('Walter Walsh','May 4, 1907','April 29, 2014','Hoboken, NJ, USA','20th-century American Marine','<p>It was a sunny, cool New England morning on October 12, 1937, when notable bastard and all-around evil scumbag Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr. walked through the front door of Dakin&rsquo;s Sporting Goods, a small outdoor shop on the main street of Bangor, Maine.&nbsp; Pulling his coat about him and adjusting his sweet gangster-style pre-hipster fedora hat, Shaffer calmly informed the ordinary-looking store clerk that he&rsquo;d placed an order for three Thompson submachine guns a few weeks earlier, and that he was here to pick them up.</p>\r\n<p>Clarence Lee Shaffer was a member of the notorious Brady Gang &ndash; a hellacious, murder-tastic gang of convicted felons who had spent the previous two years wreaking havoc on the law-abiding citizens of Indiana in an epic crime spree that makes even the most mayhem-infused multiplayer<em> GTA V </em>games look like a couple of idiot teenagers pulling the mattress tag off a fucking Sealy Posturepedic at the goddamn mall.&nbsp; They&rsquo;d stolen those awesome-as-hell gangster cars with the backwards doors, and drove away with dudes standing on the running boards spraying bullets arbitrarily into orphanages and old folks&rsquo; homes.&nbsp; They&rsquo;d robbed nearly two hundred banks, knocked over a few convenience stores, roughed up politicians, and murdered a half-dozen people.&nbsp; The three men of the Brady Gang, already listed as Public Enemy Number One by the FBI, had been caught by Indiana lawmen in 1936, but all this did was piss them off &ndash; screaming &ldquo;fuck the police&rdquo; these guys fought their way out of prison, killed a guard, then set an ambush for the cops who tried to track them down and ended up shooting two officers in the gun battle.</p>\r\n<p>Now these guys were on the lam, and they were trying to buy full-auto submachine guns from some random store in the middle of Maine.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Shaffer looked around impatiently as the mild-mannered store clerk looked around for the order.&nbsp; The clerk asked Shaffer to come around to see if he could see it, but then &ndash; completely out of nowhere &ndash; as soon as Shaffer was off-guard the clerk suddenly flipped his shit over to Ultimate Badass Mode, grabbed the ex-con by the arm, slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, and hauled him down to the ground with a sweet-as-hell takedown.&nbsp; The gangster shouted for help, but before he could cause too much noise a second clerk came up to assist, grabbing Shaffer and pulling him back towards the back of the store.</p>\r\n<p>The store clerk stood up to his full height, and commandingly identified himself as Special Agent Walter Walsh, Federal Bureau of Investigation. &nbsp;Turning from his quarry, the g-man quickly spun on his heel to try and see if he could get a visual on either of the other murderous killers of the infamous Brady Gang.</p>\r\n<p>The second he turned around, Special Agent Walsh&rsquo;s eyes met with those of a vicious-looking man in a gray fedora, giving him a death stare through the glass door of Dakin&rsquo;s Sporting Goods.&nbsp; It was Brady Gang member James Dalhover &ndash; a spree-killing psycho with an excellent view of his good buddy Clarence Lee Shaffer being dragged into police custody by a pair of flatfoot coppers.</p>\r\n<p>For a split-second, neither man moved.&nbsp; When they did, it was like a pair of goddamn gunslinging lightning bolts striking a nuclear reactor at the same fucking time.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>With the precision and speed that only comes from decades of hardcore dedication, FBI Agent Walter Walsh quick-drew not one but two pistols simultaneously &ndash; a Colt .45 and a .357 Magnum &ndash; dove to the side in slow motion like some kind of crazy Max Payne / John Woo shit, and opened fire on the mass-murdering bank-robbing maniac standing less than five feet away from him.&nbsp; Dalhover, a Capone-era hardened killer, drew his piece as well, opening fire with a spray of .45s.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Walsh took one in the hand and one in the shoulder, blood shooting from his wounds, but his bullets found their mark &ndash; Dalhover was riddled with slugs and dead before he hit the pavement.&nbsp; Walsh hit the ground, sprung back up, and stepped through the shattered glass front door into the street, where yet another danger presented itself &ndash; the Brady Gang leader himself, Al Brady, taking cover behind a sweet-ass old car, reaching in the back seat for his pistol.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Walsh stormed out of the building, pistols blazing.&nbsp; Brady leaned over the car , firing his pistol, driving another round into Walsh&rsquo;s chest.&nbsp; The FBI man staggered back, regained his footing, and drilled Brady with a couple ultra-accurate shots straight to the dome.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The entire thing had lasted seconds.&nbsp; When the smoke cleared, Walter Walsh was still standing tall, and every member of the FBI&rsquo;s Most Wanted gang was either dead by his hand or being hauled off to prison.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Actual crime scene.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Walter Walsh was born in 1907 in Hoboken, New Jersey.&nbsp; He&rsquo;d started shooting at 12, when his dad bought him a .22-caliber Mossberg to shoot rats around the family home, and once that got a little too easy for him Walsh got really good at shooting clothespins off the laundry line in his backyard.&nbsp; At 16 he lied about his age to join the New Jersey National Guard, and within just a few years the eagle-eyed lefty was winning national competitions for rifle and pistol marksmanship.</p>\r\n<p>After getting a Law degree from Rutgers while still in the Guard (he was smart as well as capable of shooting a wart off your balls from three hundred yards), 27-year-old Walter Walsh decided to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1934.&nbsp; It was the first year FBI Agents were allowed to carry guns, and in their search for good marksmen to join their ranks the FBI found a dude who could bulls-eye moving targets at 75 yards with dual-wielded pistols.&nbsp; Dude was so fucking good that some of his co-workers at the Bureau used to joke that they&rsquo;d trust him to shoot a cigarette out of their mouths like a badass influenza-hating William Tell.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Working an FBI beat wasn&rsquo;t exactly fun fucking times during the Great Depression, when Public Enemy outlaws like Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd were running around the highways and byways of the United States hosing assholes down with fully-automatic machine guns and double-barrel shotguns.&nbsp; Quickly rising to the ranks of the top agents, Walsh was responsible for tracking down bank robbers, cold-blooded murders, Mafiosi, and other horrible people that were far more likely to whip out a BAR and start smoking Feds than they were to walk backwards slowly with their hands behind their heads.</p>\r\n<p>Luckily for the FBI, Walter Walsh was damn good at his job.&nbsp; In 1934 he tracked down the final resting place of Baby Face Nelson.&nbsp; In &rsquo;35 he was driving around the murder-soaked blood-drenched streets of Chicagoland when he spotted the dangerous outlaw Doc Barker, a hatchetman for the Barker Gang.&nbsp; Walsh slammed on the brakes of his car, jumped out, and sprinted down the street after Doc.&nbsp; The gangster started running, but Walsh ran him down, jammed a .45 in his face, and did what was probably the first-ever recitation of the &ldquo;Do you feel lucky punk?&rdquo; speech.&nbsp; Doc surrendered, was hauled off to Alcatraz, and <em>later that same fucking day </em>Walter Walsh got in a shootout with a hardened gangster known as &ldquo;Slim Gray&rdquo; Gibson.&nbsp; Walsh&rsquo;s only description of the gunfight was this:&nbsp; &ldquo;He shot high.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>In his decade of service to the FBI, Walsh is credited with killing between 11 and 17 gangsters in shootouts.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Special Agent Walsh served in the FBI from 1934 to 1942, when he took a temporary leave of absence to join the fucking United States Marine Corps and fight in World War II.&nbsp; The Marines assigned the 35-year-old G-Man to teach USMC marksmen at Sniper School in New York, but after a couple years doing that he decided that there wasn&rsquo;t enough terrifying live-fire combat in his life so he requested a <em>fucking transfer to the goddamned front lines of World War II</em>.</p>\r\n<p>The Marines sent him to Okinawa in 1945.</p>\r\n<p>Walsh landed on the beach with the Marines, fought his way through the outer defenses, and then was part of a team that found itself pinned down by a hardcore Japanese sniper hiding in a tunnel fortification a little more than 80 yards from the Marines&rsquo; position.</p>\r\n<p>Walsh popped his head up once, got a visual on the sniper, calmly pulled out his Colt 1911, stood up, and dropped the fucking sniper with one shot from his pistol.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Noscope, bitches.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh7a.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Walter Walsh returned home after the war, went into the Marine Corps reserve, and started entering shooting competitions.&nbsp; He set the world record at U.S. Nationals by nearly getting a perfect score in pistol marksmanship, won dozens of military, government, and civilian shooting competitions, finished 12<sup>th</sup> in the 1948 Summer Olympics, and captained the U.S. National Team at the International Shooting Championship in 1952 (which the U.S. won), and at the Munich Olympics in 1972.&nbsp; Even though he didn&rsquo;t participate in any further Olympics (though he still won shooting competitions well into his 90s), he coached the U.S. Olympic shooting team until he retired in the year 2000.&nbsp; At the age of 92 fucking years old.</p>\r\n<p>Oh yeah, and even though he retired from the FBI he continued training Marines, and was a teacher at the Marine Sniper School that got sharpshooters like Carlos Hathcock ready to serve on the front lines of the Vietnam War.&nbsp; He retired with the rank of Colonel in 1970.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So let&rsquo;s recap for a second.&nbsp; Law graduate Walter Walsh of Hoboken, New Jersey, was a championship Olympic marksman, the FBI agent who single-handedly brought Public Enemy Number One to gunfire-infused justice in an epic shootout, a U.S. Marine who saved his entire squad from murderous snipers at Okinawa, a Vietnam Sniper School marksmanship instructor, and the 92-year-old coach of the United States Olympic Shooting Team.</p>\r\n<p>Somehow, despite being under constant danger and almost always surrounded by loaded firearms &ndash; many of which were being used by antagonists in life-fire combat situations &ndash; Walter Walsh somehow led a long, full, productive life that had more adventure in a 24 hour span that most regular humans will ever experience in their entire lives.</p>\r\n<p>He died last week at the age of 106.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/624477319177/walterwalsh9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/sports/walter-r-walsh-dies-at-106-terrorized-gangsters-and-targets.html?ref=obituaries&amp;_r=3\">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/sports/walter-r-walsh-dies-at-106-terrorized-gangsters-and-targets.html?ref=obituaries&amp;_r=3</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.suntimes.com/27317552-761/walter-walsh-oldest-olympian-and-fbi-legend-who-found-baby-face-nelsons-body-.html#.U20PO6LgeI0\">http://www.suntimes.com/27317552-761/walter-walsh-oldest-olympian-and-fbi-legend-who-found-baby-face-nelsons-body-.html#.U20PO6LgeI0</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/walter-r-walsh-legendary-g-man-of-the-1930s-dies-at-106/2014/05/02/89932b92-d15f-11e3-9e25-188ebe1fa93b_story.html\">http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/walter-r-walsh-legendary-g-man-of-the-1930s-dies-at-106/2014/05/02/89932b92-d15f-11e3-9e25-188ebe1fa93b_story.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.fbi.gov/news/news_blog/celebrating-the-life-of-walter-walsh\">http://www.fbi.gov/news/news_blog/celebrating-the-life-of-walter-walsh</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Walsh\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Walsh</a></p>','2014-05-09','624477319177','walterwalsh.jpg','walterwalsh-small.jpg','Walter Walsh','Badass gangster-hunting FBI agent, Marine Corps sniper, Olympic marksman.',''),('Date Masamune','September 5, 1567','June 27, 1636','Yonezawa, Yamagata, Japan','16th-century Japanese Warrior','<p>Carving up faces and balls as a katana-wielding 16<sup>th</sup>-century samurai warlord is probably one of the most&nbsp; badass things human beings have ever done.&nbsp; There\'s just something inherently fucking cool about dudes in big scary plate armor slicing off joints with razor-sharp swords, screaming through a field of battle knee-deep in the blood of their fallen enemies.&nbsp; In light of all this, no man fully exemplifies the full spectrum of hardcore awesome samurai shit quite like the unmatchable Date Masamune &ndash; a mighty, almost-legendary swordsman and general who fought his first battle at fifteen, was never defeated in single combat with the enemy, wore an eyepatch made from the hilt of a samurai sword, and was so over-the-top Money Mayweather swanky that his name is still used as an synonym for \"big pimpin&rsquo;\" in Japan to this very day.</p>\r\n<p>Date Masamune was born in 1566 in the northern part of Japan.&nbsp; He was the scion of the Date Clan, a powerful, wealthy family known for its ability to trample the balls of its enemies into ball-dust and embed massive swords into the skulls of anyone dumb enough to piss them off.&nbsp; Blooded for combat and responsibility and badass shit as a ridiculously young man, Date wore an eyepatch at 12, was married at 13, and won his first battle at 14, cutting his way through a rival clan with a sword in each hand and an insatiable blood rage in his guts.&nbsp; By the time he was 17, Date\'s father stepped down as Clan Leader and put Masamune in charge, sending the teenager out to command rampaging field armies of hardcore samurai and earn glory and honor for his family.<br /><br />This about this for a second -- If Date Masamune had been alive in 2014 he wouldn\'t have been old enough to buy porn.&nbsp; In 1583, he was wearing an eyepatch, hooking up with wives and concubines, and ordering thousands of samurai to destroy the enemy without mercy and immediately decapitate any enemy soldier dishonorable enough to surrender.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now during this period of Japanese history &ndash; a region descriptively-known as The Time of Warring States &ndash; there was technically a shogun and an emperor and all that stuff, but neither of those guys really gave a shit if all the little samurai clans went around wiping each other out and stealing each other&rsquo;s&rsquo; land and shit.&nbsp; Basically, if you had an army of spearmen, a solid suit of samurai armor, and a pair of trusty tempered-steel blades, you could carve your way up and down the countryside and nobody would really fuck with you. And that\'s exactly what Date Masamune planned to do.</p>\r\n<p>As head of Date Clan, Masamune was, first and foremost, a master of gaining territory through cleverness and intelligence.&nbsp; Focusing primarily on diplomacy, sabotage, and bribery, Date used badass spies, fucking <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=49512237213\">ninjas</a> (!), and giant gold-laden treasure chests to gain territory wherever possible, but if that didn\'t work he also didn&rsquo;t mind ramming a katana through your eye socket and impaling your head to a post.&nbsp; One way or another he was going to sleep in your bed, eat your steaks, and bone your concubines -- you could just do it the easy way or the hard way.&nbsp; This sort of mentality brought Date in conflict with a rival clan known as the Ashina, a group of people who pissed Date off when they gave one of Date&rsquo;s men a bunch of gold to betray him and then let that asshole hang out in their castle rather than hand him over to Date for summary execution.&nbsp; Enraged, Masamune attacked at the head of an army of face-slicing samurai, cleaved through the Ashina with extreme violence, sacked their castle, killed 800 people (including the traitor), and scared the soldiers of a nearby Ashina fortress so shitless that they burned their own fort and ran for it in a desperate attempt to avoid the wrath of Masasume (it didn&rsquo;t work).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Growing his might to become a powerful regional warlord, Date continued to expand his power base one plundered village at a time.&nbsp; It was a policy that pissed off another rival clan, the Hatakeyama, mostly because it was their castles and towns being infiltrated by ninjas and burned down by samurai horsemen.&nbsp; The Hatakeyama Clan leader, a ten-ton jerkass turdburger named Hatakeyama Yoshitsugo, decided that the best way to chill Masamune out was to kidnap his father at sword-point and hold him for ransom, which, if you\'ve been paying attention, really wasn\'t a very good plan.&nbsp; When Date heard the news that his dad had been captured, he got understandably pissed-as-fuck, rode out with an army, and caught Hatakeyama on the shores of some river somewhere.&nbsp; Hatakeyama held up Date&rsquo;s dad as a human shield, threatening to kill him if Date got any closer, but instead of backing down like a punk Date Masamune instead called up a line of badass armor-wearing musketeer riflemen and ordered them to load their guns.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Date Masamune hesitated to give the order for his men to fire, Date&rsquo;s dad &ndash; still being held as a shield by Hatakeyama &ndash; angrily screamed for his son to man up and give the order.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s how tough this clan was &ndash; their former leader was ballsy enough to say, &ldquo;Fuck this guy, I&rsquo;d be happy to take a bullet if it means killing him.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, Date still hesitated (and who can blame him?), and Hatakeyama quickly panicked, lost his shit, and cut Date&rsquo;s father&rsquo;s throat.&nbsp; Date gave the order to fire, but it was too late -- Hatakeyama ran for it, somehow eluding the fusillade of gunfire that followed him.</p>\r\n<p>Date Masamune learned an important lesson that day.&nbsp; The kind Bruce Willis learned from one of those terrorists in <em>Die Hard:</em>&nbsp; The next time you have the chance to kill someone, don&rsquo;t hesitate.</p>\r\n<p>Date Masamune amassed his army, destroyed Hatakeyama&rsquo;s army on the battlefield, raided his castle, burned it to the ground, and tortured and killed that asshole and his entire family.&nbsp; Hatakeyama&rsquo;s severed head was on display in Date&rsquo;s castle for weeks.&nbsp; Just to tie off loose ends a few years later Masamune went back to war with the Ashina, bribed some of their best commanders to betray them at the height of a critical battle, and beat their asses so hard that Ashina samurai were jumping into a river and drowning just to escape the mad slaughter-tastic rampage of Date Masamune and his men.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Known as &ldquo;The One-Eyed Dragon,&rdquo; Masamune lost his right eye to smallpox at an early age.&nbsp; The story goes that the infection messed Date&rsquo;s eye up so bad that it fell out of its socket and just hung there, so Date plucked it out with his bare hands because he thought it would be a liability in combat to have his eye hanging off his head.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know if that&rsquo;s true or not.</p>\r\n<p>Date Masamune never lost a campaign, was never beaten in one-on-one sword combat throughout his extensively-long career as a samurai warrior, was really good at arm-wrestling, and could drink any idiot under the table.&nbsp; He built his Clan into a mighty swath of territory that covered almost the entire northern third of Japan, ruling from his capital in Sendai, a city that at this time was even more prosperous than Tokyo and was home to tons of gold mines and lucrative shipping ports.&nbsp; He mostly used these to trade the Europeans for things like guns, bullets, and more guns.</p>\r\n<p>Known for putting elaborate long, curved, gold-plated crescent moons on his helmets and marching his men in badass black armor with gold trim, the sight of Date Masamune&rsquo;s army was so impressive that it inspired the word <em>Datetoko</em>, which basically means &ldquo;big pimpin&rsquo;&rdquo; in Japanese.&nbsp; The phrase is still in use today.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, in true badass fashion, Date Masamune not only dressed his guys in the most fanciest, expensive armor of any daimyo in Japan, but he also was the only guy to make sure that his army was ultra-heavy and capable of deflecting <em>fucking gunfire </em>from old-school arquebuses.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Despite being refined, ruling the third-largest fiefdom in Japan, and living a life of wealth and excess full of huge parties, massive palaces, and tons of hot chicks, Date Masamune was also a stone-cold warrior who led from the front, could call forth unbelievable numbers of warriors at a moment&rsquo;s notice, and hated any kind of weakness or wussiness.&nbsp; Like one time he was drinking some kind of fancy expensive tea out of an unbelievably-expensive gold and porcelain cup.&nbsp;&nbsp; As he was about to kick it on a couch surrounded by babes and sip his tea, the cup slipped out of his hand.&nbsp; Date was like, &ldquo;oh crap!&rdquo;, but then he used his lightning-reflexes to snatched the cup out of the air before it hit the ground.&nbsp; The second he grabbed it, Masamune instantly became super pissed-off furious-as-fuck by the fact that he could stand bravely on the battlefield and stare death in the face without flinching, but that the thought of accidentally cracking one stupid dainty tea cup caused him to display an emotional outburst that resembled something other than pure, unadulterated blood rage.&nbsp; Thinking about this made Masamune so mad that he slammed the mug into the ground, shattering it into thousands of porcelain shards.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Fuck teacups.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s another good example of this sort of thing &ndash; while leading his troops in the siege of Osaka Castle, Date Masamune decided that his front-line ashigaru peasant warriors were half-assing their asskickings and weren&rsquo;t fighting as hard as they could.&nbsp; So he ordered his riflemen to move up and fire two volleys <em>at the backs of their own men</em> to motivate them to fight harder.</p>\r\n<p>This isn&rsquo;t a guy you wanted to fuck with.</p>\r\n<p>By 1590, Date Masamune and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hideyoshi.html\">Toyotomi Hideyoshi</a> were the only two daimyo left standing in Japan.&nbsp; Toyotomi had consolidated the lower 2/3 of Japan into one big empire, and by the time that guy came around, Date knew that Toyotomi was much too powerful to take on in battle.&nbsp; But rather than submit, Date handled it in the manliest way possible:&nbsp; He was like, &ldquo;Yeah, you\'re tough, but so am I.&nbsp; So fuck it, let&rsquo;s just chill, combine our powers, and be buddies.&rdquo; He agreed to serve as a vassal to Toyotomi as long as Toyotomi didn&rsquo;t get all up in his shit and start telling him what to do.&nbsp; Toyotomi became shogun of Japan, and Date Masamune led armies in both of Toyotomi&rsquo;s invasions of Korea in the 1590s as a show of support to the Emperor and the shogun.&nbsp; When Toyotomi bit it, Date became a retainer of the next shogun, a guy named Tokugawa Ieyasu, and helped Tokugawa win the biggest battle in Japanese history, the Battle of Sekigahara, in 1600 AD.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s a crazy story:&nbsp; Date Masamune once gave a pair of samurai swords to the Pope.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not kidding.</p>\r\n<p>Date had converted to Catholicism a few years before 1613, agreeing to convert after watching a Catholic missionary cure one of Date&rsquo;s girlfriends of some horrible illness.&nbsp; So in 1613, Masamune decided he wanted to set up a trade route with Europe, and he built a western-style sailing ship and sent a delegation of Japanese nobles to Europe with a letter for the Pope and a couple ceremonial katana swords.&nbsp; His men sailed to Acapulco, Mexico, crossed over land to the Atlantic, picked up another ship, and became the first Japanese to cross the Atlantic Ocean.&nbsp; They landed at Madrid, met King Philip III of Spain, then went around to Rome and delivered the message to Pope Paul V.&nbsp; Then they came back.</p>\r\n<p>The entire trip took seven years, kind of like the original mission of the USS <em>Enterprise</em>.&nbsp; Date&rsquo;s men triumphantly returned with permission from the Pope to build a Catholic mission on Date lands, but unfortunately for those guys the Shogun had banned Christianity while they were out of town.&nbsp; Ah well.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><img src=\"/images/584119921490/masamune8a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In terms of badass samurai, Date Masamune was one of the all-time greats. &nbsp;It started with plucking out his eye and killing a man at age 14, but this ultimate badass stomped gonads in combat for over fifty years, finally passing away in 1636 at the age of 69.&nbsp; He head come into feudal Japan as the first-born son of a moderately-regarded Clan.&nbsp; Through steel, guns, espionage and ninja shit he took over a third of the country, became one of the most powerful rulers of his era, and played a vital role in the rise of two warlord shoguns.&nbsp; He led sword-swinging warriors into battle in two of the most important battles in Japanese history, did two tours of duty in Korea, commissioned a badass voyage that spanned the entire length of the globe and gave swords to the pope, and killed countless men in combat without ever losing a campaign.</p>\r\n<p>By the time he finally left this earth, he had seen the end of the Warring States period of Japanese history and the beginning of a period of peace that would last for over two hundred years.</p>','2014-06-20','584119921490','masamune.jpg','masamune-small.jpg','Date Masamune','Eyepatch-wearing Japanese samurai who kicked ass in the service of two shoguns.','Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; benevolence indulged beyond measure sinks into weakness.'),('Sir Samuel White Baker','June 8, 1821','December 30, 1893','London, England, UK','19th-century English Adventurer','<p>Sir Samuel White Baker was the kind of man the world does not produce any longer.&nbsp; A hardcore, bearded, globe-trotting 19<sup>th</sup>-century colonial badass adventurer with safari gear and a large-caliber rifle, hailing from a time when men were Men with a capital M and they sat around in wood-paneled clubs smoking pipes, sipping whiskey, singing old regimental marches and calling people &ldquo;old chap&rdquo; without even a whiff of faux-ironic hipster douchebag undertone behind it.&nbsp; A time when death-defying adventure lurked behind every corner in the darkest unexplored corners of the world, and a man who didn&rsquo;t give a crap about working some stupid day job could just pack up a suitcase full of ammunition and food and set off to the wilderness and discover a river or some shit.&nbsp; A magical time when memoirs and pulp fiction novels were one part fantasy, one part marginally-offensive colonial social Darwinist bullshit, and one part based on actual human experience knife-fighting man-eating lions in single combat and then leading brave soldiers into an epic battle against endless onslaughts of ferocious enemy warriors.</p>\r\n<p>Samuel White Baker, a contemporary of guys like <a href=\"http://www.powells.com/blog/guests/badass-authors-sir-richard-francis-burton-by-ben-thompson/\">Richard Francis Burton</a> and Abraham Lincoln, was the perfect man for his time.&nbsp; A hardcore civil engineer (nerds ftw?) who experienced more life-threatening heroic adventure on his way to take a piss in the morning than your typical Red Bull-slamming mostly-delusional &ldquo;adrenaline junkie&rdquo; has when he lights himself on fire (with a fire-proof suit on) and skateboards out of an airplane (with two state-of-the-art parachutes, a radio comm-link to a rescue team, and a spotter following him down).</p>\r\n<p>Plus he totally looks like Drunk Robert Baratheon, and if you follow me on Facebook (and <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/badasshistory\">you should</a>), Drunk Robert Baratheon is easily one of the ten best characters in <em>A Game of Ice and Fire</em>.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker1.jpg\" alt=\"\" />&nbsp;&nbsp; <img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker1a.PNG\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> The official Badass of the Week list of Game of Thrones characters, ranked<br /> by a guy who doesn&rsquo;t really watch the show and never read the books:</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">1. Barristan Selmy<br /> 2. Bronn<br /> 3. Tywin Lannister<br /> 4. Khal Drogo (beast mode)<br /> 5. Robert Baratheon (drunk)<br /> 6. Valar Morghulis guy<br /> 7. Arya<br /> 8. Tyrion<br /> 9. The Onion Knight <br /> 10. Who cares, Sir Pounce or something</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He just looks like it&rsquo;d be fun as hell to get drunk with him and shoot things with an elephant gun that shoots a bullet the size of an 80mm mortar round.</p>\r\n<p>Like all good colonial-era British Empire heroes, Sir Samuel White Baker was born in London to a super-rich family, and used his endless Lord Greystoke / Lara Croft fortune to fund his endless adventures into the middle of goddamn nowhere.&nbsp; He was trained in civil engineering and math in England and Germany during the 1830s and eventually took a shitty office job in London, but when that wasn&rsquo;t exactly tickling his balls he quit his job (presumably in an amazingly-badass fashion), married a priest&rsquo;s daughter, and ran off to Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa that I only know about because I once had to watch a really shitty HR video about how people in Mauritius are totally cool and chill and like each other and goddamn it Ben if you send any more <a href=\"/tarzan.html\">Frank Frazetta</a> paintings all-office email we&rsquo;re writing you up for sexual harassment.</p>\r\n<p>Well, like I said, Samuel Baker was a badass engineer, and in 1840 at the age of 21 he invented a fucking twenty-pound, three-foot-long rifle designed to bring down elephants and rhinos with one shot.&nbsp; A few years later he developed a type of cone-shaped bullet very much like the Minie ball, basically making Baker one of the first guys to come up with the idea of firing a rifle projectile that looked like a modern-day bullet.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Baker with his rifle.<br /> And the severed head of a gigantic rhinoceros.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, based on my limited exposure to it (via boring video while drinking shitty sludge coffee in an unlit conference room) Mauritius fucking sucks, so Samuel Baker decided to get the hell outta there and build his own city in the middle of nowhere.&nbsp; At the age of 24 Baker, his wife, his brother&rsquo;s family and some friends moved to Sri Lanka &ndash; an island that was rarely if ever visited by Europeans at this time.&nbsp; They established the city of Ceylon, the first English settlement on the island of Sri Lanka, and the small group of pioneer colonials spent the next eight years on the island fishing for pearls, writing books, and shooting elephants and tigers in the face with Baker&rsquo;s homemade rifles.</p>\r\n<p>I&rsquo;ve mentioned before that I&rsquo;m not a huge fan of hunting wild game, but it should also be mentioned that this is back in the <a href=\"/akeley.html\">Carl Ackley</a> / Teddy Roosevelt days, when hunting looked like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br />Note: These are illustrations from books Baker wrote about his adventures.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Any idiot with a functional index finger can spray the Serengeti with full-auto thermal-scoped G3A3 assault rifle while calling down satellite-deployed NSA drone strikes on a giraffe from fifteen miles away, but in the old days you were just a couple guys with a single-shot black powder rifle that took thirty seconds to reload and had an effective range of 200 yards.&nbsp; These are the days when one miss meant certain impalement and gruesome, bloody death by stomach wound because nobody was around to helicopter-lift you outta there with a vial of penicillin and enough morphine to put a pop diva back into rehab.&nbsp; When Baker hunted man-eating tigers on Sri Lanka, he was literally taking his life into his hands every time.&nbsp; Which is something to consider.</p>\r\n<p>Baker&rsquo;s wife died in 1855, and with her passing he just couldn&rsquo;t bear to be in Ceylon any longer.&nbsp; The next year he was in Turkey of all places, working for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and using his badass engineering skills to help build a railroad that connected the Danube River to the Black Sea.&nbsp; During his breaks he went tiger-hunting in Central Asia with the Sikh Maharaja of Punjab (awesome), and toured Bulgaria as a personal friend of the Ottoman Sultan.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While in Bulgaria, the Sultan took Baker to a slave auction, which bugged the hell out of Samuel White Baker because he really fucking hated slavery.&nbsp; Not really able to do much to help, Baker did purchase a recently-enslaved twenty year-old Hungarian girl at the auction, set her free immediately, and offer to help her get out of the country to freedom.&nbsp; The two snuck away from the Sultan&rsquo;s entourage, caught a rail line to Romania, and got the hell out of there, presumably with Baker quitting his engineering job in one of the most badass ways possible in the process.&nbsp; The two were married a few years later.</p>\r\n<p>In 1861 Baker headed to Ethiopia, where he met with the King of Ethiopia and taught himself how to speak perfect Arabic.&nbsp; In 1862 he was in the Sudan, hanging out at fancy parties with British colonials in Khartoum, but when that got too boring he and his wife decided they&rsquo;d head out and discover the source of the fucking Nile River.</p>\r\n<p>So they did.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Let&rsquo;s go, babes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Bakers departed in 1862 with 3 ships and 98 people, determined to become the first people to map the source of the Nile River.&nbsp; The expedition was a pain in the ass, with men deserting, being attacked by bandit slave traders, and having a tough gun battle with a Sudanese warlord who demanded Baker hand over his wife as tribute (Baker did not do this), and then when that wasn&rsquo;t bad enough they ran into two British explorers who&rsquo;d already just come back from&hellip; discovering the source of the Nile.&nbsp; <br /> Dang.