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Josiah Harlan is one of my favorite little known historical figures if only because his life reads like a bad adventure movie. A American Quaker merchant seaman jilted by his fiancé in 1822, he vows never to return to the United States. Harlan jumps ship in Calcutta and passes himself off as a doctor to British rulers there. Over the next decades he ingratiates himself with Indian and Afghani royalty, leads armies, invades distant lands, becomes fluent in various local dialects, is thoroughly seduced by Afghan culture, and ultimately reigns as a prince of an Afghan land in the Hindu Kush. Along the way he studies the flora and fauna with scholarly interest and thoroughly enjoys himself despite brushes with death, disease and duplicitous potentates. ... So then he returns to the United States and.. With his funds dwindling, Harlan began taking on new tasks. He began lobbying the American government to import camels to settle the Western United States. His real hope was that they would order their camels from Afghanistan and send him there as purchasing agent. Harlan convinced the government that camels would be a worthy investment (Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was particularly interested), but it was decided that it would be cheaper to import them from Africa than from Afghanistan. When the US Army discovered the resistance of American horses, mules, and cows to the aggressive camels, the Camel Corps was disbanded in 1863. Camels were set free in Arizona. Harlan next decided that he would convince the government to buy Afghan grapes. He spent two years working on this venture, but the coming of the American Civil War prevented this. Harlan then proposed to raise a regiment. Always horrified by slavery, he raised a Union regiment, but he was used to dealing with military underlings in the way an oriental prince would. This led to a messy court-martial, but the aging Harlan ended his service due to medical problems. He wound up in San Francisco, working as a doctor, dying of tuberculosis in 1871. He was essentially forgotten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Harlan And lastly Scott Reiniger, star of classic 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead, is Harlan's great-great-great-grandson, and thus as of 2011 heir to the title Prince of Ghor. Edit: The story of the Camel Corps is amazing in itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_Jolly
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2011 09:22 |
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:29 |
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Crazy Turkish Sultans are the best.quote:... Sometimes Murad disguised himself and, accompanied by his executioner, he wandered the streets incognito, personally carrying out inspections. When he came across some "troublemaker", Murad would turn to the executioner and select the tool he thought most suited to the job. Thus Murad had many people mercilessly executed and corpses hung at every street corner. In the early years of his reign, his executions had been justified by unquestionable guilt, but later he was killing out off ill humour or a whim. Once, he forced one of his doctors to swallow an overdose of his own opium. He impaled a courier for informing him mistakenly that he had become father of a boy, whereas in fact it was a daughter. Murad's cruelty became legendary and his approach created a terrified silence everywhere. He cut off the head of every man who came under the slightest suspicion; in 5 years time he executed some 25,000 subjects. His musician, for example, was beheaded for playing a Persian melody. In 1633, coffee houses, wine shops and taverns were closed, because they were meeting places where people could spend their time criticising the government. Murad passed a law prohibiting smoking and the consumption of alcohol or coffee throughout the Ottoman Empire on pain of death. When he caught anyone with a pipe or a cup of coffee, Murad had the offender executed on the spot, although he himself indulged in both habits quote:Ibrahim was born on November 5, 1616, as a younger son of Sultan Ahmed I (1590-1617). As an infant he had been locked up in the "Cage", and ever since he had been living in fear of death. The Sultans Osman II (1604-1622) and Murad IV (1612-1640) had executed all their brothers - except Ibrahim. In 1640, Murad actually ordered Ibrahim's death on his deathbed, because he thought it better for the dynasty to end rather than continue with 'insane seed'. But their mother, Sultana Kösem, intervened.When he had finally left the "Cage", Ibrahim began dancing through the harem, while screaming: "The butcher of the Empire is dead!". And of course the famous letter sent by the Cossacks when asked by one of the sultan's to surrender. quote:The text of the Sultan's letter to the Cossacks: quote:Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan! Off the subject slightly but does anyone know any good, redable books about the Ottoman Empire, I recently read A Peace to End all Peace and it had be wanting some background info?
