David Foster: Not safe to assume that *spending on education* and *actual education* are correlated very well.
Jim: Harrison Bergeronism. Never trust a de facto U.S. carceral institootion! https://www.tnellen.com/ cybereng/harrison.html
T. Beholder: McChuck, the song is the same everywhere: «See? The fire still burns! We need to pour more gasoline!»
T. Beholder: The obvious part is cherry picking. For example, as Simplicius pointed out — Back in August, Zelensky admitted Russia has launched over 3,500 missiles thus far, and since then Russia has only upped the intensity, which means by this point the count is likely over 5,000. Meanwhile, the U.S. has launched a total of 802 Tomahawks during the entirety of the 2003+ Iraq War, and around 2,300 total since the Tomahawk’s inception in the early 80′s. Sounds kind of significant. Also,...
McChuck: NCLB hasn’t failed. It’s succeeded beyond the originator’s wildest dreams. Of course, the plan was never to educate children, but to dumb them down and humiliate them into compliance and apathy.
Bruce: “Gamers, by the way, might note that those two models are awfully similar to saving throws and hit points.” Gygax worked for Kemper Insurance. I just checked on Wiki, and sure enough they sell life insurance. Isegoria is like James Burke. Connections!
Roo_ster: Citing Jared Diamond uncritically is a self-beclowning act.
McChuck: “The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.” It’s not actually possible to mistreat people more than the Muslims do on a regular basis. This is just another example of anti-White bias and historical revisionism. Oh, and the Muslims took millions of slaves, not thousands. In India alone, they worked more than 100 million slaves to death in well documented...
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...
