For €40, it was a steal: the opportunity to see the world’s first open-air amphitheatre, with ruined columns, stone steps and statues tucked into a hill in the north-eastern Italian countryside.
But tourists found themselves short-changed when the artefact was revealed to not have been built before 393AD, but in the early 2000s.
Now, Franco Malosso von Rosenfranz, the curator of the Berico Maritime Amphitheatre near the north-eastern city of Vicenza, has been jailed after he levelled a hill, built the fake archaeological site on top and charged tourists €40 (£35) to visit the site.
The entire thing a fake, “fiberglass, papier-mâché, or similar elements”.
Which is very fun, obviously. But this is Italy. The surprise is someone trying this so far north. If it was around Naples – say, and for example – it would be thought of as local boy doing well against the outside world.
Then again, given what they’ve already got around Naples as real stuff they’d not bother but that’s a different point.
As Officer Crabtree said in ‘Allo ‘Allo
“See Niples and do.”
Or the Welsh travel advice, “see Naples, Dai”
The really sad bit is that if you look where Vicenze is located, with a bit of effort he could *easily* have made something decent, market it as a functioning replica for functions and events, and made mint…
Just goes to show that “entrepeneur” does not equate to “businessman”….
That presupposes he’d get planning permission. I can’t believe that’s any easier in the EU-strangled Italy than here!
Italy… known for rigid adherence to EU dictats, strict adherence to the rule of Law, where organised crime and
corruption“enticement of local officials” is nonexistent, where…..*That* Italy?
Meanwhile, and OT, here’s another one of those inexplicable things that Theophrastus and one or two others regularly inform us are merely in the fevered imaginations of the ‘conspiracy theorists’ which does actually turn out to be the result of a conspiracy.
The odd thing is that these message were leaked years ago, and have been in the public domain – though not published much by the media – ever since.
In short: they knew all along that it was a lab leak, but conspired to hide this from the public, the conspiracy additionally involving the Biden administration in all-but ordering Twitter and Facebook and doubtless others eg LinkedIn to kick anyone who tried to talk about the lab leak off their platforms as ‘conspiracy theorists’.
As I say, we have known all this for years, just as we know about Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance development of the Covid virus in the Wuhan lab with money illegally channelled by Anthony Fauci from the US DOD Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 2104, which is very likely to be why (as per my mention of this a day or two ago) Biden gave Fauci a blanket pardon for everything he’d done since he signed the paperwork for that particular grant.
The oddness doesn’t end here though.
Why is the Telegraph running this story now, when it certainly knew all this four years ago?
At the time, the country and indeed the world was gripped by an almost completely bogus terror, and a (far more) definitive understanding of where the thing came from would have been a huge story.
The media was the dog that did not bark.
It seems very likely to me that someone or some group wanted the TV and newspapers to toe a certain line – perhaps related to the close to $1trillion that was about to be dished out on vaccines that didn’t work and undoubtedly killed and maimed an unknown number of people.
Could this all be what they apparently call a ‘limited hangout’ ahead of Fauci’s forthcoming testimony?
By the way, I’m pretty sure ivermectin (or the worldwide disparagement of it as a treatment in relation to Covid) is a major key to unlocking a lot of this.
The thing is, newspapers and TV were always going to take this line because their trade is doom, because also, that’s what grabs the attention of viewers. “12 children die in school shooting” is a terrible event, but in terms of threats to your kids, going swimming is more likely to kill them. The media didn’t talk about the average age of the people dying.
So you also got feedback loops going. The media fed a panic, which the public soaked up, and wanted the politicians to do things, so the politicians did. We don’t elect great leaders, we elect people who tell us what we want to hear. They had daily press conferences to keep the press off their back, which created a loop. It’s why Boris was having a party and Matt Hancock was snogging some bird. They knew it was bollocks. And anyone who looked at the stats and saw who was dying knew it was bollocks.
And that’s why jabbing teenagers and closing schools was criminal.
I don’t think closing schools mattered, but I think the last 4 years of school are generally a waste of time. Losing a year isn’t going to matter.