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2011 22:43 |
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Haha, nice, he sounds like a real life Flashman
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# ¿ Jan 22, 2011 09:03 |
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T-1000 posted:They ought to make a werewolf movie based on this. Dog Soldiers meets All Quiet On The Western Front. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv-uW7Z3fR8 Close enough?
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# ¿ Jan 23, 2011 04:50 |
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So, i'm pretty sure most of us have heard of brave people such as Schindler but there's one who's name is quite unexpected: Albert Göring, the brother of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.quote:...As the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Albert Goering in all its horror - he saw the Jews as mothers, fathers, children. So he decided to act and helped many Jews escape from Vienna by procuring travel documents... So after all that... quote:Göring then returned to Germany but found himself shunned because of his family name. He found occasional work as a writer and translator. Prior to his death, Göring was living on a pension from the government. He knew that if he was married, the pension would transfer to his wife after his death. As a sign of gratitude, in 1966 Göring married his housekeeper so she could receive his pension and not have to work anymore. One week later, he died without having his wartime activities publicly acknowledged.
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# ¿ Jan 24, 2011 06:13 |
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You know, i'm not sure what I can add to this other then ohgodwhy? http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html quote:He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to abed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic. Edit: nice write-up about the San Patricos
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# ¿ Jan 25, 2011 22:50 |
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Brice posted:I was looking something up and ended up finding out a few people a year die of Yersinia pestis in the US. Yersinia pestis is the bacteria that caused the Black Plague. Yeah, my abuelita caught the Black death sometime before I was born but she pulled through.
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# ¿ Jan 26, 2011 23:36 |
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SeanBeansShako posted:Okay, I'm not sure if this is real or not but years ago I saw something on the History channel that is stuck in my head. The USS Lafayette? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Lafayette_(AP-53)
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2011 07:07 |
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Yeah, i really liked that picture but for some reason I couldn't find one without the text. It's funny, I only know about it because it had a (very small) role in a Hitchcock movie.
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2011 07:18 |
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Paradox Personified posted:Here you go, Tineye is nice for such things. Awesome,thanks
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2011 07:31 |
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Related to the discussion going on earlier on this page I had a question. Did Nazi Germany treat Jewish World War One veterans any diffrent then other Jews?
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2011 01:18 |
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Here have a bunch of random propaganda. for gay Hitler/Mussolini rape. This one was made by the Italian Resistance http://i51.tinypic.com/qz5icg.jpg This Italian one shows FDR and Winston as cowboy bandits This Japanese one shows Churchill as a spider stealing gold from India. Another Japanese one aimed at India, it shows India destroying the British Empire This German leaflet aimed at American GIs is pretty straightfoward This British faked-photo simply tries to embaress Hitler http://tinypic.com/r/6gzor9/7 That's all I got for now.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2011 22:33 |
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Crosposting this from the "predictions of the future thread" Here's some of my favorites about the end of the world. quote:The calculations indicating the odds that Gorbachev is the actual and true antichrist are: 710,609,175,188,282,100 to 1. quote:
quote:
quote:"Look at the casket, Child. This is the death of The United States of America. This was done in secret long ago. Clinton made a pact with the devil, himself, through blood agreement with Khruschev to go The Red Way. The death knoll tolls for The USA, My Child, and many will be involved in this secret--not only Russia but China, as well. All is not well in China. While China prepares for your death, she has a very large, black vulture on her own back. This vulture will help to devour her from within."
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2011 00:05 |
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RedMagus posted:I wonder if there's any literature like that from older generations. The rome version of Fox would be interesting to read. Well, there is the Aeneid which was a propoganda work for Augustus.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2011 01:00 |
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asbo subject posted:"Hitler," Gandhi said, "killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions." On that note i'm going to reccomend this http://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Beginnings-World-Civilization/dp/B002RAR3KG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302398484&sr=8-1 It's biased of course due to the author being a pacifist but it still provides good infnromation.
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# ¿ Apr 10, 2011 02:24 |
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feedmegin posted:I'd say Hong Kong also counts as major, and I remember us giving that back - it only happened 12 years ago after all. http://www.amazon.com/Outposts-Journeys-Surviving-Relics-British/dp/0060598611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302896738&sr=8-1 This is a pretty informative (and funny) book on the subject of the remaining British 'colonies'.
