(Part 3) Top products from r/todayilearned

Here's the kind that I bought, there's a lot of brands but this one seemed to have the best reviews. Not too pricey, and it was a fun experience, I'd recommend it at least once. Just get a potluck going with a group of friends!

http://www.amazon.com/mberry-MFT10-Miracle-Fruit-Tablets/dp/B001LXYA5Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376711277&sr=8-1&keywords=mberries

Edit: Make sure to try wasabi. It tastes like ice cream, it was my favorite of all the things I tried.

Sennheiser HD 518s, geared for more electronic music, far better than Beats, Open Ear for beautiful sound

~$70

Sennheiser HD 558s, balanced all around, improvement over the 518s but less geared for electronic music. Open ear

~$100

Sennheiser 598s, practically similar to the 558, just further improved for more accurate sound reproduction

~$150

Sennheiser HD 380 PRO, closed back, extremely good sound reproduction

~$100

Audio-Technica M50x, closed back, one of the most popular Audiophile headphones on the market

~$150

2 Closed Back, 3 Open Back. As you can see, I strongly prefer open for the much cleaner and natural sound, but closed back is still an option.

I mean, if your looking for, "audio tuned to only emphasize the very highs and the very lows", then yeah, maybe beats are for you, however, that doesn't make them of higher quality at all, they are literally doing the opposite of what you would want in a headphone, it's just that you would apparently prefer it. If you had a headphone that was completely flat, then you could hear the exact amount of bass the artist was intending. For example, I have Dual-Subs in the back of my car inside a ported box. If I listen to a deadmau5 song on those with the bass settings tuned way up, I'll get an overpowering bass that basically shakes the car and drowns out the rest of the music. However, when I go home and listen to the song on say my HD518s, I'll get to listen to the song as a whole, and the bass is represented exactly at the level it should be for the song, where you can feel it, you can hear it, but it doesn't drown out the rest of the song.

Yes, LA is full of actors who've dedicated their life to the craft. Many manage to earn a comfortable living -- and very few of those dedicated actors will earn hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is a near universal dynamic across many career paths in which moderate success is common and outstanding success is rare and extremely lucrative.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on this very subject: Outliers: The Story of Success. I suggest you read it.

It's How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Similar titles include How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. None of them are by the same author, but they're all interesting historical books with similar titles (How some great culture did great things that built what we have now), none the less.

I would love to find similar titles about other countries, cultures, and civilizations. They're always so interesting!

Less than 30 days later 400,000 people watched a rock concert near Woodstock NY that would have a much larger influence on much of the populace.

> The term Woodstock Nation refers specifically to the attendees of the original 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival that took place from August 15–17 on the farm of Max Yasgur near Bethel, New York. It comes from the title of a book written later that year by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, describing his experiences at the festival.

> More generally, however, the term is used as a catch-all phrase for those individuals of the baby boomer generation in the United States who subscribed to the values of the American counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The term is often interchangeable with hippie, although the latter term is sometimes used as an oath of derision. The characteristic traits of members of the Woodstock Nation include, but are not limited to, concern for the environment, embracing of left-wing political causes and issues allied to a strong sense of political activism, eschewing of traditional gender roles, vegetarianism, and enthusiasm for the music of the period.

> The Woodstock Nation also counts as members individuals from later generational cohorts, as the underground cultural values and attitudes of 1960s bohemian communities such as Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon have seeped ever more into the mainstream with the passage of time

The influence has been credited up to the early days of the personal computer.

> What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.

Post Apollo 11 moon missions struggled to find a TV audience.

That's definitely a failure of your school system, though I'm not going to comment on Georgia's in general since I know nothing about it. I'm a former teacher who's had experience in several school districts, and all of them required a basic world history course that heavily covered Europe. Heck, when I was in school we covered European geography and history in 5th grade, then again in middle school, and again in high school.

Sounds like you got robbed. Luckily, there's lots of great books out there you can use to catch yourself up if you care to, and some of them are free. (I tried to only highlight affordable ones, but libraries are a great resource too!)

I have been contributing to The Alex Foundation for years, ever since I read "Alex and Me". Dr. Pepperberg has worked for years to understand the intelligence levels of Parrots, and her dedication is phenomenal, though her funding has been uncertain, at best, and I would like her to be able to continue to learn about these amazing little characters.

Oh, my goodness. That article is terrible.

