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๐ Fred Hampton
Fredrick Allen Hampton (August 30, 1948 โ December 4, 1969) was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded a prominent multicultural political organization, the Rainbow Coalition that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting, and work for social change.
In 1967, Hampton was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radical threat. The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among these groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers. In December 1969, Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during the raid, another Panther was killed and several seriously wounded. In January 1970, a coroner's jury held an inquest and ruled the deaths of Hampton and Mark Clark to be justifiable homicide.
A civil lawsuit was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark. It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million; the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, scholars now widely consider Hampton's death an assassination under the FBI's initiative.
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- "Fred Hampton" | 2020-06-05 | 20 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2ย November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9ย November 1917.
Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine; within two months a memorandum was circulated to the Cabinet by a Zionist Cabinet member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions in order to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann submit a draft of a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.
By late 1917, in the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration, the wider war had reached a stalemate, with two of Britain's allies not fully engaged: the United States had yet to suffer a casualty, and the Russians were in the midst of a revolution with Bolsheviks taking over the government. A stalemate in southern Palestine was broken by the Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. The release of the final declaration was authorised on 31 October; the preceding Cabinet discussion had referenced perceived propaganda benefits amongst the worldwide Jewish community for the Allied war effort.
The opening words of the declaration represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term "national home" had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words "in Palestine" meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine. The second half of the declaration was added to satisfy opponents of the policy, who had claimed that it would otherwise prejudice the position of the local population of Palestine and encourage antisemitism worldwide by "stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands". The declaration called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population, and also the rights and political status of the Jewish communities in other countries outside of Palestine. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population's wishes and interests should have been taken into account, and recognised in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs' political rights.
The declaration had many long-lasting consequences. It greatly increased popular support for Zionism within Jewish communities worldwide, and became a core component of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founding document of Mandatory Palestine. It indirectly led to the emergence of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing IsraeliโPalestinian conflict, often described as the world's most intractable conflict. Controversy remains over a number of areas, such as whether the declaration contradicted earlier promises the British made to the Sharif of Mecca in the McMahonโHussein correspondence.
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- "Balfour Declaration" | 2023-10-19 | 16 Upvotes 7 Comments
๐ Circulation of Elites
The circulation of elite is a theory of regime change described by Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto (1848โ1923).
Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.
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- "Circulation of Elites" | 2020-12-09 | 75 Upvotes 26 Comments
๐ Ashcan Comic
An ashcan comic is a form of the American comic book created solely to establish trademarks on potential titles and not intended for sale. The practice was common in the 1930s and 1940s when the comic book industry was in its infancy, but was phased out after updates to US trademark law. The term was revived in the 1980s by Bob Burden, who applied it to prototypes of his self-published comic book. Since the 1990s, the term has been used to describe promotional materials produced in large print runs and made available for mass consumption. In the film and television industries, the term "ashcan copy" has been adopted for low-grade material created to preserve a claim to licensed property rights.
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- "Ashcan Comic" | 2026-01-30 | 55 Upvotes 20 Comments
๐ Happy Petrov day
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: ะกัะฐะฝะธัะปะฐฬะฒ ะะฒะณัะฐฬัะพะฒะธั ะะตััะพฬะฒ; 7 September 1939 โ 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
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- "It's Stanislav Petrov day โ40yrs ago he saved world by suppressing a tech glitch" | 2023-09-26 | 129 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "Happy Petrov day" | 2013-09-26 | 138 Upvotes 30 Comments
๐ Unsolved Problems in Economics
This is a list of some of the major unsolved problems, puzzles, or questions in economics. Some of these are theoretical in origin and some of them concern the inability of orthodox economic theory to explain an empirical observation.
