Humans and Royalty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretender


A quick look at the list shows that almost every civilization had kings at one point. This is a universal form of state organization and human grouping that stretches from South America to Siberia. That doesn't make it a good idea, but certainly an understandable one that served humanity for a time.

Terminology is Key

An apéritif or aperitif is an alcoholic drink usually enjoyed as an appetizer before a large meal. It is often served with something small to eat, like olives or crackers. The word is derived from the Latin verb "aperire", which means to open.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ap%C3%A9ritif

A digestif is a beverage, usually small and alcoholic, which is consumed at the end of a meal. Some believe that a digestif aids the digestion of food, and bitter or carminitive herbs are generally added to the alcohol. The term is lifted from French. Digestifs can be compared with apéritifs, which are drunk before a meal — usually, the digestif will be heavier and more alcoholic. Digestifs are usually drunk neat and are most often spirits; cognac is a common selection. Other likely choices include armagnacs, brandies, and whiskies. Some wines (usually fortified) are served as digestifs as well — for instance, port, sherry, or madeira.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestif

What do you mean am I an alcoholic? I just drink before and after every meal, and sometimes during the meal!

It is a bit more dignified, isn't it?

Papal regalia and insignia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Pope hat)

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_hat

Poland Does Not Forget

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Russian_War_of_1792

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Uprising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Bolshevik_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kozakiewicz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Home_Army

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Army_in_the_West

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Legions_in_Italy


These uncivilized people are incapable of accepting defeat like gentlemen. Though their ways are backward and cruel, the natives apparently hold them in very high regard.

Method over Multitude

20 Canadians were executed near Villons-les-Buissons, northeast of Caen in the Ardenne Abbey. The abbey was made up of buildings from the middle-ages and a gothic church. The commander of the 25th German heavy armored regiment of the 12th SS-Panzerdivision, Kurt Meyer, had his headquarters in the area and probably was involved in the execution.

A small chapel at the abbey was set up in memory of the Canadian soldiers. The chapel consists of a wooden cross, over which is a niche with a statue of Mary. On the cross is a Canadian steel helmet. Every year the children of Authie place flowers at the chapel. In 1984 a bronze plaque was erected at the abbey, it reads:

"On the night of June 7/8, 1944, 18 Canadian soldiers were murdered in this garden while being held here as prisoners of war. Two more prisoners died here or nearby on June 17. They are dead but not forgotten."

[...]

On the evening of 7 July 467 [British and American] airplanes flew in clear weather and dropped 2,276 bombs. The bombings did little to harm the German forces, but the northern suburbs were mostly destroyed in the attacks. French civilians also bore the brunt with about 3,000 being killed. Later, when the city was finally taken, it was determined that no German cannons, tanks or soldiers were killed in the targeted areas.

[...]

After the war ended, the West German government had to pay reparations as compensation to any civilians in Caen killed, starved, or left homeless by the war.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Caen

The victor is not asked questions, other than at whom he wants to point his finger. Then again, the schoolyard truth of not starting fights you can't finish holds up well when applied to international diplomacy.

Is it not curious?

SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke (15 March 1911 – 6 August 2001) was one of the original 120 members of the SS-Stabswache "Berlin" formed in March 1933. From those ranks, he was to rise to become one of German dictator Adolf Hitler's last remaining generals.

Mohnke saw action while serving with the infamous Infantry Regiment Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler in Poland and the Balkans. After several failed attempts to introduce a Panzer arm to the Leibstandarte, he was transferred to a replacement battalion until he was given command of a regiment in the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. It was with this regiment that he fought in the Battle for Caen. For his superior conduct in battle, he received the Knight's Cross on 11 July 1944. After participating in most of the French campaign, he was given command of his original division the Leibstandarte Operation Wacht Am Rhein, which commenced on 16 December 1944. He served until the very last day of the war in Europe; during the Battle of Berlin, he commanded Kampfgruppe Mohnke and was charged with defending the Berlin government district, including the Reichstag (nicknamed Die Zitadelle (The Citadel)).

Mohnke was captured by the Soviets while leading his group of survivors in the attempt to break out from the Führerbunker. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement until 1949, then transferred to the Generals' Prison in Woikowo. He remained in captivity until 10 October 1955. Following his release, he worked as a dealer in small trucks and trailers, living in Barsbüttel, Germany.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Mohnke

And people think me mad for daring to suggest that human lives are not a continuous narrative. They're clearly not, but does this remove responsibility?

I don't know.

Christian Virtue and So Forth

Following the Christian victory over the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Knights continued to attack pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading, selling captured Africans and Turks and conversely freeing Christian slaves. Malta remained a slave market until well into the eighteenth century. It required a thousand slaves to equip merely the galleys of the Order.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Malta

A world without pain, degredation, ideas, art, or masturbation.

