A different view on current affairs & history
Rating: 5 out of 5
With his indomitable spirit & lucidly argued analysis, Richard Dawkins comprehensively demolishes the deeply held beliefs buttressing the rationale for religion.
He skillfully exposes all the claims made by the various religious movements & society in general that Religion is the arbiter of morality & bedrock of morality. This is convincingly proved to be totally fallacious.
With all the hype & a large dollop of prize money, one would expect world class organisation, a stunning route a la the Two Oceans & the excitement of a large-city marathon.
Instead the Gauteng Sports Challenge of 2013 had none of these attributes.
Rating: 5 out of 5
What a stunning video. Instead of the usual shots of birds taken from the ground, these photos are taken alongside the birds as if one were flying adjacent to them in the flock. Many of them are taken of migrations with shots of birds flying over well-known features such as the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty.
In each of the three episodes Earth Flight deals with birds from a different continent. So in the case of South Africa, my home country, the one portion is of Cape Gannet’s diving through a school of dolphins to catch pilchards, an epipelagic fish. This section shows gannets at wing height, from above & beneath the water. All are stunning.
Rating: 5 out of 5
John Edgar Hoover rose to become the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, & was its head for 48 years. As such he would stop at nothing to protect his country & himself.
To do so, he illegally gathered personal information on the all the senior officials in the administration including the President. Naturally he uncovered the dalliances of both Roosevelt & his wife, Eleanor.
Remarkably he served under eight presidents waging wars against threats both real & imaginary. His solution was to bend the rules to obtain the desired results.
A Bridge Too Far is a 1977 War film based on the 1974 “A Bridge Too Far” book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan and directed by Richard Attenborough, brother of David Attenborough.
The film tells the story of the failure of Operation Market Garden during World War II, the Allied attempt to break through German lines and seize several bridges in the occupied Netherlands, including one at Arnhem, with the main objective of outflanking German defences.
Having a goal or objective always serves as a great motivator whether it is at home, at work or in one’s sport. It always seems to compel one out of bed at 4am in the morning even on the coldest and wettest mornings.
Andre certainly needed one; and if truth be told, I did too. After running for 30+ years, Andre just went through the motions, so to speak, and had long since ceased to put any effort into his running.
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A Personal View – April 2014
Like in all dictatorships, collaboration with the Regime is the norm. Is one prepared to risk one’s life in passive resistance let alone supporting some form of insurrection? Hardly ever as it requires a special type of person! Within Nazi Germany itself, it made no difference to the punishment but it was the fact that it was less risky that might have tempted people to engage in passive resistance.
Inasmuch as there were many intelligent people who understood the abhorrent nature of the regime, very few chose to actively take any active form of resistance but a few did practice passive resistance.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Of the two, the coterie of Stalin is virtually unknown as compared with Hitler’s entourage. This book illuminates these close friends & colleagues of Stalin. Some names might be remembered but most will be quickly forgotten after reading this book. The likes of Malenkov, Zhdanov, Beria & Molotov feature prominently towards the end of Stalin’s life.
Despite their high status & closeness to Stalin himself, the sycophantic nature of their relationship meant that Stalin was the supreme power, the marionette operator. Unlike Hitler who left the details of execution to his subordinates, Stalin increasingly initiated campaigns such as the Doctors’ & the Jewish Conspiracies. This attention to detail grew in his dotage probably due to the fact of increasing paranoia as his physical power ebbed aways.
In spite of being in Stalin’s inner circle, they were no safer nor less likely to be summarily denounced by Stalin & executed. A case in point is Molotov whose wife Polina was a Jewish. Due to abstaining in a vote whether she should be denounced & incarcerated in the Gulags for five years, Molotov was forced to make a grovelling apology at a meeting of the Central Committee for not voting for her denouncement; her nefarious crime was be friendly with certain Zionist Jews.
Stalin’s sadism is shown in numerous examples where he forces his subordinates to be become inebriated on pain of being tortured in the notorious Lubianka Prison. Threats of excruciatingly punishment were used as a method of tormenting his subordinates. Having known Stalin for years, they readily comprehended his capacity to action those threats.
Of his three children, Svetlana was the only one with sufficient chutzpah to speak openly to her father. Both his sons were disappointments but for different reasons. Yakov was captured by the Germans during WW2 & ultimately dying at their hands. As he was no supposed to have been captured, Stalin never forgave him. Like all the other Russian POWs, they were distrusted & persecuted forever. In spite of mediocre ability, Vasily was appointed an air force general but due to alcoholism & incompetence, he had to be side-lined.
Stalin was diabolical. He would be utterly charming to an associate at a party knowing full well that he had already signed the death warrant of the unsuspecting individual.
Personally I found the final years of Stalin’s life to be of more interest as I found a lot of the earlier years quite banal.
This is a landmark work which has only now been able to peel back the veil on the inner circle due to the available of newly released source material. It will forever be the gold standard in understanding Stalin’s relationship with his minions.
This is not normally a topic on which I would dwell even though it is so beloved of the pulp fiction & popular weekly magazines but it raises my awareness from time to time. This time it was an article about a Jewish Rabbi who decries the loss of lust in marriage. That concept certainly caught my attention, if nothing else, before I was forced to read the article.