Hatuey and Hispaniola

I’m reading the book ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ and it reminded me of this quote by Hatuey (a Taino chief from Hispaniola during the genocide by the Spanish):
When he was tied to the stake, a Franciscan monk, a holy man, who
was there, spoke as much as he could to him, in the little [...]

Silvergate and the Armenian Genocide

It seems that Harvey Silvergate is trying to be controversial:
At issue this time is a lawsuit he filed in 2005 that claims state education officials violated the First Amendment by removing material from a human-rights curriculum questioning whether the mass killings in the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1918 constituted genocide. (He filed the lawsuit on behalf [...]

The Antikythera Device and a Bit of Math

Via this article in the NY Times, I went to an article in Natureabout new information about the Antikythera device. The Antikythera device is a clockwork mechanism found in 1901 off Antikythera, Greece that was made somewhere around 100 BC. It was a very elaborate device that it worked on the Metonic calender (a 19 [...]

George Orwell’s Diary

The George Orwell Prize is putting up George Orwell’s diary (I expected someone else’s) online. They will put up each of the entries 70 years after it was written and the first one is today. It’s an eye opener:
Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, [...]

Pirates and Democracy

The Boston Globe has an article about pirates and it seems they weren’t too bad:
The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government [...]

William H. Stewart

I’m a little slow to post this, but I wanted to pay tribute to Mr. Stewart who was Surgeon General under President Johnson. He did two very important things in this position: he spoke out and pushed for tougher warning messages about smoking (his predecessor Luther Terry was SG when the landmark report showing the [...]

Change

There’s something a bit different about this election. Let’s see if you can guess what I find different.

Fred Thompson

Hmm, I seem to be getting some Fred Thompson supporters stopping by. I might as well note why I don’t like him much (besides being much too conservative), he was a mole during the Watergate hearings:
On July 13, 1973, Armstrong, the Democratic staffer, asked Butterfield a series of questions during a private session that led up [...]

Crazy Conservatives

Here are a few posts via Sadly, No! As usual, they do a better job but I have a bit to add:

Grant Swank (via here) believes that evolution is a religion and is all about faith. He latches onto the word ‘theory’ (showing how little he knows about science):

But when it comes to evolution, the adherents [...]

Malcom Nance To Testify To House

Malcom Nance has been invited to speak to the House about waterboarding and torture (I linked to him here–somehow getting his name wrong). It should be interesting to see if any of the House Republicans try to argue with him (or, as TPM notes conservative bloggers have, questions his service record). It would be even [...]

He Says Waterboarding Is Torture

Malcom Nance:
Malcolm W. Nance is a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies. A 20-year veteran of the US intelligence community’s Combating Terrorism program and a six year veteran of the Global War on Terrorism he has extensive field and combat experience as an field intelligence [...]

Spanish Martyrs

On October 28, the Vatican beatified 498 Spanish martyrs who were killed during or before the Spanish civil war (the war was from 1936-1939 while the killing of Catholics, up to 7000 were killed, started in 1931 and were used by Franco as a reason to rebell). Many people are upset that the church is only honoring [...]

Turkey and Kurds

Turkey warplanes attacked Kurds near the Iraq border today (there are conflicting reports of whether the planes crossed over into Iraq) . This isn’t surprising since Turkey claims that 42 of its troops have been killed (and perhaps 8 have been taken prisoner) by Kurdish terrorists in the past month which has lead to large protests [...]

History and Genocide

I’m going to revisit a couple things as I look at this story about revisionism in Japanese history books. The question is why we should worry about what happened in the past:

In this post, I say that Congress should pass the resolution about the Armenian genocide even though Turkey is against it.  Why should we [...]

Turkey and Armenian Genocide

I mostly agree with John Cole in this post, but not about the timing of the resolution. This might be true:
But no dispassionate observer could avoid the conclusion that the Congressional vote condemning Turkey came at a most inopportune time for US-Turkish diplomacy, at a time when Turks were already raw from watching the US [...]

Genocide and America

I didn’t think anyone could be stupid enough to say slavery wasn’t a big deal or that the treatment of native-Americans didn’t constitute genocide, but Michael Medved does both and in 7 days no less. See Sadly No! (or Clif ) for more and for the links-I refuse to link to this junk.
Let me look at [...]

Metacom’s War and 9/11

In general I like Susan Faludi and this article has some interesting points, but it misses a big one: in 9/11 the US was attacked while during Metacomet’s war the the English were the invaders.  Here’s an excerpt:
The assault on Lancaster came several months into King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion, for those who prefer [...]

Iraq, Iran, and Vietnam

Let me go back to the President’s comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. 
First, Larry Beinhart at Hufffington Post does a better job than I did at explaing why it doesn’t make any sense:
1. Part of the holocaust in Cambodia is directly attributable to American bombing. The 750,000 dead. (Comparable to the number of Iraqis killed by American [...]

Civil Unions

Hmm, this is interesting (even though it’s not about space):
For example, in late medieval France, the term affrèrement — roughly translated as brotherment — was used to refer to a certain type of legal contract, which also existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe. These documents provided the foundation for non-nuclear households of many types and shared many [...]

Islamic Spain

This (Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain)
sounds like an interesting and timely story.  It would be nice if we could figure out how different cultures could coexist.
Update: I should have noted that the show has its premier tonight at 9 in many places but in my neck of the woods (Boston area) [...]