</p>\r\n<p>So instead Samuel and Florence Baker took a detour and discovered this place &ndash; Lake Albert &ndash; which they named after an English King or Prince or something.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker6a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When the Bakers returned to England, he wrote three more books (his wife Florence helped - she was a badass intellectually-gifted, ultra-fearless explorer herself), drew maps and charts of his travels, and was knighted and given medals by the Royal Geographical Society and the Paris Geographical Society for his service to the field of geography and badass exploration of uncharted worlds.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Before long, Sir Samuel was back in action again, heading to Egypt to perform some hardcore front-line military dictatorship work in the service of his old buddies in the Ottoman Empire.&nbsp; Working out of southern Egypt, Baker was made a Major-General in the Ottoman Army (despite, as far as I can tell, having no real prior military experience), and given free rein to serve as military governor for a particularly bandit-infested region of North Africa.&nbsp; He spent the next four years leading Egyptian troops in gunfights against bandits and slave traders, hunting them out and crushing them wherever he could find them.&nbsp; One time he didn&rsquo;t have enough troops for a mission, so Baker opened the doors of the local prison and went into combat at the head of an army of 1,700 Egyptian convicts.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Which is awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sir Samuel White Baker and his wife lived in Egypt for another four years, but despite being an over-the-top badass he wasn&rsquo;t particularly beloved by his people, mostly on account of his being English and not Egyptian and also because he started a lot of fights with his neighbors and wasn&rsquo;t really a great governor.&nbsp; So Lady Florence and Sir Samuel bailed on Africa, and retired to a fabulous English manor where they lived out the rest of their days sitting atop piles of money and pounding brandy in parlors filled with the stuffed heads of dangerous animals they&rsquo;d shot between the eyes at fifty yards.&nbsp; He eventually died in 1893 at the age of 72.</p>\r\n<p>Adventurer, explorer, soldier, engineer, colonial, writer, and hunter, Sir Samuel White Baker never settled for a boring fucking life and always went out of his way to push himself, his skills, and his endurance as far as it could possibly go, all just for the sake of being awesome.&nbsp; He may have been a relic of times gone by, but he&rsquo;s also a testament to how badass a human being can possibly be.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/805352112071/samuelbaker8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>','2014-06-27','805352112071','samuelbaker.jpg','samuelbaker-small.jpg','Samuel White Baker','An old-school British colonial explorer, writer, and soldier who dedicated his entire life to badass adventure.',''),('Francis Marion','c. 1732 ','February 27, 1795','Berkeley County, SC, USA','','<p>Francis Marion wasn’t the sort of guy who looked like he’d belong on a website called Badass of the Week.  He wasn’t one of those roided-out muscle-bound mangle-mutilators with a gore-caked axe standing on a pile of bodies clenching someone’s spleen in his teeth while hysterical blood-drenched peasants ran screaming about him in every direction.  He was short, frail, had malformed legs, and walked with a limp because one time he’d broken his ankle jumping out a second-story window to escape a boring house party (this is true).  He didn’t drink.  The first time he asked a girl to marry him, she said no and married his friend instead.  FFS, <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0561211/\">Leslie Nielsen</a> played him in a Disney show once. </p>\r\n<p>Yet somehow this man is credited in an official unit history as being a forerunner to one of the world’s most elite military units – the United States Army Rangers.</p>\r\n<p>How does that happen?<br /> Because Francis Fuckin’ Marion lived a life so freedom-humpin’ over-the-top red, white and blue badass that history knows him as “The Swamp Fox”, credits him with being a key figure in the violent overthrow of British Monarchy in the New World, and Mel Gibson once played a character loosely-related to him in a movie back when it wasn’t cool to hate on Mel Gibson.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">The most patriotic pseudo-Scottish<br /> Aussie on the planet.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Born on a plantation in South Carolina sometime around 1732-ish, Francis Marion was cursed at birth not only with the name Francis but also by being born so undersized that, according to his doctors, you could have put him into a pitcher of water.  He wasn’t expected to survive infancy, yet somehow he did this despite having fucked-up legs and walking with a slight limp even before plummeting out a second-story window to escape some shitty pre-America EDM at a lame house party. </p>\r\n<p>When he turned fifteen, Marion left home to become a sailor.  He caught on with a sailing ship out of Charleston, spent a summer cruising around the shark-infested Caribbean on a big juicy merchantman during the badass closing days of the Golden Age of Piracy, then survived being adrift at sea for seven days in a rudderless lifeboat after his ship was smashed to pieces by a gigantic fucking whale.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> When he got back to port, he quit his job.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Returning home intact and probably a little dehydrated/sunburned, Marion took over operations of his family plantation, where he did the patriotic early America “all men are created equal” thing most Founding Fathers did and owned a bunch of slaves who worked for him in terrible conditions for no money.  Sore-loser British revisionist opinion columnists like to make all kinds of wild claims about horrible shit Marion did as a slave-owner, but I spent quite a bit of time fact-checking this before deciding to write the article and I couldn’t find any actual historical documents to corroborate these claims, so let’s just say that owning slaves is already bad enough as it is and leave it at that. </p>\r\n<p>To round out those good pioneer colonial values, Marion also enlisted into the South Carolina militia in 1754 and served as a Lieutenant fighting hardcore battles against badass-as-hell Cherokee Indian warriors during the French and Indian War.  Constantly under attack from expert guerilla warriors striking hard from the swamps of South Carolina, Marion and his militia were hammered repeatedly by a determined foe, but eventually managed to drive the Cherokee back after a series of increasingly-brutal campaigns that left little in the way of survivors on either side.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Lieutenant Marion became a member of the state congress in South Carolina in the 1770s, and after the Colonies decided to tell King George to shove it, Marion kicked off the American Revolution by assuming the rank of Captain in the 2<sup>nd</sup> South Carolina Militia Regiment, hopping in a red, white, and blue NASCAR stock car, and peeling out to Charleston harbor blasting Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” even though that song wasn’t invented for another 206 years. </p>\r\n<p>Charleston is and will always be an important harbor to control if you want to assume tyrannical control over the Southern portion of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America, so Marion and the 2<sup>nd</sup> Carolina were ordered to basically build a big-ass fuckin’ fort and then defend it from an inevitable invasion force.  Marion and his men constructed the most awesome treehouse ever, bolstering the fortress’ 16-foot-thick walls with sand, palmetto logs, and 30+ cannons of various sizes.  When the harbor was attacked by British General Henry Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars, Marion charged up and down the walls inspiring his men to hold the line against thousands of enemy troops and over a dozen British warships.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>After throwing back the Brits and then unsuccessfully trying to relieve the besieged American defenders of Savannah, Georgia, Captain Francis Marion spent the next couple years of the war living in Charleston doing a bunch of boring bullshit that didn’t involve trying to line up redcoats with the iron sights of a flintlock musket.  It was around this time that Marion got so fucking bored he jumped out a window, breaking his ankle in March 1780 in semi-hilarious fashion.  It actually worked out pretty well, though, because while he was at home recovering the British showed back up and captured Charleston (probably because he wasn’t there to defend it).</p>\r\n<p>By the time Francis Marion was back on his already-gimpy feet, the shit in South Carolina had gone from “soul-suckingly boring” to “soul-suckingly shitty”.  Charleston had fallen, as had most of the towns in South Carolina.  The American army in the south had been smashed to fucking pieces by the stampeding bayonets of the Brits at the Battle of Camden and withdrew up to Virginia to regroup.  The U.S. had absolutely no military presence in S.C., no base of operations, and British forces swarmed up and down the region with impunity.</p>\r\n<p>This did not stop Francis Effin’ Marion from getting together 50 pissed off men and launching a one-man war against British military operations across the entire South Carolina region.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion5.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Using tactics he’d undoubtedly learned from the badass guerilla warriors of the Cherokee a few decades earlier, “Marion’s Partisans” were a badass fuck-the-police resistance movement dedicated to pissing off the British worse than every single Wayne Rooney World Cup performance combined.  Hiding out in the shittiest, most overgrown wetlands and swamps in South Carolina, Marion and his woefully-underequipped cavalrymen had no reliable food supplies, no uniforms, and were so badly (and badassly) armed that their sabers were made from table saws and their bullets were just melted-down pewter beer steins they’d looted from abandoned homes in the area.  For two and a half years they braved cold, rain, disease, and constant threat of attack from the British, constantly moving and attacking where the Brits least expected it.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion6.PNG\" alt=\"\" /><br /> “The Torreys are so affrighted with my little Excursions that many <br /> [are] moving off to Georgia with their Effects; others are runned into swamps.”</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Charging out of the swamp with hopefully-awesome-looking Warhammer 40k-style saw swords and busting locks from their Kentucky Rifles in every direction, Marion’s Partisans burned communications stations, blew up ship depots, looted supply convoys and ambushed troop convoys.  Brutal in their methods, they would take no prisoners, looted the homes of loyalists with impunity, and on more than one occasion Marion himself hung or executed his own men for desertion or cowardice.  He didn’t lead any major charges or daring attacks, but his harassing actions not only inspired American patriots to fight back, but also forced the British to garrison troops all throughout the state – which was a major fucking deal back in a war where a “large-scale battle” involved something like 2,000 guys on each side.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Marion continued his attacks, raising so much hell that the guy in charge of British forces in the south – Lord Cornwallis – ordered his men to pull back from the inland parts of the South and take up positions along the coast.  It was this decree that would lead to him bringing 8,000 men to Yorktown, Virginia only to have them surrounded and forced to surrender to French and American troops.</p>\r\n<p>When the Continental Army moved back into South Carolina, Francis Marion and his Wolverines were brought in to serve as scouts and recon troops.  Marion hated military life and bullshit regulations and constantly got in trouble for disobeying superior officers when they ordered him to do stupid shit that would put his men’s lives at risk, but he also fought in the Battle of Eutaw Springs alongside Robert E. Lee’s dad and helped recapture his former home of Charleston from the British in 1782.  So that’s a thing.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"> </p>\r\n<p>After the war, Marion headed home to find that his plantation had been torched by the British.  He rebuilt it, went back to farming, was re-elected to the South Carolina state congress, and advocated strongly for a full Amnesty to every American citizen who had supported the British in the war.  At 53 he also married his cousin, so feel free to make whatever trite overdone South Carolina jokes you want to make there, because you won’t hear me talk shit on a guy who helped fight for U.S. independence and serves as a Founding Father of the U.S. Army Rangers.</p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/70111822138/marion8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p> </p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/biography/the-swamp-fox-157330429/?no-ist\">http://www.smithsonianmag.com/biography/the-swamp-fox-157330429/?no-ist</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com/teaching-materials/bonus-materials/american-heroes-francis-marion/\">http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com/teaching-materials/bonus-materials/american-heroes-francis-marion/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/americanrevolutio1/p/American-Revolution-Brigadier-General-Francis-Marion-The-Swamp-Fox.htm\">http://militaryhistory.about.com</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Outfoxing+the+British%3A+Francis+%22Swamp+Fox%22+Marion+used+ingenuity+and...-a0105369801\">Outfoxing the British</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion</a></p>','2014-07-04','70111822138','marion.jpg','marion-small.jpg','Francis Marion','The Swamp Fox, this take-no-prisoners American guerrilla warrior made life miserable for British forces across South Carolina.','\"Colonel Marion had so wrought the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his threats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder, that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and the Peedee that was not in arms against us.\"  --Lord Cornwallis, British general'),('Clovis','c. 466 AD','November 27, 511','France','Medieval Frankish King','<p>Hey, so don&rsquo;t fuck with the Germans, am I right folks?</p>\r\n<p>I had these grand ideas to do a big super-French Bastille Day post here this week to celebrate the fact that a bunch of pissed-off Parisians attacked a fortress and decapitated their rulers almost exactly 225 years ago, but as I sat there watching eleven Germans repeatedly brutalize the already-comatose corpse of the Brazilian National Football Team like a team of 80s-film street thugs kicking a guy to death on the New York City Subway I had a distinct moment when I realized that I don&rsquo;t write enough badass shit about how fucking hardcore the Germans are.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So this week I&rsquo;ll reconcile both by writing about a group of people known as the Franks, who are basically Germans and French (and Belgians, I guess) at the same time, even though none of those sides wanna give the other guys credit for any of that (except for the parts that involve rampant inbreeding cousin-humping).</p>\r\n<p>Specifically, I want to share the insane, plundergasmic experience of the blood-soaked Germanic barbarian ruler who forged the Frankish Kingdom into the dominant military force in Western Europe, established the Merovingian Dynasty atop a pile of burning corpses, and yet is still today revered by his successors as a hero of the Faith and the guy who basically invented the entire concept of France.</p>\r\n<p>King Clovis.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />SWOON BEFORE CLOVIS<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Legends say that even as a young boy, Clovis was never afraid of anything ever.&nbsp; Like, you could tell him the creepiest hook-stuck-in-the-door ghost story ever and right when the chick started crawling out of the TV he&rsquo;d yawn, crack his knuckles, snap every neck in the room and then make a chicken salad sandwich with EXTRA FUCKIN MAYO because he wasn&rsquo;t even scared of heart disease or food poisoning because there was no refrigeration for the mayo in goddamn 500 AD.&nbsp; When he was 14, Clovis was already making headlines in Frankland because this psychotic warrior-prince was fighting on the front lines of his father&rsquo;s army, cleaving badass gigantic Visigoths from neck to groin with a single blow of his man-slaughtering battle axe, then leaping through their split-apart corpses to kill another guy behind them.&nbsp; He could also apparently tame ANY HORSE EVER, probably by unblinkingly staring them in the eyes and furiously swearing at them until they apologized and cooked him breakfast.</p>\r\n<p>When Clovis was 16 his dad was like &ldquo;yeah, ok, you&rsquo;re king now,&rdquo; and then died for some reason.&nbsp; The new Frankish ruler, known to the local Roman assholes as one of the &ldquo;long-haired kings&rdquo; because they were making fun of the fact that ne NEVER CUT HIS HAIR once in his entire life, immediately went to work turning Franks into France by killing every single human being in Gaul who didn&rsquo;t agree with him.&nbsp; But especially the Romans because nobody talks shit about his EPIC TEUTONIC MULLET and lives to tell the tale.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> You cannot talk shit on<br /> this man&rsquo;s style.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Clovis first showed up outside the walls of Soissons in 498 AD to announce the Roman governor of Belgicae Secunda was about to spend the rest of his short miserable life eating through a straw, that asshole just started laughing like he was some muscle-bound shirtless jock dickhead kicking over a nerdy guy&rsquo;s sandcastle and then nailing his girlfriend in front of him.&nbsp; \"A boy! A boy has come to fight me! The Franks with a boy to lead them have come to fight the Romans!&nbsp; WHAT THE FUCK BRO LETS DO THIS\"<br /><br /> Now allow me to regale you with a riveting tale of King Clovis and the Fall of the Roman Empire in Gaul as told through a four-panel comic strip.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis2b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis2c.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> FUCK YO STATUE</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>King Clovis led the attack personally, charging out in front of his army, &ldquo;slaughtering many men,&rdquo; and trying to carve his way through the Romans and gut that idiot governor like he was de-boning a fish with a table saw.&nbsp; But that dumbass was long gone, running for his life never to be heard from in history forever.&nbsp; Clovis destroyed the Romans, sacked Soissons, and threw the Roman Empire out of Gaul forever.&nbsp; From this point on, Gaul was Frank&rsquo;s Turf.</p>\r\n<p>Then, just in case anyone had any questions about it, King Clovis conquered EVERYONE ELSE IN GAUL Julius Caesar-style, sacking, plundering, looting, pillaging, and burning with impunity.&nbsp; He&rsquo;d drink hardcore booze all day long, slaughter his enemies in combat, and then have any cowards dumb enough to surrender be brought before him in chains so he could personally crush their skulls with an axe for being weaklings because QUITTERS NEVER WIN FOOL.&nbsp; <br /><br /> Oh, here&rsquo;s a weird Clovis story that I couldn&rsquo;t figure out where else to put it in here:&nbsp; One time Clovis was dividing up some plunder and one of his guys got all pissed off and broke a really nice vase with an axe.&nbsp; Clovis got pissed, but did nothing.&nbsp; The next day, Clovis called his entire army together for a weapons/gear inspection.&nbsp; In front of the whole army, Clovis ordered that guy to come forward, inspected him, and then told him his boots weren&rsquo;t shiny enough.&nbsp; When the guy bent down to check his shoelaces or whatever, Clovis SPLIT HIS HEAD WITH AN AXE he whipped out of fucking nowhere, then beat his chest, grabbed his balls, and shouted something like DON&rsquo;T FUCK WITH ME ASSHOLES I WILL MURDER YOU.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis5.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Clovis destroyed the Burgundians, the Allemani, some other guys, and kicked the asses of more Goths than Lithium addiction.&nbsp; He became the most powerful and largest Kingdom in Gaul, ruling a territory that stretched from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, setting up the boundaries of modern-day France, and laying the foundations for the name of modern-day France because it&rsquo;s just a mis-spelling or something of Franks anyways. &nbsp;He was also the first guy to make Paris his capital, which is pretty fucking rad.&nbsp; <br /><br /> Even though he was way the hell over in Greece the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I thought Clovis was the shit so he made him an Imperial Consul of Byzantium, and the Pope in Rome sent a bunch of bishops over to hang out in Clovis&rsquo; court.&nbsp; When Clovis wasn&rsquo;t cleaving, he also set up the Pactus Legis Salicae, a code of laws that combined well-thought-out ancient Roman judicial practices with Christian teachings and added just enough badass old-school Barbarian Justice that the code is still worth mentioning today.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis6.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Get the bad guy Clovis.<br /> <em>Get that mothafucka!</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em><br /></em></p>\r\n<p>Clovis married a super-hot Burgundian princess named Clotilda who was actually pretty awesome.&nbsp; She was a capable hand in keeping him from being completely insane, because Clovis believed women had the power of prophesy so he took everything she said really seriously, even when it was like, &ldquo;Hey don&rsquo;t kill that guy.&rdquo;&nbsp; The only marital bickering shit came because she was a hardcore Catholic and kept harping on him to convert and he was all like DAMNIT WOMAN I DON&rsquo;T FEEL LIKE IT or whatever.&nbsp; (Like any good husband he eventually caved, but I&rsquo;ll get to that in a sec).&nbsp; He did build a bunch of cathedrals and stopped plundering churches though, and he was so cool to the Church that a bunch of bishops would write a lot of really nice stuff about him later.</p>\r\n<p>Clovis&rsquo; conversion to Christianity is a great story.&nbsp; Basically, not long after kicking the fuck out of a bunch of Arian Christian heretic bastard Visigoths and conquering Bordeaux and Aquitaine in 507, Clovis was attacked by a tribe of Allemani barbarians who came from all the way on the other side of the kingdom and blized over from Germany.&nbsp; Clovis&rsquo;s guys were tired from killing so many heretics, and they were getting the crap kicked out of them.&nbsp; So, with the battle seemingly lost, Clovis is like, &ldquo;OK FINE.&nbsp; Jesus, if you can kill all these guys for me I&rsquo;ll be your best friend for ever.&nbsp; Pretty please with a cherry on top.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>And, if you believe the story of the Catholic Bishop who wrote this tale down, God came to the rescue.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis7a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis7b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The battle turned almost immediately, the barbarians were destroyed, and Clovis became the first Catholic king of a barbarian Germanic Western European people.&nbsp; He was personally baptized by the Pope in Reims on Christmas Day 508 and then died a few years later, passing off the realm to his kids and starting the Merovingian Dynasty that would rule France for 200 years.&nbsp; Nowadays he&rsquo;s considered the Father of France and there&rsquo;s a painting of him hanging in the Hall of Battles in the Louvre.</p>\r\n<p>Clovis, by the way, was later French-icized to &ldquo;Louis&rdquo;, and the French had 18 Kings named after him.&nbsp; One of them, Louis XVI, was beheaded not long after the Bastille was stormed, an act that took place exactly 225 years ago this Monday.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/20093312580/clovis8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Clovis even looks badass getting Baptized by the Pope.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/122446/Clovis-I\">http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/122446/Clovis-I</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://historymedren.about.com/od/cwho/fl/Clovis.htm\">http://historymedren.about.com/od/cwho/fl/Clovis.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04070a.htm\">http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04070a.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.asp\">http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.asp</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/fmma/fmma09.htm\">http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/fmma/fmma09.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-clovis-i-franks\">http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-clovis-i-franks</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_I\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_I</a></p>','2014-07-11','20093312580','clovis.jpg','clovis-small.jpg','King Clovis','The bloodthirsty Germanic barbarian asskicker who created the modern French state as we know it.',''),('Brian Wood','Unknown','N/A','England, UK','21st-century British Soldier','<p><em>&nbsp;(Ok, ok, I know I&rsquo;m getting this shit posted inexcusably late this week.&nbsp; All I can say is sorry, I occasionally have unfunny, unbadass things happen in my life that make it tough for me to write funny things about badass people.&nbsp; But then I remember that all emotions other than rage and indifference are signs of weakness, crush a six pack of 10W-30, and inject myself with sixty ccs of dopamine, Mountain Dew and that shit the Little Sisters give you in Bioshock until I decide to stop writing around like a star soccer player with a one-goal lead in the final minutes of extra time and start spewing blood from my eyes and nose while shooting bees from my fingertips into a parked car with the windows up.)</em></p>\r\n<p>It was an ungodly-hot afternoon on May 14, 2004, when a convoy of British FV-510 Warrior armored personnel carriers raced down the highway 150 miles north of Basrah, Iraq.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>If it was a hundred ten degrees outside, it seemed double that inside the non-air-conditioned armored vehicles, where a squad of six British infantrymen from C Company, 1<sup>st</sup> Battalion, The Princess of Wales&rsquo; Royal Regiment sat anxiously, rifles at the ready.&nbsp; On the radio came frantic calls from a platoon of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, pinned down by enemy forces in the city of Al-Amara not far away.&nbsp; The Argylls had been ambushed by over 80 fighters loyal to the radical Shi&rsquo;ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and it wasn&rsquo;t going well.&nbsp; Every radio transmission made the men in the back of the Warrior IFV even more desperate to get there and assist.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />Two warriors in Southern Iraq.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It had been a rough couple weeks for Lance Corporal Brian Wood.&nbsp; When the Allies announced they were going to have al-Sadr arrested for supporting Iraqi insurgency, the cleric came out with a call for vengeance against the West, and all hell had broken loose in a hurry.&nbsp; Wood and his squad were stationed at a vehicle checkpoint they&rsquo;d nicknamed &ldquo;Danny Boy&rdquo;, located just a few miles out of the Al-Amara city limits, and over the last couple weeks they&rsquo;d already been attacked several times by coordinated enemy troops who wanted nothing more than the complete destruction of anything even resembling a reference to a traditional Irish folk song.</p>\r\n<p>And now this bullshit.</p>\r\n<p>Wood was triple-checking his standard-issue British Army L85A2 assault rifle when suddenly the vehicle was rocked by a powerful blast that sent everyone inside reeling like they\'d just hit the emergency stop on a roller coaster mid-corkscrew.&nbsp; Within seconds, the radio was alive &ndash; &ldquo;RPG!&rdquo; &ndash; and the Iraqi highway was quickly crowded by muffled screams and the unmistakable sounds of ripping automatic weapons fire ruining peoples\' days.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Outside the coffin-like confines of the Warrior, it was pretty goddamn clear that the British convoy had rolled straight into a well-prepared ambush.&nbsp; Hardcore, dedicated, resilient Iraqi troops had staked out positions in front and to the right of the British convoy, taking cover behind roadside embankments and irrigation ditches, and the Brits had rolled into their trap like those cops in <em>Con Air </em>getting jacked by Cyrus the Virus.&nbsp; Over 100 warriors loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr fired down on the disoriented British forces with everything they had &ndash; rocket-propelled grenade launches, heavy machine guns, AK-47s and mortars.&nbsp; The lead Warrior had been rocked hard, setting it on fire and knocking out its primary gun and power systems, leaving it basically dead in the water in an exposed position where Iraqi RPG troops could rocket-hump it with high explosive warheads.</p>\r\n<p>The driver of the Warrior turned to Wood, and grimly told him the situation &ndash; we&rsquo;re fucked, the 30mm cannon has been disabled, and we&rsquo;re one lucky shot away from becoming an over-microwaved TV dinner.&nbsp; Unload your squad see what you can do.</p>\r\n<p>Lance Corporal Brian Wood of the Princess of Wales&rsquo; Royal Regiment, British Army kicked open the back hatch of the APC and gave the only order that could logically be given:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood3.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Let me say this for the record:&nbsp; The most badass invention in human military history isn&rsquo;t some crazy piece of military aerospace technology that can craterize a concrete parking garage into rubble from the upper atmosphere while traveling at Mach fourteen.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not a nuclear warhead with a megatonnage yield capable of throwing the Earth off its axis and sending it careening into the sun and ending all life in the universe in one fell swoop.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t a futuristic laser rifle, a large-caliber overcompensating-for-something handgun, or a tempered-steel sword with thousands of years of history and possibly even the remnants of a demon\'s soul.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s a fucking six-inch chunk of razor-sharp steel that you affix to the end of a machine gun and then ram into your opponent&rsquo;s heart as hard as you fucking can until he is dead.&nbsp; It\'s cold steel, without style or flair or primadonna pretentiousness, and with the principle of the fact that sure, you can shoot the guy in the head with a thermal scope from a mile and a half away, but you want to do this shit the old-fashioned way and kill each other like Men.</p>\r\n<p>On May 14, 2004, roughly three hundred years after the concept of the bayonet was actually a viable option for winning battles, Lance Corporal Brian Wood tried to save his convoy and his comrades by ordering six pissed-off British soldiers to launch a fucking bayonet charge across 200 yards of open ground towards a numerically superior force of hardened Iraqi troops who were firing AK-47 assault rifles at him from well-prepared elevated positions.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>With bullets zipping past their heads and cracking by their ears, Wood and his Brits &ndash; who were, according to one of them, &ldquo;proper angry&rdquo;, (which is a very awesome and very British thing to say, particularly when referring to a 21<sup>st</sup>-century bayonet charge) &ndash; ran screaming towards the crapping-their-pants Iraqis, bayonets gleaming in the burning-hot Middle Eastern sun.&nbsp; Moving up in short bursts, Wood and his guys would race up ten meters, drop to the ground, fire a few bursts, then get up and sprint another short burst towards them.&nbsp; Covering almost two hundred yards in a little over a minute, Wood then ordered his men to &ldquo;CHAAAARRRRRGE!!!!&rdquo; (I assume) and ran 30 meters up a goddamn embankment while AK-47 bullets tore up the ground around him.</p>\r\n<p>When they reached the top of the embankment, Wood and his five squadmates broke into three teams of two and leapt feet-first into the trench, bayonets at the ready, screaming with furious British blood rage.<br /><br />They landed in a body-strewn trench with over a dozen Iraqi fighters, none of whom were really expecting to be goddamned involved in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy on the field of battle in the year 2004.</p>\r\n<p>According to one of the guys who was there, &ldquo;Basically it was short, sharp, and furious.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood5a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood5b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> \"I wanted to put the fear of God into the enemy. <br />I could see some dead bodies and eight blokes, some scrambling for their weapons. <br />I&rsquo;ve never seen such a look of fear in anyone&rsquo;s eyes before. <br />I&rsquo;m over six feet; I was covered in sweat, angry, red in the face,<br /> charging in with a bayonet and screaming my head off. <br />You would be scared, too.\"</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Although, I must confess, I pretty much exclusively think of it going down like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When the smoke cleared, three enemy were dead, four were wounded/captured, and the rest had run for it to take cover in another trench nearby.&nbsp; Not one of Wood&rsquo;s men were injured, except one guy who got a mild blister on a finger of his non-stabbing hand.</p>\r\n<p>Of course this was just the beginning.&nbsp; After leading a bayonet charge and having some up-close hand-to-hand with the enemy, Wood, jacked up out of his mind on enough adrenaline to power a Red Bull processing plant, then repositioned his men in the trench and directed fire on the main body of the Iraqi troops, who were taking cover behind another drainage ditch nearby.&nbsp; Those guys had obviously shifted their fire to the half-dozen stab-happy Brits at this point, but before long the APCs got their 30mm cannons up and running, and those beasts laid down a pounding covering fire while Wood and his squad moved up onto the next position.&nbsp; </p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<img style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ffiring with their own rifles as well as AK-47s they&rsquo;d picked up off dead enemy troops, Brian Wood and his guys cleared two more trenches over the course of the next four hours of straight-up combat.&nbsp; They took out over 30 enemy fighters, forced the surrender of nine more, called in a friggin\' tank to blow the shit out of a concrete bunker full of explosives, and destroyed the Iraqis\' well-prepared ambush without taking a single British casualty.