Hindenburg Zeppelin Circles Manhattan Island

I never knew how big the Hindenburg was, less than 10 meters shorter than the Titanic and could travel at 80 mph. In the clip above, the Swastikas on the tail fins have been swapped for Iron Crosses. They were circling New York waiting for better weather in New Jersey.

Google Tip of the Day; Tracking Your Dome

Track how long it's been since your last mullet-mod. More info here:

Somehow Whitman Sounds Just as You Imagined He Would

A wax recording from 1860.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love..."

HT: AS

A Gay Bomb?

Widely Played, But I Like It: Bill O'Reilly Flips Out — DANCE REMIX

So God Does Is Dice?

Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial)
Albert Einstein (1954)
Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh...

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein.

Absolute Genius!

China Earthquake 7.8 [2008/05/12]

Watch the gold fish around 5 minutes in. Could be much worse than Burma. What will be interesting to see is if China handles it any better.

Re: Hiroshima Photos (Weird)

Photos of Hiroshima from the Robert L. Capp Collection

NOTE: The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp's oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I cannot speak for the entire collection, this evidence raises doubts about all of the photos and raises the strong possibility that the identification provided by the Hoover Archives is incorrect. I take full responsibility for my own failure to take additional steps to verify that the original archival designation was correct. I have removed the photographs until and unless their source can be verified by further research.

HT: M2

Gotta Love the Junta: Generals Putting Their Names on Foreign Food Aid in Burma (not Myamar)

Ugly, but completely predictable story, here.

Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals' names

Sat May 10, 3:08 PM ET

Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

Despite international appeals to postpone a referendum on a controversial proposed constitution, voting began Saturday in all but the hardest hit parts of the country. With voters going to the polls, state-run television continuously ran images of top generals including junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, handing out boxes of aid at elaborate ceremonies.

"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

Sometimes I am Embarassed to be a Canadian: Mark Steyn on Trial

Nice oped here.

A miserable quote or three:

We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness.In the week of June 2, a body of bureaucrats called the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will call on the carpet author Mark Steyn. A bellicose champion of the West, Steyn predicts in his new book, "America Alone," that Muslims will swarm over Europe, ban alcohol and put women in veils. Maclean's magazine printed an excerpt that outraged Islamic Canadians, who complained to human-rights tribunals in Ottawa and the provinces.

...

British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person ... to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.

...

Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.

There are extreme sports and then there is....

HT: AS's MHB

Military Parade at Red Square, Moscow (May Day 1941)

Le plus ce change, le plus ce meme chose

More info on today's fun here.

Hillary's Downfall

The Burmese Cyclone From Above

Harrowing Photo Essay of the Aftermath of the US Nuclear Attack on Hiroshima

The photo essay can be found here.

It's a strange thing, but when I think of Hiroshima I think of pictures like the one above, a photograph denuded of the bomb's effect on the citizens of Hiroshima and, if you are like me, a long hard look at the photographs above are a necessary correction to this odd lacunae. The story behind how it is that these harrowing photographs are only available to the public now is also very much worth a read. Israel's bombing of Syria's nascent atomic weapon facilities looks all the more prescient.

HT: AS

Sound Familiar: Hitler's Plans for War on America

HT: AS

Some Secret: A Public Tour of Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Site

Photo essay here.

Nice Piece on Ansel Adams in NYT: HT JPK

Ansel Adams

Austria's Greatest Tragedy? I Think Not

From the letters section in today's National Post.

Austria's Greatest Tragedy?
Re: Man Traps Daughter For 24 Years; Kept In Dungeon, Bore His Children, Police Say, April 28.
Much has been said over the past few days about "Austria's greatest tragedy ever." Twelve years ago I stood at the Mauthausen concentration camp with my father, a former inmate of the camp, and I also wondered how among the many farms surrounding the camp not one was able to identify what was going on in their midst for so many years during the war.

Furthermore, Mauthausen was surrounded by other concentration camps, including at least one death camp, from where my father was liberated after spending weeks burying Jewish victims.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I challenge the Austrian people to finally admit that this was in fact the greatest tragedy in the history of their nation.

Marvin Stenge, Montreal.

After all, this is the Country where Hitler was a German and Mozart an Austrian. I did once have the opportunity of visiting Mathausen. It's truly frightening how the horrors of the past can be so sanitized by the weather of 50 years. More info on just how bad Mathausen-Gussen and the smaller satellite camps can be found here. It is true that Nazi Germany did invade Austria, but they were not exactly met with much resistance. Even today, the famous Vienna Synagogue that survived the war -- it was to be made into a museum -- there are no signs leading to it, and both my friend Adam Sandler, who speaks fluent avrit (modern Hebrew), and me with a last name like Rabin, were unable to get past the Israeli security.