American history contains two outstanding wrongs committed against groups of us: the killing, displacement, and mistreatment of Native Americans and the subjection of African Americans to slavery and ongoing discrimination. Various thinkers have suggested kinds of reparations for these acts; but views differ sharply on whether reparations are justified, who should pay them, who should receive them, and what amount is fair and feasible. Instead of serving to heal our country, reparations have become one more divisive issue.
Yet reparations offer an alluring vision: via a concrete but also symbolic national gesture, we could take a major step toward healing wounds, overcoming the past, and moving together into the future. They could counteract the negativity of partisan politics and lead to a happier multiethnic and multiracial society. So we need to think through how to bring Americans to comprehend and support a plan for reparations that will help us flourish as a united people.
Fortunately, a related issue affords us a precious opportunity
Tags: Affirmative Action, African Americans, American history, Blacks, early intervention, Indians, Native Americans, poverty, reparations, US politics
Among the deepest mysteries of ancient Egypt is the Great Sphinx of Giza. Researchers, both professional and amateur, have painstakingly investigated its every aspect. Yet key puzzles remain, above all the question of why this colossal structure, the ancient world’s largest monument, was built in the first place.
It’s not that serious researchers and free-ranging speculators have not proposed explanations. But every theory put forward falls well short of true persuasiveness or stumbles over inconvenient facts. Here are three anomalies a correct theory should explain.
Tags: Ancient Egypt, Bronze Age catastrophes, Giza, Great Sphinx, Khafre, myth, pyramids, Re Horakhty, Sekhmet, Sphinx, Velikovsky, venus
The civilizations of Mesoamerica were full of mysteries. What explains their fixation on Venus? What led them to develop their intricate, highly precise calendars? What can explain the little pecked-cross circles embedded in the landscape? Why were these peoples so keenly bent on human sacrifice? What were the Aztecs referring to when they said that this was the age of the Fifth Sun?
Fortunately, there is a skeleton key that can unlock these old secrets.
Tags: archaeoastronomy, Aztec, ball game, catastrophes, inversion of Earth, Mars, Maya, Mesoamerica, Olmec, pecked-cross circles, synodical year, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Velikovsky, venus
Here are the judge’s March 16, 2020 Order and Memorandum opinion giving his final ruling. For a general explanation of the anthrax mailings case, see Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer? The judge does not appear to have read it.
Of the documents, the first set was released by FBI in the course of the litigation. The second set includes selected lawsuit documents from Dillon v. U.S. Department of Justice. Following this is a discussion of possible destruction of evidence.
The first set includes 102 pages of emails to and from accused Mailer Bruce Ivins, released by FBI on court order on March 20, 2019, plus Laboratory Notebook 4282. FOIA request #1327397 sought Ivins’s emails and other documents for September and October, 2001. FOIA request #1329530 sought the Table of Contents and the 16 pages on Ivins from the 2000-page Interim Major Case Summary of 2006. After repeated failures to find emails, FBI experts located them as 1A attachments in the Amerithrax file.
Tags: Abderraouf Jdey, anthrax, anthrax mailings, Bruce Ivins, FBI, FOIA, Robert Mueller
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to master techniques that can lead to breakthroughs in your research? No doubt you already have your own arsenal of qualitative methods, but we all can benefit from learning more. For your consideration, here are five approaches to the various techniques used to arrive at the findings in the articles and books on this Website:
Tags: Scientific Detective Techniques
People occupy corners and have jurisdiction. Truth, conversely, is sovereign, making contact with all. The necessary, universal, and eternal impose on the contingent, particular, and finite. So truth, once seen, seeks a mandate, demanding to override.
Many try to align themselves with the truth in source of their own. They may claim privileged access to it, fashion themselves as sources of it, or even create personas that present them as embodiments of it. Per Yuval-Harari, you must link yourself to a transcendental thing in any battle of the wills. This will allow you to efficiently co-opt its authority for yourself.
A contrarian can be defined as someone who
Tags: Ancient Greece, contrarianism, cynics, Eleatics, philosophy, Pyrrhonism, skeptics, Socrates, sophists
What makes a theory good? In his canonical 1991 book Inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton attempts to answer this fraught question. The philosopher identifies eleven explanatory virtues that are often placed within four groupings: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Two others, James Beebe and Kenneth Dillon, draw upon the same categorical schema to present four other virtues for consideration. All fifteen are listed and defined in the following table:
Tags: explanatory virtues, explanatory virtues of an hypothesis, notional scoring, Peter Lipton, philosophy of science, scientific theory