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War in the Air
Didn’t all those years of only vaguely discriminate bombing in World War 2 eventually just show that you had to put enough boots on the ground to get anywhere? Germany was beaten in the land battles at Kursk, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow, Normandy, Berlin and during the Bagration Offensive. Butcher Harris kept claiming that Germany would crumble and surrender but no matter how many tens of thousands of civilians were killed in a single night, cor blimey if those bally Bosch didn’t just keep on fighting! What jolly bad sports. It’s not like the Brits had the pulling-together example of the Blitz to learn from or anything.
The US-UK city bombing killed between 300K and 600K Germans, overwhelmingly civilian, with no evidence that it usefully hastened the end of the war. Just think how different things might have been if all those city bombers had instead been targetting railway lines, roads, and concentration camps.
Area bombing was never really about strategic goals – it was a terror weapon. Area bombing targetted entire urban centres for annihilation. It is the explicit targetting of civilians and pre-figured the city killing strategy of nuclear warfare. Only the most deluded believed it was superior (morally or tactically) to precision strikes. By the end of the way most of the US and UK generals did indeed know this. Nevertheless, Harris was allowed to continue his rampages (after all, US industry was making so many of these and it would have been a terrible shame to let them go to waste). Only the most Wellsian believed that aerial warfare could win the war – many believed it could shorten it. Precision bombing of military and industrial facilities would have been more effective. However, these were usually quite well defended and the casualty averse UK and US forces therefore the easy targets of night raids on lightly defended cities.
The classic book on this matter is Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. Taylor’s thesis? Late-stage city bombings were designed to both appease Stalin and to warn him that the Western Powers would use scorched earth tactics were the Red Army to advance past Berlin.
It was actually Fred Lindmann in 1942 who proposed to “dehouse” the German population. Harris seized on the paper and used it as justification right through until 1945. It was a controversial policy even during the war. It was notable that as news of the carnage in Dresden emerged, even Churchill scrambled to distance himself from the strategy. Harris responded to this by repeating his claim that bombing would shorten the war, and his famous quip that all the cities in Germany were not worth the life on one British soldier.
Hitched Into Hell
Lester Tenney was a soldier in the US Army during World War 2. He was captured by the Japanese Army and forced to walk (and survive) the Bataan Death March. In his autobiography, My Hitch In Hell, he described what he saw when he arrived at his concentration camp:
Social Killers
Apparently Web 2.0 means that nasty-arse killers can find each other online. Pekka-Eric Auvinen or “sturmgeist89” (ex-NaturalSelector89)was the YouTube name of the school shooter in Finland that killed 10 people after posting a YouTube video announcing his intentions through video and text. He posted a whole bunch of tiresome crap on YouTube all about Social Darwinism, Waco, neo-Nazism, Kaczynski, Columbine, Tokyo Sarin, Iraq media footage, other school shooters, and general thanatotic fetishism. Apparently, the “Social Darwinists” really don’t get the whole idea of maximizing the number of their offspring. Anyway, in a startling display of boneheadedness, Google is busy deleting all his videos – maybe worried it could be sued by someone? Sturmgeist89′s profile page now says “This account is suspended”… who knew mass murder was a TOS violation? There’s a record of his old profile and also an FTP site with some “manifesto” material. In a sign of impressively morbid entrepreneurship, some wag has already registered sturmgeist89.dl.am (using a difficult-to-trace Armenian URL redirector) and is re-posting the sturmgeist89 videos, probably to grab some Google AdSense money. These mass murder “spree killers” even have their own fan clubs now.
The Most Beautiful Bottom in the World
The Hilton sisters, Sister Lotus, the Most Beautiful Bottom in the World and little Lakshmi Tatma, the 8-limbed goddess. One of these things is not like the other.
Myspace Orgy Murder
Here’s the Myspace profile of Amanda Knox (AKA “Foxy Knoxy“), the woman who has apparently confessed to helping to rape and kill her flatmate, Facebook aficionada Meredith Kercher. Kercher apparently refused to join in with Knox in an orgy along with a dodgy italian waiter (Raffaele Sollecito) and a Congolese musician (Patrick Diya Lumumba). Knox’s creative writing blog displays some strong ideation.
Cultural Depictions of Joan of Arc
I was inspired by yesterday’s entry to add this little pearl of wisdom to Wikipedia’s entry for Cultural Depictions of Joan of Arc:
In the Herald Childe or Image of the Beast novel sequence by Philip José Farmer, one of the shape-shifting alien sexual predators is Joan of Arc, now living with the 15th-century serial killer Gilles de Rais buried within her vagina dentata as a fang-toothed venomous snake that bites and paralyses men during intercourse, prior to sodomising them and then eating them alive from the inside out.
I wonder how long it will take the dittohead mob that infest Wikipedia to delete it as “non notable” or “trivial”, or whatever else it is that is used as an excuse for obscure “knowledge” not explicitly related to Star Wars. Farmer’s book is, of course, incredible. One of the best mashups of detective fiction, porn, horror, and science fiction I’ve found.
Firefox And Me
This morning I noticed my laptop was feeling a little sluggish. Checked the task manager and it seems that Firefox was now eating up 650 MB of RAM. A new personal best. I do have quite a lot of extensions loaded: About This Site, Adblock Plus, Add Bookmark Here, Better GMail, CacheViewer, Cooliris Previews, DOM Inspector, FEBE, Firebug, Firefox Showcase, Flashblock, Forecastfox, FoxyProxy, GMail Manager, GMail Space, Google Browser Sync, Greasemonkey, IE Tab, MediaPlayerConnectivity, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Tab Mix Plus, User Agent Switcher, Web Dev, Zotero. However, when Firefox starts, it takes up around 100 MB total, which is not unreasonable. I just question the internal coding of any program that can swell to 6x the RAM with just 10 or so sites open. Someone is not deallocating their RAM after usage, or has decided to attempt to cache the entire Internet onto my disk.
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