This is one slice of an incredible high resolution, enhanced color image of Pluto, recently released by NASA. You can see the full, larger version here.Â
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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Wow. Just wow.
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đȘŒ
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
cherry valley forever

Discoholic đȘ©
I'd rather be in outer space đž

blake kathryn
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

#extradirty

Love Begins

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JVL

â
d e v o n

if i look back, i am lost
noise dept.
Game of Thrones Daily

Janaina Medeiros
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Show & Tell

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@grafvonhuber
This is one slice of an incredible high resolution, enhanced color image of Pluto, recently released by NASA. You can see the full, larger version here.Â
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
rainbowdrool.gif
Wow. Just wow.
The moment when this cheetah realizes heâs been labeled âleopard.â
How did this happen? More on this drawing on The Getty Iris.Â
Iâm working on the early days of the Viking invasions. The struggle is real.Â
The decline in morality is breathtaking.Â
Some Redwall shit was going down at this monastery.
Today, the year CCXXIVÂ of the French Republican Calendar starts. You can find the full calendar here.
Happy New Year, Citoyens!
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill strokes the shipâs cat âBlackieâ aboard the English battleship HMS Prince of Wales. August 1941.
via reddit
In the middle of the last century it became increasingly popular in Germany to have your picture taking with a polar bear...or at least a man dressed up like a polar bear. Psychologists and sociologists will have a field day with this and, as an historian of the period, I have developed my own theories and drawn my own conclusions. However, I'll spare you all of that and let's just look at some of these awesomely bizarre photographs.
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Herzog zu Lauenburg (1815 - 1898)
German message dog jumping over a trench, year between 1916 and 1918.
Napoleon Bonaparte sends his love.
1911 saw another diplomatic crisis between Germany and France over Morocco. Although the German position was legally sound, the French had violated previous international agreements concerning North Africa by attempting to establish a protectorate, any advantage was squandered by the clumsy, sabor rattling of foreign minister Alfred Von Kiderlen-Wachter. The ultimate result was to leave Germany isolated and further cement the entente between France and Great Britain, expressed very forcefully by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George in his famous Mansion House speech. Before the crisis was finally resolved both sides openly talked of war, hoping to leverage the threat to exact concessions, and with public opinion enraged, Europe had come closer to the edge of that terrible precipice than many at the time realized or cared to admit. The developments in Morocco, however, had even more far reaching consequences, ones that would eventually bring about the dreaded general conflagration so narrowly avoided in 1911. The Kingdom of Italy had long had interests, both economic and political, in the part of the Ottoman Empire now known as Libya, the twin provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripoli. Italy was a minor power, poor with a weak military and instable, largely corrupt government, she counted for nothing in the European balance. There were, of course, many Italian statesmen keen to change all of that, particularly foreign minister Antonio di San Guiliano. He had extracted agreements from the other powers protecting Italian interests in Ottoman Libya but with the settlement over North Africa obviously about to change, San Guiliano found that the moment was right to seize the provinces outright. Pursuing dreams of a great Italian Empire in the Mediterranean to rival that of even France or Britain, Italy invaded in September of 1911. The Ottoman army, untrained and underfunded, quickly surrendered. The Italo-Turkish War did not alarm the other nations of Europe. Italian preponderance in Libya was well established and after two war scares with Germany over Morocco the Entente Powers of Britain, France and Russia were gratified to see a more friendly country gain influence in the Mediterranean while Austria-Hungary was pleased to have attention diverted away from her own Italian speaking territories of the Trentino and Trieste. However, the immediate calm after the annexations was deceptive. The Ottoman Empire, having survived for the previous 500 years and once even reaching the temples of India in the East and the gates of Vienna in the West, was crumbling. By 1911 the Turks had only a shallow foothold left in Europe, around the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula. The new nations of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Rumania and Bulgaria had emerged from the Empireâs former territories in the region. What was to become of southeastern Europe once liberated from Ottoman rule, known as the âEastern Questionâ, dominated European diplomacy in the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th century. All of the Great Powers took an enthusiastic interest in the Balkans during this period but none more so than Austria-Hungary and Russia. The poisonous rivalry between these two eastern empires had already menaced the peace of Europe, most recently in 1908 when Austria annexed the formerly Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now, with the Turks already weakened from their unsuccessful war with Italy, the new Balkan states scented blood. The Rumanian Prime Minister sensed the coming trouble when he said âTwo will start the dance, but many are in at the end.â Looking to take control over events as the Ottoman Empire retreated out of Europe, wanting to be in charge of any future settlement, and hopefully take possession of the strategically crucial Straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Russia encouraged the formation of a âBalkan Leagueâ consisting of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. The next year, in the autumn of 1912, the League duly declared war on Turkey. Within a matter of months the Turks were defeated, the Balkan states victorious. This greatly alarmed Austria-Hungary, a multinational empire containing a large minority of Serbs, Rumanians and Bulgars. Many of these minorities, particularly the Slavs including Serbs, demanded union with their brethren outside the Empire. Militant Serbian nationalists openly agitated against Austria and it was widely believed that the Serbian government itself sponsored acts of terrorism on Austrian soil. Any expansion of Serbia was unacceptable and the chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff Conrad Von Hötzendorf was to urge war on the Serbs no less than 20 times during the crisis, from 1912 to 1913. Ultimately the threat of mobilization proved sufficient and the Balkan League had since disintegrated with its former members were busy fighting amongst themselves over the spoils of the First Balkan War in what became known as the Second Balkan War. The nation of Albania was created at Austrian insistence to block Serbia from gaining a strategically important port on the Adriatic Sea and both sides were able to save face. However, a year later, in the summer of 1914 after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian-Serb neither the Austrians or the Russians were willing to back down. The events of the previous several years had convinced the powers of Europe that threatening war was an effective, perhaps even normal, diplomatic technique regardless of the potential consequences. This in turn conditioned the public in the various belligerent countries to accept, perhaps even expect war if and when it came. The Italo-Turkish and subsequent two Balkan Wars were dress rehearsals for the Great War that was to break out a year later, narrowing the focus of Great Power politics and reinforcing the rival alliance blocs, while paving the way for a local conflict in the Balkans to become a world war.
