Today is Remembrance Day/Veterans Day/Armistice Day, called varying things in different countries. In some places it is an official holiday. But 11th of November has an older meaning that pre-dates the end of the First World War.

The 11th of November is Martinmas, the Feast Day of St Martin of Tours.

I am informed that some of the Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate this feast day on the 12th rather than the 11th. But in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions he is celebrated on the 11th, as the anniversary of his burial in 397 AD

St Martin is close to my heart for a few reasons. Principal of which is that my church @smitf_london , where I am a member, employee (til 1 Jan), and council member for (post 1 Jan).

St Martin has no real connection to London, but many churches around the world have been named for him. Heck, our church isn't even the only St Martin in London.

Raqibul Hasan Sr (also spelled Roqibul, Raquibul, Roquibul) was born on this day, 1953.

He was the first international captain of a representative Bangladesh side.

And his heroics in 1971 on a cricket field, in the face of fire, have been matched by almost no one.
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Let me provide the backdrop first. This was 1970-71. Threats of Civil War loomed over East Pakistan.

Yahya Khan was making a last-ditch attempt to have control on East Pakistan, and cricket was going to be his tool.

An International XI was touring Pakistan.
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Their second match was scheduled at Dacca.

In the 1970 Pakistan General Elections, Awami League had won 160 seats out of 300, but were still not allowed to form the Government.

And now Raqibul was roped in, probably as the ruling party's poster boy.
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A year ago, they had named him twelfth man in the final Test against New Zealand.

Like his teammates, he was given a Gray-Nicolls bat that bore the symbol of the Pakistan People's Party.

There was no way Raqibul, staunch supporter of the Awami League, would agree to that.
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He sneaked out of Hotel Purbani that night to meet his friend Sheikh Kamal.

They decided that the PPP symbol would be covered with a sticker with the message Joy Bangla (viva Bengal).

The Mukti Bahini used the slogan during the Bangladesh Liberation War later that year.
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An interview with @CondoleezzaRice appeared on the @HooverInst website yesterday. She had some things to say about historians. A thread, beginning with a direct quote 1/

#twitterstorians @AHAhistorians @SocHistTech

"Let's start by really bringing the best young historians of China and India. History is being practiced in the academy in a way that's not really very inspiring. History departments ask much narrower questions than in years past.... 2/

... When I was a young faculty member, I remember sitting at a first faculty meeting with Gabriel Allman, author of The Civic Culture, and Seymour Martin Lipset, who had written the Political Man. These were historians who explored big questions."
& now for some fact-checking 3/

Gabriel Almond (NOT Allman) was a political scientist, not a historian. He chaired the Stanford Political Science department from 1964 to 1969, and retired in 1976. Rice received her PhD in 1981 from the Univ. of Denver, and joined the Stanford faculty later that year. 4/

My historian’s mind sees a chronology snag, but I suppose it’s not impossible that emeritus profs attended faculty meetings back then. ?? Seymour Lipset was a sociologist AND a political scientist; again, not a historian. 5/

Arbitration was created to allow giant companies with equal bargaining power to settle disputes without incurring expensive court battles. So, when IBM and AT&T struck a deal, they'd agree that instead of going to court, they'd hire a neutral person to decide who was right.

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But in the 21st Century, a string of Supreme Court rulings have paved the way for "forced arbitration" - when a company tells its customers or workers that as a condition of doing business, they must give up all the legal protections that come with the right to sue.

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Once you've been bound over to arbitration, a company can maim, cheat or murder you and your only recourse is to ask a corporate judge, on the company's payroll, to decide whether you are entitled to compensation.

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You will not be surprised to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of the companies that pay their invoices.

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We've experienced a quiet epidemic of binding arbitration. Your dentist or physiotherapist probably expects you to sign one. So does your kid's piano teacher. Your ISP. And, of course, your boss.

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When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://t.co/US1YbwIikM

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Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

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Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

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Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even harder than quitting yourself.

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And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking smoking and

SITE TOUR OF THE MUSEUM OF AFRICAN LIBERATION: This morning His Excellency is at the Golden Quarry, site of the Museum of African Liberation. The site tour marks the beginning of the construction of the Continental Project which seeks to reassert the African story in World

Heritage. The visit is another milestone on the consolidation of an Afrocentric outlook on the part of the Second Republic. Only a day before, the President toured the site housing the plinth on which the statue of Mbuya Nehanda will be erected. During the visit, he made

...far-reaching suggestions which will guide artists working on the statue. The first artistic effort has triggered vigorous debate as Zimbabweans proffer ideas and appreciation on how the statue should look. The statue of Mbuya Nehanda in Parliament appears to be the more

...favoured as a prototype of the creative effort. The Parliament Statue depicts the First Chimurenga heroine in her later, elderly stage in life, presumably when she was already in settler captivity.

