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Cake day: July 30th, 2024

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  • In times past, I was fascinated by Hitler and WW2. It was a lifelong obsession that I had since childhood. But ever since the Trump era started it started to wane due to the fact that WW2 and Hitler just didn’t seem so distant anymore… the world felt like a repeat of what was happening in those days and looking up facts felt, in part, like learning more to understand what is happening now instead of about history.

    But if there is something that I need to point out is that Hitler was a SHIT leader. Germans and Germany ever since the Kaiser era were portrayed as hyperefficient and militaristic, and people then claim the Nazis were the same. They weren’t. Nazi bureaucracy was bullshit and most of their economic growth was based on plunder (initially from German Jews and other marginalized groups and later from other countries) and almost purely military build up. Germany actually lagged behind in technological build-up to most countries, despite the stereotypes of the Wunderwaffen of WW2 (Fritz-X bomb, the ME-262, etc), and industrially as any technology that didn’t have a direct military benefit was discarded. They didn’t even have any proper anti-biotics during the war!

    Even agriculture was fucked by the Germans. Despite the romanticization of the German peasantry and the countryside by the Nazis, they could not sustain their population at all. Most German food was imported, and they were preparing their population for harsh wartime rationing even before the war started. They fed their population almost entirely on stolen food from Poland, France, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. Also by killing a lot of people in the death camps they saved on food that way as well.

    People stereotype communist countries as having no food when they don’t realize that fascist nations just can’t feed their own folk. Nazi Germany wasn’t alone in having serious food problems. Imperial Japan couldn’t feed its own population and would have had widespread hunger if they didn’t start plundering China during the war.

    Hitler lead Germans and Germany into death and destruction and misery and mayhem. He did nothing good for Germany. None at all. Even towards the end of the war he would have been OK with the German people being genocided since if they were defeated by the barbarian orc-like Soviets and the mongrel Americans they were not the master race he thought they were and they deserved to die. There is a reason why he is remembered as one of the world’s greatest monsters.





  • There is a question of just how much better or worse human memory was in the old days. Some say it was better because there just aren’t that many things people need to remember, so they can remember what they consider to be important more easily.

    Laws were generally far more rudementary and easier to remember. People didn’t need to remember as many numbers as we do now, and as a general rule, the amount of news and events that the average person contended with within their lifetimes was also far fewer. I remember learning a fact that the average amount of news and information a person gets in just one week today is actually more than what the typical farmer would get in their lifetimes. That is mind boggling when you think about it.




  • Jean Clemente (the oldest human ever) smoked cigarettes (she didn’t inhale) and ate pounds of chocolate at a time. The oldest Canadian woman ever smoked until she was in her 90s (she lived to be 116), and plenty of other people who lived to be 100 also had ridiculously unhealthy lifestyles but still lived long.

    For Trump, his father lived to be in his 90s. His grandfather died younger because he was a victim of the Spanish Flu in 1918. We don’t know how long he will live, sadly. But I hope he will die of natural causes soon.





  • You aren’t alone. Historically before calculators were common, engineers and mathematicians would actually have books with basic arithmetic answers already done, or they would hire people (usually women) called ‘computers’ (no joke, that’s what the term was used for before computers as we know it were invented) to do the basic calculations for mathematicians so they can focus on the more complicated stuff.

    So even a highly talented mathematician from the 1910s and 1920s would still struggle as you do.



  • This is why the US has fairly loose gun laws. Historically governments in the US were quite tolerant of vigilante violence against opposition to laws and social norms, such as racism and misogyny. It allowed the government and police to technically keep their hands clean while letting others do the dirty work. On occassion they would arrest and charge a few of them, but by and large most of them went unpunished. With mass shooters they will of course never see the light of day again (if arrested) but in secret they will love their actions.