The snakes are an allegorical reference to illiteracy and the ability to write.

For a GOOD resource, please read How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Basically the TL;DR version is this:

St. Patrick was a slave that escaped his captors and brought reading and writing to Ireland. The Irish, having a voracious appetite for this new learning, begin making copies of every book they can get there hands on. Which turned out to be a good thing as the rest of Europe was on a huge book burning kick at the time.

The book Born to Run is a good read on the subject.

Also for those interested in documentaries, Journey of Man contains interesting histories and amazing endurance in a polar climate.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the book Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton. An amazing book by a Wild Weasel pilot who flew the F-16CJ. Although it is packed full of information from how one becomes a pilot in the Air Force, the Wild Weasel mission, to fighter pilot culture, it reads just like a novel. The audiobook is also excellent - the recitation of some of the comms on the 1st night of the Gulf War is alone worth the price of admission. I can't recommend either highly enough.

While looking up the book again, I discovered that the author also released a new book, The Hunter Killers, last year about the original Wild Weasels in Vietnam. I obviously have not read it yet, but I bet it is excellent if you want to dive into the history of the mission.

It was the US and England that Hitler and the Nazi Party were concerned they were "falling behind" in regard to implementing sterilization programs. It is worth pointing out, though, that once they got that ball rolling, they seriously outpaced us, sterilizing more people in one year than we had in twenty. Also, their sterilization program rapidly grew to include "euthanasia", beginning with infants and children and only later going on to include adults. I'm reading this book currently. It's incredibly interesting and informative. Definitely worth picking up if you're interested in that sort of thing.

It's hard to define "credit" in such scenarios.

For example: If I build an app from scratch and it takes off and I become a millionaire, I did that, myself, completely, right?

But...if I had the free time to do that because my parents gave me free housing and food, and they happened to live in Silicon Valley, giving me easy access to market it to higher-ups- didn't I technically have an advantage over someone else who might've been able to do the same thing?


But that doesn't take away from all the work I did.


The book Outliers is a fascinating take on this subject. The basic conclusion is that all (most?) ultra-successful people are a combination of luck (through birthright or location) and skill, but we as people want to believe it's primarily skill.

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
Written by a member of the original Mac team
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449316247/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1394998489&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The only official biography, very in depth on the later years, but glosses over a lot of the early years when he was in my opinion a giant prick.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451648537/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1394998612&sr=8-2&pi=SY200_QL40

What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the Internet

I don't have anything Atari specific to recommend but this book is excellent and covers a lot of the early people and companies that invented all of this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143036769/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1394998761&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40

Here's the Amazon.com link as opposed to the Amazon.ca link which I_am_a_BalbC posted.

By the way, thanks for the summary, I_am_a_BalbC! This is fascinating stuff. Just bought the book. :)

That's absolutely untrue, Pepperberg's experiments with Alex were quite systematic and rigorous. It's not a light read, but if you want to learn more about the methodology of her work and the data gained, read The Alex Studies.

Additionally, the lab is having similar success with the other birds in the program, so while Alex is a heck of a story, I don't think he can be considered a fluke.

 
 

(Bonus: if you want a less academic and fluffier read, pick up a copy of Alex & Me)

The problem is very complex, I think. Police are like the bag you use to pick up shit and keep your hand clean. They have a side which interacts with the 'normal' public and a side which just as much interacts with the criminal world. I don't think you'd find many psychologists who would be surprised at people who live in this interface 8 hours a day find the behaviour on the shitty side to become normalised.

A criminologist for whom I do not have a reference is quoted as saying "When men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it."

We look at individual, micro actions of misbehaviour by Police and have trouble understanding them. They look like cases of 'why would they do that?' and the conclusion that most people reach is that the Police Officer is a bad person. The funny thing with human behaviour is that at the micro level, we make sense of things by consciously projecting ourselves into that position. We involve our own mind emotionally and personally in what we're assessing. For any species wide assessment or large scale group behaviour, the notion of the individual unit as a free, sentient, thinking, living wildcard is the first thing to go out the window. There's no humanity at the macro level. Once we 'zoom out' far enough, human behaviour is quite predictable and not really surprising and we behave just like any other animal. Look at the obesity problem in America. You put rats in a cage with too much food, they get fat. I'm sure human population growth and spread mimics many other species over evolutionary time periods, too.