Dworkin and MacKinnon placed special emphasis on the legal definition of pornography provided in the civil rights ordinance. The civil rights ordinance characterizes pornography as a form of "sex discrimination" and defines "pornography" as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words," when combined with one of several other conditions. In the "model ordinance" that they drafted, Dworkin and MacKinnon gave the following legal definition:

1. "Pornography" means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following:

a. women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or

b. women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy humiliation or pain; or

c. women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest, or other sexual assault; or

d. women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or

e. women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or

f. women's body parts-including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks-are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or

g. women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or

h. women are presented in scenarios of degradation, humiliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipornography_civil_rights_ordinance

It's so subjective it's obviously going to be used for extreme censorship. But maybe freedom is overrated. As Stalin said: ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don't allow our opponents to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?

Sometimes it is not you who put your dreams to sleep, but the other way around.

On the Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler, possibly at the instigation of Göring and Heinrich Himmler, but also possibly at the urging of the army high command, undertook a purge of the SA — an event known to history as the Night of the Long Knives. Ernst's wife and chauffeur were wounded, and he was taken back to Berlin by a detachment of the SS. Some 150 SA leaders, including Ernst, were stood against a wall at the Cadet School at Lichterfelde and shot by Leibstandarte-SS firing squads. Ernst, believing that he faced a putsch from the Conservative, pro-Capitalist, political Right, died shouting Heil Hitler.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ernst

Listen Little Man....

In many early and post-release interviews, Peter Chung was cautiously optimistic or evasive in his opinion of the film, in the following month he publicly criticized the movie in an interview .^[3] Phil Hay, one of the scriptwriters for the film, gave a response on the same website.^[4] Producer Gale Anne Hurd described a visit from Peter Chung to the set in her DVD commentary (at 1:06:49), "And this is also when Peter Chung visited the set... and it was great to have him there, and have him feel that Charlize was bringing Æon Flux to life the way that he had envisioned an actor would be able to. And that he thought that the world of Bregna that we had created in the film was what he hoped it would be." This seems at odds with Chung's public statement that the film is a "travesty" and seeing it in a theater made him feel "helpless, humiliated and sad."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86on_Flux_%28film%29

Aussies are even lucky when it comes to ignorance!

"The Lucky Country" is a nickname sometimes used to describe Australia, taken from the 1964 book of the same name by social critic Donald Horne.

The title of Horne's The Lucky Country comes from the opening words of the book's last chapter:

Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.

Horne's statement was actually made ironically, as an indictment of 1960s Australia. His intent was to comment that, while other industralised nations created wealth using "clever" means such as technology and other innovations, Australia did not. Rather, Australia's economic prosperity was largely derived from its rich natural resources. Horne observed that Australia "showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society." [1]

In the decades following his book's publication, Horne became critical of the "lucky country" phrase being used as a term of endearment for Australia. He commented, "I have had to sit through the most appalling rubbish as successive generations misapplied this phrase."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Country

Today's "No" award goes to...

Electronic civil disobedience, also known as ECD or cyber civil disobedience, can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Generally speaking, electronic civil disobedience involves the Internet.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_civil_disobedience

See Also:
Faggotry
Ineffectiveness
Mental Retardation
Confusing agreeing with other people on the internet for meaningful activity

Context is the unnecessary glue that holds our unnecessary society together.

Renaud said the Mathers family will not be pressing charges because Spratt has already paid for his crime by losing his job at the bingo hall.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminem

Man, reality seems fucked without the newspeak filter.

In January of 2007, the online magazine Insight, a sister publication of The Washington Times, published an unsourced article reporting a rumor that "researchers connected to Senator [Hillary] Clinton" had discovered that rival candidate Barack Obama was educated in a radical Islamic Madrassa school during his youth in Indonesia.^[1].

To investigate this statement, which was quickly propagated in the United States mass media, including on Fox News, CNN reporter John Vause visited the school and found its staff in Western attire, its student body apparently consisting of Muslims, "Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian(s)".^[2] The CNN story also quoted a spokesperson for Clinton, who dismissed the allegation as "an obvious right-wing hit job" on both candidates. Insight responded that CNN's investigation did "not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting", and said that they provided "political intelligence" on "a limited budget".^[3].

A January 29 New York Times story commented on the Insight story. The article notes:

Insight editor Jeffrey T. Kuhner "whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters."

In the article, Kuhner says that the article is "solid as solid can be" ^[4]. The Fox News Channel has since acknowledged that the story violates their basic rule of knowing "what you are talking about." John Moody, vice president for news at Fox, also included this in his daily editorial note on January 23: "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC. The urgent queue is our way of communicating information that is air-worthy. Please adhere to this."^[5].
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight_magazine_%22madrassa%22_media_controversy