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# ¿ Apr 15, 2011 20:46 |
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Ha, this talk of Taft just inspired me to post this little tidbit about a certain presidental canidate from the same era. Most people only know of William Jennings Bryan - if at all- through the portrayl of him at the Scopes Trial in Inherit the Wind but he was a complicated figure and much more then that. On one hand Bryan ignored the plight of African Americans, was narrow-minded , friends with segregationists, and sought to get rid of the teaching of evolution in schools. On the other hand he rallied agaisnt big business, Imperialisim, eugenics, and honestly hoped that he could bring about world peace . quote:The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot. quote:Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. quote:There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests up on them. FDR posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckpuylgkyIs
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2011 07:39 |
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benito posted:Interesting history tidbit Lucky, there's something great about holding a old book in your hands(or maybe i'm just weird) I was reading Micheal Kazin's new biogrophy of Bryan and he reports that Bryan was one of the first politcal figures to market himself. He came up with the idea to sell recordings of his speeches and to everyone's suprise they sold very well. the book also mentions "Bryan clubs"; enthusiastic groups of supporters who would hold weekly readings of his speeches in living rooms and meeting halls.
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2011 08:33 |
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How are u posted:Talking about Michener books on the other page reminded me of another series of fantastic historical fiction novels that both lovers of history and lovers of entertainment can enjoy. The author George MacDonald Fraser wrote a series of books that follow the misadventures of a British Army officer in the Victorian age, from 1839 through 1894. The protagonist is a dyed-in-the-wool anti-hero who would rather save his own skin than fight with honor, and drink and whore rather than conform to pious Victorian morals. Despite this he becomes a lauded hero of the age. I love the Flashman books, sure their not the sort of thing you'd want to read in public but their very well researched and entertaining. I recently fiished the Mountain of Light, are And the Tiger and On the March any good?
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2011 13:40 |
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You're welcome, just read Micheal Kazin's recent biogrophy of him so I kinda wanted to share that. Edit: Currently reading Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra. It's pretty good, while it's a bit too pro-Monarchist for my taste it does do a very good job at humanizing the Tsar and his family. Anyone else read it?
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# ¿ May 3, 2011 21:03 |
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piss posted:James Brooke, White Rajah of Sarawak, might qualify. Guy turned a good chunk of the northern part of the island of Borneo into his own personal kingdom (ie not part of the British Empire) in the early 19th century, passed it on to his nephew, and it stayed in the family until Sarawak was incorporated into the new country of Malaysia in the 1940s. Also a character in one of the Flashman books.
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# ¿ May 10, 2011 22:29 |
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Are there any good English language books on the Polar Bear Expedition or the Russian Civil War in general? I just finished Nicholas and Alexandra and am halfway through The Great Game which is a absolutely amazing book.
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# ¿ May 11, 2011 22:54 |
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HonorableTB posted:I did a paper on the Polar Bear Expedition (specifically the fighting in Northern Russia around Murmansk and Arkangelsk) and I used the following sources: Thanks! I'l try to check out Russian Sideshow it looks nice.
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# ¿ May 11, 2011 23:26 |
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Was there really anything the Western Allies could have done to keep Eastern Europe out of Stalin's hands besides World War III? Obviously it will be debated until the end of time, but I can't see any real way. I bellive there were brief ideas of excuting the main Invasion of Europe by landing in Greece or Yugoslavia, if that had not failed it would have likely kept atleast Yugoslavvia, Bulgaria, and maybe Romaania, or Hungary out of the Iron Curtain.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2011 07:14 |
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Don't forget Lawernce had some pretty homoerotic fantasies involvig himself being beat.
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# ¿ Jun 14, 2011 22:52 |
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Well the Hashemites in Jordan seem to be doing fairly well.
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 00:44 |
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Hey, Rutkowski, did you by chance used to play Star Wars:Jedi Academy There was a guy with that name on the old server I used to go to.