So should we really be surprised that these people who we have living in this interface, institutionalised from other facets of society, develop behaviour patterns that have elements of each world they're exposed to? It is a very institutionalised life, it's more than a job and becomes a part of who you are. You're never off duty, really. There is always a part of you which remains switched on and you know you're responsible if anything happens. It's very hard to relate your stresses to non-Police, too. I found it very hard to have relationships with women because they especially being my age (late teens/early 20s during this) were immensely virginal in the ways of the world compared to what I was having trouble processing from work.

The criminals you deal with hate you. The public, for the most part, hates you (or at least the ones you deal with who shape your personal knowledge of how the public feels towards you are often horrible). The media is AWAYS out to fuck you and the people you're out there taking on all this shit for are the first ones to get out the pitchforks if you make even an honest mistake or error or judgement. But you know that your fellow Officers have your back and even the ones you don't like, you have a bond with. Sometimes, within the department, people won't get along (as I elaborated on a bit in my previous post), but when it's 'us and them' versus the public, you've got your fellow Officer's back first and foremost. Kind of like how people will bicker with someone from the town over about a sporting team, but gladly band together when it's an interstate rivalry.

I'm in Australia, so it's no where near as bad as it seems in America, by the way. But still here, I think all the ingredients are there. It looks like Police in America are being used by illegitimate interests and getting primed to become the authoritarian militia and when you look at it from a system wide point of view, it's very easy to see how this slide could happen. Your Officers are essentially a captive population that can be gradually re-trained and purposed without them even realising it, or having real need to question what they're doing. Their whole family is doing it, after all. Most of them are trapped in that line of work, too. Mortgage, families depending on them. I was lucky I had no debts or dependents and could spontaneously resign.

It's easy to say 'well why wouldn't they just resign, or refuse to do that', but it's really not that simple. Unfortunately, to argue against that is a very difficult and complex problem that most people who just want to bitch about the Police won't stick around to listen to.

There is a very good book (which I have to confess to not having finished) called The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert J Lifton. Though it says many other things, it explores the psychology behind how people change from being 'normal' to becoming able to commit horrible acts. Clearly I'm not comparing a decline in Police behaviour to this level of extreme, but it's interesting to look at militarisation of Police in this light.

What's a viable solution? Perhaps one place to start is to change how we view our Police. Yes, they still need to be accountable for their actions. But we should look at them as our peers who need our help and support to keep going out there and fighting the fights for us so we don't have to. They're good people, they're your friends and they want to help you. But they are also just simply human at the end of the day and if you think you'd be immune to having your personality skewed and distorted by the things they experience every day, you may be in for a very rude shock. Don't react with anger, react with empathy at what has happened to that formerly keen, idealistic person to make them behave less than admirably. You won't have to scratch far below the surface to find some pretty dark and upsetting shit. Again, it doesn't excuse bad behaviour, but we can't be surprised when we throw someone into the septic tank and they come out smelling like shit.

Our efforts should really be concentrated on the laws and policies that are resulting in parts of our society being so fucked up. I think massive drug law reform and legalisation of pretty much everything would change the landscape so much for the better that hypothesising past that point would just be guesswork.

Here's a link to the berries if anyone is interested in purchasing some. A few of my coworkers had them and tried out a bunch of different foods. They said lemons and grapefruits tasted amazing. Strawberries were far too sweet with the berries though.

They're really very comfortable. Super high quality. I can wear them for hours and not feel any discomfort.

Amazone is selling them for $160.

If you look hard though, you could probably cop them for $140, which is how much I paid.

Check out the book Born to Run. The main problem is not shoes, but thick shoes like sneakers that don't let your feet flex and bend while they encourage you to strike the ground hard on your heel and not softly on your toes. This has been a much more recent thing. Like the 1950s with the rise of Nike

• David Herbert Donald's Lincoln is great but one of the more exhaustive & dense reads.
  
• I've heard James McPherson's book is a fantastic & more concise primer on Lincoln's life.
  
• If you're looking for an entertaining read that's not exactly a Lincoln bio, I also recommend Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation.
  

If you are interested in this, I highly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. He covers several history books and looks how how each one addresses important events in american history. sometimes it's kinda depressing, but it's a great read.

If you're interested in Alex the Parrot, there's a book about him, called Alex and Me, by Dr Pepperberg: http://www.amazon.com/Alex-Me-Scientist-Discovered-Intelligence/dp/0061673986 It's pretty interesting, and not very long. I recommend it.

