Clipmarks | Kore7's 'history' clips

Bush Seeks Answers for Own Presidency

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:56:56 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: For all the talk of his clueless-ness, it's revealed that Bush, the former apotheosis of privileged irresponsibility, is desperately aware of the fateful legacy he has wrought, seeking vindication in unwritten future histories. Yet, for reasons deeply personal (not political) Bush cannot allow himself to own up to his mistakes, for fear the entire facade of capability will come down. Thus, as he shuts his eyes ever tighter, our leader's personal tragedy becomes our own.

"Our members just wish this thing would be over," said a senior House Republican who met with Bush recently. "People are tired of him." Bush's circle remains sealed tight, the lawmaker said. "There's nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, 'Mr. President, you've got to do this. You're wrong on this.' There's no adult supervision. It's like he's oblivious. Maybe that's a defense mechanism."

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease

At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.

Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?

These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation.

Tags: bush, history, legacy, iraq, war, psychology, politics, president, america

A Brief History of Economic Time

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:53:30 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

The underlying expectation -- that the present is supposed to be better than the past -- is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago.

(Also see Living in the Age of Abundance.)

Clip Source: online.wsj.com

A Brief History of Economic Time

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Tags: prosperity, progress, america, economics, income, money, poverty, capitalism, history

Iraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:45:41 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: A bloodthirsty sectarian war centuries in the making has only just begun. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.

Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq’s factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: their will is ebbing and their time here is limited. That leaves Iraqis more motivated than ever to cling to their weapons, preparing for what many see as an inevitable plunge into the abyss.

“Everyone — the Sunni, the Shia — is playing the waiting game,” an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. “They’re waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.

Tags: iraq, war, civil war, sahel, violence, middle east, muslim, religion, extremism

An Easter Sermon on Viral Marketing

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:10:28 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: By the inimitable Robert Wright.

The ultimate in viral marketing was Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Deemed a threat to the social order, he was crucified under Roman auspices. But the Romans forgot one thing: If you face a small but growing movement that threatens the imperial order, you shouldn’t attack the men in ways that help the memes.

Clip Source: theunknowncandidate.blogspot.com

An Easter Sermon

Jesus knew viral marketing.

In the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John complains that nondisciples are selling bootlegged copies of Jesus’ miraculous powers. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

Jesus tells John to quit obsessing about the intellectual property and to focus on getting the brand out. “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus adds, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Fast-forward two millennia. Weeks after 9/11, George Bush says roughly the opposite. His famous “You’re either with us or against us” means that those who don’t follow his lead will be considered enemies. The rest is history. Today, Jesus has more than a billion devoted followers. Mr. Bush has ... well, fewer than that.

Tags: marketing, viral, history, politics, empire, revenge, retribution, terrorism, terror, islam, jesus, christ, easter, religion, fundamentalism, america, abu ghraib, al qaeda, bush, war, meme, memes, bible

Math Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:15:32 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well.

See the full research article as published in Science. It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge.

When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."

Clip Source: www.sciencenews.org

Archway from the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, which was built in 1453 C.E. The larger pentagons outlined in pale blue were constructed using a large-scale girih tile pattern, and the small white pentagons were constructed using a small-scale girih tile pattern.
Image courtesy of K. Dudley and M. Elliff.

Kite and dart Penrose tiles.
Wikipedia

A Penrose tiling made up of fat and skinny diamonds.
Wikipedia

A 15th-century Timurid-Turkmen scroll now held by the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. The faint reddish lines outline the shapes of the underlying tiles. One example of each shape has been shaded in the picture.
Peter J. Lu

The five decorated shapes.
Peter J. Lu

An archway in the Sultan's Lodge in the Green Mosque in Bursa, Turkey from 1424.
Image courtesy of W.B. Denny

Although the underlying shapes aren't obvious in the final design, this diagram shows how the pattern from the Sultan's Lodge archway was constructed using girih tiles.
Image courtesy of W.B. Denny

Tags: art, tile, tiles, tiling, shape, islamic, islam, turkey, uzbekistan, patterns, pattern, symmetry, geometry, math, mathematics, penrose, girih, history, ancient, research, discovery, science

Understanding Evolution

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 19:54:17 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: A great resource

Clip Source: evolution.berkeley.edu

| |

What is evolution and how does it work?
Detailed explanations of the mechanisms of evolution and the history of life on Earth

Includes: Examples of evolution, Genetics, History of life on Earth, Macroevolution, Microevolution, Natural selection, Speciation ...