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- "Unsolved Problems in Economics" | 2022-05-17 | 157 Upvotes 237 Comments
๐ The โOh-My-God Particleโ
The Oh-My-God particle was the highest-energy cosmic ray detected at the time (15 October 1991) by the Fly's Eye detector in Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, US. Its energy was estimated as (3.2ยฑ0.9)ร1020ย eV, or 51ย J. This is 20 million times more energetic than the highest energy measured in electromagnetic radiation emitted by an extragalactic object and 1020 (100 quintillion) times the photon energy of visible light, equivalent to a 142-gram (5ย oz) baseball travelling at about 26ย m/s (94ย km/h; 58ย mph). Although higher energy cosmic rays have been detected since then, this particle's energy was unexpected, and called into question theories of that era about the origin and propagation of cosmic rays.
Assuming it was a proton, this particle traveled at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light, its Lorentz factor was 3.2ร1011 and its rapidity was 27.1. At this speed, if a photon were travelling with the particle, it would take over 215,000 years for the photon to gain a 1ย cm lead as seen in Earth's reference frame.
The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator. However, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is โ2Emc2, where E is the particle's energy and mc2 is the mass energy of the proton. For the Oh-My-God particle, this gives 7.5ร1014ย eV, roughly 60 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
While the particle's energy was higher than anything achieved in terrestrial accelerators, it was still about 40 million times lower than the Planck energy. Particles of such energy would be required in order to explore the Planck scale. A proton with that much energy would travel 1.665ร1015 times closer to the speed of light than the Oh-My-God particle. As viewed from Earth it would take about 3.579ร1020ย years, or 2.59ร1010 times the current age of the universe, for a photon to gain a 1 cm lead over a Planck energy proton as observed in Earth's reference frame.
Since the first observation, at least 72 similar (energy > 5.7ร1019ย eV) events have been recorded, confirming the phenomenon. These ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles are very rare; the energy of most cosmic ray particles is between 10ย MeV and 10ย GeV. More recent studies using the Telescope Array have suggested a source for the particles within a 20-degree radius "warm spot" in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.
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- "Oh-My-God Particle" | 2023-10-06 | 69 Upvotes 52 Comments
- "The โOh-My-God Particleโ" | 2018-02-27 | 118 Upvotes 71 Comments
- "Oh-My-God particle" | 2014-05-07 | 165 Upvotes 41 Comments
๐ Zombie Zero
Zombie Zero is an attack vector where a cyber attacker utilized malware that was clandestinely embedded in new barcode readers which were manufactured overseas.
It remains unknown if this attack was promulgated by organized crime or a nation state. Clearly there was significant planning and investment in order to design the malware, and then embed it into the hardware within the barcode scanner. Internet of things (IoT) devices may be similarly preinstalled with malware that can capture the network passwords and then open a backdoor to attackers. Given the high volume of these devices manufactured overseas high caution is to be exercised before placing these devices on corporate or government networks.
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- "Zombie Zero" | 2021-04-09 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Our world is turning into the one depicted in Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer"
"The Murderer" (1953) is a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.
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- "Our world is turning into the one depicted in Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer"" | 2011-09-26 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ List of unsolved problems in physics
Some of the major unsolved problems in physics are theoretical, meaning that existing theories seem incapable of explaining a certain observed phenomenon or experimental result. The others are experimental, meaning that there is a difficulty in creating an experiment to test a proposed theory or investigate a phenomenon in greater detail.
There are still some deficiencies in the Standard Model of physics, such as the origin of mass, the strong CP problem, neutrino mass, matterโantimatter asymmetry, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Another problem lies within the mathematical framework of the Standard Model itselfโthe Standard Model is inconsistent with that of general relativity, to the point that one or both theories break down under certain conditions (for example within known spacetime singularities like the Big Bang and the centers of black holes beyond the event horizon).
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- "List of unsolved problems in physics" | 2016-08-13 | 119 Upvotes 39 Comments
- "List of Unsolved Problems in Physics" | 2015-01-22 | 105 Upvotes 21 Comments
- "Unsolved problems in physics" | 2009-05-07 | 21 Upvotes 27 Comments