Patrick Shrier I don’t play poker online but I Think it is kind of stupid that the Feds would waste so much time and effort stopping it, They should probably regulate it and tax it, that might even help with the Deficit. I do think the banner they put up when shutting down Poker sites is quite amusing. Full story here It is only a matter of time before there is some kind of internet policing for speech as well s amusement. Net Neutrality indeed.
I am currently on an arc of reading Latin classics I have not read but always wanted to. I finished the first one a few days ago, the Penguin Classics edition of The Makers of Rome by Plutarch. It is not a complete copy of Plutarch’s Lives however, it only includes the lives of nine Romans, Coriolanus, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Cato the Elder, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Sertorius, Brutus, and Mark Antony. Plutarch writes in an engaging style that is very easy to read and the translator does an outstanding job of converting the Latin into English while keeping his style. Plutarch is not always historically accurate; he has a … More after the Jump…
This was linked on Drudge Today. Words Fail me. How idiotic can our “security” procedures in America get? That little girl sure looks like a threat to me. UPDATE: The TSA has posted a response/explanation at their Blog. The best out of context logic in the post is this “Recognizing that terrorists are willing to manipulate societal norms to evade detection”. In the words of some political hack in Washington who I can’t remember, it “requires of suspension of belief” to think this little girl was a terrorist or some kind of threat.
This is the final update I will post about writing my thesis. I got the final grade for my Capstone (Thesis) class. I have been academically cleared for graduationa and now all I am waiting on is word from the finance department and library that I do not owe them any money or have any books checked out. I should be good on both. If that is the case then on May 15, my degeree will be officially concurred and my school odyssey is complete. At least for now, or unless I get the masochistic urge to try and get a PhD, which I do … More after the Jump…
I use 1&1 as my host and this past weekend was the first time in my site’s 6 month history that the site went down. I have to say that once I emailed tech support they got back to me quick and id’d the problem very fast and told me what I needed to do an also told me ow to avoid the same thing in the future. Apparently I either downloaded a corrupt index.html file when I downloaded the latest WP update or it got corrupted when I FTP’d it to my server. Regardless 1&1 identified the problem and I had my site up and running … More after the Jump…
The region of Germany where I live in northeastern Bavaria is locally known as the Oberpfalz or in English the Upper Palatinate. Traditionally, this area was not part of Bavaria but was made up of numerous small separate sovereignties with a regional identity. This was a relic of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thrity-Years War. That all changed in 1805 when Napoleon overran Germany and reduced the 350+ sovereign entities in Germany to 39, this is when the Oberpfalz became part of Bavaria. Of note is that the vast majority of the people in the region are Roman Catholic, my town is 95% Catholic for example. The … More after the Jump…
This is one of the most influential memoirs written by a former German Officer. The cover of the copy I own highlights that it “was the book on General Schwarzkopf’s desk during the Gulf War.” I found it to be a well written book with some pretty good accounts of the battles von Mellenthin participated in as a staff officer as well as some battles he did not participate in. I would not go so far as to say that this book is a definitive account of German tank warfare in World War II but it comes very close. Mellenthin does an outstanding job of describing the operational and sometimes … More after the Jump…
An update to a previous post Spam Comments on my Blog. I think I set a new personal record last night. I got over 46 spam comments on my blog last night. The vast majority included some garbage link in BBcode, which is not supported on a WordPress site. WP only uses HTML code. This is what the average spam looked like: NXwj1S ijecicpmubjv, [url=http://wgfbpiifvfrp.com/]wgfbpiifvfrp[/url], [link=http://hpgadeqvqdmq.com/]hpgadeqvqdmq[/link], http://xbgwsdgsxdaq.com/ NXwj1S ijecicpmubjv, [url=http://wgfbpiifvfrp.com/]wgfbpiifvfrp[/url], [link=http://hpgadeqvqdmq.com/]hpgadeqvqdmq[/link], http://xbgwsdgsxdaq.com/ I have not went down any of the referenced urls for fear of getting a virus on my home machine. Any of my readers are more than welcome to try although I … More after the Jump…
About a month ago I asked when we were going to have a serious conversation about our national debt, it looks like that time might be now if our Republican and Tea Party congressman have the courage to grab the moment with the release of Rep. Paul Ryan‘s budget plan. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, is the author of the Roadmap for America, and is Chairman of the House Budget Committee. he outlined the new GOP budget proposal today in a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled The GOP Path to Prosperity. It seems to me that the ball is now in the Democrat’s court. They must explain why … More after the Jump…
Is this Cultural Sensitivity or demeaning to American women? I for one, would refuse to leave the gate in one of these for simple safety reasons if nothing else. I doubt they are made out of Kevlar and seriously doubt they make the locals respect American women any more. The only thing that garners strength in Tribal societies is projecting strength, not adopting the wear of servitude. I also wonder if this photo is not photoshopped, it just does not look right to me. There is something about both the blond and black haired soldier that does not look right. I would almost swear that I have seen the blond … More after the Jump…
 Sydir Kovpak was a Ukrainian partisan in World War II who fought the Germans behind the lines in the Ukraine and a two-time winner of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Kovpak began his military service in World War I and after that war he joined the Bolsheviks and fought in the Russian Civil War that established the Soviet Union. In World War II he was in command of partisan units in the Ukraine throughout World War II. He led a large band of partisans in the Carpathians in 1943 in an attempt to destroy the oil infrastructure there and deny the oil fields to the Germans. The attempt was … More after the Jump…
Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a female Soviet sniper during World War II. She is credited with 309 confirmed kills and was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest medal for bravery, the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943. After being wounded by a mortar in 1942 she was pulled from combat because of her growing fame and was commissioned. She spent the rest of the war as an instructor at a sniper school. After the war she completed a degree and spent the rest of her life working as a historian, mostly with the Russian Navy. Hero of the Soviet Union Citations are very difficult to find, … More after the Jump…
This article appeared on the US Army web-page this morning; Stetson hat to be new Army standard headgear. Since I am a cavalry guy I think it is a great idea, apparently the grunts don’t like it though. 🙂
Every time I hear the phrase “The Charge of the Light Brigade” I think of The Little Rascals and Alfalfa reciting the poem by Tennyson. There is more to it than that though. The Charge of the Light Brigade is perhaps one of the dumbest, yet most celebrated events in military history. It ranks right up there with Little Big Horn, or lining up the planes at Hickham Field in the military idiocy department in my book. The Charge was not an isolated event, it occurred as part of the larger Battle of Balaclava on October 25th, 1854. Balaclava was one of the opening battles of the Crimean … More after the Jump…
Just about everyone has heard of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, it is the work of fiction about World War I. It has been made into a movie several times and is supposed to represent the inhumanity of the war and the hopelessness felt by its participants in the trenches. Ernst Jünger’s, The Storm of Steel by contrast, is a different sort of World War I book entirely. Where Remarque wrote an anti-war novel based on his experiences in the war, Jünger not only did not write an anti-war account of the war he positively relished his time in the trenches. Jünger was wounded six times during … More after the Jump…