The First World War was a truly global war, fought in the Near East as well as at sea, in Africa, the Far East and Europe. Traditionally, the British had supported the weakened Ottoman Empire diplomatically and financially as a bulwark against Russian expansion into the region. However, with the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1880s providing a more direct route to India and finally the Anglo-Russian Entente, concluded in 1907, British protection of Turkey was effectively at an end; Germany seized the opportunity and won concessions to build railroads and other infrastructure in the Ottoman Empire. The reform minded group called the Young Turks which seized power in Constantinople in 1908 were keen to receive not only German money but also German guns and help modernizing their outdated army and navy. Germany and Turkey were not yet formal allies; in fact, the Chief of the Great German General Staff, Helmuth Von Moltke the Younger, dismissed Turkey's value as an ally, viewing the Ottoman military as spent force. With the outbreak of war the Turks were still officially neutral, the cabinet itself split on the question of intervention. This might have remained so were it not for the events of the autumn of 1914. The Ottoman War Minister, Enver Pasha, was a leading proponent of a German alliance and entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers but he was blocked by his more cautious colleagues. Pasha saw the war as a chance to reassert Turkish power both in Asia and in Europe and to push back against the Western imperial powers openly devoted to the Empire's dissolution, particularly the Russians who lusted after Constantinople itself and control of the Straits. Fortunately for him, two German battle cruisers, the Goeben and Breslau, had been chased across the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy and sought safe harbor in the officially neutral port of the Bosporus. The ensuing diplomatic crisis resulted in Turkey declaring that she had purchased the ships from Germany. Thus led to a rather farcical episode in which the German sailors donned fezes as new members of the Ottoman Navy; when the Breslau and Goeben sailed past the Russian Embassy, however, the men removed their fezes, put on their German helmets and proceeded to serenade the Russian ambassador with "Deutchesland Ăber Alles." To help force the Turk's decision, and with Enver Pasha's connivance, the newest ships of the Turkish navy with their German crews sailed into the Black Sea and shelled key Russian positions along the northern coast. A treaty of alliance was duly concluded at the start of November, opening up a whole other front in the First World War.
Joseph Joffre, generalissimo of the French army from 1914 to 1916. Remembered today for engineering the 'Miracle on the Marne' where the defeated and demoralized Allied armies repulsed the German invaders less than 30 miles from Paris. Beyond the patriotic legends, one cannot forget that it was Joffre's failure or refusal to recognize the size and scope of the German thrust through Belgium and his insistence on executing Plan XVII that caused the disaster of the Battles of the Frontiers; or that just as much as the general's patient resolve, German strategic blunders, specifically overestimating the scale of their triumph and pivoting eastward, away from Paris, in the first days of September, contributed to the Allied victory. Joffre continued as Chief of the General Staff for 2 more years before being replaced after the twin tragedies of the Somme and Verdun. Indeed, he was the man of the moment in 1914 but a moment that quickly passed in an era of mechanized, industrial warfare.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He saw his kingdom conquered by Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War just two years after he acceded to the throne in 1864 and then ultimately absorbed into the new German Empire in 1871. His response to this radical diminution of his position and power seems to have been to escape into fantasy, spending his vast fortune as the personal patron of composer Richard Wagner and building the famous Neuschwanstein Castle. He is still known in Germany as "der marchenkönig" or the "fairy tale king." His mysterious death in 1886 at the age of 40 had never been adequately explained and only adds to historical cult of personality which has grown up around him.
The abject poverty and absolute horror of life on the Western Front during the First World War is often clouded by so many tired cliches and easily forgotten. This is so, in part, because the grim reality far surpasses any of the depictions in fiction or on film but completely shorn of any notion of heroism or glory. A British soldier wrote to the Times back home saying, "Sitting here, and reading the English papers that arrive, one cannot help feeling that England had not yet succeeded in banishing the spectacular and romantic conceptions of war which no longer bear any relation to the actuality... The bravery of our men, and they are splendidly brave, consists of sitting, often for days and nights, sodden in trenches, with the terrifying noises and earth-shaking concussions of shells...I read of the Sportsman's battalions, all athletes. All very nice, if individual prowess were in question, but it is not. What is needed is ordinary men, trained in discipline and trained to shoot, and plenty of them." Many of the men who believed in August 1914 that the war would only last a couple of months because their army would so easily vanquish the enemy by December believed that it couldn't last more than a year because humanity could not possibly survive a year of a conflict so unimaginably terrible. A French infantryman remembered that men fell right in front of his trench "lined up as on a manoeuvre. The rain falls on them inexorably and bullets scatter their bleached bones. One evening, Jacques, on patrol saw enormous rats fleeing from under their faded coats. They were fat from human meat. His heart pounding, he crawled towards a dead man. His helmet had rolled away. He was showing a grimacing face, with no flesh; his skull bare, his eyes eaten. A denture had slid onto his rotting shirt, and out of his gaping mouth a foul animal jumped." Experiences like his were common, every day, along a front that stretched from the Swiss border to the North Sea and, in some sectors, didn't change even by a few meters for four whole years.