Great article

Great article

Originally shared by Jeff Zahari

“By some estimates, the Kongo kingdom and its immediate region lost a third of its population to the European slave trade. Between 1500 and the late 1800s, tropical Africa altogether lost roughly 18 million people to the slave trade, most of them in their prime reproductive years. This impact is better understood if one considers that the population of the continent remained stagnant at 50 million between 1700 and 1850 instead of doubling, as some demographers believe it might have without slavery’s heavy toll.”

The use of chemical warfare in Syria is systematic and always used at critical moments to shift the political focus…

The use of chemical warfare in Syria is systematic and always used at critical moments to shift the political focus of the Syrian war.

No matter what your view on the war and the stream of disinformation that has always accompanied it, you have to admit that there’s something strange going on.

Somebody is periodically launching chemical attacks in Syria and it is never to the benefit of the Syrian government. It always provokes an escalation of diplomatic and military pressure and the source of the attacks is always shrouded in mystery and followed by inconclusive investigations.

After the 2012 incident, Seymour Hersh pointed the finger at Turkey. Since then it has been pointed at jihadist insurgency groups and rogue factions within the Syrian regime itself. The only thing that is certain that chemical attacks do more to attack Assad’s legitimacy than they do to advance any military goal.

Originally shared by Teodor Poparescu

The article is dated on 17th of March. As soon as Trump announced withdrawal from Syria, someone launched a chemical attack which is blamed on Assad before any investigation.

Yet another discussion of monads for JavaScript dimwits.

Yet another discussion of monads for JavaScript dimwits.

It’s interesting to me that idea of “programmable semicolons” makes complete sense to functional programmers (for whom a program is really just one big expression) and basically none to imperative programmers who think in terms of program statements which evolve their computation through variables.

Chainable or composable units of computation are really what this is all about.