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 05:56 |
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Rutkowski posted:Yup, I was a douchebag(and still is) and pretty much only hang on the RP servers. Haha, hey then, I was at RPG World as 'Lem'
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2011 17:59 |
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Gunt McBadpost posted:
That reminds me of these German propaganda leaflets aimed at African-American troops in World War 2 Infact here: have a bunch of intresting propaganda related stuff. Japanese leaflet aimed at native Indians "The British are looting India and trampleing its dead bodies: Who is responable?" Another Japanese one that brings up the brutal way the British supressed the 1857 Mutiny and says "When will you take revenge?" "Just to save their ecnomy the British comitted this atrocity" A pro-British one showing India eating the Axis. Showing your enemies leaders as literal monsters was not uncommon The Americans stealing ARE WIMEN I'm linking the following because their all NWS, VERY NWS http://i.imgur.com/0DxIC.jpg A German leaflet aimed at African French troops: The French send the poor African to fight and die while a evil Frenchman has sex with his wife. I'm thinking this is another German leaflet aimed at British troops http://imgur.com/JrsGW A big theme in German stuff aimed to British troops was that Americans were going to seduce their wives. http://i.imgur.com/lvvbl.jpg and lastly how could I not post the Nazi Penis Gun http://i.imgur.com/Vegnb.jpg
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2011 12:32 |
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AgentF posted:
I hae no idea, I bellive I found it somwhere here http://www.psywarrior.com/sexandprop.html
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2011 14:55 |
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:This is fascinating stuff. I think the Hitlercock photo is my favorite. Yeah, check out the other sections of that site (or reasons it calls them links) http://www.psywarrior.com/links.html. Oh, and thakns Nenonen for the Finnish posts. I know very little about Finland so that was pretty nice.
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2011 22:46 |
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Actually Warrior is remembered as the first iron-hulled seagoing warship to enter service. She's also the last surviving British example of the type. I can do an effort post about her if there's enough interest. That would be nice, for some reason I think ironclads and Pre-dreadnoughts are some of the best looking ships around.
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# ¿ Jun 24, 2011 13:35 |
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:As always, Wikipedia is our best friend. What the hell? quote:Nazi propagandists went as far as declaring that Germany would return expropriated land to the Indians, while Goebbels predicted they possessed little loyalty to America and would rather rebel than to fight against Germany.[62] The Nazis considered the Sioux, and by extension all Native Americans to be Aryans,[62] a theory echoed in the sympathetic portrayal of the Natives in German westerns of the 1930s such as Der Kaiser von Kalifornie. Edit: In a intresting turn of fate the Japanese commander of the air attack on Peral Harbor- Mitsuo Fuchida- later became friends with Jacob DeShazer - who had been shot down in the Dolittle Air Raid and tortured in a POW camp- became a US citizen, converated to Christianity, and became a preacher untill his death in 1976 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuo_Fuchida
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2011 23:37 |
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Slantedfloors posted:Nazi racial philosophy is completely retarded. This is news to you? Nah, it just seemed more silly the normal, almost as nonsensical as this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_National_Socialist_Green_Party
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2011 03:15 |
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FredMSloniker posted:...paintings? Why paintings? Because Henry Wallace was one of the craziest Vice Presidents this country ever had. Someone said about Wallace that.. “ [He] gives me an eerie feeling that he isn’t really listening to me…” he seemed to consider himself “a man of destiny, a person answering the calls the rest of us don’t hear”. and to expand on the Mongolia thing (To quote Veeps) quote:Wallace was attracted to was a man named Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich, who was a 1929 Nobel Prize winner the charter and only member of something called the “Great White Brotherhood”. He filled Wallace’s head with fanciful tales of a young Jesus Christ having visited Tibet and left behind thousands of his own paintings. Wallace, acting in his capacity as Secretary of Agriculture, sent Roerich on official USDA business to Mongolia to search for drought-resistant grasses, though rumors flew that Wallace was using his government imprimatur and taxpayer dollars to authorize Roerich to search for everything from the lost Jesus paintings to a Buddhist utopia to the second coming of Christ. (Roerich’s trip was