History Matters to Me
It's a mystery.
President Obama is a recidivist violator, systematically, day after day, of Constitution, of our statutes and of our international treaties. We still have torture. We still have indefinite imprisonment. We still have war crimes all over part of Asia and Africa, violating all kinds of laws. These wars have never been declared by Congress. We have indefinite imprisonment. They use the word “detainee.” Don’t you like that word, “detainee”? You know, you’re in Guantánamo for nine years; you’re still a detainee instead of a prisoner. And the press uses their language, too.
(via azspot)
(Source: bureauvision, via savage-america)
A commando shows off his skills as he smashes bottles in a performance for children in Gyeryong City, South Korea. Thankfully, they were filled with water not beer.
From picture desk live: the best news images of the day
Photograph: EPA
Finding The Spike Lee Of Video Games
Joseph Saulter, the African American video game entrepreneur and educator, wants to see a gaming industry that reflects its customer base - not to mention the country.
Few industries are as disconnected from their customers as the video game industry. Gamers are disproportionately African-American or Hispanic, according to a survey by the Kaiser Foundation. Yet these are precisely the demographics that are underrepresented within the industry itself: both among the developers of games, only 2% of whom are black, and among the characters presented in the games they make. Most game protagonists are white males, and a USC survey revealed that a measly tenth of characters were black, and most of these were either athletes or gangsters.Joseph Saulter wants to change all this. The entrepreneur behind Entertainment Arts Research, Inc., which Ebony Magazine recently singled out as one of the first black-owned publicly traded gaming companies, has made it his quest to make the gaming industry more reflective of its audience.
Now is a big moment for Saulter, whose company is set to release a major game in July (a parkour game for iOS, discussed below). Several other ambitious projects are in the works, including a game that takes place in Chicago’s South Side in the mid-20th century. “It’s a history of the black community, it’s a history of jazz, it’s a history of the arts and of the revolutions that went on in that period of time,” Saulter says of the game, Bronzeville Etudes & Riffs, a project of artist Philip Mallory Jones, who based much of the material off of oral histories with his mother.
Fast Company caught up with Saulter to learn more about his vision of the future of video games, and what it will take to launch a “Spike Lee of video games”—a black game designer who’s also a household name.
(via teachingliteracy)
New Evidence Unearthed for the Origins of the Maya
The Maya culture began differently than previously thought, study says.
The British government knew from the moment it planned to withdraw its forces from Palestine more than 60 years ago that partition of the territory and the founding of the state of Israel would lead to war and defeat for the Arabs, secret documents released make clear.
The Israel-Palestinian crisis that has endured since 1948 was a known outcome ot the British who did much to create it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/26/british-secret-documents-palestine-partition
Soldiers and civilians in North Korea. Photo by Ilya Pitaev.
Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org.
A truly inspiring educator.
(Source: youtube.com, via notational)
March is Women’s History Month!
Photograph, Suffrage Parade, 1913
From the Series: Photographs Used in Publications, Records of the Office of War Information, Record Group 208
As March 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the watershed Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington DC, be sure to watch for more #Suffrage13 features from the National Archives, including:
One of the big human migrations, and one of the most tragic.
life:
Hindus flee Pakistan in the midst of a border war, 1947 — photograph by the great Margaret Bourke-White.(Margaret Bourke-White—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Today in History: Jan 12, 1879, the Anglo-Zulu War begins
The Anglo–Zulu War was fought between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom.
Following a campaign by which Lord Carnarvon had successfully brought about federation in Canada, it was thought that similar combined military and political campaigns might succeed with the various African kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa.
In 1874, Sir Henry Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as High Commissioner for the British Empire to bring the plans into being, however, there were many obstacles. Frere, on his own initiative, without the approval of the British government and with the intent of instigating a war with the Zulu presented an ultimatum to the Zulu king Cetshwayo with which the Zulu king could not comply.
Cetshwayo rejected the British demand that he disband his troops, and in January British forces invaded Zululand to suppress Cetshwayo. The British suffered grave defeats at Isandlwana, where 1,300 British soldiers were killed or wounded, and at Hlobane Mountain, but on March 29 the tide turned in favor of the British at the Battle of Khambula.
At Ulundi in July, Cetshwayo’s forces were utterly routed, and the Zulus were forced to surrender to the British. In 1887, faced with continuing Zulu rebellions, the British formally annexed Zululand, and in 1897 it became a part of Natal, which joined the Union of South Africa in 1910.
#660
Google’s Ingress.
(via revolutionizeed)