But how many people took even 1 hour out of their day to read the official statistics? They were online, easy to read. News is bad for you, because they will always say “lots of people dying of Covid” rather than “unless you are over 80, not much to worry about”.
Closing schools was fucking terrible – criminal, as Norman says.
I agree that they’re not much use for education these days, but they do help to socialise children.
It was bad for teenagers, but awful for young kids and their social and intellectual development.
Asa for the stats, few people read them which is the other criminal element of this – the media were under a fiduciary duty to their customers to give them straight facts, as were the government to their voters, and they failed for reasons that are extremely hard to discern.
Not the schooling; the enforced isolation, lack of socialisation, and online madness. You can see the consequences in child and teenage behaviour everywhere.
And then the jabs that don’t prevent you from getting and transmitting the disease being administered to the young, like my daughter, who was obliged by med school to have them.
Precisely.
A friend of ours is an experienced primary school teacher.
The behavioural problems they are seeing in the cohort of young children who were locked in their houses for all those months, when they should have been meeting new children and learning how to socialise and be socialised in reception/year one of school are, she says, terrible, and widespread, and well-known (and entirely unsurprising).
Sounds like your friend may not have been implicated, but the teachers’ unions bear some of the heaviest responsibility for pushing Fat Blair into lockdown.
100% (she wasn’t but they do)
Well, that aspect, yes. But I’m not sure it is the cause of teenage behaviour problems, so much that the kids don’t have Dads to give them a beating and various incentives.
And well, of course med school will insist on it. Doctors, med schools are clients of the state. You’d like to think that doctors are men and women of science, but when the state pays the bills, you become state-aligned.
The one benefit of the jab was that it reassured people, got them out of the lockdown panic. It wasn’t exactly a placebo, but people who can’t be bothered looking at the stats are also not going to be bothered about the details of a medicine.
“The one benefit of the jab was that it reassured people, got them out of the lockdown panic. It wasn’t exactly a placebo, but people who can’t be bothered looking at the stats are also not going to be bothered about the details of a medicine.”
Yup. It shouldn’t have been needed, but that would have needed us to have politicians and journalists who were willing to admit the truth. We didn’t, so we’d got trapped in a cycle of lockdowns, and the jab was their only way out of it.
But it’s not just the politicians’ and journalists’ fault. As BiS keeps pointing out, we weren’t prepared to rise up and slaughter them.
There’s a big difference between making some goo in the lab for a drug trial and mass manufacturing.
By some accounts, the mRNA in 30% of vials was so low the jab was basically a placebo.
So your daughter has a 9% chance of not having been vaccinated, Norman.
OTOH, some vials may have contained far too much, hence the vaccine injuries.
I told (asked) my kids to refuse the jabs but school and sports clubs insisted and they caved.
“I think the last 4 years of school are generally a waste of time.”
An awful lot hangs on that “generally”. Do you mean something like “for the dim and mediocre”?
“An awful lot hangs on that “generally”. Do you mean something like “for the dim and mediocre”?”
For the dim, yes, they’re a disaster.
For the bright, they’re a waste of time and probably harmful, because they can learn as much, and probably more, on their own.
It’s probably the mediocre who those final years in school might actually be useful for (or would be if they taught them anything useful)
What is generally useful after the age of 14? Not a lot. Specifics, sure. If you are going to work in medicine, you need biology beyond that age. If not, waste of time. There’s a level of French or German that is generally useful. Ordering coffee, asking for directions. Beyond that, waste of time unless you are going to get a degree and be a translator.
And anyone who is going to excel at something in life is going to have a passion for it, at which point school probably isn’t good enough. You need to get your hours in. 2 hours of teaching about filmmaking (say) isn’t going to make you Spielberg. And a Spielberg in the class is going to be utterly bored, because he already learned what a crash zoom and a dolly zoom are from a YouTube video.
It’s not even about being dim or bright. I failed a load of subjects because I thought they were a waste of time. I still think they’re a waste of time. I’m glad I spent my time fiddling around with home computers and not doing my homework translating Chaucer.
