Scientia Press

Many Germans have earnestly sought to overcome the Nazi past by publicizing its depredations, by seeking restitution of stolen property, by acknowledging wrongdoing, and by maintaining a respectful, open stance toward Jews in general and Israel in particular.  Still, such is the burden of the Holocaust that another approach may prove attractive to certain Germans.  It involves Yiddish.

While Yiddish contains elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages, it is mainly an old dialect of German.  A German speaker can understand most of it, and in fact Yiddish forms part of the study of German linguistics and literature, correctly understood.  This means that a simple initiative could help bring Germans and Jews closer. Continue reading »

History contains two outstanding wrongs committed against groups of Americans:  the killing, displacement, and mistreatment of Native Americans and the subjection of African Americans to slavery and ongoing discrimination.  Various thinkers have suggested kinds of reparations for these acts; but views differ sharply on whether reparations are justified, who should pay them, who should receive them, and what form they should take.  Instead of serving to heal our country, reparations have become one more divisive issue.

Yet reparations offer an alluring vision:  via a concrete but also symbolic national gesture, we could take a major step toward healing wounds, overcoming the past, and moving together into the future.  They could counteract the negativity of partisan politics and lead to a happier multiethnic and multiracial society.  So we need to think through how to bring Americans to comprehend and support a plan for reparations that will help us flourish as a united people.

Fortunately, a related issue affords us a precious opportunity Continue reading »

(For the right presidential candidate)

The 9/11/2001 attacks ushered in an era of endless wars, fear of terrorism, and antipathy to immigrants.  Arguably the most important issue regarding 9/11 is the doings of senior government officials in the run-up to the attacks.  Yet both the media and the 9/11 Commission report have refused to discuss it.  This refusal must raise the suspicion that there was indeed wrongdoing. Continue reading »

The first set of documents was released by FBI in the course of the litigation.  The second set includes selected lawsuit documents from Dillon v. U.S. Department of Justice.  Following this is a discussion of destruction of evidence. 

The first set includes 102 pages of emails to and from accused Mailer Bruce Ivins, released by FBI on court order on March 20, 2019, plus Laboratory Notebook 4282. FOIA request #1327397 sought Ivins’s emails and other documents for September and October, 2001. FOIA request #1329530 sought the Table of Contents and the 16 pages on Ivins from the 2000-page Interim Major Case Summary of 2006.  After repeated failures to find emails, FBI experts located them as 1A attachments in the Amerithrax file. Continue reading »

Sekhmet (“The Mighty One”), the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, was dreaded for her bloody rampages.  Yet she became the protector of kings and a favorite personal goddess of millions of Egyptians.

Why did Egyptians have a goddess who required such assiduous and even obsessive propitiation?  Why did other Egyptian goddesses play roles similar to Sekhmet’s?  What explains Sekhmet’s dual nature as destroyer and protector?  Why was she called the Eye of Ra?  Why was she originally depicted with an oval disk on her head?

We now have good answers to these questions.  But in order to understand them, we need to see why we should think that Sekhmet was Planet Venus.  And that requires us to investigate a major case of scientific rejectionism. Continue reading »

Students have long struggled, often in vain, with the rules of Latin grammar. The structure of sentences in Latin seems strange to the mind of an Indo-European native speaker. Also, Latin’s heavy use of gerundive and absolute constructions: all those verbal nouns entail a very different pattern of thinking than goes on in modern Indo-European languages. Continue reading »

There are two sides to every story. Judges rightly admonish juries to check out both sides before coming to a conclusion. Our entire system of adversarial justice is built on this principle. But under surveillance by FBI in the 2001 anthrax mailings case, U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide. So only one side got to tell its version of the story.

Upon closing the case on February 19, 2010, FBI issued an Amerithrax Investigative Summary that concludes that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. The Summary contains serious errors as well as minor ones. It also omits crucial information. So, to ensure a fair outcome, we need to look at it through the eyes of a defense attorney, to make sure that the American people can check out both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion. Continue reading »