Early Romans yes, later Romans, no. So, the simple answer is "yes", and this is why all the related words.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0142001619

The link above is for Mark Kurlansky's book "Salt" that basically tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Sodium Chloride, but were afraid to ask.

He also has books on Cod (the fish), Birdseye (the guy who froze vegetables), and several others. He's a social historian who focuses on specific topics and then shows how they've connected history and the development of society throughout time. They're good reads if you're into learning about the details of common things that had a huge impact.

There is a great book on this subject, Called Better Angels of our Nature, which actually discusses this in depth.

This slideshow is essentially the same thesis as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. A great book.

Just what was described in Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature was good enough to make it clear that humans can be extensively and creatively despicable.

See if you can find The Science of Interstellar at your local library. I bought it and found it rather interesting that Kip found some genuinely clever ways that the physics could "work" for what Nolan wanted to achieve. Yes, creative liberties were taken, but not as many as you probably think.

Highly recommend the book The Science of Interstellar The whole idea behind the movie started with science. Science is the shit, btw.

I highly recommend reading Salt: A world history. This is one of the many accidental discoveries that happened due to the hunt for salt. Another interesting one is the discovery of natural gas in china that they ended up piping through bamboo and using for cooking etc.

First witnessed in 1374 - good article here. I remember reading about this years ago, the main suggestion being that it was in the years following the black death which led to an upsurge in religious fervour - also lots of examples of self-flagellation - basically people doing anything they thought would mean God spared them from the plague.

Read it in A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman which is a fantastic read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

In Viper Pilot Dan Hampton talks about his time in the air directly after 9/11. He does a good job conveying how much confusion there was. He was actually given the green light from the ground to take out a SEAL team helicopter. Luckily he stayed cool and called everyone off before that chopper was downed.

> anyone who is bigoted towards islam almost certainly doesn't realize they are essentially the only reason we still have access to the knowledge of the greeks.

That's really, really reaching.

And at least give some credit to the Irish too.

Internet search will find quite a few sources verifying. There's a general consensus, it seems, that this is legit.


In his book The Dark Net, author Jamie Bartlett recounts how it went down:

>In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana.

The bongwater-flavored e-commerce origin story isn’t a secret—John Markoff also wrote about it in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. But it’s been stuck good in my maw (I am now a 92-year-old prospector) since I read The Dark Net while Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence for his crimes operating the Silk Road came in.


https://gizmodo.com/ask-the-dark-net-author-about-the-internets-underworld-1708463753

I've been reading a book about this called The Last Battle. AMAZING book that has completely reshaped my thinking of the regular German army during WWII.

Really great memoirs about the whole starting of this study by Dr. Irene Pepperberg

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061673986/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_rlGIybGJC4J5W

There is a whole book about the history of salt. It's been awhile since I read it but it's really good imo.

Amazon Linky

ATH M50's - Best headphones I've ever owned.

Viper Pilot is a great read about the Wild Weasels. http://www.amazon.com/Viper-Pilot-Memoir-Air-Combat/dp/006213034X

I argue that it's just plain immoral to crave that level of luxury while many people in the world don't even have running water. We could get all high-minded and call it "antisocial" or "unethical" if you want, but I like "douchebag".

Becoming a multi-multi-millionaire is not the result of hard work. It takes fortune and luck. It takes being in the right place at the right time.

If this topic has resonance then you'd do well to read a book like A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. She covers the black death and several other issues of great import from that time.

Where else am I going to get my delicious Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz

I can't believe this isn't the top comment, but if you are interested in this and the other presidential assasinations then please read Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell's book "Assassination Vacation" discusses this:

"Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath, was present, or nearly so, at three assassinations–his father's, Garfield's, and McKinley's."

In the audiobook version, Robert Todd Lincoln's voice is provided by our favorite tall, red-headed talk show host.

This is a good read about N Korea for those interested:

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290687205&sr=8-1

It's incredible (ly depressing). You should read it. I live in Seoul so scary to think this is only like 60km away.

Actually, according the the book "How the Irish Saved Civilisation" he was an exiled/kidnapped Welsh Prince. http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Saved-Civilization-Hinges-History/dp/0385418493

I really recommend a book about this whole topic: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930

If you're feeling brave you can try reading his 1994 book on black holes and time warps. I suspect that the book he wrote about the science of Interstellar is more approachable.