You don’t get chemistry and physics practicals on your own. I might have taught myself ‘A’ level Maths on my own but not Physics. Yes, I could have passed Latin, French and Elementary Maths ‘O’ levels at 13 – thanks to excellent teachers – but I *really* do not believe that I should learnt nearly as much overall if I had not gone to school from 13 to 17.
I mean how much French vocab, trig or Tudor history do most people use after they leave school?
Quite. I knew I’d never need matrix multiplication and I was right. You don’t need it to play “You Sexy Thing”.
Yes, newspapers and TV carry bad news, because it sells papers and grabs eyes.
But they also look for other angles, and they do cover good news too.
In the Covid context, ‘Fuck me, have you seen that they told us it didn’t come from a lab and all along they knew it had?’ would have sold a lot papers and grabbed a lot of eyeballs.
Yes, but they don’t make slow, boring, steady good news, like Africa getting richer. GDP of Africa has been rising at 10% per annum. How do you reflect that in today’s news? Today, Africa was 0.03% richer than yesterday (pedants, yes, I know compounding).
Same with bad news. A motorway pile-up killing 20 people will make the news. The constant background noise of people dying on country roads doesn’t. It’s 1-5 people per day.
It’s all about spikes. Someone saying “actually, it’s a few old people, nothing to worry about if you are young” is like Kryptonite to a news team. They write stories, and when we refer to fictional stories, we don’t read about accountants in Basildon.
But as I say, this was not slow, boring, steady good news – this was a spike.
‘Governments and scientists are provably lying about what caused the greatest news story since WWII, and here are the receipts – what else are they lying about?’ is a fucking enormous story.
It’s an actual conspiracy, exposed.
By contrast, roughly the same number of people dying every day, month after month after month, had become boring, and yet the repetitive boring nature of it didn’t stop them.
Except that it doesn’t.
To take the four biggest newspapers in their respective markets, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, and The Telegraph titles have all kept their ABC circulations private since the start of 2020. The Guardian joined them in September 2021).
Their last published figures for four or those were:
The Sun 1,210,915 (March 2020)
The Times 365,880 (March 2020)
Telegraph 317,817 (December 2019)
The Guardian 105,134 (July 2021).
Press Gazette’s ball-park estimates for late 2025, assuming decline in line with the rest of the industry, put
The Sun around 550,000
The Times around 140,000
The Telegraph around 150,000
The Guardian around 60,000.
So they have roughly halved since 2020.
The Daily Mail is the only one with a continuous audited record. It sold
1,13m in Feb 2020, and its sales have collapsed since then (619,480 last year).
TV news – Ofcom’s News Consumption Survey (% of UK adults using each source for news) – shows the BBC declining from 58% in 2019 to 41% in 2025, with the biggest drop (12% happening 2020-2023).
ITN is down from 40% to 25%.
I understand that correlation is not causation, and that there are many reasons not to involve yourself with the news, but whatever they were doing around Covid it did not grow eyeballs and readers.
It is, meanwhile, no coincidence, as others have noted, that the government funds the newspapers now to a significant extent.
And he who pays the piper calls the tune.
So who pays the government to call that tune? 🙂
The decline in newspapers and TV is more related to the massive growth in channels.
Says you.
The print media were being paid by the government in the form of huge scaremongering adverts.
It was the only thing keeping the newspapers alive. They had to maintain the fiction.
Beyond Covid, government spending on the old media has increased massively with nannying ads. Everyone is going to have their content changed based on who pays them.
A lab leak was always the most Okham-friendly theory simply because lab leaks happen. A bunch of “scientists” then jumped up to say, on no evidence at all, that a leak certainly hadn’t happened and set off the cunt-bullshit klaxon. Why? Because as you say it turned out that Fauci, Daszak and and that other cunt had been paying the Chinks to do stuff which is unlawful in the USA. Mmm.
One of the many, many “official” actions which persuaded me, someone at first quite prepared to accept a dangerous pandemic was brewing, to become extremely sceptical when faced with this absurd posturing.
