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Future fathers here’s some advice for you all!

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Normandy Beaches in 1944 & 70 Years Later

On June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers descended on the beaches of Normandy for D-Day, an operation that turned the tide of the Second World War against the Nazis, marking the beginning of the end of the conflict. Reuters photographer Chris Helgren compiled archive pictures taken during the invasion and went back to the same places to photograph them as they appear today.

More pictures here

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American Girl stories were the best tbh

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autumnal prince🍂🍂🍂

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November 7, 1918

Clara and I visited the science fair in the town centre. It was such a lovely evening and they showcased some extraordinary inventions. Clara was especially fond of the Photorama.

Clara has recently had an affinity towards making imaginary friends. She names this one “Patches” and says that he has a metal claw for a left arm and lives in the wooded area near our house. Such an inventive imagination.

Every morning for the past week, Clara gathers herself a lunch for her and Patches and strolls into the woods to play. I much prefer that she spend her time outdoors than to be cooped up inside, drawing all day.

God in Heaven, the sound of screams alerted Miss Cassidy and I into a horrible sight. Clara came running with a large cut on her arm, crying that Patches had done it. The foolish child, she must have injured herself by climbing a tree.

Three days have passed since that incident. I caught Clara talking out one of the windows (presumably to Patches).

She sounded… Apologetic.

I can tell that she misses the outdoors.

Heavens above, the boy is real!

Running back inside, my heart sank to my stomach as I lay eyes on the boy. How long has he been living in the woods near our house!?

After much consideration (and insistence from Clara to help him) We allowed him inside. The poor boy was closer to a cadaver than a living child and he did indeed have a metal prosthetic for a left arm.

The boy is absolutely restless, twitching and shaking unnaturally. It took us a few hours to try and calm him down. He doesn’t seem to be able to speak or know where he is.

My daughter is beyond a doubt, the bravest and kindest soul  I know. She is able to comfort this boy and insists on being by his side at all times. He must have been utterly starved, as the moment we presented him with food, he devoured it within seconds.

Christ, I may just faint and die.

The boy never seems to rest and has been roaming the halls all night.

I don’t know how she managed, but Clara surprised me this morning by presenting a well dressed Patches (the clothes were her father’s, from when he was a child).

Patches seems to be less fidgety than before.

The boy is still unable to speak, but he seems to display an unbounded curiosity.

A man came by the house late at night. He seemed disheveled and desperate. He was asking about his missing son and if we had seen him by any chance.

I told him that I had not.

When I asked for his name, he said that it was ‘Avram.’ He did not give me his son’s name, though.

The name ‘Avram’ sounded familiar, so I looked through our old newspapers to see if I had recognized his name.

Sure enough, I found it. He had been a well respected scientist who recently lost his son, Mason. The boy was mangled to pieces in an industrial accident.

…Mason.

Miss Cassidy believes we should inform the authorities of the situation. I would be inclined to agree, yet I fear that Mason would be exposed to even more danger if we do that.

I can’t bear to imagine the poor boy being studied or put to death like some lab specimen.

I awoke late at night to cries and rustling. But instead of finding Mason, I saw Miss Cassidy at the bottom of the stairs! She’s alive, thank heavens, but is knocked unconscious.

I find Avram clutching my daughter with a pistol to her head. He demands that I bring Mason to him, but I don’t know where he could be.

Like a phantom, Mason suddenly appears, slowly making his way towards Avram. I am reunited with Clara, unharmed.

I could barely register what had just happened. Mason sliced Avram’s face wide open, giving us a chance to escape.

We ran into the woods, with Avram giving chase right behind us.

I knew that no matter what, we had to run as far and as fast as we could, lest we get shot. Amidst the chase, Mason had split from us and headed down a separate path, leading Avram away from us.

Clara and I never looked back. As we ran, the night was filled with screams and gunshots.

Clara and I made it out of the woods by morning. We never saw Mason or Avram ever again. It was as though it had been a nightmare.

[Mason and Avram]

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I just left PolyU to go back to America on Friday. We didn’t have any notice before shit started going down on campus... I woke up to go to class Monday but it was canceled and only 3 days later they canceled the whole semester. It’s really crazy there right now

Hong Kong police attacked the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, again. 17 Nov 2019

香港理工大學

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FINLAND. January 12, 1940. A Finnish ski patrol, lying in the snow on the outskirts of a wood in Northern Finland, on the alert for Russian troops, during the Winter War.