I also recommend "A Distant Mirror", by Barbara Tuchman

I just got these and like them. Considered entry level for audiophile standards http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATH-M50x-Professional-Monitor-Headphones/dp/B00HVLUR86/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1462869437&sr=8-2&keywords=audio+technica+m50x

Given that the first TCP/IP connections were only used by military, banks, and universities, it's not entirely unlikely that the first transaction by a consumer was cannabis. I could picture a group of IS students making a network for such devious deeds.

Still, it will probably never be known because it was 40years ago and a bunch of he said she said to try to find out the literal first transaction. We at least can verify that it is the first known/recorded.

>In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
>
>Source
>
>Article

Funny enough this was also the year that Nixon declared the "War on Drugs", and the Stanford Prison Experiments happened.

Here is a great way to learn more about the lies your teachers told you...

jumping on your comment to say how much that book engrossed me and that anyone who has read Escape From Camp 14 might also be interested in reading Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. Out of all of the books I have read about life in North Korea this is the one that made me realise how dire the situation is out there right now due to the many stories from the different walks of life in NK.

I've been peeping these for a while, I think they might be an alright investment.

I can get it for $6-7 locally. It's just crazy expensive because it's on Amazon, like this Tuscan Whole Milk.

TBH you don't just serve in the Wehrmacht and not commit atrocities either. Hell, you don't even serve in the Polizei and not commit atrocities.

There were, however, IIRC, certain units which were basically conscripts who ended up under the SS umbrella because they weren't Ethnic Germans, as well as some last-ditch formations, but I don't really know anything much about those beyond that they kind of existed and had something to do with why SS involvement wasn't necessarily an automatic war-crimes conviction.

Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton is a great read about F-16s on Wild Weasel missions in both Iraq Wars. These guys had balls of steel.

Read Dan Hampton's Viper Pilot: http://www.amazon.com/Viper-Pilot-Memoir-Air-Combat/dp/006213034X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1462823120&sr=8-5&keywords=dan+hampton

Awesome book. 10% of what is written here is folksy bullshit.

Read Escape From Camp 14
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0143122916

Also, Nothing to Envy is another good book that gives a lot of insight into the insanity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0385523912/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1457025906&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=nothing+to+envy&dpPl=1&dpID=514Fj%2BBddhL&ref=plSrch

Here's the Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912


And a Prezi review that includes a reading level assessment:

Reading level: middle school students to adults
few parts more appropriate for older middle school students
Interesting for: people who are curious North Korean way of life and how North Koreans reacted to an economic crisis, as well as struggles in society


https://prezi.com/5bq1azo7n2rj/nothing-to-envy-presentation/

As far as lay public goes, start here: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Possibly the best researched book around violence directed to lay people... His sources especially are eye opening...

Read the book!
http://www.amazon.com/Alex-Me-Scientist-Discovered-Intelligence--/dp/0061673986/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348597233&sr=8-1&keywords=book+alex+and+me

Check out the book Viper Pilot by Dan Hampton. Story of F-16 Wild Weasels in Iraq in 2000s.

This book is an essential read, as is COD by the same author. Riveting stuff.

Ask the people who led the PC revolution.

Obligatory mention of the book "Born to run"

https://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189

Here, have a book about this -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Saved-Civilization-Hinges-History/dp/0385418493

I think this book covers it

Kip Thorne wrote a book on it:

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378

More is accurate in that movie than first appears.

He actually came up with the idea for the movie back in 2005 and spent 9 years working on it, with several different directors and writers before Christopher Nolan. Check out his book The Science of Interstellar, it's full of information about the physics in the movie and the production of it.

He even authored a book called

The Science of Interstellar

I actually learned this today too, in a completely unrelated manner. I just started reading Assassination Vacation

He also joined a sex commune but nobody would have sex with him and was nicknamed "Charles GetOut".
Assassination Vacation

Probably Lies My Teacher Told Me.

relevant

How about some Tuscan Whole Milk?

Here is the link to buy them on Amazon. Is this what you were looking for?

http://www.amazon.com/mberry-MFT10-Miracle-Fruit-Tablets/dp/B001LXYA5Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1404179047&sr=1-1&keywords=miracle+berry

https://www.amazon.com/mberry-Miracle-Fruit-Tablets-10-Count/dp/B001LXYA5Q/ref=sr_1_1_s_it?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1473815433&sr=1-1&keywords=miracle+berry

Audiotechnica ATH-M50x.

