Scientia Press

There’s no shortage of candidates for the cause of the mass extinctions of prehistory. But experts have found flaws in every one.

America’s history contains two outstanding wrongs committed against groups of us:  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 »

Here are the judge’s March 16, 2020 Order and Memorandum opinion giving his final ruling.

Of the documents, the first set 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 »

The famous Snake Goddess of ancient Crete has long attracted students of history and art. Elegant, risquée, enigmatic, she embodies the mystery and allure of Minoan civilization. Continue reading »

Immanuel Velikovsky argued famously, based on his interpretation of ancient sources, that Venus had emerged from Jupiter as a comet, interacted with the Earth and Mars in the second and first millennia B.C., and then finally settled into a nearly circular orbit of the Sun.

There are good reasons to think that Earth has turned over on various occasions.  But who can be surprised that this notion—so removed from everyday experience and common sense—seems less than instantaneously persuasive?

The good reasons include telling evidence in narrative testimony and correctly interpreted myths of the ancients, embedded patterns in ancient cultures that give evidence of inversions, and the insights and arguments of two formidable researchers.  Now we can 1) add new reasons that strengthen the case; 2) specify the approximate dates of four inversions; 3) comprehend that Earth is actually prone to inversion; and 4) point to where to find more evidence.  We can also see that understanding inversions not only helps us correct errors in interpreting past planetary and Earth science but also provides clues relevant to climate change. Continue reading »

New evidence and interpretation at the intersection of astronomy and religion can help us better understand the history of the Ancient Near East and of the origins of Islam.

In recent years, a revised and enhanced version of Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory that the planet Venus first entered the inner solar system as a comet with a bifurcated tail around 1500 B.C. (new evidence indicates shortly before 2500 B.C.) has found plentiful substantiation.  Now we have a much better explanation of the origin of Venus (it was pulled from the outer solar system by Jupiter’s gravity and, via tidal heating, became a comet with a long tail, €”overcoming the leading objection to Velikovsky’s theory).  Venus interacted with the Earth on a 52-year cycle during the Late Bronze Age, causing catastrophes worldwide.  And we now have a framework theory of the terrestrial planets into which these phenomena neatly fit and for which there is much telling evidence.  For Comet Venus, there is also newly interpreted, compelling iconographic and linguistic evidence.  The names of both Athena (A Fena, the Phoenician) and Poseidon (Bos eidon, the Bull of Heaven), for instance, referred to the double-tailed Venus.

So we can ask, with new-found confidence that the Ancients and Velikovsky were right about Venus, how can we use this to better decipher aspects of the culture of the Ancient Near East and of the background of Islam?

Continue reading »

When Venus first appeared in the skies shortly before 2500 B.C., ancient peoples worldwide strove to come to terms with this brilliant and awesome new comet-planet (the best account is in Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, though it needs some revision).  That meant assigning the deity a gender and a name.

In the Near East, they tried both genders.  In its masculine incarnation, Venus became the Bull of Heaven (as Velikovsky pointed out, the comet-planet’s body blocked the sun’s rays from the central portion of its tail and thus it was seen as having two horns).  In its feminine version, Venus was called Ishtar or Astarte; and in the Levant Astarte was depicted with serpents in her hands—the twin tails of the comet.

In Greece, according to Velikovsky, planet Venus was originally named Athena. Continue reading »

Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) was a noted historian, polymath, and theorist of the evolution of civilizations.

Born and raised in Boston, Quigley planned to pursue a career in biochemistry. But he soon shifted to history, to which he brought an analytical, scientific approach and a questing spirit. After receiving a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in history from Harvard University,1 he taught at Princeton and Harvard. In 1941 Quigley joined the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he came to teach a highly regarded course, “Development of Civilization”. Continue reading »