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I'm reading Bridge of Spies about the U2 that was shot down over the USSR. These planes made overflights (sometimes) right over some of the USSR's most secret sites. The SR-71 seems like it was made to do this same thing but hopefully be less vulnerable because of its speed but I always hear how it didn't do overflights. It seems like a lot of work and money to just get a very limited range of photographs.

In my Political Ideologies class we have a writing prompt for a paper: "Marx described the 'fetishism of commodities' as our tendency to view social relationships of production, not in terms of relationships between people, but as economic relationships between money and commodities. Thus, capitalism exploitive nature is hidden from view. Apply the concept of the 'fetishism of commodities' to some aspect of the 21st century economy, such as the Internet or the outsourcing of jobs." I understand the basic idea of it all, but am having trouble truly wrapping my head around it. I have no idea where to even begin my paper... If anyone has any input, that would be greatly appreciated.

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I've been trying to study beyond my high school level of English History, and I was wondering, since I know about the Germanic settlers/invaders of Britain, but I know next to nothing of their society and lifestyle at home in Germany.
What was life like in Dark Ages Juteland, Anglia and Saxony? What made them emigrate? I've heard a lot mostly about the Saxons, did they actually show a greater than average power and dominance on the mainland?
Thanks for any interest.

Given my limited knowledge of this subject, it seems the US Navy was quite successful in hurting the transport of oil from the Southern Resources Zone back to Japan. Did the Japanese consider moving their Navy southwards to mitigate this problem?

I know there were few large scale uses of chemical weapons (correct me if I am wrong), but what delivery systems or plans did both sides have for the use of chemical weapons. One story is that the Germans considered attaching chemical warheads to the V1 and V2 rockets. What have you guys heard?

I'm curious if these figures retained actual personal bodyguards (as opposed to soldiers who happened to protect their residences), or if it was simply hard enough to access them that it wasn't considered necessary. Given that much of the male nobility consisted of trained fighters, many of whom (one presumes) were extremely loyal to the monarch, perhaps they felt safe enough with just them hanging around? It struck me that in all my various readings about various English monarchs, I'd seen mention of the regular proximity of friends, office-seekers, serving staff, and even jesters, but never of people whose job was simply protection.

Hi guys. I was curious to understand the other day that Cleopatra was born closer to the moon landings then she was to the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza. Are the Egyptians the longest civilisation to have ever populated our earth? And if anything what would this modern civilisation be called, that we're living in today, and long has this one been around for, ie when did it actually start/how old is it??

I'm reading The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, which is about evolutionary psychology and sexual selection.

There are quite a few bits in the book about more recent history (in evolutionary terms), which basically say that rich men (nobles and the like) in the middle ages and other times had more or less all the women (peasant women were taken to castles where they would serve them) and poor men (peasants and the like) had difficulty to get access to women at all.

I can imagine it's true to some extent, but it sounds quite extreme and I wonder if the way it's depicted just serves the narrative of book (although I don't have a problem with the book, I'm just curious). The sections in the books are probably generalisations but I'd like to know if they hold true...?

Here's the quote from the title in context (p.201-202):

"Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert, was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons. His bedchamber had access to the servant girls' quarters and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs. It had access, too, to the warming room, a veritable incubator for suckling infants. Meanwhile, many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication."

There is more interesting stuff about the "six independent civilisations" - where the men in power used their power to increase their sexual reproductivity (in the form of huge harems), while men that had no wealth/power, basically were celibate (pages 173, 197-202).

For example, in imperial Rome, "Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate" while the female slaves were basically concubines (p.201).

You can find pdfs of the book if you google it (my page annotations are from the 2003 edition) - I don't want to link to it in case that's not allowed. It's basically all in chapter 6.

Slightly unrelated but it also suggests that in wealthy families, men were favoured and in poor families, women were favoured (p.125-126):

"As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis has concluded, wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes: farmers in eighteenth-century Germany, castes in nineteenth-century India, genealogies in medieval Portugal, wills in modern Canada, and pastoralists in modern Africa: This favoritism took the form of inheritance of land and wealth, but it also took the form of simple care."

How involved was he in the planning and execution of the operation, and was his involvement good or a bad for its success?

Did they disagree with the killing of women and children and civilians or did they too agree that they were to be exterminated? Currently reading the books masters of death and chapter eight has a part in it where a few enlisted men and some chaplains disagreed with how 90 children were being locked in two rooms with no water or food, inevitably they were executed by local Ukrainians appointed by haffner who was appointed by blobel.

I heard that when the holidays were over, each side went back to their own trenches and resume the fighting. It just seemed odd how this happened. I knew it was sort of a stalemate in trench warfare, but if they did come out and make "peace" in the holidays why didn't they stop fighting altogether?

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Thanks for your support!

On top of that: Why did jousting die out? What other events/festivities replaced it?