Category: Historical Events

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Global- 30 years after Rwanda genocide

An estimated 800,000 Tutsi were killed by extremist Hutu in massacres that lasted over 100 days in 1994. Some moderate Hutu who tried to protect members of the Tutsi minority also were targeted and killed.

Romeo Dallaire, in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block, told host Mercedes Stephenson he remains concerned about the continued presence of the genocide’s perpetrators and masterminds in Africa and around the world — including in Canada — who have not been brought to justice.

Inconvenient History

Given the West’s nearly exclusive focus on the trans-Atlantic slave trade these days, slavery in the muslim world, which predated the Western experience by hundreds of years, doesn’t get much attention. But that was the reality for every society until the development of the division of labor and industrial capitalism.

“This Trans-Saharan Slave Trade is easily overlooked thanks to its more famous Atlantic cousin, but the exchange of unfree people across the desert was a longer lasting and possibly larger system that deserves much ore attention.”

Another inconvenient truth was that the slave trade could not have existed without the cooperation of African kingdoms which viewed peripheral tribes as fair game.

 

Up From The Memory Hole

KONSTANTIN KISIN- The Truth About Vladimir Lenin a Century After His Death

Vladimir Lenin massacred more than 1 million people for political or religious reasons, murdered up to 700,000 in the genocide of the Cossacks, more than 15,000 peasants in the Tambov rebellion, over 3,000 sailors and civilians in the Kronstadt rebellion, thousands of workers who dared to strike or could not work, almost 2 million who died in the Gulag concentration camps and upwards of 8 million from famine and disease.

“… an official from NASA called me up”

Roger Pielke Jr.;

“Mathiness” is a term coined by economist Paul Romer, who characterized it as a style that “lets academic politics masquerade as science.” […]

Mathiness is the academic’s truthiness. Math makes research seem serious and science-like. For many consumers of research, math creates a barrier of technical sophistication that prevents the evaluation of truth-claims. When that happens, mathiness provides an aura of authority that says, “trust us, not them.”

In my UCLA talk, I opened by sharing that more than thirty years ago NASA called me up and asked me to retract my Master’s thesis, which was a comprehensive policy evaluation of the Space Shuttle program.

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