You have to be an absolute piece of crap, with no respect for history or decency, to pull off this crime:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8423827.stm
My only joy is that the five semi-humans who committed the crime were caught, along with what they stole.
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on December 20, 2009 at 11:24pm —
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The subscribers' print run of
Line of Departure Issue 65 is in the car and ready to go into the mail tomorrow. This one is a theme issue, Second World War: First Contact, addressing the early stages of the war, and the preliminary confli…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on November 16, 2009 at 10:30pm —
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I'm a big fan of Max Brooks, especially
World War Z, his definitive oral history of mankind's war to the death with the undead.
First published in 2003, three years before his better-known towering work, is
The Zombie Survival Guide. By its nature,…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on October 23, 2009 at 8:21pm —
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Today, a man named
Marek Edelman died at age 90 in Warsaw. Edelman was a tireless campaigner against hate, and for freedom and human dignity, opposing Communism in Poland, and working with the Solidarity movement in its campaign for a democratic homeland.
Had he done none of this though, Marek Edelman would still deserve remembering, for he was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto upri…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on October 2, 2009 at 8:08pm —
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For those among us who think that nature provides the most spectacular views in the night sky, I bring you a project from the
European Southern Observatory (ESO). As
reported by CNN, it's an 800-million-pixel, 360-degree edge-on panorama of our own Milky Way galaxy, all taken with a standard digital camera by French astrophotographer…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on September 16, 2009 at 1:09pm —
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The
BBC today reported on a newly revealed postscript to the expulsion of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. It should not be a surprise that Generalissimo Chiang longed to return to the Mainland. What might be surprising is how far along the planning was, as late as the 1960's. The People's Republic suffered a severe famine, due to Mao Zedong's rapid modernization and the…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on September 7, 2009 at 9:49pm —
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I'll save everyone the problem of waiting for a plot spoiler, so here it is: The Japanese win at the end of the movie. And that ending is really really boring.
Seriously though,
Inglourious Basterds is a film sure to appeal to many history buffs and wargamers. A tour de force from the inimitable
Quentin Tarantino, the leading practitioner of intelligent actio…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on August 26, 2009 at 9:09pm —
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FoxNews.com recently did a
slide show of high-tech jobs that got my attention for several reasons. One is that the current state of the economy makes anything about jobs interesting. Also, we just had our run-ins with spammers. Another is that the subject concerns professions that can yield lots of money, but cost friends.
In fac…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on August 17, 2009 at 10:29pm —
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On November 19, 1941, off the Indian Ocean coast of Australia, the Australian light cruiser HMAS
Sydney approached what its captain, Joseph Burnett, thought was the merchantman
Straat Malakka. He was wrong.
The ship turned out to be the German armed merchant cruiser
Kormoran. When challenged, the
Kormoran fired on the unsuspecting cruiser at close range, probably killing Captain Burnett and all the officers on the bridge with the first salvo. More shells and a torped…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on August 13, 2009 at 6:30pm —
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Today,
CNN is reporting online about the charming little town of
West Bend, Wisconsin. There, a group of residents are protesting the inclusion of "pornographic" books for young adults, including some that they target as "gay-affirming" in the young adult section. They advocate moving the purported smut to the adult section of the library in order to "keep…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on July 22, 2009 at 2:38pm —
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It's a little hard to have a neutral opinion of Robert Strange McNamara if you're of a certain age. President of Ford Motor Company and a quantifying "Whiz Kid," he was appointed Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy, where he shortly showed what a Secretary of Defense should neither be nor do.
I say
business for a reason, as McNamara seemed to regard mankind's bloodiest enterprise as a bloodless, emotionless, soulless exercise in numbers. An architect of the Vietnam War, he was a prop…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on July 7, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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When people can't vote at the ballot box against a dictatorship, they often vote with their feet. The Berlin Wall was a monument to this, and a grand attempt by a dysfunctional Communist regime to take away the shoe leather franchise from people who decided that moving to freedom was an alternative to suffering under dictatorship.
Nor was East Germany alone in witnessing the exodus of its best and brightest. The migration of the Cuban middle class to Florida was a consequence of Fidel Castro's…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on July 1, 2009 at 6:14pm —
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This is based on something that I just posted on
Wargamer.com, in response to the reactions to the death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop.
Michael Jackson was not a genius on a par with Elvis, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, or a whole host of legends built on talent. He was a fine dancer, a good showman, and a passable singer. The rest was a testament to the power of hype and celebrity. After all, who gave Michael Jackson the title of The Ki…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on June 26, 2009 at 9:24am —
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Fareed Zakariah can usually be counted upon for excellent analysis of events in the Middle East and the Islamic world. In this week's
Newsweek, he offers an
examination of the crisis of legitimacy now facing the Iranian theocracy, one well worth reading.
Dr. Zakariah does not see the regime as likely to fall a…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on June 22, 2009 at 3:00pm —
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Events in Iran since election day on June 12 have been truly breathtaking. The Islamist status quo faces a crisis of legitimacy, very reminiscent of that which raged through Eastern Europe twenty years ago, and the upsurge of popular rage further calls to mind the popular wrath that drove Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi from the Peacock Throne thirty years ago.
In an
insightful blo…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on June 16, 2009 at 4:07pm —
14 Comments
With yesterday's shooting at the
United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, attention has to be paid to the museum itself. A few people are going ask, why have one? Why should federal tax dollars, in a tight economy after all, go towards commemorating something perpetrated by foreigners a long time ago?
One reason comes to mind immediately: Deniers. Upon the exposure of the Nazis' crimes against humanity, General Dwight David Eisenhower comm…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on June 11, 2009 at 11:30am —
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One of the most incisive commentators in the national media, in my opinion, is
Robert J. Samuelson of
The Washington Post and
Newsweek. There are times when I don't necessarily agree with him, but I usually respect his reasoning, and unlike the vast majority of the talking…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on June 1, 2009 at 4:00pm —
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Africa might be called the Dark Continent because it's a giant blindspot to most people. We get used to the disease, famine, natural disasters, and the manmade abuses, the violence, even the genocide in Africa. After a while, it seems to be a matter of "What's another starving kid with a distended belly?" Or "What are a few thousand people chopped up by machetes among friends?"
What most of the rest of world calls shocking, disgusting and abhorrent, too much of Africa calls just another Tuesday…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on May 19, 2009 at 3:58pm —
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Major Stephen Hutchison of Scottsdale AZ became, at age 60, the oldest American service person to die in action in Iraq. Major Hutchison was a Vietnam veteran who rejoined the Army in the wake of 9/11. His wife objected, so he waited until her death to rejoin.
When killed by a a roadside bomb, Major Hutchison was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Armored Regiment, of the 1st Infantry Division.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3075251…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on May 14, 2009 at 8:54pm —
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As the government offensive in the Swat Valley heats up, there may be an erosion of support for Sharia law and Islamist governance that once existed throughout Pakistan. The Pakistani legal system reported was slow, inefficient, and corrupt, giving people reason to reach out for an Islamist alternative.
But that alternative did not work out quite as well as promised. Now Pakistan is in a fight for its life and its identity.
MSNBC's web site…
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Added by Jim Werbaneth on May 10, 2009 at 1:29pm —
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