Otto's Random Thoughts

Overall 2016 was a great year. I finally got a decent paying job for the first time in my life. My compensation literally increased an order...

Actually there are quite a few malls in Suli. But, I went to the giant new Majidi mall today. It is built like a giant airplane hanger and t...

To clarify the offensive statement by George Ciccariello-Maher is not the one on "white genocide" but this one. “To clarify: wh...

In 2016 I had two peer reviewed journal articles and a book chapter published.  The first article is "The Persecution of the Ethnic Ger...

On 27 December 1943 the NKVD began the round up and deportation of the Kalmyks from their homeland on the Caspian Sea to Siberia. The Stal...

Since I have finished grading and entering final grades for fall 2016 I have read two books on Kurdish history and gotten half way through a...

I finally finished all my marking two days ago. Now I have a break here in Kurdistan before I have to return to teaching. I hope to catch up...

The amount of scholarship on racial discrimination in the USSR is extremely limited. This is especially the case in English. The establish...

From 2011 to 2016 I lived in Ghana under the NDC. Until President Mills died in 2012 things were going well. But, after his death JDM prov...

My first semester of teaching in Kurdistan is almost at an end. It had some significant differences than my teaching in Ghana. The biggest o...

At this point I am pretty sure this blog has no human readers other than my parents. But, just in case I am wrong about this above point I e...

One island is a brutal dictatorship off the coast of the US that has been ruled by the same political party and indeed same family since 195...

Tomorrow I finish up my week on Kurds in the USSR for my History of the Middle East class. Unlike some other diaspora nationalities in the S...

The other day I gave a lecture on Kurds in the USSR to my History of the Middle East class. Tomorrow we will return to the subject. The Kurd...

To anybody from the US that might stumble across this blog I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

I did not write and publish as much related to Africa as I wanted to during my five and a half years living and working in Ghana. But, I d...

If anybody is looking for something to read not related to the elections I have put up the text of the book chapter I co-authored with Felix...

It turns out that the title of the Lundt and Marx book on Nkrumah that will have my chapter on the 24 February 1966 coup has been changed to...