A Brief History Today, as the United States and the rest of the world continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, we look back to a previous pandemic of enormously greater proportions, the infamous Black Death of Bubonic Plague that ravaged much of the world in the 14th Century. Panicked populations, desperate for answers and solutions to the deadly plague, took to blaming Europe’s Jewish population as the cause of the calamity, a scapegoating of Jews common throughout history. The pervasive theme of blaming various catastrophes on Jews made the scapegoating of the Black Death an almost foregone conclusion! …
Author: Major Dan
Major Dan
Major Daniel Zar is a retired veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He served during the Cold War and has traveled to many countries around the world. Prior to his military service, he graduated from Cleveland State University, having majored in sociology. Following his military service, he worked as a police officer eventually earning the rank of captain prior to his retirement.
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A Brief History On October 23, 2020, the comedy loving movie world was treated to the release (on Amazon Prime Video) of the second Borat movie, this one given the prodigious title of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The sequel to the 2006 Sacha Baron Cohen blockbuster, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the film features the Sacha Baron Cohen character Borat, a bumpkin from the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. While Kazakhstan is indeed a real place (the largest landlocked nation…
A Brief History On October 12, 2020, we had the opportunity to watch a “movie” composite of the web streaming series, When the Streetlights Go On, a Quibi production consisting of 10 episodes, each running several minutes. Our screening was a continuous playing of the series in the form of a movie. As with previous Quibi productions, Streetlights is a top quality video with excellent actors, directing and cinematography. Breaking News: On October 21, 2020, news of an imminent shut down of Quibi was broken, and confirmed the next day. Despite raising a considerable amount of capital for investment (nearly…
A Brief History On October 26, 2020, we take a quick look at a Quibi horror series of which we recently watched a pair of episodes, namely 50 States of Fright, an anthology series with the excellent premise of giving us a terrifying tale from each of our (at least currently) 50 states. The episodes we watched were put together well and were entertaining, with quality acting and directing from notable film types. (Note: Quibi recently announced an end to operations. We do not yet know where its content will end up.) Digging Deeper The first episode, titled The Golden…
A Brief History On October 19, 1943, the antibiotic drug, Streptomycin, was isolated by researchers at the esteemed Rutgers University. Streptomycin, useful for treating many infections, was the first drug to successfully combat tuberculosis. Today we use this medical milestone to take a look at some of the truly great advances in medicine, quite relevant in 2020 while we await the development, approval, and disbursement of a viable vaccine for the Covid-19 pandemic devastating the world. (For that matter, identifying a treatment that defeats this terrible virus would be nice, too!) As always, feel free to nominate extremely important medical…