zidouta.com

Das Sandbad (Johann SCHWARZER, Austria 1906)

Europa Film Treasures

“French lawyer Jacques Vergès is famed for defending some of the worst mass murderers in recent history. He says “everyone, no matter what he may have done, has a right to a fair trial.”"

Der Spiegel, Interview with notorious lawyer Jacques Vergès. ‘There Is No Such Thing as Absolute Evil’:

“He has met Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Che Guevara. He defended ‘Carlos the Jackal’ and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Jacques Vergès, 83, is probably the world’s most notorious attorney. His latest client is Khieu Samphan, the former head of state of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, who is on trial for war crimes.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Vergès, are you attracted to evil?

Jacques Vergès: Nature is wild, unpredictable and senselessly gruesome. What distinguishes human beings from animals is the ability to speak on behalf of evil. Crime is a symbol of our freedom.

SPIEGEL: That’s a cynical worldview.

Vergès: A realistic one.”

Paratroopers of the British 1st Airborne landing in fields of Arnhem during the opening hours of Operation Market Garden. Location: Holland. Date taken: September 17, 1944. Size: 1280 x 1158 pixels (17.8 x 16.1 inches)

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google:

“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
(…)
Search tip
Add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. (…)”

‘Sport, Olympische Spelen Amsterdam, 1928. Wielrenner tijdens de wegwedstrijd in het Hollandse landschap, gadegeslagen door een politieagent te paard.’

Nationaal Archief op Flickr. (via)

NRC, ‘Naakt short gaan’ is een oud-Hollands kunstje:

“Hoewel naked short selling de laatste jaren een vlucht lijkt te nemen met de komst van hedgefondsen en zogenoemde riskarbitragefondsen (die speculeren op koersdalingen vlak voor de presentatie van cijfers of groot nieuws), is het fenomeen bijna vierhonderd jaar oud. Het eerste geval van marktmisbruik door naakt short gaan dateert uit 1609 en is uitgevonden door een Nederlander, de handelaar Isaac Le Maire, grootaandeelhouder in de Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC.”

Meer over Isaac le Maire.

Beppie: Amsterdams meisje. 35 min, 1965. Johan van der Keuken, Ed van der Elsken. (YouTube)

“Documentaire over een tienjarig Amsterdams volksmeisje. Johan van der Keuken ontmoette Beppie toen ze op zoek naar buitenlandse postzegels bij hem aan de deur kwam. Hij besloot een film over haar dagelijkse leven te gaan maken en volgde Beppie tijdens gebeurtenissen die voor haar belangrijk waren. In de voetsporen van Beppie beleven wij haar grote en haar kleine avonturen: belletje trekken, patat eten, op school, de intocht van Sint Nicolaas, bij de kapper, in het badhuis, op bezoek bij opa en tante Miep en kerstfeest bij het Leger des Heils. Haar commentaar geeft onverbloemd Beppie’s visie op leven en dood, op de televisie, op de liefde en geld weer. De film maakte van Beppie een tijdlang een “ster”. Naast Johan van der Keuken deed ook collega-fotograaf en filmer Ed van der Elsken het camerawerk voor de film.”

Via Stefan.

Gezicht op Amsterdam in vogelvlucht, 1538. Cornelis Anthonisz. (ca. 1505 – 1561). olieverf op paneel, 116 x 159 cm.

Amsterdams Historisch Museum, De oude meesters van de stad Amsterdam:

“De stad Amsterdam beschikt dankzij schenkingen, legaten en aankopen over een collectie van ruim 1.000 schilderijen, gedateerd vóór 1800. Het is een van de rijkste verzamelingen ter wereld, waarin zeventiende-eeuwse schilders zoals Rembrandt, Hals en Vermeer met hun beste werken zijn vertegenwoordigd. In een gloednieuwe catalogus zijn al deze werken verzameld. Op 8 juli werd deze catalogus samen met de webcatalogus gepubliceerd. Klik hier voor de catalogus online.”

Webcatalogus Amsterdams Historisch Museum

German Bunker in my Garden:

“Our house is in an old quarry, and when we bought it five or so years ago, the previous owner told us that there was a tunnel built by the germans during WW2. He said it was big enough to drive into, and that his father had buried the entrance during redevelopments, but not before filling it with stuff that lying around the property (?). He showed me the rough location, and I’ve marked it on this little map with a red dot….

(…)

And that’s where the quest began…..”

(via)

The Times (November 28, 1919), Einstein On His Theory:

“By Dr. Albert Einstein.
I respond with pleasure to your Correspondent’s request that I should write something for The Times on the Theory of Relativity.”

(via)

‘The telegraph room at the original Mundaneum in Brussels. (Mundaneum)’

IHT, The web that time forgot:

“On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”"

The Founding Fathers: Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Larry Roberts

Vanity Fair, How the Web Was Won. An Oral History of the Internet:

“Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology.”

Waxy, Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web:

“Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.”

Fimoculous, Wired 1.1: An Archaeology:

“Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.

Need more historical perspective? There weren’t even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn’t even a dirty thought yet.”

Wired Issue 1.01 | Mar/Apr 1993

Фотоальбомы немецких солдат. (Photo albums of German soldiers.)

MeFi, Photo albums of German soldiers:

“Photo albums of German soldiers. Fully scanned photos from the personal albums of German soldiers from the Second World War and the years preceding it.”

Voormalig Belastingkantoor, ontwerp van G. Friedhoff, aan de Wibautstraat. Nu Philip Kohnstammhuis genaamd.

De 100 monumenten van Herrema:

“Welke bouwwerken uit de naoorlogse periode behoren tot de top van de Amsterdamse architectuur en stedenbouw?”

Zie verder Inleiding Top 100 en Negen Amsterdamse objecten door minister aangewezen als rijksmonument.

Financial Times, Lone trader seeks minute of fame:

“An independent trader apparently intent on securing his place in market history was responsible for oil prices briefly touching the unprecedented level of $100 a barrel – on the back of a single tiny trade, writes Javier Blas.

Some observers questioned the validity of the price mark when it emerged that the peak was the result of a trader – one of the “locals” who trade on their own money – buying from a colleague just 1,000 barrels of crude, the minimum allowed, industry insiders said. He sold them back a short while later for a small loss. The deal on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange was at a hefty premium to prevailing prices.

Stephen Schork, a former Nymex floor trader and editor of the oil-market Schork Report, said the price jump was due to a trader seeking his one minute of fame.

“A local trader just spent about $600 in a trading loss to buy the right to tell his grandchildren he was the one who did it,” Mr Schork said. “Probably he is framing right now the print reflecting the trade.”"

‘A 19th-century image shows federal troops employing several forms of torture. One man stood on a barrel for several hours; another carried a large log, his leg weighted with a ball and chain; a third was bound to a tree with his arms raised above his head; a fourth sat on the ground, tied.’

Boston Globe Ideas, Torture, American style. The surprising force behind torture: democracies:

“We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas – the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is “the method of the enemy.”

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn’t just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.”

Benjamin N. Friedman, Industrial Evolution:

“(…) Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change?

In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the “survival of the richest” propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought.”