History

152 posts

History Class With Professor Botswana: Who Really Discovered America?

Welcome to History Class with Professor Botswana Meat Commission FC. Art Talk alone couldn’t satisfy my forbidden lust for knowledge, so I’m gonna be all up in the rest of the humanities now. And yes, Professor Botswana has tenure so get ready to have your dick tickled by my numerous learned historical theories and shit.

For this week’s History Class with Professor Botswana, we’re going to solve one of the New World’s most enduring mysteries — who really discovered America first?  Continue reading →

QOTD: What’s Your Pope Opinion?

On the left, the famous/infamous red leather shoes of Pope Benedict XVI, soon to be ex-Pope. Who will fill them in his absence?

His resignation today, apparently for reasons of poor health, stunned the Catholic world – it is the first time since 1415 that a reigning pope has resigned. It is reported that he will continue to live in Vatican City – how will the new pope handle this?

So many questions and, so far, so few answers. Not exactly a new circumstance for the Catholic church.

What do Catholics want in a new pope? A true personna christi, a good embodiment of Christ’s teachings, as seems to be the concern of many responders to this 2012 Our Sunday Visitor article? Continue reading →

Strawmen And Freeman, A Guide To The Sovereign Citizens Movement

Sovereign Plate

On May 20th, 2010 police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas pulled over a white minivan during a drug interdiction patrol. The police pulled 45 year-old Jerry Kane from the minivan. A scuffle ensued and Kane’s 16 year-old son Joe emerged from the vehicle with an AK-47. He hit the officers with 25 bullets, killing both of them. Ninety minutes later both of the Kanes were killed in a Walmart parking lot in a standoff with the police. Why did Joe Kane kill two police officers (and wound two others in the second altercation)? Because Joe and Jerry Kane were Sovereign Citizens, people who believe that courts and cops have no authority over them, and who believe they have the right to defend themselves from them, by force if necessary. Continue reading →

The Challenger Disaster: Frozen Rockets and Political Snow Jobs

Challenger_explosion

This is part two in a two part series exploring the Challenger disaster. You can find part one here.

With the January 27th launch officially scrubbed and the overnight forecast calling for even more intense cold, the NASA administrators and Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the Challenger mission faced an increasingly difficult situation. With the launch already rescheduled due to the weather, the shuttle would sit on the launch pad overnight, further chilling the MT built boosters well below the 40°F for which they were launch-certified. Continue reading →

How the Reagan Administration and a Decade of Administrative Failures Doomed The Challenger

Challenger_explosion

In less than two weeks we will quietly pass the 27th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster-an unnecessary tragedy that cost the lives of seven astronauts on a frosty January morning in 1986. I was lucky enough this week to sit through a talk given by a former employee of Morton Thiokol-the company who manufactured the boosters used on and widely blamed for the Challenger disaster.

The commonly accepted explanation for the accident was that Thiokol’s booster design contained fatal flaws in the O-rings that held the boosters together, and coupled with poor organizational control that prevented the flaws from being addressed. The truth, however, was much greater, and much more troubling to anyone who believed in the greatness of the American space program or the infallible nature of President Ronald Reagan’s administration.  Continue reading →

Seventh Circuit Finds Illinois ‘Concealed Carry’ Ban Unconstitutional

In an opinion by Judge Posner (he of the “let’s sell our organs and babies!” camp and probable #1 reason why he’ll never be on the US Supreme Court), the 7th Circuit yesterday released an opinion invalidating Illinois’s law forbidding a person from carrying a loaded gun in public, finding Illinois’s complete ban on concealed-carry permits to be unconstitutional under the 2nd Amendment.  Continue reading →

A Day to End Violence Against Women

Today, December 6, is Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Every year on this day, Canada commemorates a terrible act of violence directed at women solely because of their gender.

L’Ecole Polytechnique is an engineering school affiliated with the Universite de Montreal. On December 6, 1989, a deranged gunman named Marc Lepine entered L’Ecole Polytechnique. He went into a mechanical engineering classroom, ordered the men to leave the room. He asked the female students if they knew why they were there, and told them it was because he was “fighting feminism”. He told them that they were women studying to be engineers, that that made them feminists, and that he hated feminists. He then shot every one of the nine female students. Six were killed. Continue reading →

It’s Remembrance Day: Tell Us About Your Family’s Military Service

I got to thinking the other day about my own family’s military service. There’s quite a lot of it.

Then yesterday I read about Holly Petraeus’ long-time service to soldier’s families, and that she can trace military service in her own family back to the Revolution.

My brother, sister and a sister-in-law all joined the Canadian Armed Forces soon after finishing high school, although only briefly, as it turned, out for all three. Continue reading →