The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939–1940. The Soviet Union ostensibly sought to claim parts of Finnish territory. It began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 (three months after the outbreak of World War II), and ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the League on 14 December 1939.

Photograph: Finnish Army

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*RARE* John Denver & Johnny Cash - Take Me Home Country Roads

Found this while going through my granddad’s VHS tapes and couldn’t find it anywhere online, so here it is.

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WORLDWIDE (October 13, 2019) – The United States Navy celebrates its 244th birthday today.

Under first President George Washington, late-18th century threats to American merchant shipping in the Mediterranean Sea by Barbary pirates from four North African Muslim States (covering roughly modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya), led to the Naval Act of 1794, which created a permanent standing U.S. Navy.

The Naval Act authorized the spending of USD$700,000 to build the Navy’s first ships – six frigates. USS Constitution (above) was one of them….and remains on active-duty to this day….serving as an iconic reminder of America’s rich Naval history, traditions, and professionalism!

On October 13, 1775 the United States Navy was formally established….and the rest is history….244 years later.

        Naval power … is the natural defense of the United States.

                                                                         – John Adams (1735 ~ 1826)

                                             *          *          *          *

On a personal note: There was no higher honor than being the son of a career Naval Officer, and a career Naval Officer in my own right. If only they took “less-young” folk like me, I’d be back in uniform, at-sea, “serving in harm’s way,” in a heartbeat, for as long as I could contribute effectively!

                                             *          *          *          *

What’s a birthday without cake?!….

                                         The “Formal” cake….

                                      ….and an “Informal” cake

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Lucky Strike Cigarettes (1936)

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AFGHANISTAN. Helmand Province. May 5, 2011. Flight medic Sgt. Billy Raines pauses after treating the wounds of a 4-year-old Afghan girl who was severely burned after a pressure cooker exploded in her home.

“Flight medic Sgt. Billy Raines has witnessed more than his share of the grim consequences of war. When asked to estimate the number of troops he has treated - who had limbs blown off in battle during his two deployments with 1-24 Charlie Company Dustoff (the first in Iraq, currently in Afghanistan) - he answered “many dozens”. Twenty-nine years old, the father of three girls, 10, 9 and 6, he has somehow managed not to become desensitized to trauma and suffering. He has seen, repeatedly, how a shaped IED can take out an armored fighting vehicle and all the men inside it; how it forms a projectile of molten copper that cuts right through steel plate, shredding flak vests and Kevlar helmets. He’s seen a tractor carrying 10 children blasted to bits by a “normal” IED - no survivors. He’s flown missions where instead of administering life support he’s collected body parts.

Yet, after all that, one four-year-old Afghan girl who had been burned, not in battle, but in an accident at home, etched a mask of resignation and pity on his young face and transformed his eyes into laser beams of compassion. In sharing what had been on his mind at that moment, he allowed that his thoughts were of her future; how she would probably never fully recover from the third degree burns that claimed 60% of her body, how limited her mobility would be, how the pain she had experienced during the three days before help arrived must have been unbearable, how much pain she would continue to experience – how she would look for the rest of her life.

It would be natural for any parent to project thoughts of his own children into the scenario, but that was not what caused Sgt. Raines’ look of concern. He had enough presence of mind to know that his daughters were ok; they were safe at home and well cared for by his wife, and he was thankful for that. Cruelty and vengeance can sometimes corrupt the spirit of those engaged at the sharp end of a war. But neither those harsh emotions nor compassion-fatigue had infected Sgt. Raines’ heart or his mind. That he still cared made him more effective at his job and underlines the ancient wisdom that recognizes (beyond skill and courage and the ability to physically endure) compassion as one of the highest attributes of a true warrior.”

— James Nachtwey [x]

Photograph: James Nachtwey for TIME

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NASA's Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities

In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.

But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez, shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000 Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.

But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities. Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the public got to see.

Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007, under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”

The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500 tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

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Indoor/Outdoor Cat Discourse Has Given Me Some Sweet Perspective

For those of you out there asking yourselves, “why won’t people change? Why won’t people listen to experts? Why are they choosing to be ignorant and stay on the same destructive path?”