The site, says the President, will house four projects: a statue representing African Liberation Movements, the Museum, a Conference facility and an amusement park. The President recounted systematic imperialist history of Africa which depicted it as a Dark Home whose inhabitants

Thread
This Day, 1801: John Adams, a lame duck president, nominated John Marshall to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him seven days later. Marshall would serve in that role for 34 years

This Day, 1937: Franklin Roosevelt became the first president to be inaugurated on Jan. 20th (they used to be Mar. 4). In his Inaugural address, he said the fight against the Great Depression was far from over: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

This Day, 1949: The interlude between World War II and the Korean War was brief, as Harry Truman - a caretaker president since Apr 12, 1945 - was sworn n

This Day, 1953: After receiving permission from Dwight Eisenhower - just sworn in as the 34th President - rodeo star Montie Montana lassoed him. Mamie Eisenhower seems delighted; VP Nixon perplexed. Secret Service wasn't too happy

He was the youngest person ever elected - just 43 years old. John F. Kennedy, sworn in this day in 1961 (youngest POTUS ever, however: Theodore Rosevelt, 42, who took over for the assassinated William McKinley in 1901)

Let me use today to remember a great man & military officer per excellence, one who may still be alive but already forgotten by the country he serves or served with blood & sweat.

1. On 11 September 2014, a NAF Alpha jet with tail number 466 crashed in Kauri.

2. Conducting an air interdiction were two fighter pilots on board the jet - Wing Commander Chimda Hedima and Group Captain Abdulrasheed Braimoh.

3. Boko Haram later released a video of an injured Wing Commander C Hedima on his knees. Before the officer was beheaded, he mentioned that he had not seen his co-pilot Group Captain Braimoh. In the gory clip, Hedima was killed.

4. Refusing to mention whether there was a search mission for the pilots, the military denied the Boko Haram video and even claimed Hedima was not the man in the clip. Spokesman, Air Commodore Alonge said clearly, 'The man in the video is not our pilot'.

5. It was a painful story to follow, for a killing that was glaring to be denied. The military would later accept that the officer was indeed killed by Boko Haram and even invite his wife for an AFN Remembrance Day. But it has remained silent on Group Captain Braimoh.

SOYLENT GREEN
Soylent Green is a 1973 American ecological dystopian thriller film depicting a future of dying oceans and year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in suffering from pollution, poverty, overpopulation, euthanasia and depleted resources.

There is an interesting correlation between what is going on in the USA today & what happened at the end of the Roman Empire.

What brought down the empire?

1/Invasions by Barbarian tribes (we had 911 & Al Qaeda/Taliban then Russians invaded our elections...)

2/Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor (we’ve had a reliance on illegal immigrants working on farms, in construction & restaurants)

3/The rise of the Eastern vs West Empire (we have China)

4/Overexpansion and military overspending (The U.S. Spends More on Its Military Than 144 Countries Combined)

5/Government corruption and political instability (this one is all about the GOP & Trump)

6/Christianity & the loss of traditional values (Religion at its core was created to control the destructive tendencies of man but people have figured out it was all just a story & science is the true god-society is currently in the middle of this transition & it will be painful)

7/Weakening of the Roman legions (consider what the Trump administration has done to the USA’s standing in the world & the politicization of our courts and key Federal agencies)

#FoodForThought

On April 12, 1922, Hitler gave a speech to a crowd in Munich proclaiming he was a Christian, “My Christian feeling directs me to my Lord and saviour as a fighter. As a Christian I have the duty for the truth and what is right.” His supporters believed him

They stated, “Hitler said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

Joseph Goebbels knew Hitler to be anti-Christian, in his diary entries, Hitler in reality wanted to destroy the churches. He saw Christianity as a symptom of decay, a strata deposited by the Jewish race.

Hitler was a deceptive politician who knew how to woo voters. He pandered to religious sensibilities. It is known that Hitler would lie if it would benefit him. In the mid 1930’s he assured people he had no aggressive intentions. Even when he annexed Austria, he assured the world

that he had no other designs whilst encouraging Germans leaders in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region to foment unrest in the country as a country of unrest will accept anything.

In 1907, Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts decided to try and prove the existence of the soul.

All he needed was a set of scales, some people willing to die under his supervision, and some dogs.

(Thread, sources here: https://t.co/eAjnXjI4Rj)

The doctor, for reasons he didn't take time to note down, believed that the soul had physical mass and thus it should be possible to weigh it.

