Sophie Scholl And Anti-Nazi White Rose Rebellion

Want to know what courage looks like? It looks like Sophie Scholl:

On February 22 1943, Sophie Scholl was beheaded by the Nazis for being part of the anti-Nazi passive resistance group The White Rose (Die Weisse Rose). Also killed by guillotine that day were Sophie’s brother, Hans Scholl, 24, and their best friend, Christoph Probst, 22.

After the defeat of the German Army at Stalingrad in 1942 several members of the faculty and students at the University of Munich attempted to rise up against the ruling Nazi Party.

The above is one of the hundreds of copies of the 6 leaflets they distributed, left in telephone books in public phone booths, mailed to professors and students, and taken by courier to other universities for distribution.

Here is its translation:

Fellow Fighters in the Resistance!

Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Fuhrer, we thank you!

The German people are in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come — the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.

We grew up in a state in which all free expression of opinion is unscrupulously suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, to regiment us in the most promising young years of our lives. “Philosophical training” is the name given to the despicable method by which our budding intellectual development is muffled in a fog of empty phrases.

A system of selection of leaders at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded trains up its future party bigwigs in the “Castles of the Knightly Order” to become Godless, impudent, and conscienceless exploiters and executioners — blind, stupid hangers-on of the Fuhrer.

We “Intellectual Workers” are the ones who should put obstacles in the path of this caste of overlords. Soldiers at the front are regimented like schoolboys by student leaders and trainees for the post of Gauleiter, and the lewd jokes of the Gauleiters insult the honor of the women students.

German women students at the University of Munich have given a dignified reply to the besmirching of their honor, and German students have defended the women in the universities and have stood firm…. That is a beginning of the struggle for our free self-determination — without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We thank the brave comrades, both men and women, who have set us brilliant examples.

For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organization, which are used to keep our mouths sealed and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorize us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.

Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German – it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew.

The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. “Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”

Our people stand ready to rebel against the Nationals Socialist enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough of freedom and honor.

Please read more here: Sophie Scholl And The White Rose Rebellion – Flashbak

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Why Professor Indiana Jones Was Hated By His Colleagues | Cracked.com

Very funny article in Cracked.com today by JF Sargent!

Excerpt below:

Dear Dr Jones,

“While your conclusions are fascinating, there are certain aspects of your journey that for the sake of my reputation (to say nothing of yours) should probably be downplayed. For example, there is the following passage:

I ran past a bunch of traps that were rigged to fire poisoned darts at me if I stepped in the wrong place. Luckily, I’m very nimble, and I made it to the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol. I swapped it with a bag of sand, but I must have gotten the weight wrong, because I activated another trap that collapsed the entire cave!

I find this highly distressing to read, as an archaeologist. It is true that the golden monkey statue is very swell, as the kids say, but a millennia-old tomb full of functioning traps isn’t just an archaeological treasure; it’s a technological marvel. I can’t even begin to explain how much we could have learned from this site if you had not exploded it.”

We must say that the title ‘God Melted Some Nazi Faces In Front Of Me’ simply doesn’t fit our journal’s aesthetic.

 

Source: Why Professor Indiana Jones Was Hated By His Colleagues | Cracked.com

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Iraqi artist Hussein Adil imagines life in a bomb suit in public performance in the streets of Baghdad

BAGHDAD The man in the bulky bomb disposal suit waved at a gaggle of awed children as he walked down a Baghdad street and sat outside a small cafe to drink tea.
But there was no bomb to defuse on Rasheed Street that day, and no armor inside the black suit to protect him from explosives.
Iraqi artist Hussein Adil designed the mock bomb suit, complete with huge helmet and visor, for this performance.
“We had to make this one because there aren’t many bomb suits in Iraq,” he said. “We have to be one of the countries in the world that needs them the most.”
Adil, a wispy 20-year-old with a wild head of tight curly hair, is one of an ever growing number of Iraqi artists looking for new ways of tackling the violence they grew up with.
The inspiration for his “bomb suit happening” was the death last year in a suicide car bombing of his close friend Ammar al-Shahbander, a much-loved journalist.

 

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Mercer 2016 Quality of Living worldwide city rankings – Business Insider

Gee, despite 35 years of a policy that ‘Greed is Good’, the USA didn’t make the cut.

Looking at 450 cities across the world, Mercer takes into account the following metrics to judge which cities made the list for the best quality of life:

Political and social environment (political stability, crime, law enforcement)

Economic environment (currency-exchange regulations, banking services)

Socio-cultural environment (media availability and censorship, limitations on personal freedom)

Medical and health considerations (medical supplies and services, infectious diseases, sewage, waste disposal, air pollution)

Schools and education (standards and availability of international schools)

Public services and transportation (electricity, water, public transportation, traffic congestion)

Recreation (restaurants, theatres, cinemas, sports and leisure)

Consumer goods (availability of food/daily consumption items, cars)

Housing (rental housing, household appliances, furniture, maintenance services)

Natural environment (climate, record of natural disasters)

Source: Mercer 2016 Quality of Living worldwide city rankings – Business Insider

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Researchers trace peanut crop back to its Bolivian roots 

I’ve wondered where peanuts originated and it turns out that like potatoes, corn, vanilla, chocolate, coffee, chili peppers, and latex (or about 90% of 7-11’s inventory), they’re from the New World.

Source: Researchers trace peanut crop back to its Bolivian roots | UGA Today

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More local wheels

This gallery contains 14 photos.

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los Punqs de España, 1978

In 1978 Spanish recording company Dial decide to cash in on the new punk music coming out of the US and UK. Rather than trying to find their own indigenous punk rockers (or Spanish-speaking bands from other countries like Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina) they’d just have their (non-English speaking) studio musicians imitate what the Sex Pistols sounded like to them.

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The resulting ‘band’ was Los Punk Rockers and their album of Pistols’ covers is Los Exitos de Sex Pistols.

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I barely made it through those three but if your appetite has been whetted for more, the entire album has been posted on Youtube by pesado766. He has a pretty cool set list on his channel of modern Spanish language punk bands.

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Cancer Researchers Claim ‘Extraordinary Results’

‘This is unprecedented’ says researcher after more than half of terminally ill blood cancer patients experienced complete remission in early clinical trials._88291939_c0151810-acute_lymphoblastic_leukaemia,_micrograph-spl.jpg

Among several dozen patients who would typically have only had months to live, early experimental trials that used the immune system’s T-cells to target cancers had “extraordinary results”.

In one study, 94% of participants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) saw symptoms vanish completely. Patients with other blood cancers had response rates greater than 80%, and more than half experienced complete remission.

Speaking at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), researcher Stanley Riddell said: “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients.”

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Graphic above from The Guardian, along with much more detail about the technique and its results.

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Approaching Rain

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Star Forming Region S106

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Star Forming Region S106 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Legacy Archive; Processed & Copyright: Brandon PimentaExplanation: Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), featured here. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in brown near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape.  S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of a recent infrared image of S106 reveal hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula’s gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

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