See also: AGW.
What I don’t understand is why the rest of the world is so quiet. I can see the US establishment closing ranks to cover each others’ backs. If the lab leak theory has something to it why haven’t (for example) German scientists been piping up?
The assumption might be that the EU etc have similar arrangements to get around similar restrictions. I’ve not seen much evidence for that though.
Some are piping up. See the German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, who set up a committee to investigate Covid and was then arrested and jailed, and his German law licence revoked, on what seem to be quite thin charges of embezzlement.
Over here Matt Ridley has been very good on this; so have Tess Lawrie and many others.
But in general terms I suppose the conspiracy theorist’s answer of choice would be: this was global – which, to be fair, you can certainly see in the objectively mad but spookily lockstep nature of governmental responses across developed nations.
We are led by ‘anywheres’, rather than ‘somewheres’, are we not.
Starmer famously said he would choose Davos over Westminster – unusually open, but I suspect not that unusual.
They have almost all happily ceded almost all power to the EU, and the international rules-based order. People express concern that we may be heading for a one world government, when in fact we’re arguably almost there.
US AID was one of the many means of channelling US government funds to quiescent scientists; the WHO was another, the WEF yet another.
Perhaps Trump’s actions in respect of these and other organisations are weakening something?
AGW is a conspiracy between some businesses, politicians, media and scientists.
Politicians – get to be able to tax you more “we need to run things”
Businessses – get contracts from government (more solar panels, more batteries)
Media – “Gotterdamarung is coming” sells better than Lomborg’s “eh, not that big a deal”.
Scientists – go along with working on climate science because they want to eat
I’ve been looking into all these “record temperature” stories and none of them pass a test for solid science.
The hottest ever temperature in the UK is in Lincolnshire, and absolutely no-one says “wait, WTF?”. You just have to look at the UK weather map, or where cider gets produced to be a little suspicious of that. Then you discover that it’s at an RAF base, and finally you read a WUWT piece:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/28/exclusive-three-typhoon-jets-landed-next-to-measuring-device-when-britains-record-temperature-of-40-3c-was-recorded/
There was a display going on, and a 0.6 degree spike for a short time and it dropped after, at about the same time that 3 Typhoon jets landed.
The Met Office call their classification of this being a record as a “rigorous process”. I call bullshit on this. Absolutely no-one with a scientific mind would look at “temperature spike” and “Typhoons landing” and not be curious about a connection.
Further, as WUWT and CliScep have pointed out, many of the Met Office’s weather recording stations are now classified as ‘junk’, either Class 4 (with an error of ±3°C) or Class 5 (with an error of ±5°C). And the new electronic thermometers can record temperature spikes as short as 30 seconds, which would have been ‘smeared’ out by the old mercury technology. It’s not statistically challenging to model a noisy system and see what happens if you increase the sampling frequency by an order of magnitude or so – surprise, surprise, new ‘record’ levels appear.
Good points. It’s really hard to trust any of this stuff.
Personally, I would be glad to donate to a project to put a high standard weather station in an empty field near Kew, Heathrow, Conigsby. Sat in the middle of a field, close by but not near a giant heated greenhouse, or on any regular flight path, and compare.
The top 10 temperatures are:-
Conigsby (2022) – RAF base
Cambridge (2019) – Class 5
Faversham (2003). Class 4
Pitsford, Northamptonshire (2022). Class 4.
Heahrow (2020) – airfield
Lingwood – Class 5, surrounded by trees and hedges
Cheltenham (1990). Too early for AGW
Raunds (1911). Too early for AGW
Heathrow (2015). airfield
Merryfield (2026) – Military airfield
Worcester (1990). Too early for AGW
Wisley (2026) – Class 4
Wisley is fascinating because there were 2 stations around 100m apart from 2018 to 2021, with variations as much as 0.9 degrees.