Possibly this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404330328&sr=1-2

Without having read it, it doesn't look like what I would call "summer reading" but YMMV

Born to Run

"Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it."

> I meant it (slavery) was a moral crime/atrocity/evil, then and now.

I agree.

> I'll be the first to agree the ancient Greeks and Romans shouldn't be thought of as beacons of enlightenment...They were, on the whole, brutal warrior/slave societies in a constant state of warfare with everyone and everything around them.

And so was most everyone else. Humans are an obviously violent species and for the simple reason than that violence is supremely effective. Humans have been abusing both other humans and other forms of life since there was a thing called humans. The idea that you will find a human community free of violence is an absurdity because if a society like this existed, they could simply be dominated by a more violent society.

However, I for one am comforted by the fact that the human species as a whole has been becoming less violent as civilization moves forward and I am confident that this trend will slowly continue. All the steps forward in civilization from Sumerian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Arab, and so many other cultures should all be considered beacons of enlightenment, or perhaps better thought of as ladder rungs, in our ever expanding circle of ethical progress.

Of course my time in existence is vanishingly small but there is good reason to think that there will be less suffering 5000 years from now just as there is less suffering now then 5000 years ago.

If this sounds surprising, I suggest people read the book "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea"

Amazon linky

It's nice because it doesn't just focus on what is horrible but also speaks about the people's lives, their thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc. It's very humanizing, especially when some of the people written about talk about how much they loved their leader and worked to meet the party's desires.

I think the thing that kind of surprised me was how, after the death of one of the Jongs, everyone basically competed with each other to appear sad and distraught in their public mournings. After all, someone who didn't express this might be seen as subversive. Her description of it all is far better than mine, it's a good book.

Not spewing BS, please read my other comments when you choose to disregard something or ask for references if necessary.

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnwIKZhrdt4

The usual troll products. Steering wheel table, Three wolf moon shirt... What, no Tuscan Whole Milk?

See also: The Last Battle, written about the battle by Stephen Harding.

holy shit if this isn't a book to get your skin crawling late at night. who needs r/nosleep when you can have nazi doctors

It is referring only to the levels of violence in the US. Of course, your questions are excellent. It is often argued that violence worldwide overall is decreasing as well (including wars, etc.). The most prominent piece on this is probably "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/

This is stated over and over recently, and it's largely false. Yes, there was some drug use in the Nazi military, but mostly among fighter pilots and tank crews. The book Blitzed by Norman Ohler is a classic example of the overstatement of drug use in Nazi Germany, and this review just tears it to shreds. I'd really recommend reading the whole thing, but a few choice excerpts are:

> The use of methamphetamine was common, he argues, particularly in the form of “Pervitin”. The drug, [Ohler] says, was manufactured in huge quantities: 35m tablets were, for example, ordered for the western campaign in 1940. This seems an impressive figure, until you recall that more than two and a quarter million troops were involved, making an average of around 15 tablets per soldier for the entire operation. Given the concentration on supplying tank crews with the drug, this means that the vast majority of troops didn’t take any at all.

And continued:

> Ohler goes much further than claiming that methamphetamine was central to the German military effort, however. He claims that its use was universal among the civilian population of Germany, too... This sweeping generalisation about a nation of 66 to 70 million people has no basis in fact. No doubt a number of Germans took, or were even prescribed, opium derivatives for medical conditions, or took them to alleviate the growing stress of living in a country that by mid-1944 was being invaded from all sides and buckling under the strain of intense aerial bombardment. But to claim that all Germans, or even a majority of them, could only function on drugs in the Third Reich is wildly implausible.

The author makes his central point, and perfectly illustrates why I hate the overstatement of drug use in Nazi Germany:

> What’s more, it is morally and politically dangerous. Germans, the author hints, were not really responsible for the support they gave to the Nazi regime, still less for their failure to rise up against it. This can only be explained by the fact that they were drugged up to the eyeballs. No wonder this book has been a bestseller in Germany.