&nbsp; One of the British APC drivers describes Wood&rsquo;s actions better than I ever could:&nbsp; <br /><br /> &ldquo;The Iraqis were hidden in little bends in these channels, and they kept jumping out with their rifles and every time Brian and Dave would put them down. Then another bunch of guys would stand up and the same thing would happen. And gradually, we got the upper hand and it all started to quieten down, until there was just sporadic fire.&rdquo;<br /><br />I picture this going down like Chuck Norris hosing down that mansion full of drug dealers at the end of <em>Delta Force 2.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Through his daring actions, Lance Corporal Brian Wood turned the tide of the battle and saved his convoy, and in the process had ordered the first British bayonet charge in over 25 years (the Scots bayoneted some Argentinians during the Falklands War in 1982, but that&rsquo;s a tale for another time).&nbsp; During his deployment, Wood would also be wounded in the face by an IED blast, survive countless face-to-face encounters with enemy forces, and once drove into a hardcore battle zone to recover a wounded buddy &ndash; Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry. Beharry is a future Badass of the Week article himself, a Grenadan who&rsquo;d been hit with an RPG after himself driving into the ambush zone twice to save wounded men from certain death.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The next time the two men met, they were at Buckingham Palace having an audience with the Queen.&nbsp; Beharry was getting the Victoria Cross.&nbsp; Wood was receiving the Military Cross for Bravery.<br /><br /> Both were well deserved.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/905475926435/brianwood9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> (Wood is on the far left)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-famous-bayonet-charge-of-modern-conflict-2012-10\">http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-famous-bayonet-charge-of-modern-conflict-2012-10</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8016685.stm\">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8016685.stm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.petrifiedtruth.com/archives/001676.html\">http://www.petrifiedtruth.com/archives/001676.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0bd_1249524865&amp;comments=1\">http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0bd_1249524865&amp;comments=1</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Danny_Boy\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Danny_Boy</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Collins, Dan.&nbsp; <em>In Foreign Fields</em>.&nbsp; Monday Books, 2008.</p>\r\n<p>Holmes, Richard.&nbsp; <em>Dusty Warriors</em>.&nbsp; HarperPress, 2006.</p>','2014-07-21','905475926435','brianwood.jpg','brianwood-small.jpg','Brian Wood','Ambushed from two sides and pinned down by machine gun and RPG fire, this British infantryman resolved to cut his way out or die trying.','The only way you can hold ground in that situation is by having boots on it — so that’s what we did.'),('Heracles','c. 1300 BC','N/A','Thebes, Greece','Mythological Greek Hero','<p>Dwayne The Rock &ldquo;Rock Man&rdquo; The Rock Johnson has a Hercules movie coming out today.&nbsp; I know very little about it, except that the trailer involves him punching a gigantic Dire Lion in the face, followed by extra-large text explaining that this is the baddest ass movie to feature a man coldcocking a feline of any size directly in the pork chops with a ten-ton knuckle sandwich. &nbsp;But I typically enjoy The Rock&rsquo;s cinematic performances to the point where my family has a large printed-out photograph of him <a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2xeMc5DC7J4/Uo-JMqkruHI/AAAAAAAADn4/qdltwzlhOiY/s1600/the-rock-a-faim.jpg\">eating pancakes</a> tacked up in our kitchen, and, honestly, Hercules is the shit and if you made a movie featuring 90 minutes of non-stop endangered species face-punching you&rsquo;d still honestly only be covering a very small percentage of what makes the Greek and Roman God of Heroes such an all-time epic mythological wrecking ball.</p>\r\n<p>So, to celebrate me mercifully not bolting myself to a tiny desk at San Diego Comic-Con this year, here&rsquo;s the over-the-top, action-packed, white-knuckled tale of the unstoppable beefed-out ancient hero, which is completely true in the sense that anything involving ancient mythology can be considered true.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Known in Ancient Greece as Heracles, Ancient Rome as Hercules, and by pretentious proto-hipster Classicist douchebags as Herakles, the ultra-strong, club-wielding Gatekeeper of Olympus was one of the most awesome mythological figures to ever crush a giant monsters&rsquo; balls with his bare hands and then celebrate by going nuts and banging every human being with a pulse in a ten mile radius.&nbsp; Serving as the ultimate paragon of manliness, strength, humping chicks (and dudes), and killing ferocious man-eating beats with a big fucking wooden club, Hercules was known as the Gatekeeper of Olympus, the Protector of Mankind, and the Patron God of Heroes, Courage, Strength, Gymnasiums, and crushing reps on the deadlift.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s also the God of Sports, a title that probably comes from the time he challenged the famous boxer Eryx to a match and kicked that guy&rsquo;s ass so hard he died from it.</p>\r\n<p>Hercules was born a generation before the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/diomedes.html\">Trojan War</a>, when notorious super-pimp and mythological date-rapist <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zeus.html\">Zeus</a> came to a woman&rsquo;s house in the middle of the night, pretended to be her warrior husband returned home early from battle, and subsequently impregnated her with the strongest demigod to ever walk the lands of Ancient Greece.&nbsp; Zeus&rsquo;s wife Hera was pretty righteously pissed that her husband was an ungrateful two-timing bastard, so she sent a couple gigantic constrictor snakes to crush Baby Herc to death with their ridiculously-powerful torsos.&nbsp; Hercules, probably the most badass eight-month-old baby ever, grabbed one snake in each hand, snapped their necks, and when his nurse came in to check on him she found him swinging them around in his crib like they were snake-chucks.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Why did it have to be snakes?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Even though he&rsquo;s considered the greatest hero in Greek myth, Hercules was also a psychotic bastard with a pretty out of control temper who was prone to falling into &ldquo;fits of madness&rdquo; where he went into fucked-up blood rages and started violently murdering innocent people for little to no reason.&nbsp; Like one time as a boy he was learning how to play the lyre (a dumb-looking harp thing), but when his teacher was like, &ldquo;hey idiot you screwed up do that part again,&rdquo; Hercules snapped his lyre in half and beat the music instructor to death with his own instrument.&nbsp; Realizing he probably needed to chill out and get some fresh air, Hercules went into the fields, bought a cattle farm, got married, had a couple of kids, settled down, and then went into another inexplicable berserker rage and murdered his own kids for no reason at all (which isn&rsquo;t very badass).&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hercules understandably felt pretty shitty about this, so he went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked her what to do.&nbsp; She said the only way he&rsquo;d ever absolve himself of his crimes was by wandering the land doing heroic deeds like Mr. T from <em>The A Team</em>.&nbsp; Hercules placed his service in the hands of this idiot King named Eurystheus, who forced the Greek hero to perform twelve impossible tasks as penance.</p>\r\n<p>These are known as the Labors of Hercules.&nbsp; And they are insane.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />Have you seen my abs?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hercules&rsquo; first mission was to slay the Nemean Lion, a big-ass lion with an arrow-proof hide that eats virgins and then kills the guys that try to avenge them.&nbsp; Confronted with a giant mega-lion that was impervious to sword wounds and could wolf down fools like human jalepeno poppers, Hercules didn&rsquo;t back down &ndash; he cornered the creature in its dark, scary lair, blocked the exit, brained it in the skull it with his club, choked it to death with his bare hands, skinned it with its own claws and then proceeded to wear its pelt around as armor for the rest of his life.&nbsp; A few years later he killed a different giant lion for a different crazy king, and that guy got so pumped he told Hercules that as a reward he could have sex with as many of his daughters as he wanted.&nbsp; So Herc fucked all fifty of them in one night, they all get pregnant, and even up through the days of Alexander the Great the Kings of Macedon and Sparta were claiming descent from the kids that were produced by this epic one-man hump-a-thon.</p>\r\n<p>Hercules&rsquo; second labor was to slay the Hydra, a big horrible dragon/snake creature with multiple heads, each of which spit out venom, and a foul murderous swamp beast with blood so poisonous it killed you as soon as it touched you.&nbsp; Hercules was like whatever and started lopping off heads left and right with a rusty sickle, but for each Hydra head he cut off two more popped up in its place.&nbsp; So eventually Athena, the Heroic Goddess of Awesome Shit, came down with a gold head-cleaving sword and a big-ass flaming iron rod for branding cattle, and told Hercules to burn the head stumps closed before new ones grow back on. &nbsp;Herc started decapitating everything like a madman and then burning the heads shut with fire.&nbsp; Hera got all pissed that the giant murderous monster was getting beat like a lump of pizza dough and sent a big angry crab to try and distract Hercules, but he just stomped its head for massive damage and exploded that dumb monster so hard that it&rsquo;s crab meat flew up into the heavens and became the constellation Cancer.&nbsp; So if you&rsquo;re born in July, your horoscope is to avoid having big sweaty hairy Greek guys Super Mario your skull into a flat chunk of organic matter roughly the size of a 40-pound barbell weight.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The third task was to capture a deer that ran as fast as an arrow, which seems way less exciting than the first two labors.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know, maybe the Labors jumped the shark at this point, because Hercules just strapped on his high-tops, ran after it and captured it, because this guy had blazing foot speed even though he was lugging around like six hundred pounds of raw muscle.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Later on Hercules fought the Erymanthian Boar, this big giant Hakuna Matata pig that laid waste to fields and farmlands across Greece and had farmers everywhere angrily shaking their fists to the sky in distain.&nbsp; Hercules casually sauntered over to Erymanthia, but decided to take brief pit stops along the way to murder a bunch of drunk centaurs and save the Titan Prometheus from the evil eagle that ate his guts out every single day.&nbsp; Then Hercules wrestled the evil razor-tusked hog to the ground, hoiseted the unconscious pig on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and carried it back home to the King, who shit a brick when he saw it and hid inside a giant King-shaped flower pot until Hercules threw the pig in the ocean (it swam to Italy).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />Problem-free philosophy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I won&rsquo;t list them line-by-line, but for the next decade Hercules performed a grand total of twelve epic feats of manly strength.&nbsp; He killed a bunch of man-eating metallic birds by shooting them with hydra-poisoned arrows.&nbsp; He strangled an oversized rampaging bull that belonged to King Minos, the creator of the Minotaur.&nbsp; He stole a belt from the Queen of the Amazons, ripped off some horses from an evil king, herded some epic cattle, tricked the Titan Atlas into stealing golden apples from some sexy forest nymphs, and then went down into the underworld to beat the shit out of Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, and drag it back to the surface world.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules0.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Yo check out this dog I found.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>During his travels Hercules ran into Antaeus, the super-bastard little asshole son of Poseidon and Gaia.&nbsp; Antaeus lived in Libya and used to kill passersby in wrestling matches and keep their skulls, which he was thinking would be cool to maybe to build into a temple for Poseidon some day.&nbsp; Antaeus tried to fuck with Hercules, which was a mistake, and even though Hercules beat his ass up and down the coastline, every time the Son of Zeus bodyslammed Antaeus face-first into the turf that jerkwad would be instantly healed by the power of the goddess Gaia.&nbsp; So Hercules was like, fuck it, picked the dude up, and Zangiefed him to death with an EPIC BEAR HUG that liquefied his organs and snapped his ribs like a rack of popsicle sticks.&nbsp; Then Hercules fucked Antaeus&rsquo; wife and their kid became the King of Libya.</p>\r\n<p>I need to stress that I&rsquo;m not making these stories up.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> He is depicted performing many of his labors<br /> while naked, because Hercules was balls-out.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After finally being released from his Labors, Hercules continued having awesome/crazy adventures.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s basically impossible to organize this, so I&rsquo;m just going to list them out here for your enjoyment.&nbsp; Like one time Hercules beats a king in an archery contest, but is stiffed on the prize (the king&rsquo;s daughter&rsquo;s hand in marriage) so he steals the guy&rsquo;s cattle instead because that&rsquo;s almost as good as a Princess anyway.&nbsp; When the guy&rsquo;s son comes by to see what&rsquo;s up, Hercules &ndash; look out folks &ndash; has another one of his &ldquo;fits of madness&rdquo; and throws that guy off a the top of a tower for basically no reason.&nbsp; Herc feels bad about this, so he goes to the King of Sparta and asks for forgiveness, but the King of Sparta is like, &ldquo;well you totally did throw a guy off a tower so I don&rsquo;t think so.&rdquo;&nbsp; Naturally, Hercules gets so pissed he kills the King and all of his sons, gives the throne of Sparta to Helen of Troy&rsquo;s dad, then goes off to do penance by performing &ldquo;women&rsquo;s work&rdquo; as the slave of some Queen for a year.&nbsp; The Greeks say this was a terrible year that involved very little killing, but Hercules and that Queen ended up having ten kids so it probably wasn&rsquo;t all that bad.</p>\r\n<p>Hercules briefly joined up with the Argonauts on the mission to find the Golden Fleece, although he only appears in one of the two versions of the story.&nbsp; During the journey he killed a bunch of guys known as Bebryces in hand-to-hand combat by grabbing their feet, swinging them over his head like a sledgehammer and pounding their heads into the ground, but eventually bailed from the mission when his favorite servant ditched the party to go live with some hot naked sea nymphs he met.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules7.JPG\" alt=\"\" /><br />I love the look on that poor bastard\'s face.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hercules once killed a couple brothers who were supposedly conjoined twins with two heads, four arms, and four legs.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t remember why he did this.&nbsp; He also beat up Lityerses, the Reaper of Men, a mythological supervillain who challenged random people to a harvesting contest (!) and beheaded those who failed to defeat him.&nbsp; Hercules, whose agricultural skills were rivalled only by his uncontrollable propensity to murder people, beat this idiot at harvesting somehow, then kicked his ass with raw physical violence and drowned him in a river.&nbsp; In a similar agrarian vein, Syleus was a guy who used to force passersby to work as slaves on his vineyard, so Hercules cracked the dude repeatedly in the face with his own hoe and burned his vineyard to the ground to teach him a lesson.&nbsp; Another time Hercules was having dinner at a buddy&rsquo;s house and the guy was like dude my wife is gonna die, so Heracles got drunk and fought <a href=\"http://www.boomtron.com/2010/07/thanos-badass-of-the-week/\">Thanatos</a>, the Greek personification of death.&nbsp; The Greek Grim Reaper was like what the fuck is going on dude this is bogus, but Hercules grabbed that asshole in a full nelson, choked him out for a bit, sent him back to the underworld, and saved the guy&rsquo;s wife literally from death itself by <em>beating up the goddamn Grim Reaper</em>.</p>\r\n<p>On yet another occasion Hercules was hanging out around the city of Troy and saw that the King put his daughter out on a boat in the middle of the ocean so she could get eaten by a sea monster.&nbsp; Well, as soon as the big ferocious sea beast showed its scaly face Hercules flew in out of nowhere, bopped it on the head with a gigantic fucking club, and beat it repeatedly about the face until it forgot how to play the piano and drowned.&nbsp; The King, who was totally pretending it wasn&rsquo;t his fault that the Princess was out there on a boat to begin with, was all like &ldquo;oh yeah I&rsquo;ll totally give you guys some magic horses to say thanks for saving my daughter,&rdquo; but when that didn&rsquo;t happen Hercules besieged Troy, sacked it, and killed the king and all of his kids except King Priam, the dude who ruled Troy during the Trojan War.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hercules eventually died when his third wife accidentally poisoned him with Centaur semen.&nbsp; Apparently Hercules&rsquo; third wife Deiandra was hanging out in the forest when she was attacked by a Centaur (a half-man, half-horse), but Hercules saved her and killed that stupid horse-man by breaking him in half at the waist with a move that kind of looks like Chris Jericho&rsquo;s Liontamer submission hold.&nbsp; Before the Centaur died, however, he leaned in and whispered to Deiandra, &ldquo;hey rub my jizz on Hercules&rsquo; clothes, will ya?&nbsp; It&rsquo;ll totally, uh, keep him from ever cheating on you and stuff.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then he died without elaborating.&nbsp; A little while later Hercules started banging some other chick so Deiandra soaked his clothes in horse cum, and the second that stuff touched his skin Hercules&rsquo; flesh was burned off his skin and he set himself on fire to escape the pain.&nbsp; The gods took the Patron Saint of Murderous Bloodlust up to heaven, made him a full-god, and now he spends eternity guarding Mount Olympus and sleeping his goddess wife Hebe, the deity who delivers ambrosia to the gods.</p>\r\n<p>Hero Cults were devoted to the worship of Hercules across Ancient Greece and Rome for centuries, and world leaders from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Commodus would claim to be either descendants or reincarnations of the epic hero.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I don&rsquo;t know, I have nothing else to add here.&nbsp; </p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/270155699/hercules9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>','2014-07-25','270155699','hercules.jpeg','hercules-small.jpg','Hercules','The Greek God of Heroes.',''),('Maurya Dissanayake','c. 1989','N/A','Sri Lanka','21st-century Sri Lankan Vigilante','<p>Somewhere off Interstate 45 in Houston, Texas, there&rsquo;s a little ordinary gas station cleverly-known as the Fuel Depot.&nbsp; On the scorching sunny afternoon of July 10<sup>th</sup>, some random Fuel Depot manager pulled his car into the quiet lot, as he did every afternoon around this time.&nbsp; Groaning with the defeated sigh of a man returning to work to finish his shift, the dude threw the gear shifter into park, turned the ignition, and stepped out onto the molten-hot Texas asphalt.</p>\r\n<p>Suddenly behind him came the screech of tires.&nbsp; A white SUV slammed to a stop, blocking the manager&rsquo;s vehicle into the parking spot.</p>\r\n<p>In a flash, two men exited the SUV.&nbsp; And they didn&rsquo;t look like they were selling Girl Scout cookies to raise money for a trip to the cheerleading regional qualifiers.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake2.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Rushing forward, the two guys ambushed the manager from behind, knocking him head-first to the ground like a human version of that time they knocked the Saddam Hussein statue down in Baghdad.&nbsp; These guys were big, scary, and they fucking meant business.&nbsp; They knew exactly who they were looking for, when he was going to be there, and what he was carrying.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Namely, a bigass bank bag stuffed with cash.</p>\r\n<p>The manager, for his part, held on tight to the precious sack of bills despite the relentless assault of humanity thundering into him, so these two upstanding model citizens valiantly proceeded to beat the fuck out of him while he was on the ground, hitting him repeatedly in the head and beck in an attempt to violently wrench the money from his hands.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now look, I get it.&nbsp; Times are tough.&nbsp; People are struggling to make ends meet.&nbsp;&nbsp; Your kids won&rsquo;t shut up about wanting you to buy some stupid useless bullshit they&rsquo;ve seen on TV, your landlord is trying to make you work off your debt by smuggling weapons-grade diet pills across the Canadian border, and you have to work three and a half hours at a back-breaking day job just to buy a goddamn replacement pack of blades for your Mach 4 ProGlide Fusion-powered Extendo-Cut Quatro Cinco Limited Edition Beard Annihilator portable handheld personal grooming device.&nbsp; Meanwhile Bank of America is deploying deep cover wetwork squads from C-130s on late-night high-altitude low-opening combat drops to break your mom&rsquo;s legs because you can&rsquo;t seem to get on top of your bills and your dinner most nights consists of despondently crunching on a brick of uncooked Top Ramen.&nbsp; It sucks.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve been there.</p>\r\n<p>But here&rsquo;s the important thing to remember:&nbsp; None of this will ever make it OK for you and your friends to beat the shit out of a stranger and rob him.</p>\r\n<p>Luckily, Karma is a motherfucker, and she will kick you <em>really goddamn hard in the fucking face </em>when you least expect it.</p>\r\n<p>And that&rsquo;s exactly what happened to these assholes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake3.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>There&rsquo;s nothing quite like a shitty, minimum-wage customer service job to make you want to punch every fucking human being on the planet in the face as hard as you can until everyone is unconscious and you can finally just stick your mouth on the goddamn Slurpee machine and chug Coke slushie until you asphyxiate.&nbsp; No matter how many managers tell you that &ldquo;company policy is that employees do not ruthlessly pummel anyone unconscious while they are on the clock&rdquo;, I&rsquo;d wager that every bag boy, fry cook, barista, cashier, and customer service specialist from Malibu to Omaha spends the majority of their shift secretly praying that they can catch a shoplifter making a break for it just so they&rsquo;d have <em>one opportunity </em>to tackle a customer in the parking lot and kick them in the head.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the true American Dream, and it&rsquo;s the only thing that got me through half my shifts at the grocery store, the movie theater, or Radio Shack.</p>\r\n<p>The difference here, however, is that the guy working the minimum wage job behind the counter of the Fuel Depot in Houston, Texas wasn&rsquo;t just some random guy.&nbsp; It was Maurya Dissanayake, a five-time Sri Lankan national MMA champion with ten years of fighting experience under his belt and a right hook that could decapitate a whale.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>And Maurya wasn&rsquo;t all that pumped up about watching two assholes beat the shit out of his co-worker.</p>\r\n<p>So he sacked up like a fucking man and did something about it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake4.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">BEST GRAPHIC EVER</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As is the case with this a lot of current events stuff, there&rsquo;s a lot of wildly-conflicting information regarding who the hell Maurya Dissanayake actually is.&nbsp; A couple reports list him as a five-time national champ in Sri Lanka.&nbsp; Others say he won five fights, which is a little different, but whatever.&nbsp; What we know for sure is that this fucking guy is a hard-working dude who came over to the states because he wanted to make a better life for himself by joining the Ultimate Fighting Championship and knocking grown men senseless with an endless barrage of roundhouse kicks to the skull.&nbsp; And when this dude isn&rsquo;t working a full-time gig selling smokes at the Fuel Depot he&rsquo;s at the gym kicking the shit out of punching bags and sparring partners using some style of martial art I&rsquo;ve never heard of before but that certainly seems effective.</p>\r\n<p>Flying out of the gas station mini-mart like a shampoo commercial Batman, the excellently-coiffed Sri Lankan kickboxer charged through the doors, closed the distance in a heartbeat, and falcon kicked the first mugger so fucking hard in the face that the dude keeled over and smacked into the side of the car on his way to the blacktop.&nbsp; The second dude, who was so preoccupied with being a robbing douchebag that he didn&rsquo;t notice the gigantically-tall dude with perfect hair come running up like a one-way express train to Facekickopolis, and that poor bastard looked up just in time to catch a five-knuckle Instagram to the chops and go sprawling out on his back.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&nbsp;<img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake5.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake7.PNG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After clubbing down two thugs with two swings and pulling his boss&rsquo;s balls out of the fire, Dissanayake continued to lay down an epic beating the likes of which would make any customer service representative blush.&nbsp; A third perpetrator, the guy who had been driving the SUV and had the good fucking sense not to leave the relative safety of his vehicle, started to pull the getaway car out of the lot, ready to get the fuck out of there at a moment&rsquo;s notice.&nbsp; The groggy muggers struggled to their feet and desperately tried to flee the flying fists of Sri Lankan fury, and Maurya was more than happy to oblige them.&nbsp; Maurya backed off to let them make their escape, but when both muggers suddenly <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crhwQPKr7w\">grew a pair of nuts</a>, took a step towards him, and started talking shit the fucking semi-pro UFC hopeful who had just beat the hell out of them Maurya wasn&rsquo;t having it.&nbsp; He threw a friggin&rsquo; shoe at them, charged, and nailed one of the dudes completely fucking senseless with a punch that could have sunk a warship.&nbsp; The two other guys bailed, leaving their buddy to face Maurya&rsquo;s wrath.&nbsp;&nbsp; Maurya, unsure of whether the dude had a weapon on him and unwilling to take the chance, knocked the guy out with a couple kicks to the head and called the cops.&nbsp; It was probably a good call &ndash; the cops have already been using that dude&rsquo;s mug shot in lineups because he&rsquo;s also a suspect in a troubling string of unrelated crimes.</p>\r\n<p>According to Dissanayake, &ldquo;I think I did really good. I did everything as I planned. I didn&rsquo;t even miss anything, whatever I hit, I landed on them.&nbsp; One thing &nbsp;I regret, the first time I kicked the guy I couldn&rsquo;t knock him out. If I had knocked him out, I would have got two guys. I could have [had] both criminals instead of one guy.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>His best quote, however, reads like a line from <em>The Raid</em>.</p>\r\n<p>\"I know there\'s a possibility that they could come back and try to get revenge or something, but I\'m ready. &nbsp;I wouldn\'t say I\'m scared, but I\'m careful, and I\'m prepared. If they come, they come.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/61992269515/dissanayake8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Dissanayake in Sri Lanka.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So, without further ado, while most of the world was out watching shitty, super-dark, ultra-grainy shaky-cam footage of former teen heartthrobs not almost-punching each other, they missed out on one of the most awesome security-camera-recorded asskickings ever.&nbsp; Enjoy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/a4Yiv5dego0\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Link:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.tmz.com/2014/07/28/mma-robbery-hero-mayura-dissanyake-dream-to-fight-ufc/\">http://www.tmz.com/2014/07/28/mma-robbery-hero-mayura-dissanyake-dream-to-fight-ufc/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/mma-fighter-rushes-defend-coworker-article-1.1882461\">http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/mma-fighter-rushes-defend-coworker-article-1.1882461</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2707629/They-picked-wrong-gas-station-Clerk-pulls-MMA-fighter-skills-tackle-thieves.html\">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2707629/They-picked-wrong-gas-station-Clerk-pulls-MMA-fighter-skills-tackle-thieves.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mma/2014/07/28/gas-station-attendant-uses-mma-skills-to-foil-robbery/13298393/\">http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mma/2014/07/28/gas-station-attendant-uses-mma-skills-to-foil-robbery/13298393/</a></p>','2014-08-01','61992269515','dissanayake.jpg','dissanayake-small.jpg','Maurya Dissanayake','Three muggers ambush a gas station attendant in broad daylight.  They don\'t realize the other guy who works there is the five-time Sri Lankan MMA champion.','Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.'),('','','','','','<p>Hey guys,</p>\r\n<p>I\'m backed up against an insane midnight deadline to get the manuscript submitted for my second book in the <em>Guts &amp; Glory </em>series, and since I\'m under the gun on this it\'s looking more and more likely that I\'m not going to get a chance to hammer out my website article today.&nbsp; So, this is a good opportunity for me to tell you that I\'m going to be on TV for the next five weeks, narrating a series called <em>Hardcore Heroes</em> that\'s running every Wednesday at 10pm on the AHC Channel (formerly the Military Channel).&nbsp; <a href=\"http://www.ahctv.com/tv-shows/hardcore-heroes/about-hardcore-heroes.htm\">Here\'s the link</a> to the show page, where you can check out clips and maybe full episodes at some point (if you\'re in Canada you can see it all on the <a href=\"http://www.history.ca/hardcore-heroes/\">History Channel Canada</a> page).&nbsp; I\'m talking about a bunch of badass guys &ndash;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kittinger.html\"> Joe Kittinger</a>, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp.html\">John Paul Stapp</a>, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dix.html\">Drew Dix</a>, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/leonov.html\">Viktor Leonov</a>, Chuck Yeager and Carlos Hathcock &ndash; and doing my best not to sweat profusely or swear like a fucking sailor.&nbsp; I\'m including my write up on Yeager below just in case you forgot how much ass he kicked (spoiler: it was a lot).<br /><br />ALSO &ndash; If you haven\'t checked it out yet, <a href=\"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/guts-glory-ben-thompson/1118879488?ean=9780316320504\">here\'s the link</a> to pre-order my new book <em>Guts &amp; Glory: The American Civil War</em>, which is the first in a new series of badass history books I\'m working on for middle school kids.&nbsp; It\'s out in October.&nbsp; My deadline is for the second book, <em>The Vikings</em>, which will be released in May provided that I actually finish it on time tonight.&nbsp; The third book will be on World War II and I have to somehow find a way to write that entire book by October 15<sup>th</sup>, which is a deadline I don\'t even want to think about right now.<br /><br />ALSO ALSO &ndash; If you haven\'t got your Kickstarter yet, <a href=\"mailto:benthompson23@yahoo.com\" target=\"_blank\">email me</a>.&nbsp; I\'m boxing and sending out another shipment of returns/lost in mail/did not receive on Monday and I\'ll include yours in there.&nbsp; Once everybody gets their shit I\'ll post whatever extra decks I have on the site for people to order.<br /><br />See ya next week.&nbsp; Send prayers and good karma my way if you get a chance, not only for this anxiety-inducing deadline but also for all the extended Kickstarter box packing I\'ll be doing this weekend.&nbsp; Also so that I\'m not rocking huge boogers when they show me on TV, because I haven\'t seen any clips from the show yet and I\'ve got hardcore state fright about watching myself say things on cable television.<br /><br />Thanks!<br />-Ben<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>---</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-family: helvetica; font-size: large;\">Chuck Yeager</span></p>\r\n<p><img style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yeager.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"15\" /></p>\r\n<p>If you were to look up the words \"balls-out\" or \"fearless\" in the Great Big Encyclopedia of Ultimate Badassitude, you\'d probably just see a giant picture of Chuck Yeager\'s scrotum.&nbsp; The man was the world\'s premier test pilot for over three decades, literally getting into giant rocket-propelled flying deathtraps with wings, embarking on the most dangerous flights ever attempted, and blasting through the stratosphere at ludicrous speeds so fast that most lesser people would have their brains blast right out the backs of their heads.&nbsp; The man is an aviation legend, a pioneer in the field of \"going as fast as fucking possible just for the sake of being totally awesome\", and a guy who made a living out of giving the Grim Reaper the finger, spitting in his eye, and/or pounding him in the balls with a two-by-four.</p>\r\n<p>Chuck Yeager\'s adventure in badassitude started in 1941 when he got sick of the Axis powers\' bullshit and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces as an aircraft mechanic.&nbsp; Fixing planes and tightening nuts quickly got boring for Yeager, probably because he didn\'t have to spend every waking hour warding off the ominous Black Hand of Death, so he transferred to aviation and became a fighter pilot instead.