poland

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Apparently, there are still good things about America.  And these Polish people know it.  So much so that a bunch of them have been live-action role-playing (LARP) as Americans.  Specifically, Americans in small-town Ohio.  And what has come of it is completely bonkers!

Vice has the story of the Polish LARPers, who were inspired in part by shows like Stranger Things and The X-Files (and also by Breaking Bad, if some of the photos are to be believed).  And at least two pages on Facebook (here and also here) are filled with more pictures.  Seems that these folks wanted to imitate the Fourth of July.  They certainly do not lack in their research.  These are just… wow.  It’s like that Star Trek episode where the crew finds the planet that’s copying 1920s-era gangster Chicago.  The cop with the donut (pictured here) is cracking me up hard....

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Chris Knight's avatar

During my lifetime, I have met six survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Each of them Jewish. Some were at Treblinka. Some at Bergen-Belsen. Some at Auschwitz.

Hearing only them tell his or her story would remain as one of the most humbling and heartbreaking and in the end most inspirational tale of human hope that I have ever listened to. To hear the tales of six such people leaves a far greater impression upon one’s mind of the sacredness of even one human life. These people and many more went through Hell on Earth… but not one of them came out of it with affirmation that in spite of the evil that mankind is capable of, there is also a far greater potential for good. Every single survivor of the camps is, has been and forever will be a victory against those who sought their extermination. For all that ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Early on the morning of September 1st, 1939, a squadron of Nazi German Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of WieluĊ„. More than twelve hundred people were killed. Minutes later a German battleship opened fire on the military depot at Danzig. In the hours that followed dozens of motorized German divisions stormed into Poland along three fronts.

World War II had begun.

Nothing more to say here, other than to remember history… and a prayer that we may be mindful of lessons that are all too often only paid for at the highest of cost....

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s turning out to be quite a week for the science of genetics. First the DNA of the woolly mammoth has been mostly reconstructed.

And now comes word that the final resting place of Nicolas Copernicus has been positively identified.

Copernicus was the sixteenth-century astronomer who turned human understanding of the heavens upside-down (and would later on invite the wrath of religious officials especially after it was championed by Galileo Galilei) with his treatise “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. Copernicus contended that in spite of the unquestioned assumptions of Ptolemy fourteen hundred years earlier, the Earth was not at the center of the universe! That in fact the Earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun, which was just another star among countless others. The heliocentric theory was of course correct and for this, Copernicus is widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy. ...

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