To imply that using meth 'stripped the Nazis of empathy' is to imply that not only everyone who was involved in Nazi atrocities was somehow not responsible for their actions and on meth constantly, but to also imply that similar atrocities are impossible unless the perpetrators are on drugs or in an altered mental state. The lesson of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is that normal people committed those acts, just like you and me. A good book which delves deeper into this topic is Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. I wish people would stop propagating this nonsense and do proper research.

I typed up a really long reply and then realized it was a little too off topic and in depth without really answering your question. Essentially, no, the original intent was never to systematically kill off the Jewish population. If you'd like to learn how eugenics gained a foothold in Nazi Germany and how the "stages" of eradication plans unfolded, I would suggest reading The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. It goes into detail about how mental illnesses, genetic illnesses, and certain races were targeted before and after the start of the war and how the Nazi's were able to convince (specifically) doctors to take part in genocide.

I would suggest the excellent book. Lies my teacher told me. http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281 written by a sociologist who goes into a lot of still prevalent inaccurate topics in school books. It's not a uniquely american phenomena by any means.

I think it stems from the fact that people don't feel comfortable talking about past wrong doings and would rather gloss over it then have to tell children that mistakes were made. It also gets wrapped up in patriotism and revisionist history. I mean is anyone the bad guys in their own country's text books?

King Leopold II to be specific.

And he devastated the Congo. This is a book everyone should read.


Also, this book is an essential read on "ordinary men" in a Nazi reserve batallion and how they coped with (or outright enjoyed) the tasks entrusted to them. Some ran away, some drank themselves to oblivion, severe depression, etc.

You are going to get a new asshole torn open for openly disregarding the abundant accounts from outside and within the German armed forces themselves that state German Wehrmacht personnel willingly aided the SS. More importantly they also aided the Ordnungspolizei, the more important of the two, imo, as most people are not even aware of their existence. Most will probably read that name and go "Or dung poli- who?" especially people who think the Wehrmacht were shining beacons of virtue. By the end of the war the OrPo were assimilated into the SS. Who were the Ordnungspolizei and why were they incorporated into the SS? They were, prior to 1936, Germany's police forces. With their collectivization under Nazi control they became Germany's federal police. Many of the people simply retained their jobs during all of this, as it's easier for everyone if the police who worked under an organization of this or that name continue their jobs under a different organization with the same scope, broadly speaking. Give it a few years and the OrPo would be accompanying the German advance into the Eastern Front, where they participated in war crimes as a paramilitary force that herded Jews into ghettos and took part in mass murder. Let that sink in for a second, the once FEDERAL POLICE of Germany was gradually warped to the point where it was carrying out mass murder and finally amalgamated into the SS as there ceased to be a need to distinguish the two.

People all too often cite the SS as being packed to the brim with young and ideologically volatile German men who grew up affected by the rhetoric they were exposed to and bought into it. This is simply not reflective of reality when police officers who were predominantly middle-age and lived their early lives before post-WW1 sentiments began to brew were, in their 30s and 40s, complicit in war crimes and mass murder. As police officers. You really believe the Wehrmacht was guilt-free when what used to be civilian law enforcement took up arms and rampaged across Europe, safely behind the frontlines for the most part, murdering ethnic minorities and other "undesirables"? This is without even mentioning those same policemen become taskmasters in all corners of Europe, overseeing ten times or more their number in local collaborators, often regional police forces the Germans simply left intact and incorporated for their own uses. There's a good book on this called Ordinary Men. If ordinary cops can do that, you can bet your ass a soldier who has no reservations about killing people can do the same if not worse.

I'm sure there were German officers who vehemently opposed the shit they were being fed, but it wasn't significant nor does it stand as evidence disproving the occurrence of other incidents. You don't disprove something which is factually recorded as having happened by putting forward a case where the opposite occurred. Just like how you don't retroactively prove you didn't commit a crime by not committing a crime in a difference situation. That's not how it works.

Manstein was supposedly one of those German officers, rather far up the chain of command, who was not always in agreement with Hitler. Right up until the point he received a large estate in Poland and tax benefits, much like many other officers in the Wehrmacht complaints from him promptly ceased to manifest themselves and he was more than happy to serve. Manstein. The Manstein.

You're arguing with at best isolated anecdotes and excerpts from history which can be cherry picked to present a misleading narrative that is still mostly acceptable- if only to those who don't dig deeper and have little general knowledge of the Second World War and its darker details. At worst you're putting forward overwhelmingly misleading generalizations and just blatantly incorrect information you cannot find anywhere except from those who advocate historical revision. Against the bigger backdrop of documented history- minus cherry-picking, that's just not a fight you're going to win.