I’ll tell you why. Now keep in mind, about 7% of the population has a bachelors degree. About .1% have a doctorates.

So back to the cats. All the experts (cat behavioralists, vets, biologists, ecologists, environmental engineers, and so on) unanimously agree that cats should be kept indoors, because being outdoors is bad for them and the environment, and that cats get plenty of enrichment inside. These .1% most educated. I have never seen an educated person say otherwise. I, a biologist, in the top 7% most educated in the world, also agree.

The facts state, statistically, what these experts state. There is no contrary data, at all.

But what do people say?

“Well my cat loves it and he’s fine so.”

“Well cats like it better that way.”

“Well that’s just the way it’s supposed to go!”

“Keeping my cat inside is a lot of work.”

“It’s easier to let them out!”

Uneducated, unknowledgeable. But they still believe they know better. They refuse to change, when all that is asked of them, is to get a few more cat toys, and keep the cat inside. That’s it. They can also choose to not have a cat, that’s fine too.

But nope. That’s too much to ask. Can’t do it. Fuck people that suggest it.

And y’all expect people to change for climate change? Something they can’t even see? You expect them to change for other people? Things ingrained since birth like pronouns? You expect old people to suddenly not be racist? For People that don’t even live in their home? People that they don’t know? You expect them to get off their asses and change anything? You’re all shocked and upset when it’s more of the same?

If you ain’t gonna lead it’s time to shut up, because one way or another, that’s you too.

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LITHUANIA. Vilnius. 1991. The body of a young Lithuanian man killed by Soviet troops is mourned by his family in the Cathedral.

The January Events took place in Lithuania between January 11 and 13, 1991, following the military occupation of the country by Soviet troops, who invaded the country after the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the USSR in March 1990. As a result of Soviet military actions, 14 unarmed civilians were killed and 702 were injured.

Photograph: A. Abbas/Magnum Photos

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Differences in Colonial Attitudes, 17th Century Edition

British colonist: Hello! I am from the greatest nation on earth, as confirmed by Almighty God through our victory at sea over the hated Papist Spaniards. We have the greatest institutions and traditions in the world, and owing to our cramping overpopulation, utter lack of economic opportunities, and frothing hatred of the poor, I am here in this new land to spread the benevolence of our institutional perfection to you.

French colonist: I don't give a shit about any of this or any of you, just give me The Beaver

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IRAQ. Mosul. 2018. Nour, 10, lost 19 members of her family and was badly wounded in a suicide bombing.

Nour, a brown-haired 10-year-old whose favorite game used to be pretending to be a princess, stopped playing make-believe in July of last year, when she lost 19 members of her family as they tried to escape Mosul’s besieged Old City, where the Islamic State was making its last stand.

Her parents, relatives and neighbors had decided to leave their makeshift bomb shelters where they had been cowering for days and run for the safety of the Iraqi Army lines. As they dodged bullets and stumbled through mounds of rubble, an Islamic State suicide bomber ran at them and detonated her bomb.

Nour remembers being blown into the air, but nothing else. Her parents, her little sister, six cousins, six aunts and uncles and her grandmother were killed.

Her surviving relatives, a 63-year-old great-aunt and her 21-year-old married sister, found her at a field hospital, where an American military medic had saved her life. They took her, frail and bandaged, to her aunt’s home.

But her family had no way to nurse the painful scars across her face, hands and arms, or the emotional pain she carried. Nour had second- and third-degree burns from her fingertips to her elbows and across her cheeks, as well as severe nerve damage in both hands.

Her great-aunt, Sukaina Muhammad, who lost her husband in the same blast, makes ends meet with food parcels from a local charity. She spent the family’s meager life savings on two surgical operations to help Nour regain the use of her arms, but she cannot afford reconstructive surgery.

This spring, they enrolled her in school, hoping a regular routine would help her cope with her withdrawal and sadness. In her first week in class, her classmates and teachers laughed at the claw-like appearance of her burned hands.

“Can you imagine anything as cruel as that?” her aunt asked.

Nour stopped going to class. She now spends her day helping her great-aunt with household chores. Her favorite toy is a stuffed Mickey Mouse.

She prefers that over the pretty dolls her cousins have.

“It’s hard to pretend like that,” she said. “I’m not beautiful like them.”

[x]

Photographs: Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times

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Super Smash Bros moves performed by Marvel stuntmen