&nbsp; On just his eighth combat mission Yeager\'s P-51 was shot down over the French countryside, but he didn\'t even give a crap.&nbsp; Chuck joined up with the French Resistance, helped them make some bombs to throw at the Nazis, and eventually escaped back to England.&nbsp; Oh yeah, and he won the Bronze Star for throwing a seriously-wounded American pilot over his shoulder and carrying this dude across the motherfucking Pyrenees Mountains.</p>\r\n<p>Getting shot down by the fucking Krauts only served to get Chuck Yeager really really ripshit pissed off, and he immediately went back and became one of the war\'s few \"Aces in a Day\", blasting the shit out of five German Me-109s in just a couple of hours.&nbsp; Not long after that he won the Distinguished Flying Cross for being one of the first Americans to ever take down a badass Nazi Me-262 jet fighter.&nbsp; During the war, he recorded 13 official aircraft kills over the course of 61 missions, and by the time he was sent back home he had already achieved the rank of Captain.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yeager2.bmp\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But shit was just getting started for Chuck Yeager in terms of limitless badassitude and pushing-it-to-the-limit-ness.&nbsp; His experience as both a mechanic and a badass fucking fighter pilot got him attached to the Aeronautical Systems Flight Test Division back in the States, where his chief duty was to test-fly repaired aircraft to make sure they were airworthy - an exercise that was basically one step removed from playing Russian Roulette with an automatic pistol.&nbsp; During his tenure flying around in a bunch of \"hopefully functional\" airplanes, Yeager so greatly impressed his superiors with his amazing ability to not die in a giant flaming inferno that he was selected to test-fly the new rocket-powered experimental Bell X-1 prototype aircraft.&nbsp; This was a pretty big deal, since he was chosen from a field of 125 senior pilots with buttloads of flying experience, and he definitely lived up to the task.&nbsp; Even though he had broken two ribs the day before and was in so much pain that he could barely get the cockpit hatch closed, Chuck Yeager sat behind the controls of this giant flying explosion and prepared to do what no man had ever done before - break the sound barrier.&nbsp; On 14 October 1947 Yeager went completely balls-out full-throttle, hitting Mach 1.07 and becoming the first man to ever travel faster than the speed of sound, proving that it was possible, in fact, to travel that fast without having all of your internal organs disintegrate and turn into a thick disgusting soup (before this, scientists weren\'t so sure).&nbsp; For his amazing fearlessness in the face of probably-certain death, he won the Congressional Silver Medal of Honor.&nbsp; To give you some indication of how fucking huge this accomplishment was, his MoH citation states that it is, \"For consipicuous gallantry and a total disregard for his own personal safety.\"</p>\r\n<p>Awesome.</p>\r\n<p>Some dude broke Yeager\'s air speed record by busting out Mach 2 in 1953, but Chuck wasn\'t the sort of total fucking badass who was going to roll over and die just because someone stole his claim to being the \"Fastest Man Alive.\"&nbsp; No, he sought vengeance pretty much immediately.&nbsp; A mere <em>two months</em> after his record was broken, Chuck Yeager hit Mach 2.44 in a Bell X-1A.&nbsp; He went so fucking completely over-the-top balls-out that immedately after he hit the fastest speed ever recorded, the plane went completely out of control, plummeting 51,000 feet in the span of 51 seconds (!!) but Chuck didn\'t even blink.&nbsp; He just said, \"fuck you plane!\", pulled out of the dive mere feet from the ground, and flew back to safety.</p>\r\n<p>After serving as the United States\' premier test pilot for over nine years Yeager became the first-ever commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School, where he trained the first generation of badass NASA astronauts.&nbsp; He also served as an Air Force squadron commander in Europe for a while, and led the 405th Tactical Fighter Wing in the Vietnam War - personally logging 127 combat missions in a B-57 bomber.&nbsp; He retired as a Brigadier General in 1975 and spent much of his free time afterwards working as a consultant for the USAF and NASA.&nbsp; His final flight was in 1997 - the 50th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier - when he hit Mach 1 in an F-15 Eagle at the age of 74.&nbsp; During his decades-spanning career, Chuck Yeager logged over 10,000 hours of flight in 155 different military aircraft and completely re-defined what it meant to be badass, fearless, and balls-to-the-wall all the goddamned time.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yeager1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.medalofhonor.com/ChuckYeager.htm\" target=\"blank\">MedalofHonor.com</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><img src=\"../images/576527810/benandbook.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"9\" height=\"16\" /></p>','2014-08-08','576527810','hardcore.png','hardcore-small.png','Hardcore Heroes','Quick update for Friday 8/8.',''),('Jalil Zandi','May 2, 1951','April 1, 2001','Garmsar, Iran','20th-century Iranian Pilot','<p>Are you ready to have you fucking mind blown?&nbsp; <em>Top Gun </em>is based on a true story.</p>\r\n<p>Yes, <em>Top Gun</em>.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sure, it&rsquo;s more &ldquo;inspired by true events&rdquo; than &ldquo;based on a true story&rdquo; but that shit was ripped from the damn headlines of August 19<sup>th</sup>, 1981, when a hardcore pair of the most totally-rad fighter aircraft of all time went ballistic on some fuckin&rsquo; enemies of Democracy and splashed a couple Soviet-constructed Sukhois in the Mediterranean during the first live-fire combat experience the Grumman F-14 Tomcat would see in its long and illustrious career of turning state-of-the-art Russkie tech into heaping chunks of white-hot garbage.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> There&rsquo;s a reason friggin&rsquo; <br /> <a href=\"http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/83/skystriker/\">G.I. Joe used this</a> as their preferred<br /> air superiority fighter.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So I went into this week with every intention of writing about the first time a pair of badass F-14 Tomcats planted the righteous heat-seeking Fist of Freedom up the tailpipe of some America-hating enemy pilot&rsquo;s fuselage, but honestly the entire engagement lasted literally forty-five seconds and I think I can sum that shit up for you in like a paragraph and a half.</p>\r\n<p>Basically, in the late 1970s, evil dictator and well-known insane-person Muammar Gaddafi seized power over Libya and declared a no-fly zone over a huge stretch of International Waters off the coast of North Africa.&nbsp; So, naturally, in 1981 US President Ronald Regan launched Operation NOBODY GIVES A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK MUAMMAR GADDAFI and parked a pair of 110,000-ton aircraft carriers right in the middle of the place Gaddafi told him to stay away from and dared the Libyan dictator to do shit about it.&nbsp; Gaddafi was nuts, but he had balls, and he sent out two Su-22 Fitter attack aircraft to engage the Combat Air Patrol of the USS <em>Nimitz</em> &ndash; a pair of U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats from fighter squadron VF-41, better known as &ldquo;The Black Aces&rdquo;.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Libyan Su-22s</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The F-14s, callsign Fast Eagle 102 and Fast Eagle 107, did something awesome, kicked it into overdrive, accelerated at zone five afterburner, and closed head-on to within 1,000 yards of the Libyans at a speed of 540 knots (621 mph).&nbsp; The Libyans responded by firing a missile that sort of vaguely arced in the Black Aces&rsquo; direction, which triggered the American &ldquo;don&rsquo;t fire until fired upon first&rdquo; protocol.&nbsp; The Tomcat squadron leader, Commander Hank Kleeman, dove in at the first Su-22, waited for him to break out of his turn, and annihilated it with a Sidwinder missile.&nbsp; The second Tomcat, flown by Lieutenant &ldquo;Music&rdquo; Muczynski, fell in behind the Libyan flight leader, who went into a climb and roll to try and evade.&nbsp; Music stuck with him, then unleashed a fucking Sidewinder from such a close range that Music had to crank a 6G straight vertical climb to avoid crashing into the wrecked fuselage and accidentally teamkilling himself.&nbsp; Both Libyan pilots ejected into the water and shook their fists angrily at the sky while the exceptionally-sweaty radar tech dudes in the <em>Nimitz </em>CIC clapped and high-fived each other.</p>\r\n<p>And that&rsquo;s basically it.&nbsp; Mav and Iceman returned to base, somehow miraculously landed their supersonic fighter aircraft on the deck of an aircraft carrier (this is by far the most difficult part of the <em>Top Gun </em>video game), and it was all big smiles, high fives, you can be my wingman any time, bro fist bump, and sail off into the sunset to bang Kelly McGillis and convert to Scientology.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi3.PNG\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>And that was basically going to be my entire article this week.&nbsp; That is, until I started digging into the operational history of the F-14 Tomcat and came across some seriously insane shit that BLEW MY MIND EVEN HARDER THAN THE FUCKING TOP GUN THING.</p>\r\n<p>You ready for this shit?&nbsp; The top-scoring fighter pilot with the most air-to-air kills from the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat is an Iranian dude named Jalil.</p>\r\n<p>And he recorded all of those kills while flying for the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force.</p>\r\n<p>And he looks like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> what up ladies</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I don&rsquo;t know, maybe this is common knowledge or some shit, but I had no idea that friggin&rsquo; Iran was the only other country in the world that operates the F-14 Tomcat, and that they still have twenty-something operational aircraft to this day.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Apparently, back in the early 70s the pro-western Shah of Iran had a big problem with the fucking Soviets flying bullshit recon flights over his airspace, so he went to the USA and asked if we had anything capable of blasting a MiG-25 Foxbat out of the sky.&nbsp; The US was like, &ldquo;well, we got F-14 Tomcats and F-15 Eagles, you pick,&rdquo; so the Shah bought two billion dollars&rsquo; worth of F-14s and a missiles and other stuff to go with it.&nbsp; Then he sent a bunch of his best pilots and mechanics to the states to be trained by US Navy personnel in the operation and maintenance of the aircraft.&nbsp; By 1979, Iran had almost 80 F-14s and over 120 qualified pilots to fly them.&nbsp; The crazy thing is that some folks think this two billion in funds actually kept the F-14 project alive, because military high command was considering just scrapping it.</p>\r\n<p>We&rsquo;d given him all this shit because we wanted him to use it to kill Russians.&nbsp; Instead, he got his ass overthrown by a radical Shi&rsquo;a Muslim cleric known as the Ayatolla, who pretty much hated the USA and everything it stood for but kept the Tomcats for himself anyways because, let&rsquo;s be honest, they&rsquo;re really fucking cool.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Iranian Air Force Major Jalil Zandi was a daredevil, balls-to-the-wall fighter pilot with an awesome &lsquo;stache, a badass love of awesome aviator sunglasses, and a reputation for taking the Highway to the Danger Zone and doing the sort of awesome coffee-spilling Ghost Rider requesting fly by shit that got Maverick in trouble like <em>all the time</em>.&nbsp; A daredevil asskicker who pulled three Gs every time he threw on a pair of shades, Zandi had been one of the pilots hand-selected to visit the United States and train on the Tomcat with the most badass pilots the US Navy had to offer.&nbsp; So, naturally, when the Ayatolla came to power and declared a new ultra-conservative Islamic republic, Jalil Zandi was one of the first guys arrested at gunpoint in the middle of the night, thrown in jail, and sentenced to ten years in prison for disloyalty to the new regime.&nbsp; Because apparently the fact that this guy had once set foot in the United States far outweighed the benefits of having a highly-trained F-14 Tomcat pilot on his flight roster.</p>\r\n<p>This happened across the country.&nbsp; Many of the F-14 pilots and techs who had trained in the states were arrested or killed, but not before some of the techs sabotaged the aircraft and missiles on their way out the door.</p>\r\n<p>In 1980, however, when a massive rampaging Iraqi tank army under Saddam Hussein launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, the Ayatolla changed his mind and had his former pilots released from prison to save their country from utter destruction at the hands of an Iraqi madman.</p>\r\n<p>Amazingly, Jalil Zandi walked out of prison, dusted off his flight suit, clenched his teeth, and resolved to fight for his country no matter what.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next EIGHT YEARS, Jalil Zandi was in pretty much constant combat against the MiGs and Mirages of the Iraqi Air Force.&nbsp; Flying at the head of an ever-shrinking operational force of F-14 Tomcat fighters (the United States refused to ship replacement parts, missiles, or weapons for the Tomcat, so by 1986 the operational strength of the Iranian Tomcat fighter wing had dropped from 80 to 25), Zandi constantly took to the air and flew straight-on into ever-increasing swarms of enemy fighters that vastly outnumbered him.&nbsp; Blasting left and right with missiles and his 20mm Vulcan gun, Zandi shredded enemy MiGs without mercy.&nbsp; He was tasked primarily with defending Iranian oil fields, sometimes taking to the air against entire squadrons of Iraqi Air Force units.</p>\r\n<p>In one of his first engagements, Zandi blasted a pair of MiG-23s on his own, nailing one with a long-range Phoenix missile and the other with a Sidewinder.&nbsp; In another engagement he escorted a massive Iranian oil tanker plane on a dangerous run deep through Iraqi airspace and found himself tangling with a squadron of MiGs.&nbsp; The plane he was escorting survived.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Counting air-to-air kills has always been an exercise in making yourself completely fucking insane, and it&rsquo;s especially true with a war like the Iran-Iraq War where every side is run by an intense Orwelllian propaganda machine that claims every single battle was won because their guys ran out and killed ten thousand of the enemy with their bare hands without losing a single soldier.&nbsp; Iran officially credits Major Jalil Zandi with destroying eight enemy aircraft, with three more listed as &ldquo;probable&rdquo; to bring his total to 11 &ndash; making him a two-time fighter ace.&nbsp; Iraq claims he only shot down three, which, incidentally, would still be enough to tie the number of kills earned by the United States&rsquo; top-scoring fighter pilot of the supersonic age.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll never actually know the truth, but I&rsquo;d argue that the fact this dude survived eight years of non-stop war in the cockpit of an F-14 despite limited repair facilities, no backup, no ability to replace his missiles or ammunition, and being constantly outnumbered by huge margins is more than evidence enough that this guy fucking kicks ass.</p>\r\n<p>Major Zandi&rsquo;s final fight took place in October of 1988, when he found himself going up against eight badass French-built Mirage F1 fighters.&nbsp; Zandi fought hard, scoring two unconfirmed kills in the engagement, but eventually was shot to shit and had to bug out of there.&nbsp; He somehow limped his aircraft (which by this point looked like Charlie Sheen&rsquo;s plane at the end of <em>Hot Shots</em>) across the Iranian border, then ejected when his second engine shut down on him.&nbsp; His F-14 crashed and burned, but he made it back to base in one piece and spent the rest of the war running things from the ground as a General.&nbsp; Which ain&rsquo;t bad.&nbsp; He retired in 2001.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/122867315593/zandi8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://theaviationist.com/2013/08/19/tomcats-2-libya-0/#.Uj3kAxCE6B4\">http://theaviationist.com/2013/08/19/tomcats-2-libya-0/#.Uj3kAxCE6B4</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/persian-cats-9242012/?story=fullstory&amp;page=1\">http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/persian-cats-9242012/?story=fullstory&amp;page=1</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0077.shtml\">http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0077.shtml</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_214.shtml\">http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_214.shtml</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.iiaf.net/iiafmisc/announcements/announcements.html\">http://www.iiaf.net/iiafmisc/announcements/announcements.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?221151-Iranian-Tomcat-F-14/page3\">http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?221151-Iranian-Tomcat-F-14/page3</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://luckypuppy.net/the-f-14-tomcat-in-combat/\">http://luckypuppy.net/the-f-14-tomcat-in-combat/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalil_Zandi\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalil_Zandi</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-14_Tomcat_operational_history#Combat_history\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-14_Tomcat_operational_history#Combat_history</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Cooper, Tom.&nbsp; <em>Iranian F-14 Tomcat Units in Combat</em>.&nbsp; Osprey, 2012.</p>','2014-08-15','122867315593','zandi-small.jpg','zandi.jpg','Jalil Zandi','The highest scoring F-14 Tomcat fighter ace of all time.','');
INSERT INTO `weekly` VALUES ('John III Sobieski','August 17, 1629','June 17, 1696','Olesko, Poland','17th-century Polish General','<p>I may have mentioned this before, but even though I get shitloads of email from all around the world two of the biggest non-English-as-a-Primary-Language supporters of Badass of the Week come from the good people of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/urbanowicz.html\">Poland</a> and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/alparslan.html\">Turkey</a>.&nbsp; While some of you might think this is a really weird combination, it actually makes a lot of sense &ndash; these are two ultra-badass historical military powers, each of which features centuries of hardcore asskicking motherfuckers who <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ataturk.html\">blasted the shit</a> out of their enemies on battlefields <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski.html\">across the globe</a>, yet never seem to get the respect and attention they deserve from stick-up-the-ass military historians who can&rsquo;t get a boner for any warrior that was born east of Berlin.&nbsp; Centuries of lock-step Polish battlefield prowess get boiled down to DURRR HORSES CHARGED PANZERS LOL, and even though the Turks conquered the entire Middle East, North Africa, and half of Europe and fought off multiple invasion attempts as recently as Gallipoli you still can&rsquo;t order a shawarma in Oxford without some fool talking about &ldquo;The old sick leprous wretched corpse-man of Europe.&rdquo;&nbsp; It&rsquo;s fucked up.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well this week I get the honor of talking about the high-water mark in both of these countries&rsquo; epic military history &ndash; the Battle of Vienna in 1683.&nbsp; A hardcore, blood-and-guts conflict that marked the furthest expansion of the Ottoman Empire as well as the most glorious military accomplishment in Polish history, when two all-time shit-wrecking civilizations went sword-to-sword and didn&rsquo;t stop face-shanking until the entire battlefield was littered with slain warriors and carnage.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski1.PNG\" alt=\"\" /><br />WHAAAAAAAT</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The tale begins in Belgrade, in the year 1683.&nbsp; For the last <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=46114175341\">few centuries</a> the Ottoman Turkish Empire has been the dominant force in Asia and East Europe, with all-powerful Turkish Sultans and their hardcore armies of Janissary riflemen stomping fucking scrotums left and right from Morocco to Hungary.&nbsp; Constantinople has fallen, Turkish hordes have swept aside resistance in the Balkans and Hungary, Budapest is in Ottoman control, and the Pope is shitting a brick just thinking about the prospect of the great Sultan once again turning faithful Christians into something sort of resembling the contents of a chunky can of dog food.</p>\r\n<p>A few years back, under the capable eye of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turks had made it to the gates of Vienna.&nbsp; Fucking Vienna, like Mozart and shit, and here were the Turks thinking about bulldozing it to the ground with artillery and building a mosque on the smoldering ruins.&nbsp; Suleiman had gotten close &ndash; really close &ndash; but in 1683 it was the Sultan Mehmed IV who had his eyes on the prized possession of the Holy Roman Empire.&nbsp; He dispatched his Grand Vizier, an almost-universally-despised dude named Kara Mustafa who was far more interested in amassing personal glory than in kicking balls for the Sultan, and sent him on the march with 200,000 of the toughest warriors the Turks had to offer (numbers on the size of this army range from 90,000 to 300,000, so who knows).&nbsp; Badass Janissaries, heavy artillery, Mongol warriors from Crimea, and even Romanian and Hungarian knights headed out to exert the Sultan&rsquo;s dominance over the godless Christian infidels of the West.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />EPIC HEADGEAR</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A Holy Roman Empire army marched to face the Grand Vizier, but the forces of the Duke of Lorraine were ridiculously outnumbered as fuck at and at the Battle of Petronell in July 1683 they were thoroughly beaten down and had two Imperial Princes killed in action.&nbsp; The Duke of Lorraine withdrew in a hurry, and Kara Mustafa was besieging Vienna in under a week.&nbsp; The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold just happened to be chilling in Vienna when this shit went down, and barely managed to bravely flee the city before the Turkish artillerists were bombing cannonballs in his face.&nbsp; In his wake he left behind one of the biggest and richest cities in his empire, which at this point was defended by the brave General Ernst Rudiger, Count of Starhemburg, whose 16,000 soldiers were supported by 8,000 civilian fighters and 700 able-bodied students from the University of Vienna.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Opposing them was a massive field of 200,000 Turkish warriors who had spent the previous couple generations perfecting the art of reducing enemy cities to rubble and plundering them with impunity.</p>\r\n<p>Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa ordered his men to begin the siege.&nbsp; They immediately got to work digging trenches, building fortifications, setting up their cannons, and digging massive tunnels to undermine the walls of the lightly-defended city.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Enter the greatest King in Polish history &ndash; John III Sobieski, better (and more accurately) known as Jan Sobieski.&nbsp; A big guy with an awesome \'stache who looks like he\'d be more at home as the protagonist in a <em>Root Beer Tapper </em>clone than at the head of a formation of badass lance-wielding heavy cavalry.&nbsp;&nbsp; But Sobieski isn\'t about to dole out old-timey folk wisdom behind the bar while wiping down a frosty mug with a cloth towel &ndash; he\'s a fucking hardcore lifetime warrior who cut his teeth battling scimitar-wielding Cossack horsemen and charging head-on into Mongol cavalry formations at the head of a terrifying regiment of Winged Hussars that he raised with his own money.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and if you forgot who the goddamn <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hussars.html\">Winged Hussars</a> are, let me refresh your memory:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />FUCKIN XTREEEEEEME</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>At the Battle of Beresteczko in 1651, Jan Sobieski led the Hussars in an attack that smashed the light cavalry formations of the Ukrainian Cossacks.&nbsp; In 1664 he battled Swedish invaders at the gates of Warsaw.&nbsp; In 1667 he led warriors against the Mongol Tatars, raising 8,000 men with his own money and successfully defending the city of Podhajce against 20,000 steppe horsemen with the sheer force of his own impenetrable fucking steel ballsack.&nbsp; At Chocim he destroyed 20,000 Turkish front-line warriors and captured over 100 pieces of artillery, an heroic asskicking that made him such a national hero that he was elected King of Poland a year later based on his own popularity alone.&nbsp; Known as \"The Unvanquished Northern Lion\", by a Turkish army that had the good sense and honor to appreciate a righteously-hardcore badass even when he wasn\'t fighting under the same flag, Jan Sobieski had fought his way to the Crown on military awesomeness alone, then went home at the end of every day to share a bed with a fucking hot French countess he\'d brought in straight from the court of Louis XIV.</p>\r\n<p>And, more importantly even than his track record kicking ass in the name of Poland, Jan Sobieski was a man of honor.&nbsp; So when the Pope sent him a letter desperately requesting he send aid to the battered defenders of Vienna, Sobieski assembled every single goddamn warrior he had &ndash; at the expense even of garrisoning his own cities against attack &ndash; and personally rode to the rescue at the head of a force that was 20,000 men strong.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski5.PNG\" alt=\"\" /><br />Let\'s do this.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Back in Vienna, things were bad.&nbsp; Real bad.&nbsp; The Turks, masters of siege warfare, were smashing the walls to cinders with their heavy artillery.&nbsp; Boasting the best gunners and heavy infantry in the world, the Turks were also trench and mine warfare experts, and they had their hard-as-nails sappers digging intense tunnels under the walls of Vienna, stuffing them with gunpowder, then blasting them open to create breaches in the defenses.&nbsp; Sometimes the Viennese dug counter-tunnels, with led to what-the-hell-is-even-going-on underground D&amp;D sword-and-gunfight battles that took place 10 feet underground in a space roughly four feet across, like something out of a Vietnam movie or some Iwo Jima shit.&nbsp; Still, the walls held.&nbsp; The Viennese fought back with everything they had, desperately resisting the impressive Turkish onslaught.&nbsp; They were ravaged by disease, barfing their guts out and disintegrating from plague.&nbsp; They were losing key bastions and positions and trenches daily.&nbsp; Still, for 30 days, they held.</p>\r\n<p>Then, on September 2<sup>nd</sup>, the Turks heroically stormed a hail of gunfire to take the Burg Ravelin &ndash; the crucial defensive point on the Vienna walls.&nbsp; Four days after that, another mine blew up, bringing down an outer wall, and the Turks assaulted it and overran the beleaguered, sick defenders in yet another trench just outside the city gates.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>This point officially marks the high water mark of the Ottoman Empire.&nbsp; For all intents and purposes, they\'d done it.&nbsp; Even General Rudiger and those Vienna University Halo-playing stoner-soldiers knew it.&nbsp; The Turks had taken the walls.&nbsp; They had Vienna dead to rights.&nbsp; The gateway to the West was about to be open.&nbsp; Tonight, they would sleep in Vienna, on enemy soil.</p>\r\n<p>Yet, somewhat amazingly, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa waited.&nbsp; For some stupid reason, he didn\'t order the final attack.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The reigning theory is that Vizier Mustafa wanted the glory for himself.&nbsp; He knew that Vienna was dead, but if he assaulted it he\'d have to split all the loot with his men who had fought so hard for it.&nbsp; If he got the Viennese to surrender, he\'d get all the glory and riches for himself.&nbsp; So he demanded surrender.&nbsp; Rudiger told him to fuck off.</p>\r\n<p>Then, on the morning of September 12<sup>th</sup>, 1683, almost a week after he should have stormed the walls, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa turned to his right flank and noticed something he wasn\'t really expecting.</p>\r\n<p>King Jan Sobieski of Poland.&nbsp; And 76,000 Polish, German, Saxon, Bavarian, and Imperial troops riding hard behind him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />HEY YOOOOOOOOOO</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Turks fought like heroes, adjusting to their flank attack and resisting with everything they had, but once again Kara Mustafa fucked them.&nbsp; Rather than redirect all 200,000 guys to repel the attack, he kept half his guys in the trenches facing the city and somehow thought he could hold back the largest cavalry charge in human history with only half his force.</p>\r\n<p>It didn\'t work.&nbsp; Racing down from the hills as hard as he could, Jan Sobieski led an epic attack of heavy European cavalry through the Wienerwald Forest (hahahahaha) and straight into the flank of the Turkish formation.&nbsp; The Turks battled bravely.&nbsp; They didn\'t break right away.&nbsp; For several hours the infantry of the Turks, known for their hard fighting, battled like the kind of warriors who conquer kingdoms.&nbsp; But in the end, the mighty Poles were too much.&nbsp; Sobieski raced ahead, Hussar wings fluttering behind him, on a final charge that smashed through them, cut off their flank, sacked their baggage train and forced the Turks to flee.&nbsp; They withdrew in good order &ndash; their defeat had been decisive and total, but hadn\'t inflicted an insane number of casualties.</p>\r\n<p>Still, Sobieski rode into the gates of Vienna a hero.&nbsp; The Savior of Christendom.&nbsp; Because he totally was.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />I rule.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Jan Sobieski drove the Turks back to Romania, and for his failure and dipshittitude the Grand Vizier was choked to death with a bowstring on the streets of Belgrade on the orders of Sultan Mehmed IV.&nbsp; Sobieski returned home and won fame with his people for promoting poetry, painting, and art, and for signing \"Eternal Peace\" documents both with Russia and Germany (even though neither of these lasted very long).&nbsp; He is still remembered as the unsung hero of Western Civilization, because without his military might and ball-stomping cavalry we\'d probably all be speaking Turkish at this point.</p>\r\n<p>And that\'s something we should all keep in mind when we think about the great military civilizations in history &ndash; if it wasn\'t for the Poles, the Turks would potentially have ruled Western Europe.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/28505525333/sobieski9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links/Sources:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304774/John-III-Sobieski\">http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304774/John-III-Sobieski</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14061c.htm\">http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14061c.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.polska.pl/Jan,III,Sobieski,%281629,%E2%80%93,1696%29,1964.html\">http://en.polska.pl/Jan,III,Sobieski,%281629,%E2%80%93,1696%29,1964.html</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Agoston, Gabor and Bruce Alan Masters.&nbsp; <em>Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire</em>.&nbsp; Infobase, 2009.</p>\r\n<p>Grant, R.G.&nbsp; <em>Commanders</em>.&nbsp; DK Publishing, 2010.</p>\r\n<p>Halecki, Oskar, and O. Forst de Battaglia.&nbsp; <em>The Cambridge History of Poland</em>.&nbsp; Cambridge University Press, 1971.</p>\r\n<p>Millar, Simon.&nbsp; <em>Vienna 1683</em>.&nbsp; Osprey, 2008.</p>\r\n<p>Young, William.&nbsp; <em>International Politics and Warfare in the Age of Louis XIV</em>.&nbsp; iUniverse, 2004.</p>','2014-08-22','28505525333','sobieski.jpg','sobieski-small.jpg','Jan Sobieski','The man who saved Europe by leading the largest cavalry charge in human history.','\"I came, I saw, God conquered.\"'),('Kamla Devi','c. 1950','N/A','Uttarakhand, India','21st-century Indian Survivalist','<p>Leopards kick ass.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sure, they might look like an overgrown spotted version of your housecat running amok in a fucking spazzed-out catnip psychosis, but look at this an awesome video of a fucking leopard assassinating an antelope with a badass Backflip of Death and tell me that it doesn&rsquo;t pump you up so goddamn hard you want to smash your head through a dump truck and scare the shit out of whoever happens to be driving it:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/t6KjA85XIkY\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>This shit is like the National Geographic version of a fucking SAS sniper in a ghille suit taking down his target in the middle of a 100-meter-dash by flying side-kicking it in the fucking face and then bodyflipping it with his teeth.&nbsp; In the dark, hellish nightmare landscape of popular culture where the Discovery Channel of all fucking places has turned Shark Week coverage of the goddamned <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/megalodon.html\">Megalodon</a> into something the <em><a href=\"http://www.viralfiesta.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/AAG2.jpg\">Ancient Aliens dude</a></em> would jerk off to, it&rsquo;s good to remember every once in a while that fucking <em>nature kicks ass </em>without the help of supernatural vampire zombie alien shit, and that many biological organisms in your own backyard <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=11577785209\">c</a><a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=11577785209\">an utterly destroy</a> a miserable soft human body in a number of horrific and tragically-awesome-looking ways.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Kamla Devi found this shit out for herself the hard way on Sunday.&nbsp; When this 54-year-old single mother from the rural northern part of India was carrying a bucket of water to irrigate her fields, she suddenly found herself face-to-tooth with a six-foot man-eating leopard that outweighed her by twenty pounds and had a mad desire to literally claw her fucking face off and devour her insides.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s another video for you.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s a clip of a leopard completely freaking out, losing its shit, and attacking like a hundred people at the same time because it&rsquo;s pissed off and awesome.