>In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws.

>Barbara Tuchman, "A Distant Mirror: life in the calamitous 14th century"

I would recommend reading [Ordinary Men] (http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068) a book that uses the narrative about a group of ordinary Germans from all walks of life committed some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust: many Jews were not killed in chambers (the final solution) where their screams could be ignored. These "ordinary men" were forced to take jews out of villages and shoot them in cold blood, even infants.

The author uses it as a cautionary tale of the horrors of brainwashing propaganda and war; how average joes can be convinced that what they're doing is ok because it is sanctioned by a higher authority and therefor rationalize it to themselves. For more on that you can read about Milgram's psychological experiments, described in [Obedience to Authority] (http://www.amazon.com/Obedience-Authority-Experimental-Perennial-Classics/dp/006176521X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342748841&sr=1-1&keywords=obedience+to+authority). In the 1950s people were insisting that the Holocaust was a strictly German thing, that it happened once and never again. Milgram proved that most Americans would be willing to inflict pain on others to the point of death (they truly thought the actor was being killed by shocks) as long as some authority sanctioned it. He showed that even in our "good country" if an authority figure tells you to do something, you place all responsibility on him and become willing to kill. Afterwards participants would say things like "I felt bad for hurting the guy so bad, but I wanted to do my job well" and things like that.


People have always been quick to deny involvement, or claim to be just doing their small part. It's complacency towards hate that leads to these atrocities, not millions of hateful people.

That's something I've been saying. I have no idea what did or didn't happen in WW2, I wasn't there. And I'm more than willing the believe in the possibility that numbers are inflated to some extent, because there aren't detailed records giving an exact count. For years I had heard "6 million Jews killed" when they fail to mention that many of them were the disabled and infirm, the mentally handicapped, gypsies, homosexuals, political undesirables, and a variety of other figures. A book on how the medical field was corrupted and different kinds of people killed and methods is quite fascinating.

Even if the numbers are inflated, which Russia, the US, and Israel would never want to correct even if they were, who cares? Let's say there were only 1 million executed. How is that better? If there is some conspiracy that's inflating the numbers, great, but how is a million people acceptable? Hell 10,000 people is too many. Genocide isn't good at any number.

Let's say they discover incontrovertible proof that there were only 500,000 Jews (and others) killed in a factory fashion. What do we do with this information and "facts"?

These things are stupid, I'm not sure why people waste their time trying to uncover supposed conspiracies from 75 years ago, especially one that at best, alters some numbers of body counts which doesn't make anything better.

Battle for Castle Itter Wiki entry

Itter's prisoners were freed by units of the American 103rd Infantry Division of General Anthony McAuliffe on May 5, 1945.

The next day, the American units, including 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee, Jr., the former prisoners themselves, and anti-Nazi elements of the Wehrmacht under the command of Major Josef ‘Sepp’ Gangl, who died in the battle fought alongside the German guards against attacking SS elements until reinforcements arrived.

If you want to buy the book, here's the Amazon link.

May 1945. Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue fourteen prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps.

It's a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.

Based on personal memoirs, author interviews, and official American, German, and French histories, The Last Battle is the nearly unbelievable story of the most improbable battle of World War II-a tale of unlikely allies, bravery, cowardice, and desperate combat between implacable enemies.

Lies My History Teacher Told Me (Amazon link) looks at how history books do a terrible job of teaching American history. History books have improved since then, but there's still a lot that is glossed over or ignored.

Here's some random examples that I found interesting:

• During the Revolutionary War, the French fought the British around the world in India, Gibraltar, the Caribbean, etc. Many of these colonies were considered more important to the British Empire.
  
  
• The War of 1812 was fought because the British were supplying Native Americans with arms, making expansion westwards difficult. Most textbooks claim it was because of American sailors being impressed. However, New England was against the war, despite most of these sailors coming from New England.
  
  
• Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist; he screened the first movie in the White House, Birth of a Nation. This is the same movie that inspired the KKK to reform.
  
  
• Helen Keller's writings were ignored, since she was considered a radical socialist and blamed society for contributing to blindness.
  
  
• The South was against states' rights just prior to the Civil War when they were in power, arguing that northern states did not have the right to protect runaway slaves.