The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), pp. 14, 23-25.  "Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the…

In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they were being held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave. Bolshevik authorities at first…

Just to get this out of the way first real quick: Whenever someone dares to differ with the common government and TV narrative about Russia and their role in the world, that person is usually instantly condemned as spouting "Russian talking points," or being "paid by Putin." This is probably especially the case this week as Russia is waging an aggressive invasion against their neighbor Ukraine as we speak. But that is still nonsense. Where would a Texan obtain these talking points? Are they true? Back in the days of the Communist Soviet Union, there were some Americans, many fewer…

As the end of the century [in this case the end of the 80s] approaches, the triumph of Westernliberal democracy again seems the inevitability that it did at the turn of the previous century.This is an absolute triumph of the Western idea. It is seen in the failure of all viable alternativeideas, and also in the spread of consumer culture around the world. This may signal the end ofhistory in the sense of humanity’s ideological evolution, and the universalization of Westernculture.Note: all summary of Hegel’s philosophy is taken strait from Fukuyama. If you don’t like theinterpretation, blame Frank, not me.The…

In 1887 James Blyth became the first person to spin electricity from air, lighting his home in Marykirk, south of Aberdeen, with a 33ft cloth-sailed wind turbine. Blyth was born in Marykirk and had a cottage there, but by the 1880s was based in Glasgow, where he was a professor at Anderson College (now the University of Strathclyde). Established in 1796 to provide ‘useful knowledge’ for skilled workers, Blyth echoed the principles of the college when he offered the benefits of his new technology to Marykirk’s villagers as a cheap, clean way to light their main street. They declined, fearing…