&nbsp; These creatures are fast, agile, and way bigger than you&rsquo;d think, and you sure as shit don&rsquo;t want to be on the receiving end of its mutant housecat fury &ndash; even though half the guys in this video are trained professionals trying to tranq and relocate the creature they&rsquo;re still shitting bricks when it looks like this claw-laden beast is about to painfully disembowel them.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/W4h9_91YmZA\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\"></iframe><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Being a single mother in a dirt-poor region of rural India isn&rsquo;t exactly a fucking picnic, but Kamla Devi never complains about that shit.&nbsp; She gets things done.&nbsp; This is a woman who supported herself and her son by starting up her own farm in Uttarakhand, just along the India-Tibet border, and she sustains her family by working the fields for hours every day, doing whatever she has to do to stay alive and provide for her child.</p>\r\n<p>Around 10am on Sunday, August 24<sup>th</sup>, Kamla was carrying a couple buckets out to the field to irrigate her crops when suddenly she heard a rustle and caught the ever-so-short glimpse of spotted death lunging for her throat.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Man-eating leopards aren&rsquo;t <em>that </em>weird of an occurrence in India, with a little over a thousand people dying from leopard attacks in the last hundred or so years, but I&rsquo;d still probably guess that the last fucking thing you&rsquo;d expect to see on Sunday morning is a man-sized cat trying to eat your head.&nbsp; With lightning-quick (you might say &ldquo;cat-like&rdquo;) agility, the leopard appeared from its hiding place, charged forward in an instant, and lunged for the 54-year-old mother&rsquo;s throat.&nbsp; Kamla Devi got her arms up to defend herself, grabbing at her attacker, but the leopard bit hard down on her hand, shattering it in two places, then swiped at her with its claws, cutting a gaping wound across her face that immediately started gushing blood.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Kamla Devi was momentarily frozen with shock and pain and terror.&nbsp; Then she got mad.&nbsp; This woman was a survivor, and she wasn&rsquo;t going down without a fight.</p>\r\n<p>She clenched her other hand around the farming tool she just happened to be carrying with her at the time:&nbsp; A big fucking scary-looking iron sickle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> \"I gathered my courage to fight back. I promised myself that this is not my last day here.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The next time Mister Whiskers accidentally scrapes your thumb while pawing at a piece of string and you go running to the medicine cabinet in a quest for hydrogen peroxide and neon band-aids, clutching your hand and complaining to your family about how &ldquo;he got me really good, this is a bad one&rdquo; and shit, try and picture this scenario for a second.&nbsp; Take Mister Whiskers, make him roughly the size of a professional soccer player, and then have him crack you across the nose with a fist full of razor-sharp claws and tell me if you&rsquo;re capable of doing anything other than drowning in a two-inch-deep puddle of your own blood and failure.</p>\r\n<p>Kamla Devi is not a large woman.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know her size, but from the pictures I&rsquo;ve seen she looks quite small.&nbsp; Yet here she is, face-to-face with an angry man-eating leopard, bleeding profusely with a broken hand in a field that&rsquo;s miles away from anyone who could possibly help you.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well this chick didn&rsquo;t give up.&nbsp; She grabbed that sickle, threw the leopard off her, and began an epic showdown that lasted nearly thirty minutes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Multiple times the leopard charged into her, swatting and biting.&nbsp; Every time she fought it back, swinging with her sickle and battering it with her shattered hand.&nbsp; Its claws drove into her legs and torso, gashing huge wounds that soaked her clothing in blood.&nbsp; Still, Kamla Devi fought on, grabbing the leopard&rsquo;s ear, punching at its mouth, and swinging savagely with a farming tool that was now being used as a weapon of mass destruction.&nbsp; She blocked a paw strike with her good arm, but the force of the blow broke that arm as well.&nbsp; Still, with a broken arm and two broken hand bones on the other arm, Devi grabbed, wrestled, and swung for her life, rolling on the ground with the leopard, rolling, fiercely fighting and stabbing.</p>\r\n<p>Devi cites the life-or-death hand-to-hand combat as proceeding for &ldquo;almost a half hour&rdquo;, much of which involved the two being locked in a grapple.&nbsp; If this is true, it&rsquo;s like going six 5-minute MMA rounds with a fucking man-eating carnivore at the top of the evolutionary food chain.&nbsp; Which is truly insane.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi61.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> &ldquo;I thought I was dead but I did not lose patience and courage.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>However long it lasted, the cloud dust eventually settled on the battlefield, leaving two warriors lying in a heap on the dirt and grass.&nbsp; One of them was dead.&nbsp; Kamla Devi was alive.</p>\r\n<p>She then proceeded to limp her way over a mile back to her village with a gushing head wound, three broken bones, and cuts across her entire body, nearly passing out from pain, exhaustion, and blood loss all the way.</p>\r\n<p>She made it to her village, collapsing in the arms of her friends and family.&nbsp; It would take another two hours before she could get to the nearest hospital.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi52.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />\"She\'s dead Jim.\"<br />\"Oh, wait...\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It took three hours of surgery and fifty stiches to get Kamla Devi into stable condition at the hospital.&nbsp; The doctors who worked on her told CNN they had no idea how the fuck she made it out of there alive, let alone walked back to her town.</p>\r\n<p>But you shoulda seen the other guy.</p>\r\n<p>The head of Kamla Devi&rsquo;s villiage submitted her for a bravery award with the Indian government saying that &ldquo;her story will inspire the hill women not to give up fight come what may.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>I&rsquo;d add that it&rsquo;s not just the hill people who are gonna be inspired by the story of a badass dirt-poor 50-year-old single mother with a rusty sickle refusing to die, kicking the shit out of a 6-foot leopard in hand-to-hand combat Liam Neeson wolf-puncher style, and walking home to tell the tale.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/70746177452/kamladevi71.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/11058006/Kamla-Devi-Indian-woman-fights-off-leopard-with-farm-tools-during-30-minute-ordeal.html\">Telegraph.uk</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2734094/Kamla-Devi-Doctors-say-brave-widow-fought-leopard-attack-keeping-surgery.html\">Daily Mail</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/27/leopard-killed-indian-woman-kamla-devi\">The Guardian</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/27/world/asia/india-leopard-woman-attack/\">CNN</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.wwfindia.org/about_wwf/priority_species/threatened_species/common_leopard/\">WWF website</a></p>','2014-08-29','70746177452','kamladevi.jpg','kamladevi-small.jpg','Kamla Devi','A 54 year-old single mother in rural India is ambushed by a man-eating leopard.  She fights back with the only thing she has - an iron sickle.',''),('Joseph-Simon Gallieni','April 24, 1849','May 27, 1916','Saint-Beat, France','20th-century French Soldier','<p>On this date exactly one hundred years ago today, French General Joseph Gallieni saved the city of Paris and the combined armies of France and England from encirclement and perpetual Kaiser Wilhelm ass humping in one of the most daring, balls-out military maneuvers of all time &ndash; he stripped the entire garrison of Paris down to basically nothing, loaded all of his back-line troops into a fleet of 600 commandeered motherfucking Paris taxi cabs, and then drove them all at top speed straight up the ass of the entire German army when they least expected it.</p>\r\n<p>At the time he did this, the 65 year-old Gallieni was already a national hero of France, a 43-year veteran of the French Colonial Marines who had fought dozens of wars on at least three continents, and the man who established a significant number of counter-insurgency tactics that are still employed by modern militaries to this day.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> This guy couldn&rsquo;t even read the fucking<br /> newspaper without shit exploding around him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A couple weeks ago I talked about how the Poles and the Turks are two severely-underrated world military powers, but perhaps the most atrociously-maligned fighting force in the world is the fucking French Army.&nbsp; Despite fielding the most hardcore ground forces on the European continent for centuries, throwing down the decomposing corpses of their slain enemies since the days of Charles Martel trampling skulls in 700 AD, for some bullshit reason whenever anyone outside Paris discusses the French military all they want to talk about is how Hitler marched his goons under the Arc d&rsquo;Triomphe (because apparently being one of a dozen countries that were unprepared for the Nazi Blitzkrieg overrides the French successfully bailing the United States out in the Revolution, occupying the burning ruins of Moscow during the Napoleonic Era, battling to the last man against the Germans at Verdun, and holding the lines against German Panzers to save the British Army at Dunkirk).&nbsp; Fuck that.&nbsp; These guys are as tough as they come.</p>\r\n<p>Joseph-Simon Gallieni was born in the southwest part of France, along the Pyrenees Mountains, in 1849.&nbsp; His father, a retired infantry officer turned wine-grower (fun fact: any time a Frenchman retires from his job he is automatically given control of a winery), taught Gallieni the value of working your balls off from sunup to sundown, then shipped his kid off to military academy at the age of 11 so he could accelerate balls-growing and put some hair on his chest while perhaps building character at the same time.&nbsp; Gallieni attended the best military academies in France, became a devout pro-Democracy Republican (even though he was currently serving in the Empire of Napoleon III), and graduated in 1870 as a Second Lieutenant in the French Colonial Marines.</p>\r\n<p>He graduated just in time to be thrown into the front lines of the Franco-Prussian War.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni1a.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /> son of a</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Lieutenant Gallieni and his Marines found themselves on the front lines of the Battle of Sedan in 1870, when his regiment was ordered to hold the town of Bazeilles against an onrushing horde of hardcore pointy-helmet-wearing Bavarian German infantry.&nbsp; In some of the most brutal house-to-house fighting of the war, Gallieni and his men battled through the burning streets of Bazeilles, busting out windows and firing from sniper positions despite being outnumbered ten to one by a horde of German troops.&nbsp; With buildings being pummeled to rubble around them by Prussian artillery fire, Gallieni survived a shrapnel wound and continued to command his men to battle even as his regiment sustained massive casualties from enemy gunfire.&nbsp; For seven hours, the Marines held the line, taking and losing ground with bayonets and rifles, until finally, with his 1000-man regiment reduced to just 19 surviving soldiers, Gallieni&rsquo;s troops ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender.&nbsp; Gallieni was taken to Prussia and interned in a fucking fortress there, but somehow made the best of it &ndash; while he was there he learned to speak fluent German and read every book on German military history that he could get his hands on.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Battle of Bazeilles</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Gallieni was released after the war, returned to France, and was given permission to serve overseas in the colonies.&nbsp; After a brief stay on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, Gallieni went to Senegal, where he was given the dangerous and awesome mission to scout and explore uncharted territory through the Sudan, then negotiate with the native Kings and get permission for France to build a railway line through their turf.&nbsp; Despite a couple dangerous situations and harrowing escapes, Gallieni made it work, and for his efforts he got the Legion of Honor.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After Senegal, Gallieni went to Martinique in the Caribbean for a while, but eventually came back to the Sudan as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1886.&nbsp; In his absence, some shit had gone down in the Sudan (as it tends to do).&nbsp; Some native Muslim warlord named Mahmadu Lamine had gone on a rampage, capturing and plundering a few Senegalese towns and threatening the French garrison, so Gallieni was called in to lay the fucking beatdown and show everyone who was boss.&nbsp; Gallieni&rsquo;s first plan &ndash; which at the time was a ground-breaking maneuver &ndash; was to make peace with every native tribe except Lamine&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Before Gallieni, most Euro colonials figured, fuck it, let&rsquo;s just kill all of these assholes because they&rsquo;re all inferior to us anyway, but Gallieni made a point of allying himself with the tribes to help him isolate his true enemies.&nbsp; Even though he was still a strong imperialist, his method of dealing with insurgency was basically the same one we continue to use to this day &ndash; consolidate one point of strength, cooperate with the locals, adapt your policies to the region you&rsquo;re operating in, and avoid making war with the entire population because that shit costs you men and money that you can&rsquo;t afford to spare.</p>\r\n<p>Using these tactics, Gallieni was able to isolate Lamine, crush his forces, drive him into the jungle, then go into the jungle, find him, and have him executed by firing squad.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> French Marines in Africa.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, well at this point the dudes in France realized that Joseph Gallieni was awesome at kicking the asses of badass guerilla warriors, so in 1892 they sent him to French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) to deal with a hardcore revolutionary Viet warrior named De Tham who had been beating up on the French military in the region since 1887.&nbsp; Gallieni got there, went nuts, defeated De Tham in several battles, recaptured several rebellious Cantons for France, and then had to give up trying to kill the guy when France made peace with him in 1895 (someone else did it for him a few years later).&nbsp; After this, Gallieni was sent to Madagascar, where he put down an anti-French revolt through diplomacy, brute force, and by using his now-perfected tactic of arming loyal locals and using them to beat the shit out of non-loyal locals.&nbsp; Before leaving the island in 1905 he deposed Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar (who wasn&rsquo;t nearly as cool as <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ranavalona.html\">Ranavalona I</a>) and decided, nah, fuck this Queen shit, this place belongs to us now.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">Boom.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Having now fought tooth-and-nail against German infantry, Muslim insurgents, Vietnamese revolutionaries, and African warlords (thereby allowing him to recreate all of American military history in about 25 years), in 1911 the now-62-year-old General Joseph Gallieni returned to France as a national hero.&nbsp; He was given a high administrative position in the French military, but then promptly pissed everyone off by suggesting that France should bolster the defenses on the northern part of the country and alter the military uniform so the soldiers no longer had to wear red pants.&nbsp; Overall French commander Joseph Joffre, who completely fucking hated Gallieni&rsquo;s guts (mostly because a lot of people thought Gallieni should have been overall French commander instead of Joffre), responded by saying all of these ideas were retarded and then sticking Gallieni with the prestigious-yet-pointless position as military governor of the Paris garrison.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Three years later, the Germans initiated World War I by launching a full-scale invasion of France.&nbsp; By attacking from the North, which was lightly defended.&nbsp; The French were still wearing red pants, which kind of made it hard for them to hide from German machine guns.</p>\r\n<p>The results weren&rsquo;t pretty.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A lot of us think of World War I as being a hardcore never-ending slog of Trench Warfare, but in the opening days of the campaign there was a lot more open-air maneuvering than you&rsquo;d think.&nbsp; The initial German onslaught, launched from the north thanks to the Kaiser&rsquo;s complete disregard for Belgian neutrality, caught the combined French and British defenders completely-off guard.&nbsp; Massive casualties were sustained all across the Allied lines as the Germans stormed through huge gaps in the line, routing the British and French and driving them back into something now known as The Great Retreat.</p>\r\n<p>By early September, Joseph Gallieni received word that the entire German army was just a few days&rsquo; march from Paris.&nbsp; You could see them from the top of the Eiffel Tower.&nbsp; The French government shit a brick and withdrew to Bordeaux.&nbsp; The rest of the army fell back beyond the Marne, leaving Gallieni and his small garrison as the only thing standing between the Kaiser&rsquo;s forces and the city of Paris.&nbsp; Gallieni swore to defend the capital to the last man.</p>\r\n<p>But then, just as the Germans were looking like they would waltz right into Paris, something weird happened.</p>\r\n<p>They turned south.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<img style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni5a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Apparently, the German First Army, located at the extreme right of the German lines, didn&rsquo;t view Gallieni and the Paris garrison as a threat.&nbsp; The German commander, General von Kluck, knew that it would be dumb as hell to leave the city completely undefended, so what he decided to do first was to bypass Paris, swing his entire army around the flank of the retreating French army, surround them, fuck them up royally with a few million artillery shells, then come back and storm Paris whenever the fuck he felt like it.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>On paper, this kind of makes sense.&nbsp; What kind of moron would leave Paris, a city of four million people, completely undefended and attack the entire German First Army with just a few thousand reserve troops?</p>\r\n<p>Joseph Gallieni.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni5b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>With complete disregard not only for his direct orders from General Joffre, but also against pretty much every military doctrine on earth, Joseph Gallieni ordered his men to charge into the flank of the German army.&nbsp; They crashed into their foes along the Ourcq River on September 5, 1914, catching von Kluck&rsquo;s Prussians completely by surprise and forcing them to wheel their entire force around to face the new threat.&nbsp; Even though Gallieni&rsquo;s men weren&rsquo;t able to punch through the Germans or fuck them up too bad in a straight-up duel, his tactic was massively successful on a strategic level &ndash; by pinning von Kluck in place, Gallieni had saved the fucking French and British Armies and bought them the opportunity to stop retreating, turn around, and sucker-punch the Kaiser in the ballsack.&nbsp; The entire Allied force attacked in the First Battle of the Marne, stopped the relentless German advance, and forced the Kaiser to order his men to retreat back from Paris.</p>\r\n<p>When he heard the attack was going forward and the Germans were starting to falter, Gallieni commandeered 600 Paris taxi cabs, loaded them up with every single fully-armed troop he had left, and shipped them all out to reinforce the attack.<br /><br />He didn\'t stop attacking until the entire goddamn German army was in full retreat.&nbsp; They wouldn\'t so much as sniff a freshly-baked Parisien baguette for the rest of the war.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni6.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For his actions at the Battle of First Marne, General Joseph Gallieni became a hero of France.&nbsp; He remained the governor of Paris despite requesting multiple transfers for field commands, and then resigned in 1916 due to poor health.&nbsp; He died later that year and was posthumously named a Marshal of France in 1921.</p>\r\n<p>Nowadays there&rsquo;s a French Metro station named after him, which seems appropriate.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/42585931355/gallieni8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/ourcq_clergerie.htm\">http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/ourcq_clergerie.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_ourcq.html\">http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_ourcq.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.webafriqa.net/library/african_proconsuls/gallieni.html\">http://www.webafriqa.net/library/african_proconsuls/gallieni.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gallieni\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gallieni</a></p>','2014-09-05','42585931355','gallieni.png','gallieni-small.png','Joseph Gallieni','Exactly one hundred years ago today, this man saved Paris by fighting the Germans with an army of taxicabs.','“The members of the Government of the Republic have left Paris to give a fresh impulse to national defence.  I have been entrusted with the task of defending Paris against the invader.  That task I will fulfil to the end.”'),('Edward Loder','c. 1948','N/A','Cambridge, MA, USA','21st-century American Firefighter','<p>In the dark midnight hours of November 14, 1987, well after everyone else in the twenty-story Boston skyscraper went home for the night, two lone repairmen were performing routine maintenance operations in a narrow, 20-by-20 utility shaft that ran up the entire length of the building.&nbsp; Pulleying themselves up and down on a motorized window-washer-style plank led by two guy wires, the techs went about their graveyard shift, working hard in a cramped space while suspended nearly eight stories above the floor of the shaft, their feet dangling towards the treacherous blackness below.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Then, suddenly, a spark lit the darkness.&nbsp; The motorized hum of the repair cart came to an abrupt stop, leaving only silence.&nbsp; The techs, now stuck dangerously suspended nearly 100 feet from the ground, immediately slammed the emergency button.</p>\r\n<p>Less than an hour later, a crowbar jammed between the doors of the access shaft a few stories above the repair techs&rsquo; heads.&nbsp; Through the door emerged Boston Firefighter Eddie Loder of Rescue One, geared up with full rappelling equipment and ready for action.&nbsp; Without hesitation, this hardcore firefighter vet clipped in and dropped down the repair shaft, cracking a joke to the scared-shitless repair techs as he calmly lowered himself down a narrow, wire-filled, poorly-lit treacherous utility shaft ten stories off the ground in an attempt to save the lives of two complete strangers he&rsquo;d just met five seconds ago.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>If anyone ever seriously told me that they thought firefighters were overrated I would straight up punch them in the throat.&nbsp; These guys are some of the bravest, most hardcore men and women on earth, and that&rsquo;s not even a statement of opinion, it&rsquo;s a fucking fact.&nbsp; Firefighters and other first responders are the very definition of the word &ldquo;hero&rdquo; &ndash; they literally put their life at risk every time they clock in for work, and they do it not for personal or individual glory, but to help others in need and to save lives.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s insane to even think about.&nbsp; These folks witness all kinds of horrible shit &ndash; people burned to a crisp, cut in half, falling to their deaths &ndash; and they even watch their own friends and coworkers die in the line of duty, yet they get out there and fucking do it anyways.&nbsp; Breathing in lung-crushing amounts of smoke and running face-first into fireballs isn&rsquo;t just over-the-top hardcore, it&rsquo;s these guys&rsquo; job description.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So when you&rsquo;re talking about Edward Loder, a 40-year vet of the prestigious Boston Fire Department and a man believed to be the most decorated man in the DEPAHTMENT&rsquo;s history, you know you&rsquo;re talking about a badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Loder (whose name I assume is pronounced LODAH), joined the Boston Fire Department way back in 1970.&nbsp; Over the first decade or so of his career, this hardcore grizzled fireman gained a reputation for being tough as hell, and before long he was assigned to Rescue One &ndash; a special detachment designed to, you guessed it, rescue people from all manner of life-threatening situations ranging from potential suicides jumping off roofs to people trapped in wells and shit.&nbsp; Basically, any time someone was dangling over a bottomless pit, Ed Loder was the man called to pull them to safety.</p>\r\n<p>His first Roll of Merit citation came for the utility shaft rescue in 1987, when Loder and another firefighter rappelled down two stories inside a cramped utility shaft to rescue two guys who&rsquo;d been stuck when their motorized pulley thing shorted out.&nbsp; Loder rappelled down, latched the worker on to him, then, deciding it too dangerous to go back up, he <em>rappelled down two more stories with another man strapped to him</em>.&nbsp; The strength required for this seems mind-boggling, but both utility techs walked away unharmed and Ed Loder made a name for himself as a dude who would get crazy shit done to save fucking lives.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Two stories stand out in Loder&rsquo;s career, which is saying something when your job is basically to save the lives of people who are in imminently fatal positions.&nbsp; The first was a dramatic, high-profile, death-defying rescue that took place in May of 1990 on the roof of the goddamn Ritz Carlton hotel on Boston&rsquo;s super-high-end Newbury Street.&nbsp; A twentysomething woman with severe mental illness had gone into an intense depression, locked herself in her sixteenth-floor hotel room, and was pacing back and forth on the balcony threatening to hurl herself off the parapet to her death.&nbsp; Firefighters tried to get in through the door of the hotel room, but she screamed she would jump if they opened it.&nbsp; They tried to set up one of those big bounce house bags that catch you when you leap, but she thwarted that as well.</p>\r\n<p>The only place she didn&rsquo;t check for firefighters was above her.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Because who the fuck would expect to be death-from-aboved by a 40-year-old fireman leaping from the roof of the building like John Fucking McClane, swinging over like Luke Skywalker Tarzanning across the Death Star ventilation shaft, and tackling her away from the ledge just at the moment she was about to jump?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>welcome to the party pal.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>That&rsquo;s right &ndash; using his ingenuity, suicide-negotiation genius, and gigantic fire-resistant balls, Eddie Loder climbed to the roof of the friggin&rsquo; Ritz Carlton, strapped himself in, threw himself off the roof attached only by a guideline, swung down, and kicked this would-be suicide away from her impending doom as a crowd of mind-fucking-blown-away bystanders looked on from the street below.&nbsp; He literally put his life at incredible risk to save the life of a woman who wanted to die.&nbsp; If that isn&rsquo;t guts, I don&rsquo;t know what is.</p>\r\n<p>The next rescue came three years later, in April 1993, when some jacked-up escaped mental patient was going nuts on the roof of Boston City Hospital threatening to swan-dive to the pavement six stories below.</p>\r\n<p>Naturally, Ed Loder was sent up in the bucket to get him down.</p>\r\n<p>What resulted kind of makes me think of that scene from <em>Dirty Harry</em> where Clint Eastwood thwarts a suicide by punching the jumper.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/Nglh-BExEus\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Loder extended the rescue ladder to its maximum height of 105 feet &ndash; not something that is generally recommended &ndash; but still sat about five feet below the roof of the building.&nbsp; The man was visibly insane and freaked out, throwing rocks off the roof at cars as they drove down Mass Ave.&nbsp; Loder, looking to get closer to the guy, stood basically on the next-to-last rung of the fully extended ladder, straining every muscle as he leaned and reached for this guy to try and help him.&nbsp; For over an hour he hung there, negotiating with a madman, trying to get this guy to chill out and come down and not kill himself or injure someone else.&nbsp; He managed to chill the dude by cracking a joke about wanting to take him out to eat sandwiches, but while all this was going on his muscles burned as he hung over a hundred feet from the curb and certain death.&nbsp; But this fucking firefighter wasn&rsquo;t about to give up for anything.</p>\r\n<p>Then, just when it looking like things were going ok, the man looked Ed in the face, said &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to jump,&rdquo; and leapt from the roof of the hospital.</p>\r\n<p>Ed Loder caught him.&nbsp; One handed.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder5.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So here&rsquo;s this Boston firefighter, one hand gripping the shirt of a madman, both hanging at the very maximum extent that a fire ladder can go, suspended over downtown Boston in the middle of the day while a huge crowd watches in horror. &nbsp;Grabbing on for all he could, holding this guy while maintaining his grip on the ladder, Eddie Loder yelled for the ladder operator to lower them down.</p>\r\n<p>Only instead of lowering them, the ladder operator (presumably in awe of the fucking insane display of badassitude he just witnessed) hit the wrong button and accidentaly swung the ladder towards the building, bodyslamming Eddie against the building, crushing his right arm, and causing him to start bleeding profusely all over the place.</p>\r\n<p>Still he hung on.</p>\r\n<p>An excruciatingly long, finger-breakingly long ladder ride later, both Eddie Loder and the man planted their feet firmly on the sidewalk.&nbsp; Both would be fine.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Firefighter Eddie Loder was highly decorated for both of these encounters, but his service history is basically just a list of badass things he&rsquo;s done in his 42-year career kicking ass for the BFD.&nbsp; In &rsquo;94 he almost died fighting a nine-alarm fire (!) but managed to pull a buddy of his out of the ridiculously-smoke-filled basement of a warehouse by finding a fire hose and tracing the line back out of the building.&nbsp; In 1998, at the age of 50, he saved a woman who had jumped off the Longfellow Bridge when he threw on a flotation suit, dove into the freezing-ass Charles River in the middle of the frigid Boston winter, swam 400 feet to the woman&rsquo;s floating body, dragged her to a waiting boat, and then resuscitated her with CPR.&nbsp; In 2005 he jumped onto dangerous subway tracks to pull a woman out from underneath a Red Line train after she&rsquo;d fallen off the subway platform and got stuck under the train.</p>\r\n<p>In addition to all the unit citations given to Rescue 1 (and the list is as long as Dhalsim&rsquo;s arm), Eddie Loder is among the most decorated firefighters in Boston history, receiving the Roll of Merit in 1987, 93, 98, and 2001, as well as the prestigious Walter Scott Medal of Valor in 1990 for the rescue at the Ritz.</p>\r\n<p>As of 2012 the 42-year-veteran was still on the job.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/34881251499/loder7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p>Ellement, John.&nbsp; \"Firefighter catches man jumping off BCH building\".&nbsp; <em>Boston Globe</em>. April 17, 1993.</p>\r\n<p>Kenney, Charles C.&nbsp; <em>Rescue Men</em>. PublicAffairs, 2007.</p>\r\n<p>Middleton, Michael.&nbsp; <em>Medal of Valor Firefighters</em>.&nbsp; McGraw-Hill Professional, 2003.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2014-09-12','34881251499','loder.jpg','loder-small.jpg','Eddie Loder','The most decorated firefighter in the history of the Boston Fire Department.',''),('Bennie G. Adkins','February, 1934','N/A','Waurika, OK, USA','20th-century American Soldier','<p>Four days ago, on September 15, 2014, an 80 year-old retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major named Bennie G. Adkins traveled to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor from the President.</p>\r\n<p>His acceptance of America&rsquo;s highest award for military heroism was a long-overdue formality coming over 48 years after he performed some of the most intense acts of over-the-top hardcore military badassitude you&rsquo;ll likely ever read about, then somehow survived to tell the tale.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s the story of a Green Beret Special Forces soldier with a Steven Segal-like immunity to bullets, an 81mm mortar, plenty of ammunition, and a badass escape that involves, of all things, a friggin&rsquo; man-eating tiger stalking him through the bloody jungles of South Vietnam.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In the three months leading up to March 9, 1966, the men garrisoning the U.S. Special Forces base in the A Shau Valley knew that some seriously nefarious machinations were in the jungles beyond their walls.&nbsp; Reconnaissance had reported an increasing buildup of troops and radio chatter in the previous weeks, and it was only a matter of time before things got ugly.</p>\r\n<p>32 year-old First Sergeant Bennie Adkins of the 5<sup>th</sup> Special Forces Group was one of 17 elite American Green Berets sent to assist the South Vietnamese in their struggle to defeat the communist forces of the North.&nbsp; This particular base, a triangle-shaped hilltop fortress in the jungles of the A Shau, was set up to interdict enemy troops carrying supplies through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail &ndash; by advising South Vietnamese civilian militia on how to raid into enemy territory, the Americans could attack the Viet Cong supply pipeline without formally spreading the war into places like Laos and Cambodia.