How does evolution impact my life?
The relevance of evolutionary theory to our everyday lives

Includes: Agriculture, Conservation, Medicine ...

What is the evidence for evolution?
Multiple lines of scientific evidence relating to evolution

Includes: Homology and analogy ...

What is the history of evolutionary theory?
The history of ideas, research, and contributors in the study of evolution

Looking for information on controversies in the public arena relating to evolution? See our frequently-asked questions.

Where species come from - November 2006
Cries of "Save the rainforest! Save the coral reefs!" may rally the conservation movement — but what about the arctic tundra, or the semiarid desert? Are those ecosystems unthreatened? Far from it; ecosystems all around the world and at every latitude are endangered in some way by human activity. So why do rainforests and reefs get so much attention?

Read the whole story to see the evolution connection >>

Phylogenetic systematics, a.k.a. evolutionary trees
All life on Earth is united by evolutionary history; we are all evolutionary cousins — twigs on the tree of life. Phylogenetic systematics is the formal name for the field within biology that reconstructs evolutionary history and studies the patterns of relationships among organisms.

Evolution 101
This in-depth, multi-part course takes you through evolutionary theory and mechanisms, from definitions to details, natural selection to genetic drift, mutations to punctuated equilibrium.

Tags: evolution, science

How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:01:00 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

Today's Christian conservatives often note that Jefferson's famous line declaring that the first amendment had created “a wall separating church and state” was not in the Constitution but in a private letter. But in that letter, Jefferson was responding to one sent to him by a group of Baptists in Danbury, Conn. We usually read Jefferson's side of that exchange. It's worth re-reading what the Danbury Baptists had to say because it reminds us that for the 18th-century evangelicals, the separation of church and state was not only required by the practicalities of their minority status, but was also demanded by God. “Religions is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals,” the Baptists wrote, warning that government “dare not assume the prerogatives of Jehova and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.” Government had no business meddling in the affairs of the soul, where there is only one Ruler.

Clip Source: www.washingtonmonthly.com

April 2006

The Framers and the Faithful
How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.

By Steven Waldman

It is ironic, then, that evangelicals—so focused on the “true” history—have neglected their own. Indeed, the one group that would almost certainly oppose the views of 21st-century evangelicals are the 18th-century evangelicals. John Leland was no anomaly. In state after state, when colonists and Americans met to debate the relationship between God and government, it was the proto-evangelica1s who pushed the more radical view that church and state should be kept far apart. Both secular liberals who sneer at the idea that evangelicals could ever be a positive influence in politics and Christian conservatives who want to knock down the “wall” should take note: It was the 18th-century evangelicals who provided the political shock troops for Jefferson and Madison in their efforts to keep government from strong involvement with religion. Modern evangelicals are certainly free to take a different course, but they should realize that in doing so they have dramatically departed from the tradition of their spiritual forefathers.

Tags: government, steven waldman, evangelicals, christians, christianity, religion, church, state, framers, constitution, usa, america, rebellion, revolution, england, founding fathers, belief, faith, separation, rights, bill of rights, politics, history

Winston Churchill on America

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:19:55 GMT

clipped by: Kore7

Clip Source: time.blogs.com

"Americans will always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives," - Winston Churchill.

Tags: churchill, winston churchill, america, usa, quote, history, right

Remember: Saddam Was Our Man

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:49:26 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: NY Times OpEd from March 14, 2003.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad -- for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.