Come on Interested. You know what happened at the time. Anyone who bucked the pardigm risked losing their job or their standing. People were pilloried for contradicting the paradigm on social media. As always it was about incentives. Certain powerful individuals had taken control of the dialogue & anyone who strayed from it was attacked. There were powerful incentives to go along with it & powerful disincentives to not do so. This really doesn’t require a conspiracy. It doesn’t now. They can only lose by revealing the truth
I don’t disagree.
One of the greatest tricks that powerful people have played on the rest of us is in forcing us to tap dance on the heads of pins as to the definition of the word ‘conspiracy’.
You say above that powerful individuals took control of the dialogue, and attacked anyone who strayed and while creating powerful incentives to go along with it.
I completely agree that this is what happened.
We can’t say who these powerful individuals were, or are, nor what the incentives and punishments were, and this is why it fits many people’s definition of a conspiracy – unknown powerful people doing in secret an obviously bad thing for reasons we cannot discern using powers and bribes that we cannot quite name.
But whether we call it a conspiracy or not – why was it done?
Why would the Daily Telegraph lose – and what would it lose – by publishing this story, which was well known, in 2021?
Why would governments want to lock us all down and give us these new treatments?
Why would they lie about their effects?
(For example, the failure of the jabs to prevent transmission was known from the very start – they were never even designed, nor intended, nor tested for this property by any of the manufacturers. So why did governments around the world say, in lockstep, that you had to get the jabs to ‘Save Granny?’ Why was it almost a criminal offence to point out that this was nonsense?)
Why would they further damage our economies in the pursuit of all of this?
Many, many questions remain.
Can you name any remotely similar story in which a given narrative was pushed across almost the entire world, and so ruthlessly suppressed?
Even war fighting was covered more fairly, accurately, and transparently – you got more truth out of Afghan than out of the Department of Health.
Because, as Western Bloke said, above,
Politicians and the media had all insisted on a lockdown which they knew were unnecessary (or should have known, if they had half a brain and looked at the date). So we’d got trapped in a spiral of ever-harsher lockdowns, and they couldn’t stop them without admitting that they’d been a complete waste of people’s lives and resources right from the start.
The jabs allowed them to get out of that without admitting error – the jabs allowed them to say that we were safe now, the lockdowns had been needed but no longer were.
That’s partly why they were so oppressive to anyone who suggested the jabs didn’t work – it shook that whole edifice. If the jabs don’t work, they’re back into having to say either that lockdowns must continue or that they had never been necessary.
@ BiSD
To be strictly accurate, that wasn’t a response to my question as to why they lied about their effects – I think it was a general catch-all explanation for the jabs. He said:
But that’s trivial.
This is just a different conspiracy theory; I’m not averse to these, but this one requires us to ignore the fact that the jabs were in development in January 2020, within days of the genome being published, and before most people had even heard of the virus, and two months before the WHO declared it a global pandemic.
In which light it looks far more like the pandemic was the selling tool for the jabs – half a trillion dollars or more at stake, remember – than the jabs were the tool to end lockdowns.
For the latter to be correct, we need to believe that:
1) the US government funded the development of virus (which it did, in secret)
2) then brought in lockdowns against all previous policy and while ignoring evidence (which it did, in secret) from eg Jay Bhattacharya which showed most people had already had the virus
3) then somehow realised the lockdowns were pointless because it became obvious, as it did to everyone, that the virus was unstoppable, and (as above) most people had already had it, and anyway only a small number of people were vulnerable
4) but decided to keep the lockdowns going for literally years, and bankrupt the world economy, as well as pay out hundreds of billions for jabs which, at best, didn’t work and, at worst, killed and maimed an unknown number of recipients, as opposed to just saying, ‘Actually we’ve overreacted here, look at the stats guys’ and sacking some senior scapegoats eg Fauci. They got away with 2008 and twenty years in Iraq (and arguably Afghan) without losing too many senior scalps, but they couldn’t get out of this??
