Browsing: Society

A Brief History On March 27, 1794, the United States Congress authorized the building and purchase of a fleet of 6 frigates, ships that would become the core of what became a standing US Navy, a naval fighting force that would eventually rule the oceans for many decades, ruling the waves from World War II to the present. Digging Deeper After fighting and winning the American Revolutionary War against the greatest military power in the world, Great Britain, the US fought valiantly at sea with a tiny Navy against the greatest naval power in the world, albeit with the help…

A Brief History On March 26, 2017, 99 Russian cities saw thousands of protesters objecting to the mass corruption of the Russian kleptocracy led by Vladimir Putin. Polls indicate 67% of the Russian population found Putin responsible for the corruption, and yet in March of 2018 Putin “won reelection” to the Presidency of Russia by an amazing 76% of the vote! Digging Deeper Obviously, the Russian vote was a total scam on the people of Russia. Putin jailed his main opponent and kept other serious opponents from running by disallowing their candidacy based on trumped up convictions or possibly killing…

A Brief History On March 25, 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley was booted from the University of Oxford (England) for the publishing of a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, a continuation of a long history of discrimination and persecution of atheists and agnostics by religious believers. In spite of a long, slow march toward religious toleration of competing beliefs, atheism did not enjoy any sort of rapprochement with “mainstream” religion and still has not. Digging Deeper Around the time of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, a growing number of educated and prominent figures had gravitated away from…

A Brief History On March 24, 2015, we more or less found out the answer to the question, “What if your pilot (or co-pilot) hijacks your airliner?” In this case, he dies, along with all 150 people on board the airliner! In this terrifying scenario come to life, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz flew Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps, the first fatal plane crash in the airline’s 18 year history to that point. Digging Deeper The Airbus 320-211 had taken off from Barcelona, Spain, headed for Dusseldorf, Germany, an economical air trip on an airline owned by Lufthansa as a…

A Brief History On March 22, 1960, Scientists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes of Bell Labs in New Jersey patented their invention of the LASER, a device that concentrates and focuses visible light that today we find useful in a myriad of applications. Without the laser, we would not have CD’s and DVD’s, BluRay’s and the like. Digging Deeper The theoretical possibility of creating a laser or laser like device was proposed by Albert Einstein in 1917 and other theoretical scientific work contributing to the development of the laser (and its predecessor, the maser) continued throughout the 20th Century. In…