Clip Source: readthese.blogspot.com

March 14, 2003, Friday

A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making

SEATTLE -- On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.

Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies -- chiefly France and Germany -- resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s ''Health Alteration Committee,'' as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.

As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.

Tags: saddam, hussein, saddam hussein, history, iraq, coup, cia, usa, washington, britain, israel, kassem, baathist, kurds, busness, foreign policy, arms, regime, dictator, middle east

The Rich Get Richer - James Kurth (The American Conservative)

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 02:39:24 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Wide-ranging article by Kurth exploring the historical rise and fall of first-world financial inequality through the lens of globalization, foreign policy, and the rise of Islamism.

Clip Source: www.amconmag.com

The American Conservative

September 25, 2006 Issue

Growing income disparity doesn’t presage a new labor movement at home — but it may signal more terrorism for us abroad.

by James Kurth

Tags: globalization, history, politics, conservatives, socialism, communism, marxism, interest, war, finance, rich, taxes, government, inequality, world, terrorism, islam

Émilie Du Châtelet: The Scientist Whom History Forgot

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 23:54:25 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: After a life of intellectual prosperity against all the prevailing norms of her time, her life was tragically cut short after finishing her greatest work, the only complete French translation and annotation of Newton's Principia Mathematica to this day.

[T]o her dismay, Du Châtelet discovered that she was pregnant. Then aged 43, she was an elderly women by contemporary standards. Although Voltaire was not the father, he helped Du Châtelet deceive her husband into thinking that the baby was legitimate. Plagued by gloomy premonitions, Du Châtelet intensified her work schedule, working 18 hours a day to finish in time. Although she did succeed, she died soon after the baby was born. On her last day she recorded the date on her Newton commentary. Her Principia was published 10 years later, in 1759, to coincide with the return of a comet vindicating Newton's physics.

Clip Source: physicsweb.org

According to Francois-Marie Voltaire - Enlightenment France's great writer and philosopher - Emilie du Châtelet "was a great man whose only fault was being a woman". Du Châtelet has paid the penalty for being a woman twice over. In her own lifetime she fought for the education and the publishing opportunities that she craved. Since her death, she has been cast in the shadow of two men - Voltaire, with whom she lived and studied, and Isaac Newton, whose work she criticized and interpreted. Her translation from Latin of Newton's Principia, his great work on gravity, remains the only complete version in French.

In 1738 Voltaire published their extraordinarily successful Elements of Newton's Philosophy. Well illustrated, it clearly explained the basic principles of Newton's discoveries in mathematical astronomy and optics, so that for the first time the new physics became accessible to a wide range of French people. Voltaire hero-worshipped Newton but recognized that he himself could not match Du Châtelet intellectually. "I used to teach myself with you," he wrote 10 years later, "but now you have flown up where I can no longer follow."

Tags: emilie du chatelet, châtelet, chatelet, scientist, science, mathematics, physics, newton, principia, principia mathematica, france, french, history, voltaire

The Bomb: First Impressions

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:21:46 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Good article about the American public's response to waking up on August 6, 1945 to discover out-of-the-blue that "they possessed the most powerful weapon in the history of war."

In the early days after the attack, only a few scattered voices objected. Most of them were religious. The Vatican and Catholic newspapers promptly denounced nuclear weapons. One minister in New York said, “Our savage generation cannot be trusted” and called the nuclear program “a triumph of research, but also a superb symbol for the Age of Efficient Chaos.”

Clip Source: www.americanheritage.com

Sixty-one years ago, on August 6, 1945, as the Enola Gay opened its bomb bay above Hiroshima, most Americans were enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon. As “Little Boy” fell toward that city of 343,000, Fords and Packards rolled along peaceful country roads half a world away. When a pressure wave shot through Hiroshima with the speed of a bullet, children played stickball in the streets of Dayton and Peoria. And as a blue-white flash cooked the sky above Hiroshima to 18 million degrees Fahrenheit, American families sat down to Sunday roasts.