&nbsp; Not a bad plan, until the NVA figured out what was going on and prepared to storm the facility to destroy every last human being inside it.</p>\r\n<p>The Green Berets requested reinforcements, but never received them.&nbsp; Instead, they were almost completely surrounded by enemy forces.&nbsp; At 4am on March 9, 1966, the 17 Americans and 410 South Vietnamese &nbsp;heard the first rumblings of what was about to become a four-hour artillery barrage from heavy mortars raining death down into their base.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Amid the whistling shells and earth-churning explosions that quickly enveloped the base stood Sergeant First Class Adkins.&nbsp; Adkins had been a typical Oklahoma farm boy back in 1956 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, but after being stationed in Germany as a clerk-typist keyboard jockey for a few years he decided screw this and volunteered for the Special Forces instead because what&rsquo;s the point of half-assing it.&nbsp; Already on his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Adkins knew what was up.&nbsp; He grabbed his M-16 and a crate of high-explosive 81mm mortar rounds, raced from his tent, charged through cascading pillars of dirt and flame, and dove into his mortar pit like he was going down a Slip &lsquo;n Slide after falling off a motorcycle.</p>\r\n<p>Despite having no idea really where the hell the NVA artillery positions were located (best guess: FUCKING EVERYWHERE), Adkins grabbed a shell and dropped it into the mortar and started indiscriminately pasting everything around him with airborne death-bombs raining from the sky like the Biblical Plague of Shrapnel.&nbsp; When an enemy tube zeroed in on his position, Adkins was blown from the pit by the massive concussive blast of a friggin&rsquo; 105mm heavy mortar, but the shrapnel burning in his back and the NFL-quality concussion failed to even dim this guy&rsquo;s senses or urge to kill in the slightest.&nbsp; He just threw his helmet back on, somersaulted back into the pit, and got right back to the business of taking a high-explosive fireball-generating artillery shell the size of a large newborn baby and hurtling it at high speeds towards swarms of unsuspecting enemies over two miles away from him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Fore!</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For three long, nightmarish hours the artillery flew in both directions, blasting apart structures, minefields and barbed wire fences and snapping palm trees (and warriors) into splinters.&nbsp; One a couple occasions, hard-as-hell enemy troops launched probing attacks at the base defenses, fading back into the jungles only after clearing a U.S. minefield or planting a Bangalore bomb against the fort&rsquo;s walls.&nbsp; At one point, word came to Sgt. Adkins that one of these attacks had wounded a couple American soldiers, and these guys were now pinned down in the open with mortar fire zeroing in on them.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Without hesitation, Adkins grabbed his shit and leapt out of the pit, racing to the front of the battle to save his buddies and kill anyone who was fucking with them.&nbsp; Adkins found his dudes in bad shape, but braved mortar explosions, sweeping machine guns, and the occasional crack of Dragunov sniper rifle fire to grab his wounded brothers-in-arms and drag them either to safe firing positions or the medical tent.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>By the afternoon things had chilled out a little in terms of everyone being blown up and killed all the time, and the Americans were able to call in some evac aircraft to land at the tiny airstrip on the base and get the wounded out.&nbsp; Despite occasional potshots from snipers zipping past his head every so often (no big deal compared to the hell he&rsquo;d just survived), Adkins started carrying wounded troops firefighter-style on his back to the Airstrip.</p>\r\n<p>Then, suddenly, right as the men were starting to be loaded on the aircraft, some seriously fucked-up shit went down.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>With the abrupt sound of gunfire, everyone turned to see a fucking two-ton truck loaded with a dozen or so previously-South Vietnamese aligned infantrymen barreling towards them, guns blazing.&nbsp; Apparently, while most of the South Viet troops were hardcore warriors fighting communist oppression, these clowns figured this base was as good as done for so they might as well defect and try to avoid being executed by the victorious NVA troops who were sure to be kicking balls around the camp any minute now.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well&hellip;.. uh fuck that.&nbsp; Sgt. Adkins opened fire, then ran across the open to draw the truck away from the airstrip so the evac planes could get out of there.&nbsp; Within minutes the attack had been thwarted and the planes were in the air.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In the afternoon and evening of the 9<sup>th</sup>, Adkins made two daring sprints beyond the relative safety of the base walls &ndash; once to pull a wounded man out from a trench, and once to retrieve a crate full of ammunition and food that had accidentally been air-dropped into the middle of a goddamn unmarked minefield.&nbsp; These are both truly heroic actions in and of themselves, yet in the narrative of Sgt. Bennie Adkins at the Battle of the A Shau Valley they both get lumped into a single sentence.</p>\r\n<p>The first day had just been the artillery barrage, and the main infantry assault came from the North Vietnamese at dawn the next morning, as an almost-endless horde of determined, unstoppable NVA troops came storming out of the dark jungles from every direction with one thought on their mind &ndash; take this base and wipe it off the map.</p>\r\n<p>Once again, Bennie Adkins, working on basically Kiefer Sutherlundian amounts of restful sleep, sprung into action.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Amid chaos, destruction, blistering machine gun fire and death-screams of comrades and enemies alike, First Sergeant Bennie Adkins launched round after round from his mortar.&nbsp; Even as other South Vietnamese heavy weapon positions were smashed by artillery or overrun by the NVA troops now storming over the camp walls, Adkins manned his post, firing even after being blown out of the pit and wounded a second time.&nbsp; When his mortar shells ran out, Adkins switched to a fucking bazooka and started launching high explosives all over the place like Arnold at the end of <em>Commando</em>.&nbsp; When the enemy came within sight of his mortar pit, he pulled his M-16 and laid down a stream of full-auto death from his assault rifle, took a bullet and some shrapnel from a grenade, then killed another group of enemies by throwing their own grenade back at them.</p>\r\n<p>Around 2pm, after almost a full eight-hour shift of non-stop asskicking, the U.S. and South Vietnamese troops fell back to the interior of the base while U.S. aircraft streaked overhead unleashing loads of white-hot napalm into the attacking troops.&nbsp; Adkins busted into the communications tent, killing guys in close-quarters combat despite having already received over 18 bullet and shrapnel wounds in his body.&nbsp; He and some survivors attempted a counterattack, but it was no good &ndash; there were too damn many of these guys.&nbsp; The order came to get the fuck out of there.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Around 5pm, after nearly two days of battle, Sgt. Adkins, injured, dehydrated, wounded badly, and low on ammunition, personally volunteered to hold back the attacking NVA forces while the American and South Vietnamese survivors made a break for the airstrip to be evaced by helicopters.&nbsp; As his men went, Adkins laid down gunfire from machine guns, bazookas, and assault rifles, killing anyone in his path, buying as much time as possible before grabbing a wounded buddy and carrying him towards the helicopters.</p>\r\n<p>The bad news?&nbsp; By the time he got to the evac helicopters, they were already gone.&nbsp; All that was left of the base defenders were himself, the seven combat-ready Special Forces soldiers, and a couple dozen suriviving South Vietnamese.</p>\r\n<p>They immediately made a break for the jungles to try and evade the enemy and escape with their lives.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sgt. Bennie Adkins, working on two days with no sleep and wounded 18 times in various parts of his body, proceeded to elude the NVA for 48 hours through the dense jungles of Vietnam.&nbsp; He survived a run-in with a man-eating tiger, dodged NVA patrols, and somehow made it back to a position where he could contact rescue and get out of there alive.&nbsp; He is personally credited with killing 145 enemy soldiers in his 86-hour battle.</p>\r\n<p>He would serve one more tour in Vietnam, and retire a Command Sergeant Major &ndash; the highest enlisted rank in the U.S. Army.&nbsp; He made it home alive, has been married for 59 years, founded and ran an accounting firm, and became the 80<sup>th</sup> living Medal of Honor recipient on September 15, 2014.&nbsp; When asked about his medal, he said, &ldquo;I\'m just a keeper of the medal for those other 16 (U.S. troops) who were in the battle, especially the five who didn\'t make it&hellip; I can tell you every man who was there and the five who lost their lives. I can tell you how that happened. It diminishes, but it does not go away&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/71742015786/adkins9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/15/us/adkins-medal-of-honor/index.html?hpt=hp_c2\">http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/15/us/adkins-medal-of-honor/index.html?hpt=hp_c2</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.army.mil/article/133369/Medal_of_Honor_nominee_reflects_on_Vietnam_battle/?from=moh_adkins_news_text\">http://www.army.mil/article/133369/Medal_of_Honor_nominee_reflects_on_Vietnam_battle/?from=moh_adkins_news_text</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/adkins/\">http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/adkins/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.army.mil/article/132618/\">http://www.army.mil/article/132618/</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2014-09-19','71742015786','adkins.jpg','adkins-small.jpg','Bennie Adkins','86 hours of combat, 18 wounds, 145 enemy soldiers killed, one Medal of Honor awarded 48 years after the fact.',''),('Wu Mei','February 17, 624','December 16, 705','Lizhou, China','Medieval Chinese Empress','<p>In the 4,000 year history of the Chinese Empire, only one woman was ever bold &ndash; or powerful &ndash; or hardcore &ndash; enough to seize control of the Imperial Throne and openly dominate the Middle Kingdom with the full weight of an honest-to-god Son of Heaven Emperor of China.&nbsp; That woman was the much-hated, much-awesome, much so wow many diabolical shank-you-in-the-face-while-you&rsquo;re-sleeping tyrant Wu Zetian &ndash; Empress of the T&rsquo;ang Dynasty, creator of the Zhou Dynasty, and a spicy Szechuan-style murderess who came from humble beginnings, ruthlessly annihilated anything that stood in her path, and ultimately held all of China under her iron-fisted power for over half a century.</p>\r\n<p>And Wu Zetian Ain&rsquo;t Nuthing to Fuck Wit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>There&rsquo;s no place to hide once I step inside the room</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Wu Zetian was born in 624 AD in a small city in Szechuan Province.&nbsp; Her father was some military officer and semi-wealthy landowner, but thanks to a razor-sharp wit and intellect Wu was well-known not only for being super hot and super awesome to talk to, but also for being really goddamn smart, educating herself in history, literature, and affairs of state at a time when most women weren&rsquo;t doing much except washing dishes and watching the Kardashians.&nbsp; A fortuitous combination of luck and badass cred eventually got young Wu admitted into the Palace of Emperor Taizong as a maidservant at the age of 14, and thanks to her knowledge of classical literature and semi-unusual ability to read and write she was given the task of cleaning and maintaining the Imperial Library.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, sure, ok, badass librarian shit aside, Wu was destined for better things than dusting off the Emperor&rsquo;s fucking workstation, and so one day when Taizong came into the study while she was working she started talking to him about awesome shit like the Three Kingdoms and Lu Bu and other hardcore bastards from Chinese history.&nbsp; Emperor Taizong pretty much popped a boner immediately.&nbsp; He nicknamed her the &ldquo;Charming Lady&rdquo;, made a point of visiting her to talk about warlords and explosions pretty much any time he wasn&rsquo;t running the day-to-day operations of the Chinese Golden Age at the height of the T&rsquo;ang Dynasty, and eventually took her in to be one of the concubines in his harem (which, while it isn&rsquo;t exactly empowering, is pretty much as high up the fucking power food chain as most women could hope to get in 7<sup>th</sup> century China).&nbsp; When Emperor Taizong died in 646, all of his concubines had their heads shaved and were thrown into a convent (an old Chinese custom), but Wu had already seduced the Prince (scandalous!) and within three years she&rsquo;d managed to escape a lifetime as a nun and get right back into the business of running shit in China.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em>Tiger style</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Emperor Gaozong promoted (is that the word?) Wu Zetian to the rank of &ldquo;Favored Concubine,&rdquo; and his wife, the Empress, immediately lost her shit and started trying to start shit.&nbsp; But Wu Zetian hadn&rsquo;t clawed her way from some backwater town in Szechuan Province and fought her way out of a convent to get outwitted by some dumb aristocrat biznatch.&nbsp; She subverted the Empress, banged the Emperor, had three sons for him, and then framed the Empress with killing a baby and for being a witch and that&rsquo;s not even her real hair color anyways etc.&nbsp; On Wu Zetian&rsquo;s orders (and she had honestly no authority to do this), the Empress was arrested, her hands and feet were cut off, and she was forcibly drowned in a vat of wine.&nbsp; The last thing she saw before asphyxiating in a facefull of booze was Wu Zetian&rsquo;s awesome-looking victory snarl.</p>\r\n<p>Wu Zetian pretty much immediately became Empress of China, married Gaozong, and then &ndash; stop me if you didn&rsquo;t already see this coming a mile away &ndash; oh no out of nowhere Gaozong suddenly suffers a massive stroke and is almost completely incapacitated yet somehow still alive.&nbsp; Acting as regent for the out-of-commission Emperor, Wu Zetian starts sitting in on all important political functions, and basically single-handedly rules over the world&rsquo;s largest and richest empire with utter cold-blooded impunity.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>GHOSTFACE KILLAH</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>To cement her place on the throne, Empress Wu did an awesome thing and created one of the world&rsquo;s first organized secret police services, then basically told them to go fucking nuts and assassinate or arrest anyone who didn&rsquo;t like her.&nbsp; Thirty-six high-ranking political ministers are executed, commit suicide, or have tragically fatal accidents in just a couple months.&nbsp; Her eldest son was exiled to Mongolia for disobeying her orders, and her second son is stripped of his royalty and declared a peasant because he was possibly thinking about maybe plotting an uprising or something.&nbsp; Two military commanders on the frontier start asking around about raising troops to overthrow the Empress, and by the end of the year both their heads are hanging on display outside the gates of her palace.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s worth noting that even though Wu Zetian was an utterly brutal and ruthless motherfucker who stone-cold bulldozed everything in her path and maintained a tyrannical choke-hold on her power thanks to dozens of badass assassins who snapped necks for her in dark corners across China, Empress Wu was also a super-capable ruler who successfully ran a first-world country of 50 million people.&nbsp; Remembering her peasant roots, Wu reformed agricultural laws to lessen the tax burden on peasant farmers across China, instituted some of the world&rsquo;s first labor laws, streamlined the bloated military into a more efficient fighting force, and cut the fat in her own government by forcing any government administrator to complete a ridiculously-difficult civil service examination to prove they were smart enough to have the job.&nbsp; She kicked out useless politicians, brought in well-trained scholars, built irrigation systems to improve farming, and did other chill shit that isn&rsquo;t super exciting to write about.&nbsp; When a bunch of uptight idiot Confucian scholars came out and said no fucking way should China be ruled by a woman, she told them Confucianism sucks, dumped it as the official Imperial religion, and started building a bunch of temples and shit for a previously-lesser-known faith called Buddhism.&nbsp; The Buddhists were so pumped they carved a hundred-foot tall Buddha out of a limestone cliff face near her capital and carved it to look like her.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian4.JPG\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Cash Rules Everything Around Me</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Emperor Vegetable finally kicks in in 683, and the crown fell to the only one of his kids that hadn&rsquo;t been exiled or killed or stripped of power &ndash; Wu Zetian&rsquo;s youngest son, who at this point was still too young to rule on his own without a regent.&nbsp; The Chinese Cersei Lannister went along with this shit for like a year, then eventually took an incredible step that no Chinese woman ever had the balls to do (or would ever have the balls to do again) &ndash; she said fuck it, deposed her son, and declared a new Imperial Dynasty.&nbsp; The T&rsquo;ang is dead, we&rsquo;re the Zhou Dynasty now.</p>\r\n<p>Then she moved the capital to a different city, declared future Emperors would pass through the maternal line, and ordered all those fucking asshole misogynist Confucian scholars to start writing epic heroic biographies of great women from Chinese History.&nbsp; Those that refused were buried alive.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>PROTECT YA NECK</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em>&nbsp;</em></p>\r\n<p>Empress Wu Zetian ruled the Zhou Dynasty with an Iron Fist for another <em>twenty-two years</em>, doing whatever the hell she wanted and daring anyone to step to her.&nbsp; She continued improving the lives of the peasants, made the government stronger and more efficient, and led her newly-refurbished badass army on a half-dozen massively-successful military campaigns that stomped out barbarian tribes, lawless warlords, and seditious rebels with equal zeal and impunity.&nbsp; She also became an Ol&rsquo; Dirty Bastard, and even into her 70s she was known to have a fucking apartment building full of hot young guys she was fucking whenever she felt like it.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In her fifty-plus years as the fucking sole autocratic dictator of Imperial China, Empress Wu never faced a serious coup or rebellion attempt.&nbsp; She abdicated the throne peacefully to her son in 705 AD at the age of 80, and died a year later in her bed with a fucking smile on her face.&nbsp; Her son would end the Zhou Dynasty, move the capital back, and go back to the T&rsquo;ang Dynasty, meaning that for the rest of time the fucking history of the T&rsquo;ang Dynasty has to be written with a little asterisk next to it marking the 22 years that it was outsmarted by the toughest chick in Chinese history.</p>\r\n<p>Her tomb is marked by a giant dick-shaped stone marker with absolutely nothing written on it.&nbsp; It was traditional for Emperors to do this and have a scholar write an inscription after their death to mark the Emperor&rsquo;s legacy, whether it be good or bad.&nbsp; With the Empress Wu, nobody could find any words.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52787309381/wuzetian61.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/heroine6.html\">http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/heroine6.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/tang/emperor_wuzetian.htm\">http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/tang/emperor_wuzetian.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-demonization-of-empress-wu-20743091/?no-ist\">http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-demonization-of-empress-wu-20743091/?no-ist</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://chineseculture.about.com/od/historyofchina/fl/Wu-Zetian.htm\">http://chineseculture.about.com/od/historyofchina/fl/Wu-Zetian.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2014-09-26','52787309381','wuzetian.jpg','wuzetian-small.jpeg','Wu Zetian','The only female Emperor of China.','\"I only need three things to subordinate it: an iron whip, an iron hammer, and a sharp dagger.\"'),('Andrew Carnegie','November 25, 1835','August 11, 1919','Dunfermline, Scotland','20th-century Scottish Philanthropist','<p>At the age of 13, Andrew Carnegie was a tiny little dirt-poor Scottish immigrant living in Pittsburgh working 72-hours a week and collecting a paycheck of $1.20 every Friday.&nbsp; Using nothing more than his own guts, brains, and ingenuity, this 5&rsquo;3&rdquo; tall Ayn Rand wet dream would transform himself from the kid chained to a printing press on the cover of a book about evil capitalist industrial practices and become the single richest human being on the planet earth &ndash; and then he&rsquo;d donate 90% of his personal wealth (roughly $4.76 billion by today&rsquo;s standards) to charities ranging from science museums to music halls.&nbsp; His foundations and donations would fund the creation of insulin, set up the world&rsquo;s biggest retirement program for teachers and scientists, open 2500 free libraries around the planet, and create everything from the International Court of Justice in The Hague to goddamn <em>Sesame Street</em>.&nbsp; Oh, and even though he&rsquo;s known as &ldquo;The Father of Modern Philanthropy&rdquo; he still had enough cash left over to buy a fucking Scottish castle, marry a trophy wife half his age, and rub his balls all over the industry that gave the Pittsburgh Steelers their name.&nbsp; Oh yeah, and he also almost single-handedly kept the friggin&rsquo; Union railroad and telegraph lines running during the Civil War.</p>\r\n<p>Dude was so hardcore that Scrooge McDuck is believed to have been partly modeled after him, and not the dickhead Scrooge from that Christmas movie but the cool one who bangs Magicka De Spell and then shotguns fifths of Fireball with Launchpad McQuack.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52676711666/carnegie1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Andrew Carnegie was born in some place called Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835.&nbsp; His dad was a weaver and his mom occasionally stitched up shoes for local shoemakers, but when the Industrial Revolution rolled out steam-powered looms in 1847 it made the profession of weaving even more useless.&nbsp; Andrew&rsquo;s dad was basically replaced by the kind of robot that gets steampunk slash fic written about it, and, since there wasn&rsquo;t anything else to do in Scotland, dad borrowed a bunch of cash and moved his family to Pittsburgh,.</p>\r\n<p>Young Andrew didn&rsquo;t really go to school or anything like that, but his dad did have the good sense to make him read badass shit written by hero Scottish killmongers like Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, so even though Andy couldn&rsquo;t calculate the circumference of a circle using Pi he still understood the massive importance of crushing your enemies into fucking dust with your bare hands and then eating the dust and shitting it out and throwing that shit at your other enemies.&nbsp; Even though he was only thirteen years old, Carnegie went to work immediately to help support his family, getting a job changing yarn spools at a textile factory for a buck twenty a week.&nbsp; He busted his balls 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and spent his insignificant amount of free time taking advantage of a free library that had been donated to the city by some rich asshole.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52676711666/carnegie2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Andrew Carnegie, world&rsquo;s first hipster,<br /> seen here at some age</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Carnegie eventually took a job as a message boy in a Western Union telegraph office, and busted his ass so hard that they promoted him to telegraph operator and paid him the exorbitant sum of five bucks a week.&nbsp; Carnegie was so intense about his work that he memorized the tones of the telegraph beeps and could translate that shit without having to read the code, a move that impressed people so much that in 1853 Carnegie became the personal secretary of the Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Western rail line.&nbsp;&nbsp; Even though he was only 18 years old, Carnegie knew that this railroad thing was the real shit, so he convinced his mom to mortgage their house so he could invest five hundred bucks in railroad cars on the stock market.</p>\r\n<p>He turned that five hundred bucks into a steady five grand a year income, which was fucking nuts in 1837.&nbsp; It all went bonkers from there, especially after he started putting cash into oil and steel &ndash; two things that ended up being pretty important in the 1800s and 1900s.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52676711666/carnegie3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well whatever, I pretty strongly distrust anyone that has more money than me (a policy that I think qualifies me as a <a href=\"http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misanthrope\">misanthrope</a>) , but Andrew Carnegie wasn&rsquo;t just some rich asshole with a ton of money who got his rocks off by making people bark for cash.&nbsp; When the Civil War broke out in 1861 Carnegie&rsquo;s boss was tapped to run the transportation and logistics department, and Carnegie went to work for the Union running rail and telegraph lines up and down the country to keep the Federal armies supplied and in communications.&nbsp; Carnegie joked that he was the first casualty of the Civil War, because a couple days before First Bull Run he got whipped in the face with a telegraph line Doc Brown style and it left a permanent scar on his face.&nbsp; During the war he oversaw the rebuilding of rail tracks torn up by the rebels, personally oversaw the railroad evacuation of Union troops to D.C. after First Bull Run, and did his best to maintain steel production, railroad efficiency, and communications along Federal supply lines throughout the war.&nbsp; This didn&rsquo;t keep him from being drafted into the infantry, but Carnegie bought his way out of it because this is America and that is how things work here.</p>\r\n<p>After the war, Carnegie would use his already-impressive stacks of cash to buy a massively successful steel plant, take over all his rivals, flex nuts all over the place, make it rain, and found a bridge building company that built a bridge in St. Louis that goes over the Mississippi River.&nbsp; In 1886 he wrote a bestselling book on why capitalism is awesome (possible subtitle: <em>because it made me a shitload of money</em>) and by 1892 he was ruling the biggest steel company in the world and making enough money to buy one of those islands where you&rsquo;re allowed to hunt people with an elephant rifle (though I don&rsquo;t think he ever actually did this, it doesn&rsquo;t mention it on the Carnegie Foundation website).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/6yjI5238Zxc\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p><br /> By most accounts Carnegie was a good boss, and he would go above and beyond to take care of his people because he knew what it was like to have to eat Top Ramen every night of the week.&nbsp; However, one incident in 1892 resulted in this dude having his &ldquo;World&rsquo;s Greatest Boss&rdquo; coffee mug revoked, and that was the infamous strike at the Homestead steel plant.&nbsp; Basically, Carnegie Steel made like a 60% profit one year, and the workers at the plant were pissed and went on strike because their raises only amounted to a measly 30%.&nbsp; They complained like a bunch of Commies but Carnegie couldn&rsquo;t hear them because he was off in Scotland banging his 20-year-old trophy wife at his summer home which was a bigass fucking castle on a Scottish mountain where I think Madonna got married one of those times.&nbsp; Anyways, Carnegie told the Homestead plant manager to take care of this shit for him, so the plant manager called in the Pinkertons and they ended up shooting like ten guys to death.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll argue this is OK regardless of where you stand on the economic conservative spectrum &ndash; either Andrew Carnegie was completely removed from it all and this was the product of a psycho branch manager and some overzealous private mercenaries (understandable), or Andrew Carnegie is a badass James Bond supervillain who was good to his minions as long as they didn&rsquo;t fuck with him (awesome).</p>\r\n<p>Either way, Carnegie sold the plant to J.P. Morgan a few years after this ugly incident.&nbsp; The transaction &ndash; a $480 million purchase &ndash; was the largest single transaction in world history at the time it occurred.</p>\r\n<p>Andrew Carnegie gave literally every single dollar of that money away to charities across the world.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/52676711666/carnegie51.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>He kept the castle though.<br /></em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The list of Carnegie&rsquo;s philanthropic accomplishments makes the Gates Foundation look like the Sochi Olympic Committee.&nbsp; He bought a huge private park in his hometown in Scotland and immediately donated it to the public so they could check it out any time they wanted.&nbsp; He founded 2,500 libraries in cities from Pittsburgh to Belgrade and made them completely free for everyone.&nbsp; He donated 7,600 organs to various churches (I assume this means pipe organs but who knows with this dude).&nbsp; He set up Carnegie-Mellon University as a technical school for the children of his employees, then established TIAA-CREF, a retirement fund aimed at giving hard-working teachers, researchers, and scientists something to actually look forward to.&nbsp; He created a huge endowment to set up an instate of World Peace in 1910, and if that makes you laugh because there were two goddamn World Wars after 1910 I should also mention that Carnegie paid for the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, where war crime trials continue to be held to this day.&nbsp; He established Carnegie Hall to foster music.&nbsp; He donated millions to Booker T. Washington&rsquo;s Tuskegee Intitute.&nbsp; He put id=\"mce_marker\"35 million towards various museums, research facilities, and educational institutions &nbsp;across every discipline and in every corner of the world.&nbsp; My personal favorite is that he set up the Carnegie Hero Fund, an awesome group that provides recognition and a little cash to everyday people who put their lives on the line to help others &ndash; everyone from firefighters to a dude who jumps off a bridge to save a drowning baby.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve used their site more than once to find people to write about here, which is how I got the idea to write about this guy in the first place.</p>\r\n<p>Andrew Carnegie, pauper turned billionaire turned philanthropist, is believed to have donated something on the order of 90% of his personal wealth to charity before he died in 1919.&nbsp; Before he passed, he wrote a super popular book about how the ultra-rich have an obligation to help those in need, and it&rsquo;s something that inspired other billionaires to follow his lead.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><br /><img src=\"/images/52676711666/carnegie6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Being rich seems like it would be awesome.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://carnegie.org/about-us/foundation-history/about-andrew-carnegie/\">http://carnegie.org/about-us/foundation-history/about-andrew-carnegie/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.history.com/topics/andrew-carnegie\">http://www.history.com/topics/andrew-carnegie</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.biography.com/people/andrew-carnegie-9238756\">http://www.biography.com/people/andrew-carnegie-9238756</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie</a></p>','2014-10-03','52676711666','carnegie.jpg','carnegie-small.jpg','Andrew Carnegie','Dirt-poor immigrant becomes the richest man in the world, then donates 90% of his money to charity.','Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.'),('Locusta of Gaul','c. 1st century AD','69 AD','Gaul, France','Ancient Roman Assassin','<p>At the height of the Roman Empire, in the glory days where the Legions were powerful, the gold was plentiful, and the Emperors were drunkenly and impulsively ordering political assassinations while laying on top of piles of naked women, the Eternal City was a place where death, intrigue, and Scorcese-like drama was lurking behind every piazza.&nbsp; Political double-dealing, aristocratic corruption, and good-old fashion blood feuds sunk their talons into the darkest corners of the world&rsquo;s wealthiest city, spilling blood across the streets with frightening regularity.</p>\r\n<p>If you were a powerful Roman and you needed your hated arch-nemesis to somehow break out into spontaneous cardiac arrest and then fall off a building onto a couple sword points, all you needed was an ice-cold heart and a fat bag of even colder gold coins.</p>\r\n<p>All you had to do was call Locusta of Gaul.&nbsp; A hardcore all-natural free-range organic chemist assassin so nefariously-good at using biological sciences for evil that she was known to the people of her city simply as Locusta the Poisoner.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Resistance is futile.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Aside from the part that this master alchemist and career assassin&rsquo;s name ends with &ldquo;of Gaul&rdquo;, we don&rsquo;t know much about the origins of the Black Widow of Imperial Rome.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s mentioned in countless ancient sources, yet her past remains a mystery, forever lost to time.&nbsp; We know she was of common peasant stock and hailed from the dark side of the Alps in present-day France, and it&rsquo;s probably safe to assume she inherited some of her knowledge of the dark powers of hemlock from her Gallic barbarian ancestors in the region.&nbsp; She arrived in Italy sometime in the mid-first century AD, in the early days of the Empire, successfully realizing that this was the best place in the world if you wanted to make a living killing people for money.</p>\r\n<p>Locusta was a dedicated, masterful botanist who took something as lame and useless as science and applied it to important things like giving people heart attacks for fun and profit.