Modern History (1800 – present)

[wjfox]

I learned BASIC when I was 9-10 years old, which would have been the late 1980s.

It was incredibly simple to learn. I made my own games (although they were pretty, er... basic).

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Hello world!

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Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal
by David Corn
May 25 , 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century.

The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.

Cambodia: In early 1969…

Bangladesh: In 1970…

Chile: Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970…

East Timor: In December 1975…

Argentina: In March 1976…

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... riminal/

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Historic Great Plains Bison Slaughter Had Surprising Lasting Consequences for Native Americans
by Dr. Russell Moul
May 26, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Prior to the decline in the number of bison, the bison-reliant Indigenous populations were among the most well-off people on the American continent. There has been significant academic research to suggest that their living standards were equal to if not better than their European contemporaries. But the loss of the bison had substantial and lasting negative effects on these people.

It was well known at the time that communities of Native Americans faced significant malnutrition and hunger due to the loss of these animals. There is evidence that they had to resort to eating horses, mules, soiled food, and even old clothing to prevent starvation. The loss of this resource represented a loss in livelihoods and stability that had lasted for centuries.

According to a recent paper written by Donn L. Feir, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Victoria, and colleagues, the bison-reliant societies experienced a 2–3 centimeter (0.8–1.2 inch) decline in height relative to other Native American nations that were not dependent on the animals. This effectively eliminated a height advantage that had been present before the slaughter.

The data for this was collected by the physical anthropologist Franz Boas between 1889 and 1903, who recorded the height, gender, and age of nearly 9,000 Native Americans.

The team have also shown that the elimination of bison resulted in substantially higher rates of child mortality (nearly 16 percent higher) in the early part of the 20th century.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/historic-gr ... ns-69120

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Special Forces Parachuted With Nukes Strapped To Them During The Cold War
by Oliver Parken
June 9, 2023

Introduction:

(The Drive) For U.S. special operations personnel, conducting high-altitude parachute jumps are pretty much par for the course. Yet doing so with a nuclear bomb strapped between your legs is on an entirely different level.

That’s exactly what can be seen in the top shot above. Here, a U.S. Army Special Forces paratrooper is pictured free-falling during a training exercise with a Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM, harnessed to them. A form of atomic demolition munition (ADM), SADMs were man-portable nuclear weapons, also known as "backpack nukes." These munitions were fitted into specially designed hard/cloth carrying cases for their transportation on the backs (or between the legs) of special operators. SADMs weighed in the region of 150 pounds, with their warheads – the W-54/B-54 – contributing around 50-55 pounds. SADMs were extremely small, just 24 inches long by 16 inches wide.

But why did special operations personnel train with these munitions? In order to unpack this question, we need to look back to the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S. began to diversify its nuclear weapons capabilities.

The atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 imparted a level of devastation never before seen in the history of human conflict. Just a few years later, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949, codenamed “Joe-1” by the U.S. While the U.S. military conducted further tests of such weapons into the early part of the Cold War, a broader view emerged that smaller nuclear weapons for limited tactical purposes would likely prove critical for operations on the ground in future conflicts.

Indeed, the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in a possible conflict involving the Soviet Union became an important component of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ policy during the early to mid 1950s and into the early 1960s. As such, scientists and technicians at the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories began miniaturizing the size of the warheads used in nuclear weapons.

Read more here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ ... -cold-war

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In 1856 a Woman Climate Scientist Concluded that Elevated Carbon Dioxide in Our Atmosphere Would Have a Warming Effect
by Doris Elín Urrutia
July 17, 2023

Introduction:

(Inverse) Monday’s Google Doodle celebrates the life of Eunice Newton Foote, the woman who published the earliest-known scientific paper about climate change.

In 1856, Foote performed a simple but revolutionary experiment. She took two flasks, used an air pump to manipulate their moisture content and air density, and when they reached the same temperature, she set them in the Sun, then moved them to the shade. What makes her work so important almost two centuries later is that, in one round, she saw what would happen when the Sun shined on a flask containing carbon dioxide.

