History
oracknows | May 21, 2008Here's how not to allow personalized stamps to be produced:
BERLIN -- German neo-Nazis used a personalized stamp service offered by Deutsche Post to create a 55-cent stamp carrying a portrait of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, the company said Wednesday.
The latest newsletter of the far-right National Democratic Party gloated about being able to slip the stamp past Deutsche Post's quality control personnel.
"The Hess stamp is out there," wrote Hannes Natter in the May edition of Deutsche Stimme, or German Voice.
Deutsche Post spokesman Dirk Klasen confirmed that someone managed to slip an order…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This is too hilarious for words. It's priceless.
It's Chris Matthews applying a little history smackdown--I mean lesson--to an ignorant right wing talk radio host named Kevin James, who was overjoyed at President Bush's use of the Neville Chamberlain gambit the other day and wanted to take the opportunity to throw the same gambit around too about the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. Bad idea:
My only complaint is that Matthews didn't deliver what would have been the perfect coup de grâce. That would have been to ask (1) what did Neville Chamberlain do in March 1939…
oracknows | May 15, 2008
Jake and Elwood hated Illinois Nazis. I hate Michigan Nazis. Actually, I hate all Nazis, but I especially detest Nazis from states I've lived in, such as Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois. But worst of all are Michigan Nazis, because it's my home state, and even worse than that are Detroit Nazis, because that's my home town. I was born there and lived there until I was around 10. I will always have an affinity for the city, no matter how down and out it is.
And there's a Nazi in Detroit now trying to take advantage of the crappy economy to recruit to his hate cause:
On a dead-end street along…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2008
In a famous skit, Wayne and Schuster had Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, saying "Julie, don't go! It's the Ides of March!" Now we can see why Julie went. He was old, and worried...
This is a bust of Julius Caesar in his "old age" (old age be damned. He looks younger than I am) that has recently been found in the sediment of the Rhône River next to the Roman city of Arles, which Caesar founded. It is thought to be from life, and is the oldest bust of J. C. known.
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2008
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda's naive optimism and Huxley's sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and "to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement". They also have a blog. It is…
oracknows | May 11, 2008The ignorance and stupidity, they burn:
Why, yes, actually, we did "allow" Nazi Germany to host the Olympics back in 1936. Hitler even presided over some of the ceremonies. The sign is so wrong that at first I wondered whether it was a Photoshop job, but apparently it's legit.
I realize this photo is from around three week ago, but I didn't see it until Ed pointed me to it yesterday. Given my interest in World War II history and the Holocaust, you just knew I couldn't resist it once made aware of it. True, it's not as hilariously dumb as Tony Zirkle, but it does reveal a shocking level of…
oracknows | May 9, 2008...or so sayeth, well...YOU ARE DUMB. Bryan may be a little late in piling on, but better late than never.
Zirkle, as you may recall, was the hapless candidate for the Republican nomination to run for a Congressional seat in northwest Indiana who accepted an invitation to speak at a celebration of Hitler's 119th birthday by the American Nazi Party--excuse me, the American National Socialist Workers' Party--as I joked about a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, though, I didn't give Zirkle all the credit he is due. I just made fun of his cluelessness about giving a speech on Hitler's birthday…
clock | May 4, 2008Grunewald station in Berlin is a small, unasuming train station that looks like thousands of such stations around the world. But it is at this spot that thousands of Jews were loaded onto trains to Auschwitz and other places, initially in precise batches of 100 people per day, later increasing to more than a thousand per day, some days skipped, some days seeing two trains off, most well documented, but some trains going off into unknown directions....
clock | May 4, 2008Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe where, by design, concrete slabs that are initially perfectly aligned, due to sinking of the soil, adopt all sorts of different angles. Looking down the "aisles", one sees people, children playing hide-and-seek, and suddenly disappearing. People vanish, while the entire structure slowly turns from perfect order to disorder:
oracknows | May 3, 2008Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain.
Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2008
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by an artist, Augustus Earle, who visited Australia and New Zealand, and spent some time on board the Beagle with Darwin. Earle wrote a book entitled A narrative of a nine months' residence in New Zealand in 1827: together with a journal of a residence in Tristan D'Acunha, an island situated between…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2008
Monastic archaeology is enjoying a boom right now in Sweden. Elisabet Regner has written up and analysed Frödin's many years of fieldwork at Alvastra (founded in 1143), Lars ErsgÃ¥rd & Marie Holmström have published the results of their 90s project around that same monastery, Marie Ohlsén is doing fieldwork at Krokek (founded in the 1430s), Gunhild Eriksdotter has reevaluated Dalby (founded before 1066), Maria Vretemark & Tony Axelsson are finding amazing things at Varnhem (founded c. 1150) and Göran Tagesson is digging at Vretakloster (founded c. 1110 and mentioned here before).…
oracknows | April 30, 2008Oh, glorious day!
As hard as it is to believe, it's here once again, and freedom lovers everywhere should rejoice! Yes, indeed, it's the day that everyone who detests fascism should celebrate:
Fuehrerstodestag! (Otherwise known as "Dead Hitler Day.")
Sixty-three years ago today, Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Reich, finally cornered in his rathole, his nation and glorious capital of what he thought would be a "thousand year Reich" in ruins, rather than face his enemies, decided instead to blow his brains out in his bunker as the Red Army was relentlessly advancing on him. After over 12 years…
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2008Commenters on yesterday's entry broached the subject of being the descendant of European royalty. I'd say everybody alive today with even a vaguely europid complexion is such a royal scion.
Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2008In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is convoluted and, in my opinion, quite fascinating.
Gotland is a large limestone island in the Baltic and a province of Sweden. Its first organised Christian congregations came together in the early 11th century, and they had some rather unusual burial customs. They had already practiced inhumation as…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about what I thought to be a fairly amusing story. It was the story of one hapless candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in a district in northwest Indiana whose excuses for giving a talk to the American National Socialist Workers Party's Chicago celebration of Adolf Hitler's 119th birthday last weekend can only be characterized as what in LOL Cat lingo one would call "EPIC FAIL" (he claimed he didn't think people there were of a "Nazi mindset"). I've also written more than I now wish I had about the inherent dishonesty of Ben Stein's claim in the movie…
evolvingthoughts | April 26, 2008
I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such things. But I forgot that in this case there is a double whammy: philosophers have spent a lot of time mocking sociology, especially in the context of science. So below the fold, I put a comment made by respected sociologist of science, Eli Gerson, which he put in the comments of that post, and which…
razib | April 25, 2008If you read this weblog you are aware that I have a fascination with the intersection of human history and human evolutionary genetics. There are many questions I have about the finding from evolutionary genomic studies that light skin evolved at least twice independently in Eurasia within the last 20,000 years or so at the extremities. The selection coefficients are large, so I am confused as to why even minimal gene flow did not result in equilibration and homogenization of the allelic profiles of the populations. I have posited that the answer has to do with very low population densities…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2008
I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all.
This one's for Eli Gerson...
oracknows | April 25, 2008
Ed happened to beat me to this one, which I saw on Orcinus. If you want a lesson on what not to do to get elected, here it is, courtesy of Tony Zirkle, candidate for the Republican nomination to run for a seat in his House district in northwest Indiana:
Don't show up at a white supremacist commemoration of Hitler's birthday.
Don't give a speech about white women being taken into sexual slavery in Israel to a white supremacist commemoration of Hitler's birthday while standing under a large portrait of Adolf Hitler.
Don't talk about sexually transmitted diseases supposedly being encouraged…