He had the imagination to believe that a piece of soul magically departs your body when you die, possibly to live in a heaven-like place for eternity, but thought it unrealistic that this couldn't be weighed like a bag of flour.

He decided the best way to prove his theory would be to weigh somebody at the precise moment they snuffed it, and then immediately after. The weight disparity would be the weight of the departed soul.

MacDougall looked for volunteers that would be up for the job of dying, and, shortly before that, having their last act on Earth be a fucking weigh-in.

217 years ago today, on January 1, 1804, Haiti became became the first independent Black republic in the world following a 12 year revolution. It changed the trajectory of world history.

In 1893, Frederick Douglass gave a speech outlining why Haiti's revolution was so important:

"Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown for the blow struck at Harper's Ferry...but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century."

"It was her one brave example that first of all started the Christian world into a sense of the Negro's manhood. I was she who first awoke the Christian world to a sense of 'the danger of goading too far the energy that slumbers in a black man's arm.'"

"Until Haiti struck for freedom, the conscience of the Christian world slept profoundly over slavery. It was scarcely troubled even by a dream of this crime against justice and liberty."

"The Negro was in its estimation a sheep like creature, having no rights which white men were bound to respect, a docile animal, a kind of ass, capable of bearing burdens, and receiving strips from a white master without resentment, and without resistance."

The Greek civilization was the most influential civilization in the history of the world. All of today’s thoughts and ideas can be traced back to the Greeks. They gave us democracy, mathematics, drama, philosophy, Olympics and a whole bunch of Gods.

A THREAD

Here are some interesting facts revolving around Greek mythology.

Hercules gave us the saying “Taking the bull by its horns”:

The saying, “Taking the bull by its horns”, comes from Greek mythology. It was one of the 12 labors of Hercules that he had to perform to repent for..

..killing his own wife and children in a fit of madness caused by Hera. He saved the city of Crete from a raging bull by seizing its horns.

Athena defeated Poseidon to become the guardian of Athens:
Athena and Poseidon both wanted to become the guardian of a certain city so they decided to give a gift each to please the residents of the city. Poseidon gave them water in the form of a spring but the water was salty..

... and of no use. Athena gave them an olive tree which was much more useful as it gave food, oil and wood and so she won and since then that city has been known as Athens.

100 years ago, Argentina was one of the richest, most successful countries in the world. Even as recently as the early 1960s, its GDP per capita was higher than that of Japan, Italy, Spain or Austria.

What went wrong? Never-ending shambolic governance, never in the common good.

Argentina has scarcely had a decent government in a century. Its political system is a disaster. Its economy is a disaster. The right fails, the left fails, and Peronism - which stands for nothing, believes in nothing, but just drapes itself in emotion and the flag - rules.

It is the only economy I can think of which travelled from the Third World to the First World, then all the way back to the Third World again. There are four different kinds of economies:

- Developed
- Underdeveloped
- Japan
- Argentina

But this isn't a thread about Argentina. It's a thread about Britain: a country with which Argentina has this fascinating love/hate relationship. Conflict over the Falklands/Malvinas and football; but British culture is hugely influential among young, well-educated Argentinians.

And you see: I think the two countries have more and more in common. And not in a good way either.

I left the UK in 2012. When a Uruguayan here asked me why, I answered: "Because we're turning into Argentina".

What did I mean by that?

It's a bitter pill to give up your childhood faith in the Myth of 1776. Moldbug warned us that the pill slits open and the sodium core burns as it goes down.

...but it makes perfect sense that an elite will always be in power

I remember reading a brief article 20 or 30 yrs ago

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asking "why do planets and moons spin?"

and the answer was an appeal to statistics - there are a ton more items in a random distribution of momentums that equate to "spinning" than equate to "not spinning".

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Planets and moons are formed by the coallescence, under gravitation, of various small bits.

Things falling in from infinity, basically.

Depending on the random assortment of starting locations of those infalling bits, you get torque applied to the accumulating mass core.

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In order to end up with a planet with absolutely no spin, you need a PERFECT balance of starting locations of all of the constituent bits before they start their fall in.

This is possible, but is an insanely small subset of all possible starting configurations.

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Governments and societies form from the coalescence of individuals.

We could imagine a society where Everyone Was Perfectly Equal ... but that would require a starting universe where all people were born with equal talents.

🧐Some videos of Ali Alexander from a recent interview published on January 12th, 2021.

Some interesting history and confessions from the man himself.

Thread

MY UPDATE TONIGHT: What just changed.

Executive orders and control of the agencies has done significant damage to America. That’s going to change.

Medicaid work requirements — done.

The public charge to deprive immigrants of their legal rights — done.

More judges that respect “life” but not “human lives”— that’s over.