After two to three minutes had passed, Foote recorded the temperatures of her flasks. Across all her setups, she found that the round containing carbon dioxide registered the warmest temperature, and took the longest to cool down.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature,” Foote wrote in her study.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/google ... ailblazer

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Japan-South Korea Forced Labour ‘Deal’ Is Part of a Struggle to Heal Old Wounds
by Jinsung Kim
July 20, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurasia Review) On 15 March 2023, the South Korean government announced its plan to strike a ‘deal’ with the Japanese government regarding forced labour during Japan’s colonial period (1910–1945). Under the proposed arrangement, South Korean companies as the third party that benefited from Japanese economic cooperation in the past would provide compensation to the victims of forced labour.

As of 7 May 2023, 10 bereaved families of the labourers and one forced labourer have accepted the proposal. It is anticipated that this number will continue to rise.

The announcement stirred various responses, with some scholars criticising the plan for leaving many questions unresolved. But both the South Korean and Japanese governments anticipate that this plan will improve bilateral relations and help resolve some diplomatic conflicts. Still, the deal faces historical challenges from its inception, bolstering South Korean opposition.

The plan may reinforce Japanese politicians’ ongoing attempts to distort the history of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. Prominent Japanese political leaders have consistently denied the Japanese Empire’s responsibility for war crimes and exploitation during the colonial period. Despite offering official apologies as prime minister, Shinzo Abe refused to accept Japan’s accountability, arguing that the ‘definition of aggression’ had not been established in 2013. Abe frequently contradicted his official statements through personal remarks, perpetuating the denial.

The Japanese government has also sought to glorify the past and conceal the dark history of Japan’s colonial rule. In 2015, the Japanese government succeeded in designating Hashima Island — also known as Battleship Island — as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The exhibit hall on Hashima Island primarily emphasises its contribution to Japan’s modernisation and rapid industrialisation, neglecting the forced labour endured by approximately 60,000 conscripted Korean workers. This stark contrast raises questions about the Japanese government’s commitmentto addressing forced labour issues as stated in its UNESCO application.

Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/20072023 ... analysis/

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Historical DNA Study Connects Living People to Enslaved and Free African Americans at Early Ironworks
August 3, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A first-of-its-kind analysis of historical DNA ties tens of thousands of living people to enslaved and free African Americans who labored at an iron forge in Maryland known as Catoctin Furnace soon after the founding of the United States.

The study, spurred by groups seeking to restore ancestry knowledge to African American communities, provides a new way to complement genealogical, historical, bioarchaeological, and biochemical efforts to reconstruct the life histories of people omitted from written records and identify their present-day relatives.

The research represents a collaboration among Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, the genetic testing company 23andMe, and the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society.

Described Aug. 4 in Science, the work reveals how 27 individuals buried at Catoctin Furnace were related to each other, the genetic conditions they may have had, where in Africa and Europe they or their ancestors likely came from, and where in the U.S. they have descendants and other genetic relatives living today.

“Recovering African American individuals’ direct genetic connections to ancestors heretofore buried in the slave past is a giant leap forward both scientifically and genealogically, opening new possibilities for those passionate about the search for their own family roots,” said study co-author Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and host of the genealogy and genetics TV show Finding Your Roots.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997226 and here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997172

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Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer
By Wendell Berry
1987

Introduction:

(Originally Published in New England Review) Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.

My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it. A number by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones. The first is the one I mentioned at the beginning. I would hate to think that my work as a writer could not be done without a direct dependence on strip-mined coal. How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?

Extract from Unprocessed by Megan Kimble (pages 214-215)

(Megan Kimble) “I do not believe that ‘employment outside the house’ is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home for either men or women”, wrote Wendell Berry in his famous 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” … he declared that his work didn’t require a computer…Originally published in the New England Review, the essay appeared next in Harper’s magazine with reader comments alongside the piece. “Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative,” wrote one reader. “Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. Wife meets all of Beery’s uncompromising standards for technological innovation. She’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure.

Berry responded: “If I had written in my essay that my wife worked as a typist and editor for a publishing house, doing the same work that she does for me, no feminists, I daresay, would have written to Harper’s to attack me for exploiting her…It would have been assumed as a matter of course that if she had a job away from home she was a ‘liberated woman.’ Possessed of a dignity that no home could confer upon her.”

But…what makes for good work? If a wife edits her husband’s manuscripts because it contributes to the economic well-being of a shared household – and because she enjoys it – is this better work than what she might do for someone else, somewhere else, to earn a paycheck to contribute to that same? The better question might actually be: Is it more pleasurable? “More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more , we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement,” wrote Berry in a later essay, “Economy and Pleasure.” “We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there.”

