense Establishment Archives.

The archives’ staff was told to conceal “material that might harm the [army’s] image [and show it] as an occupying army devoid of moral foundations, [which displays] violent behavior against an Arab population and cruel acts (killing, murder).”

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