5) all the while stamping down extremely hard on anyone who said that the lockdowns didn’t work and were not necessary
6) precisely because the virus wasn’t too serious
7) while all the time also stamping down on an extremely cheap (and very safe even if ineffective) treatment that they could have used to offer the same reassurance – if people were prepared to accept a brand new injection to end lockdowns I see no reason why they wouldn’t have accepted a repurposed and sexied-up pill? – or just having the pharmaceutical companies produce a genuinely harmless jab akin to a placebo.
I yield to almost no-one in my belief that governments are stupid – I find myself arguing, though, that they are not that stupid.
1) the US government funded the development of virus (which it did, in secret)
That’s the one line of what you’ve written I don’t agree with.
The US government knew nothing whatsoever about it. A very few individuals funded by the US government did. They were the very few that knew what was going on.
I doubt if there was any malice in their intentions. If they bent a few rules they thought it was in a good cause. It got done what they thought needed doing. Problem with experts, isn’t it? They think they’re experts.
Which is my response to a recent accusation by Steve. I really don’t have much confidence in experts.
But the US government did fund it.
The fact that some people in the US government didn’t know while others did is pretty irrelevant.
I reckon you could make the same point about all government funding of everything everywhere.
I doubt if there was any malice in their intentions.
Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t. I tend to the other view but who knows.
Yeah, but announcing that only the vulnerable needed jabs would have had the same reassuring effect and brought everything back to normal much more quickly and cheaply. Why did they insist on jabbing everyone, including children?
Yes. 40,000 care workers lost their jobs or resigned because they didn’t want to be shot up with shit.
They have been replaced by the care visa pathway, and each “care worker” has been accompanied by up to 16 dependants.
How you can care for lots of dependants on a care worker salary is a mystery, until you learn that it’s the taxpayer paying for about 60,000 of them.
I am curious to know how the fraud lasted so long. Did archaeologists just snigger about it and not tell anyone?
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Historical sights are mostly about what’s beautiful and awe-inspiring, which is why lots of people go to Stonehenge and not to the Rollright Stones, even though Stonehenge was reconstructed in 1901. Stonehenge before that looked a bit shit.
History beyond about 150 years ago doesn’t really matter. It might be interesting, but it’s not like this bloke was putting sawdust in bread.
The fraud probably lasted so long because EU funds were involved. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
“History beyond about 150 years ago doesn’t really matter.”
I don’t quite agree…
If it’s about direct applicability and influence on Daily Life™ , you have a point.
But history in and of itself can teach a *lot* of things, including the Undesireability of trying to re-invent certain wheels, or the fact that people 500, 1000, even 1500+ years ago were *essentially* the same, even though the societies they lived in differed greatly from ours.
Sometimes with a certain sense of grim humor, like, off the top of my head…, a cuneiform tablet cursing the “Youth” defiling the backyard of some old geezer disturbing his peace and Quiet…
( “Get Off My Lawn” wasn’t invented by whoever wrote the text for Clint Eastwood, it seems…)
History is not just about Warlords and Musclehead Nobles waging wars… It’s about *people* , and how they dealt with shyte thrown their way by Real Life™, often with far fewer resources than we have..
Might be a lesson or two in there for peeps who care to listen….
edit, @ CodeMonkey : formatting text using the menu *after* you first posted also triggers the “Invalid Email” response.
Triggered in my case, by tring to put “quote” on the first sentence.
But history in and of itself can teach a *lot* of things, including the Undesireability of trying to re-invent certain wheels, or the fact that people 500, 1000, even 1500+ years ago were *essentially* the same, even though the societies they lived in differed greatly from ours.
“essentially the same” is a good point
History is not just about Warlords and Musclehead Nobles waging wars… It’s about *people* , and how they dealt with shyte thrown their way by Real Life™, often with far fewer resources than we have..
Might be a lesson or two in there for peeps who care to listen….
The problem with anything from over 150 years ago is that technology changes the incentives. And any lessons learned for today can be learned from the past 150 years.
History is not just about Warlords and Musclehead Nobles waging wars… It’s about *people* , and how they dealt with shyte thrown their way by Real Life™, often with far fewer resources than we have..
Worth knowing with a government determined to drive you back to the level of subsistence farming. Your history has also become your future.