Opening the evidence
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The original book was first published in 1865; LSD was first synthesized in 1938, 73 calendar years later. This checks the statement about the original book, not later psychedelic interpretations. Rick replied, “Um, I don’t know.” Joe did not say that Carroll wrote the book while taking LSD.
The New Testament itself does not name six messiahs killed by Rome. Acts 5:36-37 names only two failed rebel leaders, Theudas and Judas the Galilean, both of whom were killed. The fuller list of about six messianic claimants executed by Rome, figures like Simon of Peraea, Athronges, and the Egyptian, comes from the historian Josephus, not from the New Testament.
Xerox PARC did have real machine translation and computational linguistics research starting in the 1970s, led by pioneer Martin Kay who joined in 1974 and helped form the Language Understander project there. But that work was software and theory aimed at helping humans translate written text, sometimes called a translator's assistant, not a hardware device built for simultaneous, real time spoken translation, which was far beyond the speech technology of that decade.
Literacy in the Roman Empire was low overall, historians estimate somewhere around 5 to 15 percent, but that low rate applied broadly across the population, not to pagans specifically. The Roman upper class, senators, philosophers, and writers like Cicero and Tacitus, were pagan and highly literate, with a whole tiered education system built to train them in reading and rhetoric centuries before Christianity existed. Saying pagans as a group were not literate gets the picture backwards.
The Mahdist forces did win major victories against Egyptian armies that had machine guns and artillery, most notably wiping out Hicks Pasha's expedition at the Battle of Shaykan in 1883, where about 7,000 Egyptian troops were killed. But the Mahdists were not armed with sticks and stones, they fought with rifles captured in earlier battles along with swords and spears, and Hicks's force was Egyptian led by a British officer rather than a true combined British-Egyptian army. At the later Battle of Omdurman in 1898, machine guns under Kitchener devastated the Mahdists, so the claim only holds for the earlier fights and overstates how primitive their weapons were.
All four Sunni legal schools and Shia jurisprudence classically hold that apostasy is punishable by death, so the claim reflects the traditional, majority legal position accurately. But stating it as simply how Islam works skips over real diversity today, many modern scholars reject the death penalty for apostasy, groups like the Ahmadiyya explicitly reject any earthly punishment, and most Muslim majority countries do not legally enforce execution for leaving the faith.
This understates the actual gap by about half. Mainstream biblical scholarship dates the Gospel of Mark to around 70 CE, tied to its reference to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple during the Roman Jewish War, which puts it roughly 40 years after Jesus's traditionally dated death around 30 CE, not 20 years.
It is true that written Japanese combines two syllabaries, kanji borrowed from Chinese, and the Roman alphabet, and this combination is often called one of the world's most complex writing systems in casual and popular sources. But calling it definitively the single most complicated system in the world overstates the case, since linguists don't have an agreed way to rank writing systems by difficulty and other complex scripts have their own strong claims. The facts about the four systems are accurate, the superlative ranking is opinion dressed up as settled fact.
There really is a long gap between the disappearance of Harappan writing and the appearance of Brahmi script in India, but tying its reemergence specifically to Alexander the Great's invasion misstates the evidence. Historians point instead to contact with the Persian Achaemenid empire in the 6th century BCE, a century or more before Alexander arrived, plus indirect evidence of earlier literacy such as Panini's grammar, and some Brahmi inscriptions may predate Alexander entirely. Alexander's expedition gets mentioned in sources mainly because Greek writers who traveled with him recorded seeing Indian writing already in use, not because he brought writing back to India.
This is also Stark's thesis, that Christian charity during plagues in 165 and 251 CE lowered Christian death rates compared to pagans. It is a plausible and influential idea, and later computer modeling found it consistent with theory, but there is no direct ancient mortality data proving Christians actually survived plagues at higher rates, and some ancient Christian writers themselves undercut the picture. Stating it as a plain fact rather than a debated hypothesis overstates what is actually known.
Chile did have one of the more stable and long-running democracies in Latin America before the 1973 coup, so there is real substance here. But calling it flatly the most democratic country in South America overstates it, since Uruguay is widely regarded as having the longest continuous democratic tradition in the region and is often given that title instead of Chile.
There is no language actually named Fawi or Faui, but Indonesian Papua really does have unusually tonal languages in the Lakes Plain family. The closest match, Iau, is described as having 8 core phonemic tones and 11 tone patterns on nouns, and the similarly named Foau language spoken in Fuau village has 8 tone melodies, not 12. So the general idea, a New Guinea language with a huge number of tones, checks out, but the specific name and the number 12 do not match any documented language.
There is no language actually called Foray. The name almost certainly points to Fore, pronounced FOR-ay, the very first New Guinea language Jared Diamond learned by his own account. Papua New Guinea highland languages do have real documented systems where the verb for existence or being changes based on the noun class of the subject, including animacy, for example Enga and Kuman, but these systems usually involve several verb categories sorted by shape, posture and state rather than a simple two way animate versus inanimate split, and none of the sources checked confirm this specific two verb animals versus objects setup for Fore or its close relative Foi. So the general idea has real linguistic roots but the specific claim as stated does not match documented grammars.
It is true that ordinary boiling does not reliably destroy prions, and that is a real problem for sterilizing surgical tools. But the 900 degree Fahrenheit figure is far too high. CDC and WHO guidance calls for autoclaving at 121 to 134 degrees Celsius, about 250 to 273 degrees Fahrenheit, usually combined with a sodium hydroxide or bleach pretreatment, not temperatures anywhere near 900 degrees.
This is true for hadith collections but not for the Quran. The Quran, which Muslims regard as containing Muhammad's revealed teachings, was substantially compiled into a standard written text within about 20 to 25 years of his death under Caliph Uthman. It took roughly two centuries for the hadith, the separate reports of Muhammad's sayings and actions, to be gathered into major written collections like Sahih Bukhari, so the two century figure only fits part of the picture.
The core idea, that Italy used schools and a national army to build a shared national identity after unification, matches real history and the famous line attributed to Massimo d'Azeglio about needing to 'make Italians.' But the unification date is wrong: the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, not 1862, and full unification wasn't completed until Rome was taken in 1870.
This gets the Italian love vocabulary backwards and invents a word that does not exist. 'Amo' or 'ti amo' is the romantic, passionate form of love used for a partner or spouse, while friendly or family love is expressed with 'ti voglio bene,' built from the verb 'volere,' not any word resembling 'voyen.'
The Secret History of the Mongols was not rediscovered in the early 1960s by Joe Fletcher. A Russian monk, Archimandrite Palladius, found an abridged copy and translated it in 1866, and later scholars including Paul Pelliot, Erich Haenisch, Francis Cleaves, and Igor de Rachewiltz did the major reconstruction and translation work over the following century. No historical account ties the text's rediscovery to Joe Fletcher or to the 1960s specifically.
Describing any writing system as the 'best' is a subjective value judgment rather than an empirical fact. While Hangul is praised by many linguists for its logical structure and phonetic efficiency, 'best' depends on the specific linguistic needs and criteria of the user.
This is sociologist Rodney Stark's well known argument from The Rise of Christianity, and it rests on real facts, early Christians did reject abortion and infanticide and gave women more standing than the Greco-Roman norm. But the claim is presented as settled history when it is actually one scholar's model built on rough population estimates, not hard census data from antiquity, and other historians have pushed back on how much weight it can bear.
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