Felix: Seductive though these after-the-fact geographic explanations may be, we should remember they do explain why a 1000 years ago, the people of what is now the US, using their innovative sea-going vessels, flooded EurAsia and dominated the newly connected world for a time. Well, not the whole world. Australia was easy, but sub-Saharan Africans, safe from predation behind natural barriers of tropical diseases, waterfalls, and the Sahara, developed technologies far beyond those of the rest of the...
Al in Ottawa: I read Dreadnought by R.K. Massie a few years ago. One of the things he documented is that the Kaiser wanted to send weapons and supplies to the Boer states during their war against Britain but he could not due to the Royal Navy. A couple of years later Dreadnought is launched rendering every battleship that preceded her obsolete. The Germans coined the term “funfminuten” ; to describe their existing battleships as they would last five minutes against Dreadnought or her sisters....
T. Beholder: And now we know slow drones tend to make large raptors feel territorial, especially around nests, and when the trespasser ignores threat, the bird tend to rip it a new one. …but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranoplan, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on. It was not a hydrofoil, of course. So it seems he wasn’t particularly interested in what this was about, after all. Looks like a...
John L. McCormack: O’Neill accurately dates the genesis of CHAOS/COINTELPRO to 1967 and LBJ. The headline in the 1974 NY Times, however, refers to something that happened “in Nixon Years.” And of course, Colby, who kept his job through this period and had been in the CIA since 1947, was in the dark about CHAOS while Nixon was somehow the real mover behind that program.
T. Beholder: Von Tirpitz was a genuine nutcase who successfully turned Britain from staunch ally to bitter adversary. “Staunch ally”, really? Without his excessive influence over Kaiser Wilhelm we may wonder if WW1 would have happened. I wonder what do you even mean under this. The immediate cause was that an Archduke was shot in Sarajevo and it seemed the Serbian cabinet was not at all innocent in the accident. For Austria the traditional way of responding to this was a war, and it did (after some...
Michael van der Riet: On a point of information, OK was not the title of the Naval High Command. Ober means High and Kommando means Command. No Naval there. Wiki can’t help me out and I hope that someone here may enlighten me. The most likely title might have been Oberkommando der Kaiserliche Marine or OKKM. AFAIK the top military authority, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, was always called the OKW and was never abbreviated? Von Tirpitz was a genuine nutcase who successfully turned Britain from...
T. Beholder: Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety. How does it make sense? France at the time was a hopeless British puppet; Napoleon was the last serious attempt to break the hold. This did not stop until after WWII; many are still outraged that some French people dared to concede they were conquered by someone else, instead of sacrificing themselves and families for their proper...
Bruce: Alt-history: Germany goes with a fleet of E-Boats from 1900. Steel hulls, low-slung, torpedoes and machine guns. Maybe bubble the steam underwater instead of leaving a smoke cloud (This being before cheap powerful diesels, though after the things were invented).
Jim: This, by the way, was a consequence of population growth, hence the Drive to the East.
Jim: What does the author have to say about the fact that, by 1910, Germany was importing twenty to twenty-five percent of her food by maritime means perfectly vulnerable to British naval blockade?
T. Beholder: He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad. […] “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” Again, the very same thimble-riggery as with McCarthy crusade against “infiltration” and much more recent “infiltration” by the Church of Xenulogy. And we see the same thing feebly pushed today. Any domestic forces falling out of favor anymore are suddenly “discovered” to...
Jim: If American men still had balls they would passionately shoot each other much more often, to such an extent that it should happen even on the floor of the Congress, as it did in the days of old. https://www.history.com/ articles/charles-sumner- caning-cilley-duel-congr essional-violence
W2: Any look at violence that ignores race is risible garbage.
Bob Sykes: There are probably only a few hundred thousand young black males who commit most of the violent crime. That is a solvale problem. Lock them up until they are 40. Older blacks aren’t as violent. The same demographic commits most of the violent crime wherever they are found. They are not Homo sapiens.
PM: Can somebody help me out here, please? I’m familiar with the 13:50 statistic, but isn’t it even worse than that? If you accept that violent crime skews roughly 80:20 male:female, then far fewer of the offending demographic are responsible for that 50% of homicides?
W2: Does the author mention the 13% responsible for 50% of the violence?
Bob Sykes: Both the CIA and the FBI were criminal organizations from their founding, and still are.
Bruce: Roo_ster, I read Jerry’s foreword for Roswell by Karl Pflock. Jerry said the Russians launched a bunch of empty cruise missiles over the South Pole to break up over South America in the 1970s. Seemed big. Never saw anything about the story again. Odd!
Jim: In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],” he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery.” “LOL. LMAO.” —Some Guy, Probably.
Jim: If there’s one thing the military-industrial complex can do, it’s keep secrets.
Isegoria, may you have a rational yet funny Christmas! ;-)
Thank you kindly, Borepatch. In fact, I’ll try to keep things rational yet funny into the New Year.
..and that’s why I come here often.
Happy coming New Year!
Happy New Year to you, too, Tatyana. (S Novim godom!)