eventful, but in a much less mystical way: he was arrested by the Chinese on suspicion of spying, and, in his absence from the U.S., was charged there with tax evasion.) Now, Wallace wasn't a bad guy, he just had some really weird mystic ideas. The problem with Wallace was that he could be easily duped in some of the worst ways, such as on a state visit to the Soviet Union quote:In Siberia, his Soviet hosts squired him about in style and took him to a bustling gold-mining center called Magadan. Wallace, an ardent admirer of Stalin’s Soviet Union and a proponent of a one-world government, was dazzled, describing it as a productive hive of human enterprise, “a combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company”. Unfortunately, Magadan was actually a slave labor camp the Soviets had slapped a figurative coat of paint on, Potemkin Village-style, in anticipation of Wallace’s visit. I'm going to have to reccomend Veeps it's a pretty hilarious look at each of America's Vice Presidents up to 2007 http://www.veeps.us/ http://www.amazon.com/Veeps-Profiles-Insignificance-Bill-Kelter/dp/1603090037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309728643&sr=8-1 We've had some really screwed up Vice Presidents quote:...When his father passed away, Johnson inherited a slave named Julia Chinn. She bore him two children, and she and Johnson cohabitated for several years. While it wasn’t unheard of in the antebellum South for a randy landowner to get freaky with the help every now and then, setting up and keeping house was another matter entirely. quote:...New Hampshire Senator William Plumer was more colorful when he commented on Clinton’s habit of falling asleep in the presiding chair of the Senate, and his doddering management style when he was awake: “He is old, feeble & altogether uncapable of the duty of presiding in the Senate. He has no mind—no intellect—no memory—He forgets the question—mistakes it—& not infrequently declares a vote before its taken—& often forgets to do it after its taken.” ... quote:...Curtis was very proud of his Native American heritage, having grown up on a reservation and learning to ride bareback as a boy. He was conspicuous and relentless in using his Native American lineage for political gain, so much so that it was impossible to separate Curtis the politician from Curtis the Kaw Indian. H.L. Mencken would refer to the President and his VP as “Lord Hoover and the Injun”. During Curtis’ House days, Speaker Tom Reed became rather fond of “the Indian”, and on one occasion—when Curtis thought he’d interrupted the Speaker and excused himself—Reed called after him, “Come back in here, Indian, I want you to hear this!” quote:
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2011 22:43 |
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Monkeytime posted:The third installment of the Atlantic's World War II photo series is out: These are great,thanks for keeping us updated. c355n4 posted:
What exactly was a "antisocial"? Edit: You know,reading up on concentration camp badges on Wikipedia got me to thinking since the Nazis persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses does anyone know how Quakers were treated in Nazi Germany or have a link to a good article or book on the subject?
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# ¿ Jul 4, 2011 00:33 |
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Paxicon posted:In living history news, the last heir to the Imperial Austrian throne has died. He was born in 1912 and at seven years he had to flee the country along with the rest of the family. From his Wikipedia entry. quote:During his time in parliament, Otto was alleged to have struck fellow MEP Ian Paisley. (Pope John Paul II had given a speech to the European Parliament in 1988, and Paisley shouted at the Pope, "I renounce you as the Antichrist!", holding a poster reading "Pope John Paul II Antichrist", whereupon he was excluded from the session and expelled from the room by other MEPs. It's always nice to see progressive royalty.
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# ¿ Jul 5, 2011 00:52 |
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Patter Song posted:Not to disagree with him or anything (anyone who punched Ian Paisley is cool in my book), but a member of one of the most prominent Catholic families in the world punching someone that is calling the Pope an Antichrist is probably not doing it in the name of religious tolerance. Point taken, I didn't think about it that way but hey he punched Ian Paisley.
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# ¿ Jul 5, 2011 04:32 |
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:29 |
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Marvin Griffin "In 1958 Griffin took advantage of the intense media coverage surrounding the Springhill mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, Canada to promote tourism to his state by offering a group of survivors free vacations to Jekyll Island. However, to the segregationist governor's chagrin, one of the rescued miners was black, resulting in a public relations nightmare.[3]" Thanks for posting those, I love learning about my state's screwed up history.
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# ¿ Jul 11, 2011 02:48 |