&nbsp; Inventive, cruel, powerful, and intelligent, this mysterious woman from the countryside of Gaul dedicated her life to the study of herbal lore, creating hundreds of extracts from various plants and fungi and using them to ingeniously devise new ways of ruining her enemies.&nbsp; Utilizing everything from mushrooms to human blood, Locusta tested her dark concoctions on animals to ensure their potency in her constant quest for the perfect toxins. &nbsp;It wasn&rsquo;t long before she realized the best applications of this would be to become a hitman, crafting herself a fortune by helping the corrupt asshole aristocrats of Rome destroy other corrupt asshole Roman aristocrats.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta2c.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta2b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em><br />SPOOKY HALLOWEEN SHIT</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Earning a name for herself as a master poisoner, Locusta turned Rome into her own personal Jonestown and made some of the most powerful men in the city chug Drano from a beer bong until they barfed to death.&nbsp; As a hardcore killer-for-hire making money hand-over-mortar-and-pestle, this diabolical assassiness offered dozens of varieties of painful death, utilizing things like hemlock, belladonna, nightshade, arsenic, quinine, and possibly even cyanide and opium overdoses to surreptitiously and prematurely end the lives of the most powerful men in the city.&nbsp; A lot of modern sources like to call her &ldquo;history&rsquo;s first serial killer&rdquo;, but those sources are all dumb because she was doing it for the cash and not out of some sick personal obsession.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s safe to assume that dozens of Locusta&rsquo;s victims died without anyone even suspecting foul play, but you also can&rsquo;t put out fucking Yellow Pages ads under the name &ldquo;Locusta the Poisoner&rdquo; without a cop or two rolling around to ask you a few stations.&nbsp; Locusta was arrested twice for murder, but both times she was bailed out when powerful Roman senators flexed their political balls to get her exonerated of her charges.&nbsp; Presumably they did this in exchange for a future kill, or because they needed to save their own butts from being implicated in the murder investigation, but either way this chick was like an Ancient Roman Keyser Soze with dark friends from up on high the prince of darkness himself.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The third time Locusta was tossed in jail was a little different.&nbsp; It was 54 AD, and the woman who came to bail Locusta&rsquo;s ass out was none other than the Empress Julia Agrippina &ndash; an ultra-badass woman, one of my all-time favorite female badasses, and a person you should be familiar with if you&rsquo;ve read my book <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Badass-Relentless-Onslaught-Gunfighters-Commanders/dp/0061749443/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1413575959&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=badass\">Badass</a></em> (a masterpiece critically-acclaimed by at least a half-dozen Amazon commenters and a fantastic work of art I personally choose to shamelessly plug any time I get the opportunity).&nbsp; Agrippina pulled Locusta out of jail and tasked her with the most high-profile hit of her career &ndash; to kill the Emperor Claudius himself.</p>\r\n<p>Locusta didn&rsquo;t bat an eye at the request.&nbsp; On October 13, 54 AD (almost exactly 1,960 years ago), the Poisoner put her plan into motion.&nbsp; The night before, she poisoned Claudius&rsquo; bodyguard just enough that the guy had to call out sick with explosive barf diarrhea.&nbsp; Then she bribed Claudius&rsquo; food taster to take the night off, leaving nothing in the way of Emperor Claudius wolfing down a delicious bowl of amazing stew that oh yeah just so happened to be spiced up with super-poisonous Death Cap Mushrooms.&nbsp; Claudius fell out of his throne, clutching his neck, and a doctor came up to do what doctors did during this time, which was to stick a feather down the Emperor&rsquo;s throat until he barfed up whatever was making him sick.</p>\r\n<p>It didn&rsquo;t work.&nbsp; Locusta had already soaked the feather in strychnine and paint thinner.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Just as Agrippina planned, Claudius beefed it and was succeeded by her their son, a guy named Nero who you should probably have heard of before.&nbsp; Everything was going OK until then Agrippina accused Locusta of poisoning her husband and had her arrested and sentenced to death by bludgeoning.&nbsp; Which came as kind of a surprise to Locusta, who was actually expecting to, you know, get paid pretty decently in exchange for murdering the Emperor of Rome on the orders of the Empress.&nbsp; But whatever.</p>\r\n<p>Well, a few months later, Nero decided hey, he might have some use for a woman who can snap her fingers and have anyone in the Roman Empire secretly assassinated.&nbsp; So, in 55 AD, Emperor Nero freed Locusta the Poisoner from prison, gave her a ton of money and a huge plot of land, made her an aristocrat, and publicly declared that she be absolved of all crimes she has committed and will ever commit, which, you gotta admit, is a nice touch.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>&ldquo;Mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since Claudius became a god by eating them.&rdquo;&nbsp; <br /> -Nero</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 55 AD, Nero hired Locusta to kill his step-brother, a 14 year-old punk-ass fucking kid named Britannicus that everybody in Rome seemed to like for some dumb reason.&nbsp; Locusta&rsquo;s only question was whether Nero wanted agonizing extended pain or just quick and sudden death.</p>\r\n<p>Nero invited Britannicus to a big huge party at the palace, and everyone was having this great time until Britannicus took a sip from his wine goblet and almost immediately fell to the ground shaking and convulsing and foaming at the mouth.&nbsp; Everyone got a little worried, but Nero was like, &ldquo;nah, dudes, don&rsquo;t worry about it, he has epileptic seizures and you all know this.&rdquo;&nbsp; Britannicus did actually suffer from epilepsy, so people were like yeah ok and just waited it out, and of course that dumb kid stopped breathing pretty quickly because that&rsquo;s what happens to people when they chuck a fifth of arsenic.<br /> The next day, Nero rewarded Locusta the Poisoner with a big villa atop a hill in downtown Rome and declared her the official Imperial Poisoner.&nbsp; Locusta was probably also the person behind the attempted assassination-by-poison of Julia Agrippina (revenge is a dish best served cold and laced with cyanide), but Agrippina was fucking awesome and had already made herself immune to most kinds of poison.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next 14 years (which, holy shit), Locusta the Poisoner not only performed risk-free assassinations on behalf of one of Rome&rsquo;s most ruthless Emperors, but she also opened up a school where she trained other women in the fine arts of making unsuspecting dumbasses huff Clorox until they bleed out of their eyes and nose.&nbsp; Living in a huge palace, she trained future poisoners such as the infamous Martina, the woman associated with death of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/germanicus.html\">Germanicus</a>, and many others.&nbsp; She also continued her studies of chemistry and biology, learning new formulas and testing them out (at the Emperor&rsquo;s request) on convicted criminals, slaves, and anyone else she wanted.</p>\r\n<p>Well, Nero pissed off a lot of people, and in 69 AD he was sentenced to death by being beaten with iron rods.&nbsp; Nero almost always carried a special suicide poison kit Locusta had crafted up for him, but in his hurry to escape his assassins he forgot to pack it in his luggage so instead he had to do it old-school and kill himself with a knife.&nbsp; His successor, the Emperor Galba, was a little bitter about all the poisoning bullshit and had Locusta dragged through the streets in chains and then publicly executed, ending her reign of terror once and for all.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/156573224535/locusta7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.historyswomen.com/moregreatwomen/Locusta.html\">http://www.historyswomen.com/moregreatwomen/Locusta.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://aklanier.com/2013/08/28/locusta-the-poisone/\">http://aklanier.com/2013/08/28/locusta-the-poisone/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://ancientstandard.com/2011/06/16/locusta-romes-professional-poisoner/\">http://ancientstandard.com/2011/06/16/locusta-romes-professional-poisoner/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://thearrowsoftruth.com/tag/locusta/\">http://thearrowsoftruth.com/tag/locusta/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locusta\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locusta</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Gibson, Dirk C.&nbsp; <em>Legends, Monsters, or Serial Murderers?</em>.&nbsp; ABC-CLIO, 2012.</p>\r\n<p>Suetonius.&nbsp; <em>The Twelve Caesars</em>.&nbsp; Penguin, 2007.</p>\r\n<p>Stratton, Kimberly B.&nbsp; <em>Daughters of Hecate</em>.&nbsp; Oxford University Press, 2014.</p>\r\n<p>Tacitus.&nbsp; <em>The Annals</em>.&nbsp; Acheron, 2012.</p>','2014-10-17','156573224535','locusta.jpg','locusta-small.jpg','Locusta the Poisoner','Not even the Emperor himself was safe from this master alchemist and ancient Roman assassin.','“This was the famous Locusta; a woman lately condemned as a dealer in clandestine practices, but reserved among the instruments of state to serve the purposes of dark ambition.  By this tool of iniquity the mixture was prepared.” - Tacitus, Annals'),('William T. Anderson','c. 1840','October 26, 1864','Hopkins County, KY, USA','19th-century American Outlaw','<p><em>Hey!&nbsp; <a href=\"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/guts-glory-ben-thompson/1118879488?ean=9780316320504\">I have a new book coming out</a><a href=\"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/guts-glory-ben-thompson/1118879488?ean=9780316320504\"> next week</a>.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s about the Civil War.&nbsp; If you pre-order it from Barnes &amp; Noble before Tuesday, it&rsquo;s half off, so it&rsquo;ll cost you like eight bucks.&nbsp; So it\'s less than a drinkable bottle of wine, will also take you twice as long to finish and is three times as likely to get you laid.&nbsp; This article is a chapter I submitted for the book that my editor asked me to replace with something else because it was too gruesome and fucked-up, so I&rsquo;m posting it here to go with my month-long SPOOKY HALLOWEEN SHIT theme.&nbsp; It is about a really terrible human being named Bloody Bill Anderson who was killed in battle exactly 150 years ago this Sunday.&nbsp; It will probably give you nightmares.&nbsp; Which is badass.</em></p>\r\n<p><br />Sweat rolled out from under the blue wool kepi worn by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel P. Cox as he watched a trio of his fellow Union cavalrymen charging hard in his direction, their exhausted horses kicking up dirt and mud, hurriedly carrying his brave men as they raced for their lives across the open field.&nbsp; Crouched in a well-prepared hiding place in the underbrush just inside the treeline, Cox, a former U.S. Army scout, motioned for the 300 Federal soldiers of the 33<sup>rd</sup> and 51<sup>st</sup> Missouri Militia to stand fast and wait for his signal.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Figures started to become visible among the massive cloud of dust behind the three fleeing riders.&nbsp; A vision of hell itself was stampeding in Cox\'s direction &ndash; 30 of the hardest-looking, most brutal, most barbaric horsemen this country has ever seen.&nbsp;&nbsp; A 19<sup>th</sup>-century biker gang on horseback, packing a fearsome array of carbine rifles, six-shooter pistols, and other assorted weaponry,&nbsp; their saddles decorated with scalps, severed heads, and skulls taken from slain Union soldiers.&nbsp; Hardened veterans of dozens of engagements, these blood-drenched savages were cold-blooded murderers and outlaws, known for riding into battle under a banner of No Quarter &ndash; they took no prisoners, and only death would stop them from fighting. <br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Just a month ago, these vicious guerillas had perpetrated one of the most horrific atrocities of the war, killing dozens of troopers and civilians in a bloodbath unparalleled in the Civil War.&nbsp; Cox had been ordered here specifically for the purpose of killing or capturing the most wanted men west of the Mississippi, and now he finally had his quarry in his sights.</p>\r\n<p>Cox waited for his three men to reach the woods so they wouldn\'t be caught in the crossfire.&nbsp; As soon as he had an open shot he sprung his trap, ordering his unit to stand and unleash a devastating volley straight into the face of these psychotic, terrifying riders.</p>\r\n<p>The rippling crack of 300 muskets fired in unison sent men and horses hurtling to the ground.&nbsp; Some of the riders, seeing the ambush awaiting them, turned and ran for it.</p>\r\n<p>Only five men continued in their charge, undeterred by facing a force of 300 armed infantrymen alone.&nbsp; At the head of this small, suicidal group was the unit\'s commander, 25 year-old William T. Anderson, better known by his hard-earned nickname &ndash; Bloody Bill.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Frothing at the mouth, growl-screaming a fearsome Rebel Yell, his long, wild, unruly dark hair falling out from under his flamboyant wide-brimmed hat, this psychotic madman raced for the center of the Union line, unleashing a storm of bullets from a pair of .44-caliber revolvers.&nbsp; Bearing down on the inexperienced Union militiamen as they fumbled to reload their rifles with shaky hands, Anderson discharged twelve rounds, dropped his pistols, drew two more revolvers, and continued firing, his macabre collection of human scalps and a silk cord with 57 knots tied in it &ndash; one for each man he\'s killed &ndash; serving as frightening proof of his skill and deadliness in combat.</p>\r\n<p>Cox\'s militiamen finished reloading just as Bloody Bill and his small cohort reached their lines.&nbsp; Their second volley of fire, unleashed at point-blank range, riddled the charging men with hundreds of bullets.&nbsp; Anderson was dead before he hit the ground.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>There are a lot of characters in the Civil War that can be looked at objectively, as men taken out of their time of history, fighting for what they believed in even though they may have had their own personal faults.</p>\r\n<p>Bloody Bill was none of these things.&nbsp; He was a bad, bad man, any way you wanna look at it.</p>\r\n<p>The most feared outlaw of the Civil War, Bloody Bill Anderson was born in Missouri, sometime around 1838-ish.&nbsp; His dad was a haberdasher who moved the family north across the border to Kansas during a magical time known as \"Bleeding Kansas\", which sounds about as fun as it actually was.&nbsp; Basically, Kansas was going to become a state, so since the U.S. government couldn\'t decide if it should be a slave state or a free state they decided to let the state\'s residents vote on it.&nbsp; Naturally, this meant that everybody in the state who had an opinion on the subject went around killing everyone who disagreed with them.&nbsp; Destruction, disorder, arson, and street fights were a daily occurrence.&nbsp; Crime was out of control.&nbsp; Death was a daily event.</p>\r\n<p>Bloody Bill fit right in.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill4.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Getting his start robbing liquor stores and stealing horses owned by anti-slavery activists, things got personal for Bill in 1862, when Bill\'s father was killed with a shotgun.&nbsp; Apparently, Bill\'s dad got pissed off when a neighbor boy refused to marry his daughter, so pops broke into the guys house with a shotgun.&nbsp; The neighbor boy got the drop on Bill\'s dad and shot him point-blank in the chest, killing him instantly.&nbsp; Bill, whose mother had already died from being struck by lightning a few years earlier, responded by going to the neighbor\'s house, killing him and his brother-in-law, burning down their family liquor store, fleeing to Missouri, and forming a band of 30 outlaws intent on killing every pro-Union person they could catch.</p>\r\n<p>Anderson eventually hooked up with the most infamous of the Missouri guerillas &ndash; Captain William Clarke Quantrill.&nbsp; Quantrill, an Ohio schoolteacher turned murderous raider, was fighting a private, unauthorized war for the Confederacy in Missouri, attacking Union troops, trains, and supply depots across Missouri to disrupt their war operations.&nbsp; Anderson was made a Lieutenant, going on several raids against Federal forts and positions, but, by his own account, he wasn\'t even all that interested in the Southern cause or any of that stuff &ndash; he just enjoyed robbing, killing, and looting.&nbsp; A 19<sup>th</sup>-century rebel without a cause riding the high plains in search of booty and mayhem.</p>\r\n<p>He changed his tune in August 1863, when Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr., eager to smash Quantrill\'s group of outlaws, issued arrest warrants for every woman in Missouri that he believed had provided aid to Quantrill\'s Raiders.&nbsp; Anderson\'s three sisters &ndash; aged 10, 14, and 16 &ndash; were thrown into an old prison in Kansas City.&nbsp; On August 14, 1863, the prison building collapsed, killing Anderson\'s sister Josephine and crippling his sister Mary.</p>\r\n<p>Now it was personal.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>A week later, Bloody Bill Anderson and Quantrill\'s Raiders rode into the pro-Union town of Lawrence, Kansas, looted the stores, pillaged, set fire to every building, and killed 150 unarmed men and boys (in Quantrill\'s words, \"every man big enough to hold a gun\") in cold blood, with Anderson personally accounting for 14 murders.&nbsp; A few months after that the Raiders, who included infamous future outlaws Frank James, Jesse James, and Cole Younger, took Fort Blair from the Union &ndash; and Anderson saw to it that every man in the fort was killed, right down to the Army band.</p>\r\n<p>Pursued by thousands of Union troops seeking retribution for these heinous crimes, Quantrill\'s men headed to Sherman, Texas, where they could chill until things cooled down.&nbsp; Even though Sherman was a pro-Confederate town, this didn\'t stop Bloody Bill from killing a couple guys and robbing some of the stores, pausing his mayhem only long enough to get married to a local saloon girl.&nbsp; While they were in Texas, Quantrill of all people accused Bloody Bill of being too out-of-control psychotic, so Bill told him to get lost and broke off from Quantrill\'s unit.&nbsp; Frank and Jesse James went with him.</p>\r\n<p>On June 11, 1864, local residents in Northern Missouri found the bodies of 12 Union soldiers who had been killed and scalped, their bodies left to rot.&nbsp; Bloody Bill was back.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&nbsp;<img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>For the next four months, Bloody Bill Anderson\'s gang of guerillas, never more than about 50 men wearing stolen Union uniforms, went on a rampage across Kansas and Missouri, killing and raiding Union forces, cutting telegraph wires, burning rail bridges, and leaving behind a wake of mutilated corpses.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The most brutal of these raids took place in Centralia, Missouri, on September 27, 1864.&nbsp; Anderson\'s crew, in town hoping to get word from Confederate General Sterling Price about an upcoming Rebel expedition to Missouri (Price turned Anderson\'s offer for help down, saying that he didn\'t want to work with psychos), ended up getting drunk, setting fire to the city, and robbing half the stores.&nbsp; When the noon passenger train arrived, Anderson\'s men boarded it, robbed everyone, and forced 24 uniformed Union soldiers to get off the train.&nbsp; Bloody Bill stripped off their jackets, lined them up, and shot them in the head one by one.&nbsp; A few hours after this, a militia unit under Major A.V.E. Johnson arrived on the scene, responding to the disturbance with a force of 120 men from the 39<sup>th</sup> Missouri Infantry, but they rode straight into a trap &ndash; Anderson and his men ambushed the inexperienced troops, rode them down, killed anyone who tried to surrender, then executed all the wounded and decapitated their corpses.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It was at this point that Samuel P. Cox was called in to deal with Anderson.&nbsp; He ambushed Bloody Bill outside Albany, Missouri, catching him in his own trap and gunning Anderson down as he fearlessly charged straight into a vastly-superior force, surrender never being an option for such a violent man.&nbsp; His body was displayed publicly in Richmond, Missouri for two days.&nbsp; On the third day, pro-Unionists pulled his body down, decapitate it, put his head on a pike outside the city, and dragged his body through the streets behind a horse.&nbsp; It was eventually recovered and buried just outside town.&nbsp; Much to the mayor\'s chagrin, the local townspeople came out and put flowers on it every night.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;<br /><img src=\"/images/946248726864/bloodybill7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">\"If I cared for my life, I\'d have lost it long ago.&nbsp; Wanting to lose it, I can\'t throw it away.\"<br />- Bloody Bill Anderson</p>','2014-10-24','946248726864','bloodybill.jpg','bloodybill-small.jpg','Bloody Bill Anderson','One of the Civil War\'s most terrifying outlaws and bushwhackers.','\"Hell was suddenly transferred to earth and all the fiends of darkness summoned to join this carnival of blood.  Centralia, with all its horrors, was eclipsed here in the enormity and infamous conduct of the bloody demons!  No treatment was too brutal, no treatment too cruel to satisfy the greed of that hellish crew, and were it possible for human souls to grow drunk on blood, I trust the idea may offer some palliation for the scenes enacted there, for the bloody, dastardly, cowardly, wanton acts committed upon the living and dead persons of those brave Union boys!  Men\'s heads were severed from their lifeless bodies, exchanged as to bodies, labeled with rough and obscene epitaphs and inscriptions, stuck upon their carbine points, tied to their saddle bows, or sat grinning at each other from the tops of fence stakes and stumps around the scene.  God knows the sight was too horrible for description.\"  - Sgt. Thomas M. Goodman, 25th Missouri Infantry\r\n'),('Clive Dytor','1956','N/A','Cardiff, Wales, UK','20th-century British Soldier','<p>One of the weirdest wars in modern history was fought thirty-two years ago over a tiny set of mostly-pointless uninhabitable islands off the coast of Argentina known as the Falklands.&nbsp; The Falkland Islands measure roughly 4,700 square miles of frozen rock primarily inhabited by sheep and penguins, and is home to about 3,000 people, yet despite having a land mass smaller than 48 American states and a population that is roughly equal to the average attendance of the Academy Awards ceremony for some reason Argentina and the United Kingdom have spent an utterly-ridiculous amount of time and energy bickering and arguing over who owns it.</p>\r\n<p>The story goes that Falklands were colonized by England way back in the golden age of the British Empire Owning Shit All Over the Fucking Place, and they maintained a garrison there for something like three hundred years.&nbsp; By the early 1980s, however, the power-hungry and tyrannical Argentinian military dictatorship decided it was dumb as hell to have a British military possession hanging out just off the coast of Buenos Aires, so the Argentinians sent in a bunch of troops to occupy the Falklands in July of 1982, rolled their flag up the capital, and officially declared it Argentine territory.</p>\r\n<p>They figured the British would just say fuck it and decide they weren&rsquo;t really interested in risking British lives to assert dominance over an ancient colonial holding located literally half a globe away from London.&nbsp; Just impotently shake their fists ragefully at the screen like a Call of Duty player who just lost capture the flag and is watching a digital representation of a grown man in full battle gear rubbing his balls all over the place before switching off their console in anger.</p>\r\n<p>They were wrong.&nbsp; Because the Brits deployed aircraft carriers, paratroopers, and the Royal Fucking Marine Commandos.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Royal Marines celebrated their 350<sup>th</sup> birthday last week, meaning that these guys have been kicking fucking nutsacks from Beijing to Calais for one hundred and seventeen years longer than the United States has existed as a goddamn country.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re older than the colony of Connecticut, and you don&rsquo;t get to hang around for that long unless you&rsquo;re a top-shelf double-barrel oak-aged group of knife-fighting badass motherfuckers.&nbsp; If these guys are making the trip all the way down the Atlantic from Bristol to the Falkland Islands, they&rsquo;re not going home until they get a little blood on their bayonets.</p>\r\n<p>The capital of the Falklands is the college-campus-sized &ldquo;city&rdquo; of Port Stanley on the coast of the eastern island, and when the British Royal Navy rolled up the Argies had more troops deployed here than there were people actually living in the Falkland Islands.&nbsp; Port Stanley was ringed by mountains on three sides and a protected harbor from the fourth, perfect territory for a defensive war, and they&rsquo;d garrisoned the town with howitzers, troops, and an airstrip that could launch badass ultra-modern Mirage fighters equipped with ship-killing Exocet missiles.&nbsp; <br /> The British plan was simple.&nbsp; The harbor was too well protected, so they&rsquo;d drop the Royal Marine Commandos on the far side of the island, march 80 miles across open ground hopefully undetected, and surprise sneak-attack the enemy from the direction they&rsquo;d least expect it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>&ldquo;Yomping&rdquo; is a fake word the Royal Marines use to describe hiking for a ridiculously-long distance while lugging around a backbreaking full 90-pound pack of gear.&nbsp; These guys undergo some of the most intense training anywhere in the world, including&nbsp; a ridiculous 26 weeks of Basic Training followed by an additional six weeks of Commando School &ndash; all told, about eight months of non-stop training.&nbsp; They were dropped at San Carlos Bay and slogged eighty miles across rocky, ice-covered ground in the middle of the Argentine winter, walking the distance from Philadelphia to New York City in just under a week while wearing a backpack that weighs about the same as actress Demi Moore.&nbsp; At the end of their mud-and-ice cross-country epic Lord of the Rings-style journey, these guys were then ordered to go out in the middle of the night, charge through a minefield, up a fucking mountain, and attack a battle-hardened group of heavily-entrenched Argentinian Regular Army soldiers who were dug in to fortified positions complete with machine gun and anti-tank bunkers and sniper nests and outnumbered the Marines nearly two to one.</p>\r\n<p>The Royal Marine Commandos didn&rsquo;t even blink.&nbsp; They just unpacked their shit, finished their cigarettes, grabbed their rifles, and went to work.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The plan was for two Royal Marine units, 42 Commando and 45 Commando, to simultaneously attack up the two major mountains overlooking Port Stanley &ndash; Mount Harriet and a twin-peaker called the Two Sisters.&nbsp; They would proceed in standard operating procedure for the Royal Marine Commandos &ndash; move in under cover of darkness, infiltrate as close as possible to enemy positions, then ambush them by popping up right in front of their gun sights and shooting them at point-blank range.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>On the evening of 11 June 1982, a couple Argentinian machine gunners thought they might have noticed some movement on the ridge below them.&nbsp; They fired up a flare to illuminate the darkness, and pretty much shit a brick when they saw a couple hundred Royal Marine Commandos spread out in assault formations less than 500 yards from their position.</p>\r\n<p>The night lit up with tracer fire immediately.&nbsp; Mortars and artillery quickly followed from both sides, blasting the entire mountain range with towering fiery shrapnel-packed explosions.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor4.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Marines dove for cover as bullets and tracers ripped through the night sky.&nbsp; Lieutenant Clive Dytor, commanding 8 Troop, Zulu Company, 42 Royal Marine Commando, ordered the men of his section to return fire immediately.&nbsp; The 25 year-old Welshman was in a pretty tough spot &ndash; he had just a dozen or so guys with him, and he was facing a couple hundred Argentinians with heavy weapons plastering his guys from an elevated position with Browning .50-caliber machine guns that ripped up the rock and ice around them like it was going through a food processor.&nbsp; His cover was good, but his two sections were also split up &ndash; they&rsquo;d dove different ways for cover, and now there was a big gap between the first and second sections.&nbsp; Worse yet, mortars were starting to zero in on his guys.</p>\r\n<p>Dytor and his men were pinned down for some time, and casualties quickly began to mount.&nbsp; His ammo was getting low, three Marines were dead, and one more had his leg blown off by a mortar.&nbsp; When another mortar slams nearby, wounding yet another of Dytor&rsquo;s guys with flaming chunks of shrapnel, the Welshman remembered an old story from World War II &ndash; during the battle for Tobruk, the men of the Scottish Black Watch found themselves in a similar situation, pinned down by Germans in an elevated position with MG42s.&nbsp; The adjutant of the Watch, a big Scotsman with huge titanium balls, stood up in full view of everyone, screamed &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t this the Black Watch?!&nbsp; THEN CHARGE!!!!!&rdquo;&nbsp;&nbsp; That adjutant immediately got ripped in half by a Nazi machine gun, but his boys ran ahead and carried the day with their bayonets.</p>\r\n<p>This gave Clive Dytor a weird idea.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Standing up in full view of his men &ndash; and the Argies &ndash; Lieutenant Clive Dytor, Royal Marine Commando, ordered his men to fix bayonets and follow him.&nbsp; Screaming his unit battle cry, &ldquo;ZULU!!!!!&rdquo; he locked a fucking bayonet on the end of his FAL L1A1 service rifle and started running full fucking speed uphill towards the enemy firing his gun from the hip Schwarzenegger-style.&nbsp; As he ran ahead, oblivious to a hail of .50-caliber machine gun bullets whizzing around him in every direction, he managed to make out a very British scream of confidence from one of his hardened sergeants:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;&ldquo;Get your fucking head down, you stupid bastard!&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>But Clive Dytor did not get his head down.&nbsp; He ran like a bat out of hell, firing indiscriminately into the darkness, bayonet at the ready, straight towards the machine gun nest.&nbsp; When he reached it, he dove in, gun at the ready, bayonetting, swinging, and shooting.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It was only at this point that he realized his men were right there with him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>That got the whole thing going. My two front sections picked it up and came on through with me, and we swept up. <br />We took the position. We should have been cut to pieces - we were full frontal, straight on to heavy machine gun. <br />But we just kept on pushing through.</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Royal Marine Commandos, attacking an almost impossible situation, ran from trench to trench, fighting with tooth and nail, using everything from grenades and rifles to claw their way through enemy positions.&nbsp; Sniper nests were taken out with goddamn bazookas.&nbsp; Trenches were carried in hand-to-hand combat.&nbsp; The Argentinians fought heroically &ndash; particularly a conscript named Oscar Poltronieri who volunteered to man a gun and single-handedly held back an entire detachment of Commandos to buy the rest of his comrades time to withdraw and fired his fifty cal until he was killed at his post &ndash; but by sunrise the fight was over.&nbsp; The survivors surrendered, and the Marines were in control of the ridge.&nbsp; Port Stanley surrended the next day, and the war was over.&nbsp; The Royal Marines had suffered four men dead, ten wounded, but taken over two hundred prisoners.</p>\r\n<p>Clive Dytor received the Military Cross for his actions at the Battle of Two Sisters.&nbsp; After the war, he&rsquo;d return home and become a priest.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s been the headmaster of the Oratory School in Oxford for the past twelve years.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/438143512338/dytor7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>What happened here was a miracle, and I want you </em><br /><em>to fucking acknolwedge it.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1388665/We-dont-need-food-just-ammunition-and-tons-of-it.html\">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1388665/We-dont-need-food-just-ammunition-and-tons-of-it.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.naval-history.net/F55-45_Commando_Battle_for_Two_Sisters.htm\">http://www.naval-history.net/F55-45_Commando_Battle_for_Two_Sisters.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/9164691/Falklands-War-hero-explains-why-he-entered-the-church-after-being-awarded-the-Military-Cross.html\">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/9164691/Falklands-War-hero-explains-why-he-entered-the-church-after-being-awarded-the-Military-Cross.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2007/06/14/sinclair_dytor_falklands_feature.shtml\">http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2007/06/14/sinclair_dytor_falklands_feature.shtml</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Dytor\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Dytor</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Ford, Roger.&nbsp; <em>The Whites of Their Eyes</em>.&nbsp; Brassey&rsquo;s, 2001.</p>\r\n<p>Phillips, Ruska.&nbsp; <em>A Damn Close-Run Thing</em>.&nbsp; Shilka, 2011.</p>\r\n<p>Van Der Bijl, Nick.&nbsp; <em>Victory in the Falklands</em>.&nbsp; Pen and Sword, 2007.</p>','2014-11-07','438143512338','dytor.jpg','dytor-small.jpg','Clive Dytor','Royal Marine Commando leads a bayonet charge against the Argentinians during the Falkland War.','The only thought going through my head was to get the advance moving again and to try to regain the forward momentum: the idea of being killed didn’t enter my mind. I did what any well-trained infantry officer would have done.'),('Kevin Vickers','September 29, 1956','N/A','Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada','21st-century Canadian Policeman','<p>Last month the people of Canada witnessed a potentially-catastrophic national tragedy unfold on national television when a psychotic, mentally-unstable chunk of human garbage carried a loaded rifle into the House of Commons in Ottawa and randomly opened fire on everything in sight like a fucking asshole.