Who Were the Sea Peoples?

At about 1:37 in the video below, Professor Roger Bowley begins to recount the "history" of the number zero: The problem with Bowley's account is that, like with so many scientists, he apparently thinks it is A-OK just to make up history as you go along. First of all, he can't even get the little facts right: the Muslim author he wants to cite was "al-Khwarizmi," not "al-Khwazimi," and he was a Persian living in the Middle East, not North Africa. But the heart of that passage is how the Catholic Church fought against Fibonacc's introduction of Arabic numerals, since it was the time of the Crusades, they were Muslim, the "work of the devil," as a result they were banned in Florence, etc. This seemed like typical invented-from-whole-cloth anti-Catholicism, and so I immediately wrote Thony (an actual historian of mathematics), who responded: "No, I have never come across anything like that in all that I have read about ...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) notes that while slavery was hardly questioned in antiquity, the Catholic Church gradually eliminated it in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. When Aquinas condemned slavery as "contrary to natural law," this soon became the official Church position. Nevertheless, some Church officials, even some popes, continued to own slaves. But some popes engaged in fornication and had children out of wedlock, despite official Church opposition to sex outside of marriage. And the Spanish and Portuguese imperialists often continued to enslave people, despite Church opposition. For instance, Spain colonized the Canary Islands in the early 1400s, and started enslaving the islanders.  This prompted Pope Eugene IV to declare that "these people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without exaction or reception of any money" (quoted on 171). In the 1500s, Pope Paul II asserted that "the same Indians and all other p...

While the blood libel actually occurred far too often in the Middle Ages, Philip Daileader claims that he has not been able to discover a single instance of a Catholic bishop supporting the charge. Universally, he says, they dismissed the idea as nonsense. Similarly, when hoi polloi of the People's Crusade attacked Jews in France and Germany, "The Church opposed these attacks, and local clergy often came to the defense of Jews in their community." Jews suffered a lot at the hands of the common people of Europe through the Middle Ages. Almost always, church officials denounced these episodes and tried to protect the Jews from their attackers.

Whenever you point out something particularly bad being done by a corporation or an industry to a libertarian and ask if the free market might have had a part in it, you are told "The free market does not exist: we are living in a world where markets are plagued by a myriad of interventions!" But this free-market that does not exist whenever one is pointing to a problem, suddenly pops into existence whenever a libertarian wants to take credit for some improvements that have gone on in the world: "and peaceful solutions (the free market) have emancipated more people from grinding poverty than any other force in the history of the world." Sorry, the exact same mixed economy that has produced crony capitalism and pollution has produced the economic growth that has lifted people out of poverty, since that is the only sort of economy we have had during the time Woods is discussing. You don't get to call it your beloved free market whenever it produces somethi...

Interesting post here : In 1618 the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi showed by observation and parallax measurement that the comet of that year was indeed supra-lunar driving another nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian theory of comets. Galileo, who due to illness had been unable to observe the comet, was urged by his claque to enter the arena with his opinion on the nature of comets. Galileo then famously launched an unprovoked and extremely vitriolic attack on Grassi condemning his work and defending what was basically a version of the Aristotelian theory. It was one of Galileo’s less glorious moments, far from using mathematic to criticise a doctrine of Aristotle’s Galileo was defending Aristotle’s theory of comets against an astronomer who had used mathematic to disprove it. So, in this case, someone from the Church was disproving a theory of Aristotle's while Galileo was dogmatically defending it. Life is usually not as simple as we like to make it out.