Link to Berry’s “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer” essay:
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teach ... mputer.pdf

Link to Berry’s “Economy and Pleasure”: https://www.omnifoo.info/images/Wendell ... asure.pdf

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Witness to JFK assassination casts doubt on ‘magic bullet’ theory

3 hours ago

A former Secret Service agent who was metres away from John F Kennedy when the former president was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 has spoken out to cast fresh on the official findings.

Paul Landis, 88, who had been assigned to protect first lady Jackie Kennedy, challenged the Warren Commission’s findings that a “magic bullet” had struck and exited the president before hitting then-Texas governor John Connally Jr.

Mr Landis told the New York Times he recalled hearing several shots ring out in Dealy Plaza as he walked just behind the president’s limousine, and saw the president slump forward after being struck in the head.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 08757.html

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Ocean Explorers Rediscover Long-Lost Japanese WWII Vessel Akagi 18,000 Feet Below Ocean
by Madison Dapecevich
September 16, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) In a monumental occasion for marine archaeology and world history, explorers aboard E/V Nautilus successfully completed the first deep-water visual dive to revisit the Second World War (WWII) Imperial Japanese Navy vessel, Akagi. Seen at a depth of 18,000 feet (5.5 kilometers) below the surface of the ocean, a Japanese and American-led expedition team conducted the first visual survey of the wreckage with a "heaviness of the heart like tears that pour like rain" since it sank to the dark ocean seafloor 81 years ago.

At the time, the Akagi, written 赤城 in Japanese, was considered the flagship of the Japanese naval fleet. Its bombing and subsequent sinking by U.S. forces were pivotal to turning the tide of war during the Battle of Midway near the U.S. Hawaiian Islands.

A crew of deep-sea explorers and historians aboard R/V Petrel conducted a dive with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with sonar. Then, the team recorded – for the first time since its sinking – sonar images that indicated the long-lost Akagi aircraft carrier has been found in 18,000 feet of water in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM), roughly 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) northwest of Pearl Harbor.

Nearly four years later, Nautilus researchers in 2023 descended remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) to the seafloor. It represents the first time human eyes have seen the wreckage in real-time since its 1942 sinking.
It was a success.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/first-look- ... -70723

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Witness to JFK assassination casts doubt on ‘magic bullet’ theory

...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 08757.html

This is not the first time doubt has been cast on the lone assassin theory:

In its 1979 report, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was likely "assassinated as a result of a conspiracy". The HSCA did not identify possible conspirators, but concluded that there was "a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President". The HSCA's conclusions were largely based on a police Dictabelt recording later debunked by the U.S. Justice Department.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassina ... ident%22.

I didn't realize that this evidence had been "later debunked." Still, it shows that the assassination has been a result of a never ending debate revolving partly around whether there was just a single gunman.

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Pearl Harbor: Bombed Battleships’ Records Provide Boost for Climate Science
September 18, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Weather data from several ships bombed by Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor has been recovered in a rescue mission that will help scientists understand how the global climate is changing.

Crew members aboard various vessels - such as the USS Pennsylvania and the USS Tennessee - died when their battleships were targeted in December 1941. Despite these losses, many boats returned to service during the Second World War and US naval servicemen continued their daily duties, which included recording weather data.

A new research paper, published in Geoscience Data Journal, tells the story of the recovery of World War II weather data that comes from 19 US Navy ships. Its rescue was made possible thanks to the hard work of over 4,000 volunteers who transcribed more than 28,000 logbook images from the US Navy fleet stationed at Hawai’i from 1941-1945. Previous studies have suggested these years were abnormally warm. The new dataset, encompassing over 630,000 records with more than 3 million individual observations, will help to show whether this was the case.

Dr Praveen Teleti, the University of Reading research scientist who led the research, said: “Disruptions to trade routes in World War II led to a significant reduction in marine weather observations. Until recently, records from that time were still only available in classified paper documents. The scanning and rescuing of this data provides a window into the past, allowing us to understand how the world's climate was behaving during a time of tremendous upheaval.

“There are two sets of people we need to thank for making this mission a success. We are very grateful to the global team of citizen scientists for transcribing these observations and creating a huge dataset that includes millions of entries about air and sea surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1001449

For a presentation of the research paper as published in Geoscience Data Journal: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ ... /gdj3.222

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