Van alle donkere tijden in onze geschiedenis: de pestepidemie, de conquista, WOII,… waren de jaren ‘80 definitief het ergste: een gevaarlijke mix van Reagan & epauletten deed de meest vreemde subculturen ontstaan. Eén van de stromingen die ontstond was de ‘New Wave’. Het fenomeen had een typische look, een fusie van de 50’s, de horror [...]

Boing Boing: Fascinating story of how the De Beers cartel pumped up the value of a relatively common gemstone, the diamond, by conducting a global psychological manipulation campaign.

This is the pond Henry David Thoreau wrote about in his famous book Walden.

Hell is other people removing your cigarette
France’s National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
Sartre himself would have been appalled by this. The guy smoked two packs a day. Being French I imagine him smoking Gauloises, essentially pocket sized factory-chimneys. [...]

Paris exhibit shows Sartre as a man of his word
Two things I didn’t know about Sartre:

He was born on the exact same day as my grandfather.
He used amphetamines to improve his writing. The manuscripts of these writings hardly contain any corrections or alterations. This hardly surprises me. The phenomenological viewpoint where one has to [...]

Robert Fisk understands the mess in Lebanon better than any other ‘Western’ reporter.

Lincoln Unvarnished:
Captain Derickson was President Lincoln’s chosen bedmate–but only when Mary was away, suggesting that whatever the exact nature of Lincoln’s relationship to the Captain, Lincoln himself recognized it would hurt Mary.

“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”–Sir Winston Churchill
No wonder they call him the greatest Briton ever.

19th Century news going online: “More than a million pages from 19th Century British newspapers are to be put online by the British Library.”

This weekend, I was rummaging through some old stuff of mine. I moved out of my parent’s house eight years ago, and left a lot of things in my old room, old toys, old books, etc. For some reason, my father bought a copy of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth (we have a [...]

Just like G.W.Bush today, Adolf Hitler believed he was on a divine mission, to rid the world of evil. He survived several assassination attempts. In 1939, a Communist planted a bomb at a beerhall, where Hitler was to speak. The bomb went off, only thirteen minutes after Hitler had left the building. The British Special [...]