Tags: america, world war ii, bomb, atom bomb, manhatten project, nuclear, nuclear weapons, japan, hiroshima, history

Hezbollah's Other War - Michael Young

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 16:48:01 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: A great insider perspective on the intertangled, democratic and sectarian groups that have used (and abused) Lebanon for cross-purposes throughout its history, laying the groundwork for the current Hezbollah stranglehold on the country. Fans of simplistic, black-and-white views of the world may want to skip this article.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

How long it seems (and yet it is only a year) since the Lebanese were celebrating the Cedar Revolution — or what they always more revealingly called the Independence Intifada. Following the killing of Rafik Hariri in February 2005, it seemed that the Lebanese people were coming together to demand the end of Syrian dominance and the resurrection of their nation’s democracy. In that not so distant past, I had high hopes for the development of a liberal, even libertarian, Lebanon; after all, I reasoned, coexistence, freedom and entrepreneurial drive had been the natural state of the country between independence in 1943 and the start of the civil war in 1975 and even beyond. Maybe I was biased in this regard. My late father was an American, my mother is a Maronite Christian and I spent the first decade of the war living in predominantly Muslim West Beirut, where I came to embrace multiple identities and distrust the exclusivist certitudes of many Lebanese. When I returned to Lebanon in 1992, after several years in the United States, my enduring memories from that earlier time were of a remarkably diverse society that could rebound from its worst calamities, seemingly effortlessly. Many of the clichés were true: a neighborhood firefight might break out between militias in the morning, but by the end of the day people would be repairing their damaged properties. The Lebanese could be infuriatingly anarchic, stupidly selfish, but they were also determined to take initiatives and embrace new departures. This I saw as the essence of the liberal ideal. When the Syrian Army left, I believed, that ideal could at last be fulfilled.

Tags: lebanon, beirut, nasrallah, hariri, hezbollah, christians, druse, sunni, shiite, muslim, islam, politics, history, international relations, democracy, michael young, nytimes

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History - Pictures

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 01:42:44 GMT

clipped by: sohil

Clip Source: mysite.verizon.net

Tags: fun, funny, politics, political, news, fox, conservatives, liberals, america, usa, terrorism, christianity, christian

Maligned T. rex eyesight the best in animal history?

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 21:58:35 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

T. rex had a binocular range of 55°, which is wider than that of modern hawks....Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged.

Evidence the mighty T. rex was more of a predator?

Clip Source: www.sciencenews.org

INSIGHT. Tyrannosaurus rex's cheek grooves (below the eye sockets) and narrow snout cleared its sight lines, giving it impressive vision, according to a new study.
Stevens

In the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, one human character tells another that a Tyrannosaurus rex can't see them if they don't move, even though the beast is right in front of them. Now, a scientist reports that T. rex had some of the best vision in animal history. This sensory prowess strengthens arguments for T. rex's role as predator instead of scavenger.

Scientists had some evidence from measurements of T. rex skulls that the animal could see well. Recently, Kent A. Stevens of the University of Oregon in Eugene went further.

He used facial models of seven types of dinosaurs to reconstruct their binocular range, the area viewed simultaneously by both eyes. The wider an animal's binocular range, the better its depth perception and capacity to distinguish objects—even those that are motionless or camouflaged.

T. rex had a binocular range of 55°, which is wider than that of modern hawks, Stevens reports in the summer Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged.

"It was a selective advantage for this animal to see three-dimensionally ahead of it," Stevens says.

He found that T. rex might have had visual acuity as much as 13 times that of people. By comparison, an eagle's acuity is 3.6 times that of a person.

In modern animals, predators have better binocular vision than scavengers do, agrees Thomas R. Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland at College Park. Binocular vision "almost certainly was a predatory adaptation," he says.

Tags: tyrannosaurus rex, t rex, dinosaur, dinosaurs, vision, eyesight, eyes, evolution, paleontology, predators