Utopia, you are standing in it!

I have been to Munich several times over the last 15 years or so, and every time I visited the city I planned to take the short train journey to Dachau.But for some bizarre reason I never got there.It was as if fate didn’t want me to go there, maybe it was afraid I wasn’t ready to face the horrors that were committed there, for I am an emotional man,not whiny but emotional.

I can not even fathom the disgust and hate the allied troops must have felt when they liberated the camp this day 72 years ago.

Below are pictures if what they found when they arrived on 29 April 1945, subsequently the same day Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun.

Polish survivors celebrating the liberation of Dachau

Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp’s liberation “prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and…

The Boston Herald published an odd commentary the other day, one that scoffed at core elements of the media myth of the “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 while repeating the dubious elements anyway.

Cronkite in Vietnam

Such can be the appeal of media-driven myths, those apocryphal or improbable tales about powerful media influence: They can be too compelling to resist and as such invite comparisons to the junk food of journalism.

The Herald’s commentary discussed the mythical “Cronkite Moment” as historical context in considering the lies told about the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which may have permanently damaged Joe Biden’s beleaguered presidency.

The commentary asserted:

“Back in 1968 widely respected CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reported that the controversial war in Vietnam, which had so divided the country, was lost, hopelessly ‘mired in stalemate.’

“Coming from Cronkite, a battle-hardened World War II…

Posted by Krista J. Kesselring, 10 October 2021.

A new collection of essays on the Court of Star Chamber and its records is out now, freely available online thanks to the Open Access provisions of its publishers. Many historians and literary scholars draw upon Star Chamber’s records as sources or texts, as shown to good effect by contributors to the new book. Some of the essays in the volume suggest, too, that we should look not just through our archives but at them.[1] This post briefly follows up on this suggestion and expands upon the Introduction’s observation that ‘the record’ meant something quite particular for the people who produced the legal documents we use.

Anyone who works with the documentary relics of the past has had occasion to bemoan the fires, floods, wars, and other such ravages…

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Many of Earth’s complex systems ‘may be more resilient than currently thought’, in the words of the study. Makes a change from claims that various climate nasties lurk just round the corner if this or that is allowed to happen.
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We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to ‘tipping points’: irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing, says Phys.org.

These cautions often refer to spatial patterns as early-warning signals of tipping points. An international team of ecologists and mathematicians has studied these patterns and come to a surprising conclusion.

“Yes, we need to do everything we can to stop climate change,” the authors said in full agreement with the recent IPCC report. “But the Earth is much more resilient than previously thought. The concept of…