Rudolph Joseph Rummel (born October 21, 1932, Cleveland, Ohio) is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government (compare genocide), his research claiming that six times as many people died of democide during the 20th century than in all that century's wars combined. He concludes that democracy is the form of government least likely to kill its citizens and that democracies do not wage war against each other (see Democratic peace theory).
Rummel is the author of 24 scholarly books, and published his major results in Understanding Conflict and War (1975–81). He then spent the next fifteen years refining the underlying theory and testing it empirically on new data, against the empirical results of others, and on case studies. Power Kills (1997) sums up Rummel's research. Other works include Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders 1917-1987 (1990); China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991); Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1992); Death by Government (1994); and Statistics of Democide (1997). Extracts, figures, and tables from the books, including his sources and details regarding the calculations, are available online on his website. Rummel has also authored Understanding Factor Analysis (1970) and Understanding Correlation (1976). He is the author of the Never again series of alternative-history novels, in which a secret society sends two lovers armed with fabulous wealth and modern weapons back to 1906 with orders to create an alternative, peaceful century. These works are available online.
The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR), based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and founded by R. J. Reynolds in 1875, is the second-largest tobacco company in the U.S. (behind Altria Group). RJR is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc. which in turn is 42% owned by British American Tobacco of the United Kingdom.
The son of a tobacco farmer in Virginia, R. J. Reynolds sold his shares of his father's company in Patrick County, Virginia, and ventured to the nearest town with a railroad connection, Winston-Salem, to start his own tobacco company. He bought his first factory building from the Moravian Church and established the "little red factory" with seasonal workers. The first year, he produced 150,000 pounds of tobacco; by the 1890s, production had increased to several million pounds a year. The company's factory buildings were the largest buildings in Winston-Salem, with new technologies such as steam power and electric lights. The second primary factory building, built in 1892, is the oldest Reynolds factory still standing and was sold to Forsyth County in 1990.
Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (Campinas, April 29, 1947) is a Brazilian journalist,, and essayist on several issues like the history of astrology and mysticism; the history of revolutionary mentality; and philosophical anthropology, known for his conservative political stances, and for being a vehement critic of leftist.
Now living in the United States in the state of Virginia, he is an international correspondent and writes a weekly column for the Brazilian newspaper Diário do Comércio. He also teaches philosophy on a free course to over 1000 students online. Carvalho has previously written for several other magazines and newspapers, such as Bravo!, Primeira Leitura, O Globo, Época and Zero Hora, and taught philosophy to a smaller circle of students, while still living in Brazil. He also translated to Portuguese works of important philosophers of the 20th century, such as the Romanian Constantin Noica, the Spanish Xavier Zubiri, the French René Guénon, the German-American Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. He has commented and developed researches and theories on the works of Aristotle. He has also delivered lectures on his own work and on the work of several of those philosophers mentioned above.