World War II
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
oracknows | March 27, 2010As far as silly Internet memes go, given my interest in World War II history, I have a weakness for Downfall parodies, which have grown up on YouTube like kudzu over the last couple of years. I also thought it was only a matter of time before someone did something like this and wondered why it hadn't been done before:
(Note: In case you don't know or remember who Poul Thorsen is, read this.)
I love it:
"Perhaps that 14 Studies website was too high brow." Heh.
"Now I'll have to pay for another stupid telephone survey." Heh heh.
"But what's the use? Orac will only make fun of me." Heh heh heh…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
oracknows | January 2, 2010Given my long known weak spot for Downfall parodies (even though they are an Internet fad whose time has come and probably already gone), how on earth did I miss this?
PodBlack Cat shows me that, believe it or not, Hitler was a chiropractor. He's been asked to talk about the use of chiropractic for infant colic (you know, the same thing that Simon Singh got in trouble in the U.K. for criticizing), but there is a most unfortunate (and hilarious) complication:
Best line: "Christ, there is more evidence that Elvis is still alive!" Well, maybe not. There are lots of good lines, and I had a hard…
oracknows | December 7, 2009
...the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thus finally sucking the United States into the conflagration that had been raging for two years in Europe and even longer in Asia.
Stories like this one from the AP remind us that the generation who fought and died to defeat Nazi-ism and Japan's imperialism is very old and won't be with us much longer. Ed Johann, the subject of the story, was a 17-year-old apprentice seaman on that fateful Sunday morning. He is going back for the first time since the attack because at age 86 he may not have many more chances:
For years, Johann said he wouldn't go to…
oracknows | November 25, 2009You know, I have three manuscripts in the hopper with two of them having recently been returned to me with reviewers' comments. Frustratingly, one of these is a manuscript that I've been trying to get published for nearly a year now. Given that I appear to have some work to do over the long holiday weekend coming up in order to answer reviewer criticisms and get the manuscripts ready for resubmission (you know what I'll be doing either Friday or Saturday--and it won't be shopping), I truly appreciate this bit of advice on how to deal with the wayward reviewer who doesn't appreciate the…
oracknows | November 4, 2009As regular readers know, one of my interests outside of medicine is the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Granted, I haven't written as much about it lately as I used to, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest. Actually, I think it may be because I seem to be encountering fewer and fewer major issues of Holocaust denial, although the Bishop Williamson case did draw my ire earlier this year, and I have been perturbed by Holocaust denier David Irving's traveling anti-Semitism show that's now slithering its way through the U.S. and is now in the eastern part of the country.
One thing that I have…
oracknows | September 10, 2009...Hitler is most displeased with President Obama and what he did earlier this week:
oracknows | September 3, 2009As I mentioned the other day, September 1 marked the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the "official" start of World War II. I say "official' because the invasion of Poland marked the beginning of a true shooting war in Europe after a long period of escalating tensions and increasingly brazen provocations by the Nazi regime, culminating in March 1939 with its invasion of what parts of Czechoslovakia Britain and France hadn't already given it in the Munich Agreement from the prior year. Because of mutual defense pacts signed earlier, which declared that an attack on any of…
oracknows | September 1, 2009Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…
emjohnson | July 9, 2009On July 9, 1858 the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas was born. To honor the man widely held as the "father of American anthropology" the American Anthropological Association offered a tribute for Boas today on their blog. What conveniently went unmentioned was the fact that the AAA censured Boas in 1918 for revealing that American anthropologists were covertly working as spies for the US government.
As Boas wrote to the editor of The Nation:
The point against which I wish to enter a vigorous protest is that a number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse…
oracknows | April 29, 2009Ten days ago, I made a bit of fun of the big, fat slobbery 120th birthday kiss that David Irving planted on Adolf Hitler's cheek (metaphorically speaking). At the time, I mentioned that there is one Hitler-related holiday that I can actually celebrate, and that day is here:
Führerstodestag.
Führer Death Day! 64 years ago today, April 30, the mass murdering dictator Adolf Hitler blew his brains out. Spread the word and wish all Holocaust deniers, fascists, and neo-Nazis a very unhappy Führerstodestag.
oracknows | April 25, 2009I just learned yesterday from a link a friend sent me and from Professor Deborah Lipstadt's blog that the team of producers who made The Soloist have optioned the movie rights to Professor Lipstadt's book History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier, which is the story of the libel suit brought against her by Holocaust denier David Irving in the U.K., a lawsuit that Irving ultimately lost big time.
This is excellent news. Having read her book, as well as Richard Evans' account of the trial, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, I had always thought…
oracknows | April 20, 2009David Irving has made a career out of being a Holocaust denier and then protesting when someone calls him a Holocaust denier. As you may recall, he even sued Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt for correctly referring to him as a Holocaust denier in one of her books.
Let's take a look at what's on his website today. If you go to Irving's main website and click on today's newsletter, this is what you will see as a flash screen before the website goes to the newsletter:
That's right! It's a big fat, sloppy 120th birthday kiss to Adolf Hitler, straight from David "I'm not a Holocaust denier"…
oracknows | April 18, 2009One more reason why John Stewart and his writers are geniuses is here, where he examines the "Tea Parties" we in the U.S. were subjected to three days ago, including one in my own town:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Nationwide Tax Protests
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
How is it that to the right comparing Bush to Hitler was overblown and unfair over a great many issues, including the war in Iraq (a criticism that I actually agreed with, even though I was thoroughly opposed to the war--think Hitler Zombie), but putting Obama'…
gregladen | April 6, 2009In June of 1940, France fell to Germany. Among the troops who were overwhelmed by the German attacks were about 17,000 black West African colonial troops with the French Army. Many of these soldiers were shot do death by the Germans, who considered these Africans to be subhumans, as they stood in surrender. Surely, it would be fair to consider this to have been part of the Holocaust.
Then the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese did a pretty good job of trying to take over the world, millions upon millions died in that war, and the rest of the Holocaust happened.
The Allies banded together…
oracknows | March 7, 2009It's a rare thing indeed for this to happen, but words fail me here:
Wow. Just wow.
Because clearly the Obama administration is getting ready to fire up the ovens for responsible borrowers who paid their mortgages on time. Truly, a black hole of stupid in a single cartoon! The stupid burns on so many levels at once, that I remain astonished.
Either there was nothing for the Hitler Zombie (you remember, that undead dictator whose feeding on a victim's brain leads to incredibly dumb Hitler, Holocaust, or Nazi analogies) to find here, or the Undead Führer so thoroughly snacked on Mike…
oracknows | February 16, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…