&nbsp; Typically speaking, heroism in the midst of extreme fucked-up horrible shit isn&rsquo;t the sort of thing I typically like to write about on this website.&nbsp; I purposely avoid it, not just because the research is heartbreaking, but also because it&rsquo;s hard to write and upbeat and energetic piece when you&rsquo;re talking about innocent people dying horrible deaths for no good reason.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>However, in the case of the October 22, 2014 attack on Canadian Parliament, the unstoppable adamantium-plated hero-balls of Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers single-handedly prevented such a situation in what has to be one of the most badass gunfight situations of the modern era:&nbsp; This hard-as-nails Canadian Jack Bauer meets Max Payne fucking took out a wannabe spree-killing mass-murderer half his age by diving out from behind a pillar in an old cathedral-style stone hallway Bullet Time-style and capping the dude mid-air at point-blank range like something out of a John Woo wet dream.&nbsp; He did this at the age of 58, which would still probably make him one of the younger members of the <em>Expendables </em>cast whenever Stallone finally gets around to including him in one of those movies.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers1.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Kevin Vickers was born in New Brunswick, a province located somewhere in Canada probably, and spent the last <em>three goddamn decades </em>working as an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.&nbsp; And while you and me might like to think of the Mounties as those dudes in the Pharrell hats and red coats who ride mooses and get their picture printed on the side of maple syrup containers, the modern-day RCMP wears hardcore body armor, has its own SWAT-style Tactical Response Team, and is responsible for taking down thugs ranging from Russian mobsters and al-Qaida affiliated terror suspects to brutal rapists and convicted murderers.&nbsp; Guys like Kevin Vickers manually pull the heads off of meth dealers and assault rifle-toting heroin traffickers from the Klondike to the Bay of Fundy, so you can keep your lame dead-horse &ldquo;Canadians all have mullets and play ice hockey&rdquo; stereotypes to yourself.</p>\r\n<p>When Officer Mountie Vickers wasn&rsquo;t tracking violent fugitives through knee-deep snow far in the sub-zero Canadian wilderness, clubbing jaywalkers in the back of the head with a full-size replica of the Stanley Cup, or kicking in the doors of scuzzy back-alley Ontario crackhouses with his well-polished knee-high boots, this guy also earned the respect of the First Nations (this is what you call American Indians when they&rsquo;re Canadian) for being cool to them while resolving a hardcore fishing-rights dispute that had erupted into nasty violence in the early 2000s.&nbsp; A dude who was well-known for being chill with pretty much everyone around him that wasn&rsquo;t actively in the process of breaking the law, Vickers was also given an award by the Association of Progressive Muslims of Canada for his &ldquo;bias-free policing&rdquo; and by the World Sikh Organization for letting members of their faith wear the kirpan dagger into the Houses of Parliament (probably because armed people in Parliament apparently don&rsquo;t pose much of a threat to this dude).&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Vickers&rsquo; early career.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After 28 years of hardcore front-line experience bagging punks across Canada, in 2005 Vickers was appointed to the prestigious post of Sergeant-at-Arms of the Canadian House of Commons.&nbsp; There have only been nine of these guys in history, but the post is so badass that Vickers is actually the second Sergeant-at-Arms I&rsquo;ve written about (the first was <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=898588118753\">David Vivian Currie</a>).&nbsp; At Sergeant-at-Arms, Vickers&rsquo; primary responsibility is to maintain security for the entire legislative body of Canada, including the Prime Minister (and the Queen when she&rsquo;s in town), and his secondary job is the task of wearing a cool-ass hatt and carrying the ceremonial mace (the representation of the Queen&rsquo;s power in Canada) into the Chamber before Parliamentary meetings.&nbsp; If this doesn&rsquo;t sound like that cool of a job, you should know that one time some MP grabbed the mace when he wasn&rsquo;t supposed to and everyone got so fucking pissed about this act of treason that the government declared he couldn&rsquo;t be re-elected to office until he publicly apologized to the people of Canada for being such a raging asshole.</p>\r\n<p>Like a true stone-faced badass, over the course of his nine-year tenure Vickers never spoke in session and never gave an interview to the media until this shit went down last month.&nbsp; When he was recently asked about getting the job, he said that in his interview he told the Prime Minister, &ldquo;If you make me your sergeant at arms, there will be no walls built around Canada&rsquo;s Parliamentary buildings.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>It was a claim he didn&rsquo;t have a problem backing up.&nbsp; Because when shit went down, this guy and his oversized-mace-sized ballsack were all the security the government needed.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>This would be a sweet weapon in a<br /> Dynasty Warriors game.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>On the morning of Wednesday, October 22<sup>nd</sup>, 2014, a mentally-unstable 32 year-old man came to the unconscionable conclusion that he was going to walk into the middle of downtown Ottawa with an old-school lever-action Winchester and open fire.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve chosen not to name him here, mostly because I don&rsquo;t believe people like this deserve to have their names mentioned in the same breath as the heroes who stop them.</p>\r\n<p>For whatever reason, this jackass brought his rifle to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shot and killed Corporal <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/americas/nathan-cirillo-soldier-killed-in-ottawa-used-strength-to-help-others.html?_r=0\">Nathan Cirillo</a>, a 25 year-old veteran from the Argyll and Southerland Highlanders Regiment and all-around stand-up guy who had been posted there as an honor guard, and then ran across the street towards the main building of the Canadian House of Commons.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As this maniac ran towards the front doors of the government building, he was immediately confronted by Samearn Son &ndash; a hardcore fearless dude and 10-year veteran Parliamentary guard.&nbsp; Son screamed that there was a gun, alerting the people inside as to what was going on, and then heroically ran up and grabbed the shooter&rsquo;s rifle like something out of a Terminator movie.&nbsp; The gunman managed to crank off a round while wrestling for the gun, and the bullet hit Son in the foot, causing him to lose his grip on the rifle.</p>\r\n<p>Determined to bring out a senseless bloodbath, this motherfucker next ran into the main hallway of the House of Commons, firing large-caliber rifle rounds through thankfully-locked and barricaded doors into rooms where the Canadian Prime Minister and other high-ranking MPs were hiding.&nbsp; He then exchanged gunfire with the security team on site before running into the Hall of Honor, taking cover behind a bulletproof stone wall, and reloading his weapon.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>At the other end of the Hall, Canadian Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, wearing his full-on work tuxedo, opened the lock box in his office, withdrew a 9mm pistol, racked the slide, and started cooly walking towards the sounds of gunfire.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> This place might as well have doves flying around it<br /> because JOHN WOO SHIT is about to go down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Members of Vickers&rsquo; security team gave him a heads-up that the shooter was hiding in there, but he told them to stay back while he handled shit.&nbsp; Moving stealthily up through the hallway, pistol at the ready, he moved towards the concealed shooter&rsquo;s position.&nbsp; Then, when he was taking cover behind a pillar just more than an arm&rsquo;s reach away, he saw it:</p>\r\n<p>The tip of the Winchester&rsquo;s barrel, peeking out from behind the stone wall.</p>\r\n<p>Kevin Vickers took one step, dove sideways, spun on his back-mid air, and fired three rounds before he&rsquo;d even hit the ground.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers6.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I don&rsquo;t really know what was going through the shooter&rsquo;s mind, but my guess is probably that the last fucking thing he expected was to see a white-haired ex-Mountie with glasses in a full fucking tuxedo come flying in Max Payne style out of nowhere and barrel roll in front of him with a gun blazing.&nbsp; He was shot multiple times, fell, and then Vickers plugged him a couple more times from the prone position just to be sure. &nbsp;&nbsp;As security teams swarmed over the body of the dead gunman, Vickers calmly got back to his feet, and walked to his office to reload his pistol (in case there were more than one shooter).</p>\r\n<p>Someone snapped this picture of him on the way:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers7.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Which is like the British/Canadian version of this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After single-handedly bringing down a potential spree-killer, Kevin Vickers went in to the caucus room to check on the Prime Minister and let him know shit had been handled.&nbsp; Then he called his mom to tell her he was ok because she was watching it on the news and was probably freaked out.</p>\r\n<p>Kevin Vickers went right back to work the next day, because real badasses don&rsquo;t take fucking Annual Leave just because they mid-air bullet time shot a first-degree murderer in the face at point-blank range.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When he brought his mace to the House of Commons, the entire Parliament gave him an extended standing ovation for literally saving all of their lives from a homicidal maniac.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As usual, he didn&rsquo;t say anything.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/960224519246/vickers9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-shooting-the-face-to-face-encounter-that-ended-the-attack-on-parliament-1.2812802?cmp=fbtl&amp;utm_content=bufferf4349&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=facebook.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer\">CBC.ca</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://heavy.com/news/2014/10/kevin-vickers-sergeant-at-arms-hero-ottawa-parliament-hill-shooting/\">10 Things You Should Know</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/parliament-to-accept-and-embrace-wearing-of-kirpan-sergeant-at-arms-explains/article614877/?from=21217602\">Globe &amp; Mail</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.robnicholsonmp.ca/media_/rob-in-the-news/appointment-of-new-sergeant-at-arms-of-the-house-of-commons\">Appointment Announcement</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canada/11181545/Kevin-Vickers-a-Canadian-hero.html\">Telegraph.co.uk</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Vickers\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2014-11-14','960224519246','vickers.jpg','vickers-small.jpg','Kevin Vickers','When a psychotic gunman attacked the Canadian House of Commons, this guy brought him down single-handedly in a badass gunfight.','\"He’s a very intelligent and responsible person. He\'s a people person-type fellow, too.  But you don\'t want to mess with him.\"  – Kevin\'s cousin Keith'),('Abdul Hafiz','c. 1919','April 6, 1944','Kalanpur Village, Haryana, India','WWII Indian Soldier','<p>So I&rsquo;ve been diving super hardcore into finishing the third and final Guts &amp; Glory book (the first one is <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Guts-Glory-American-Civil-War/dp/0316320501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1416605885&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=guts+and+glory\">on sale here</a> in case you&rsquo;re looking for a non-denominational holiday present to amaze and delight your friends and family and relatives and probably also pets) with the sort of reckless abandon that can only come from being a damn month late on my deadline with no end in sight.&nbsp; The book I ultimately hope to have completed at some point before the end of human existence is on World War II, and while I was researching a badass chapter on Gurkha warriors cracking skulls I accidentally came across what has to be one of the most balls-out awesome tales of borderline-suicidal heroism I think I&rsquo;ve ever heard.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s the story of a Muslim dude from India who fought the Japanese in Burma with the British Army, if that makes any sense.&nbsp; More specifically, it&rsquo;s the story of a dude who pumped his platoon up by telling them they were invincible, proceeded to run uphill across an open field straight-on into a fortified company of enemy troops who outnumbered him by a significant margin while firing a machine gun from the hip like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of <em>Commando, </em>and didn&rsquo;t stop screaming and shooting and killing everything in his path until the entire enemy formation was in full retreat.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz1.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br />Look at this dude\'s main profile picture, then<br />imagine him covered in blood and coming at you like this.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In early 1944, the Japanese Imperial Army launched a full-on attack against British India, hoping to destroy the vital Allied garrison at Imphal, cut off resupply routes from India to the Chinese guerillas, and possibly even open the way for a full-on Japanese assault on Calcutta itself.&nbsp; Somehow transporting a ridiculously-huge armada of 90,000 battle-hardened veteran troops through trackless Indiana Jones-style thick monkey jungle wilderness without anybody knowing about it, the Japanese came screaming in out of nowhere and attacked Imphal from pretty much every single direction at the same time.&nbsp; Cut off in the city and outnumbered two to one, brave British and Indian troops somehow fought on, receiving air drops of everything from bullets to paratroopers to keep their struggle alive.</p>\r\n<p>Early in the morning on April 6, 1944, Indian reconnaissance scouts reported back to British Army command with some really shitty news -- a badass commando team of Japanese infantry had infiltrated through the Allied front lines and captured a vital position overlooking the only jungle road that lead into Imphal from the north.&nbsp; As long as the elite 51<sup>st</sup> Infantry was resting their nuts on this ridge, you weren&rsquo;t going to be able to get a friggin&rsquo; bicycle into the city without a Japanese dude shoving a live mortar round down your pants.</p>\r\n<p>The scouts reported that 40 men were positioned there as of 6:30am.&nbsp; By the time Abdul Hafiz of the 3<sup>rd</sup> Battalion, 9<sup>th</sup> Jat Regiment, Fifth Indian Division arrived at 9:30, it had already been reinforced to a full-strength company complete with heavy machine gun and grenade launcher sections.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A native of Kalanpur Village in Northern India, Abdul Hafiz was the incredibly-berserker commander of the 40-man platoon sent to re-take the ridge at all costs.&nbsp; A Jemadar (which is more like a Second Lieutenant than a race of superwarrior aliens who live on the other side of an Gamma Quadrant wormhole) and veteran infantry officer, this dude was a literally completely fearless war-mongering battle-demon in the vein of Khalid bin Walid who didn&rsquo;t have a problem staring death in the face and hocking a big loogie in its eye.&nbsp; He took one look at an enemy strongpoint manned by a significantly-larger entrenched enemy force aligned atop a difficult cliff without any cover on it whatsoever, assembled his men, and got them more pumped up than a fucking Iron Maiden song by basically doing the World War II version of that thing where those football players huddle up the team before the game and start frothing at the mouth like tweaked-out Norse Vikings.&nbsp; Hafiz told his assembled men that they were &ldquo;invincible&rdquo;, and that he guaranteed beyond a shadow of a doubt that if they showed no fear and attacked like true warriors the enemy would be driven before them in a glorious victory for the ages.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I would have love to have seen a transcript of exactly what was said this morning, because whatever it was that Jemadar Hafiz said to the men of 3/9<sup>th</sup> Jat Regiment, it fucking worked.&nbsp; His guys freaked out, grabbed their bayonet-equipped Enfield rifles, and ran screaming out from the jungle head-on towards Japanese heavy machine gun nests.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Swarming out with an epic battle-cry, the Indian Army troops ran full-speed up the ridge, being raked with machine gun fire every step of the way.&nbsp;&nbsp; As you can imagine, a couple of these dude were chopped pretty much in half by wave after wave of large-caliber rifle ammunition pretty much immediately, and the attack faltered a bit once these guys realized, hey, maybe we aren&rsquo;t actually invincible here, but Hafiz didn&rsquo;t give a fuck.&nbsp; Firing his Thompson submachine gun and hurling grenades, he shouted an ancient Muslim war cry and pressed on, ignoring the hail of bullets being thrown in his direction.&nbsp; When an enemy bullet ripped through his leg just below the knee this dude didn&rsquo;t even flinch &ndash; he just kept sprinting.</p>\r\n<p>Hafiz had already chucked all his grenades and blown through every .45-caliber bullet in the magazine when he somewhat-miraculously reached the enemy front lines, so instead of waiting for reinforcements or reloading his gun or doing some other lame bullshit he just ran up to the closest enemy machine gun, GRABBED THE FUCKING BARREL OF THE GUN and turned it away from him, apparently not even reacting to the fact that machine gun barrels are red-fucking-hot after they&rsquo;ve carried a couple hundred rounds downrange.&nbsp; But this dude didn&rsquo;t give a shit.&nbsp; Pointing the barrel of the gun straight in the air, he pulled out his knife, but before he could shank the understandably-freaked-out enemy machine gunner one of Hafiz&rsquo;s buddies jumped in and bayonetted the guy in what was probably a much more humane death than Hafiz had planned for him.</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s how I picture it going down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz4.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Crushing his way through the front line with hand-to-hand combat, Hafiz and the rest of his platoon overpowered the defenders in the trench.&nbsp; But this guy wasn&rsquo;t done.&nbsp; Searching through the carnage around him, this dude grabbed a Bren gun off a wounded comrade, slammed a magazine in it, and started running towards the next trench spraying automatic weapons fire in every direction like a fucking psychotic blood-raging madman.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He personally took out a half-dozen more enemy soldiers, cleared out both mortar pits and another machine gun nest, and took out two Japanese officers.&nbsp; When the surviving defenders started running for it, he ran after them, standing at full-height feeding mag after mag into his Bren and ripping off rounds from the hip as he ran.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz5a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz5b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz5c.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He chased the fleeing enemy over the ridge and down the far side of the hill, firing and screaming like a banshee, until suddenly a hidden machine gun opened fire from the jungle and drilled the berserking Indian dead-center of the chest.&nbsp; Falling to the ground, knowing his second bullet-related injury would be a mortal wound, he rolled over on his front, rested the Bren on its bipod, loaded another magazine, and started laying down rounds in the direction of the enemy machine gun.&nbsp; His last words to his top NCO were &ldquo;Re-organize on the defensive positions!&nbsp; I will give covering fire!&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>The 23 surviving members of his unit would occupy the Japanese trenches and hold until reinforcements arrived.&nbsp; The ridge, officially known on British Army maps as &ldquo;Runaway Hill&rdquo;, would stay in Allied hands for the rest of the battle.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/786230910015/abdulhafiz6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>The complete disregard for his own safety <br /> and his determination to capture and hold the position at all costs <br /> was an example to all ranks, which it would be difficult to equal.<br /> <br /> -Victoria Cross citation, Jemadar Abdul Hafiz</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.cwgc.org/foreverindia/military-honours/abdul-hafiz.php\">http://www.cwgc.org/foreverindia/military-honours/abdul-hafiz.php</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/36627/supplement/3501\">https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/36627/supplement/3501</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.victoriacross.org.uk/bbahafiz.htm\">http://www.victoriacross.org.uk/bbahafiz.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Hafiz_%28VC%29\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Hafiz_%28VC%29</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources</p>\r\n<p>Luto, James.&nbsp; <em>Fighting with the Fourteenth Army in Burma</em>.&nbsp; Pen and Sword, 2013.</p>\r\n<p>Perrett, Bryan.&nbsp; <em>For Valour</em>.&nbsp; Orion, 2012.</p>\r\n<p>Sharma, Gautam.&nbsp; <em>Valour and Sacrifice</em>.&nbsp; Allied, 1990.</p>\r\n<p>Singh, Jaswant and Manvendra Singh.&nbsp; <em>Till Memory Serves: Victoria Cross</em>.&nbsp; Rupa, 2012.</p>','2014-11-21','786230910015','abdulhafiz.jpg','abdulhafiz-small.jpg','Abdul Hafiz','Army lieutenant tells his men they are invincible, leads them on suicide charge, goes into psychotic blood rage. What else do you need from me here honestly.','So fierce was the attack, and all his men so inspired by the determination of Jemadar Abdul Hafiz to kill all enemy in sight at whatever cost, that the enemy, who were still in considerable numbers on the position, ran away down the opposite slope of the hill.'),('Pliosaur','c. 175 million BC','c. 160 million BC','The Ocean','Prehistoric Crocodile Monster','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Ok folks, it\'s like noon on the day after Thanksgiving and I\'ve had a couple too many beers and am spending every spare minute of my life trying desperately to complete a <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Guts &amp; Glory </em>book project that\'s seriously over a month late, but as I sit here procrastinating and stressing<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>out about whether or not I\'d have time to write my website article today I came across a trailer that got me super pumped up like pretty much out of my mind.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>And before you go and suggest Star Wars I should mention that franchise has been dead to me since 1999, and the last fifteen years of having my greatest childhood memories turned into a line of baby clothing at Target has literally made it impossible for me to get excited about any new content in the series no matter how many times you want to show me clips of Darth Vader jerking off in the Millennium Falcon with a lighstaber held by Carrie Fisher topless circa 1983.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">No, of course I\'m taking about the new <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Jurassic Park</em>.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Ok, well, yeah, it looks like a weird mix of rehashed, less-suspenseful scenes from the first movie spliced together with the cheesiest dialogue and plot this side of a dubbed 1980s Japanese Godzilla flick, but mostly I saw this scene and was like what the hell is going on here, I need to know everything about this shit or I will probably die.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur1.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /> GOOD IDEA WITH THAT LITTLE FENCE<br /> THAT SHOULD WORK</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">That gigantic shark-chomping aquatic hell gator from ancient Earth\'s past is supposed to be a Mosasaur, a smaller, more agile version of his older, tougher, more badass cousins, the Pliosaurs.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Pliosaurs maliciously lurked the deepest, most miserable depths of Earth\'s oceans during the Jurassic period roughly 160 to 145 million years ago, give or take a few centuries.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Pliosaur means \"MORE LIZARD\", which is awesome, and these impossibly-gigantic evil underwater croc-mouthed murder monsters are the largest and most fucked-up aquatic reptiles to ever stalk the scariest depths of our planet\'s waters.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>They combine the quad-flipper propulsion of a big-ass sea turtle with the terrifying spike-filled mouth of a saltwater crocodile, only instead of just wolfing down bullshit creatures like two-ton wildebeest this thing ate Loch Ness Monsters by crushing their bodies with a wrecking ball-strength jaw clamp augmented by serrated rows of razor-sharp curved teeth the size of your foot.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\">THANKSGIVING FACT:<br /> DON\"T SERVE FISH ON THANKSGIVING<br /> WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU MRS PETERSON</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The most well-known species of these gigantic gator-mouthed monstrosities is <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Liopleurodon ferox</em>, mostly because some British TV show lost its shit and told everyone that Liopleurodon grew to be like 80 feet long and could bench press skyscsrapers.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>In reality, Liopleurodon was only like 5-7 meters tops, which makes it just a couple feet bigger than a 22-foot gator:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><span style=\"font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 115%;\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur31.png\" alt=\"\" /></span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 115%;\">&nbsp;</span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">So you\'re probably safe as long as you can swim faster than like 30 knots or so over a short distance.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Just for a fun Pliosaur factoid, Liopleurodon means \"smooth sided teeth,\" which is a direct reference to his impeccable dental hygiene and also at his skill of plesiosauring all the ladies.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Among the biggest Pliosaurs ever found was the awesomely-nicknamed PREDATOR X, which was a fucking obscene travesty of sanity and reality that measured forty-three feet in length, weight almost 40 tons (the biggest whales on earth today weigh around 3 tons), had a goddamn crocodile jaw filled with 12-inch teeth, and rocked two difference sizes of flippers that gave him an insane short-distance sprinting speed underwater.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The thing\'s skull was almost seven feet long, with three to four times the cross-sectional space for bite muscles as your typical alligator.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">In case you forgot, alligators have the strongest bite in all of the animal kingdom.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur4a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur4b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur4c.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Rocking a bite four times the strength of a T-Rex and with teeth twice the size of that sucker, Predator X was the biggest and most badass apex predator of Jurassic Earth.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Discovered on some Norwegian island over by the North Pole in 2009, Predator X was eventually given the genus-specie <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Pliosaurus Funkei </em>because it was MORE FUNKY LIZARD and also because the guy who found it was named Bjorn Funke, which sounds like the name of a Swedish 1970s revival band specializing in George Clinton cover jams.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Pliosaurs rocked big, frightening, horrific jaws lined with teeth the size of Bowie knives, which were designed to grab, crush, and rip, and which were curved backwards so they\'d lock in to the face of an unsuspecting Plesiosaur and keep it from trying to punk out and swim away.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>It had the similar brain size and shape of a Great White, meaning it was also probably single-mindedly interested in murdering and devouring every living thing in the ocean at all times like a sick demented freak, and it was an excellent tracker because its nasal cavity was set up so it could receive different smells in each nostril, helping it not only to detect the enemy but also to triangulate the position of a wounded bleeding animal by smell alone.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>It\'s big-ass flippers allowed it to accelerate rapidly, possibly even jumping like a whale, and some people speculate it might have been able to move around like a turtle on land as well.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Oh yeah, did I mention it breathed air?<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>So it was always up near the surface ready to leap out and lock in to shit?</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur5a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur5b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> It\'s a magical Liopleurodon, Charlie.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">One problem with Pliosaurs is that it\'s hard to find any good present-day predators to compare them too, since these things seem to be a weird-o mix of gators, turtles, and T-Rexes, only they\'re the size of Megalodons, had the bite strength to rip a modern-day automobile in half, weighed the same as a fully-loaded dump truck and primarily ate creatures that don\'t exist anymore.&nbsp; If their attack was anything like an alligators, it would swallow most smaller prey whole, use its powerful jaws of steel to brutally crush medium prey into an easily-digestible organic paste of blood-covered misery, and with bigger prey it could bite and then do that awesome badass \"death roll\" where it spins around in a circle and pulls parts of it\'s enemy off like a living razor-toothed food processor.<br /><br />Pliosaurs are typically described as \"ambush predators\", meaning they liked to lay completely still and come flying in out of nowhere with a short burst of speed like your typical croc or gator.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>They could go super fast through the water over short spans, and everything they bit almost immediately died a gruesome horrible death.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Scientists believe they ate Krakens, whales, ichthyosaurs, giant squid, Loch Ness monsters, and probably sharks and fish and other shit.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/931398313701/pliosaur6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7264856.stm</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">http://scitechdaily.com/predator-x-officially-named-pliosaurus-funkei/</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/seamonsters/factfiles/liopleurodon.shtml</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">http://dinosaurs.wikia.com/wiki/Liopleurodon</p>\r\n<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>\r\n <o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n  <o:RelyOnVML/>\r\n  <o:AllowPNG/>\r\n </o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>\r\n <w:WordDocument>\r\n  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5.4pt;\r\n	mso-para-margin:0in;\r\n	mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;\r\n	line-height:115%;\r\n	mso-pagination:widow-orphan;\r\n	font-size:8.0pt;\r\n	font-family:\"Arial\",\"sans-serif\";}\r\n</style>\r\n<![endif]-->','2014-11-29','931398313701','pliosaur.jpg','pliosaur-small.jpg','The Pliosaur','The apex predator of the Jurassic ocean and the largest aquatic reptiles of all time.',''),('Nina Onilova','April 10, 1921','March 8, 1942','Novonikolayevka, Ukraine, USSR','WWII Soviet Soldier','<p>Well, my beloved readers, it finally happened.&nbsp; It took ten years, but I finally missed a week of updating my website.&nbsp; I briefly considered posting a YouTube video of my ritualistic seppuku this week to regain the honor I lost by my malfeasance (I don&rsquo;t know if that is the correct word here or even what the hell it means but it popped in to my head for absolutely no good reason whatsoever and seemed appropriate so I&rsquo;m including it without even attempting to look up the definition), but I figured that instead I&rsquo;ll just write something for the front page instead and push the poor old Pliosaur back to the realm of extinct obscurity.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In all honesty, it has been an insane six months (year?) for me, and it all capped off with an insane schedule where I completed the first draft of a World War II book, proofread the entire manuscript for the upcoming <em>Guts &amp; Glory </em>Vikings book, did two magazine interviews, caught up on over a hundred emails on my personal account (I&rsquo;m not even counting the BotW email, which is cripplingly impossible to manage), and shipped what I hope dear God for the love of Jesus is the last of the kickstarter orders.&nbsp; Between that, working a 40 hour a week job, having a kid, and helping my brother move, I didn&rsquo;t get a chance to write anything.&nbsp; But, the good news is that I&rsquo;ve now officially completed three full-length book manuscripts in twelve months and can go back to spending my spare time drunkenly driving digital Jagdpanthers into the sides of mountains and pissing off all my prepubescent screaming asshole teammates because I haven&rsquo;t quite got the hang of <em>World of Tanks </em>just yet.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, here&rsquo;s a badass story about a tough-as-balls Ukrainian orphan chick who emulated her all-time favorite action movie scene in a live-fire situation when she laid waste to a horde of counter-revolutionary Fascists with a belt-fed machine gun and then blew up a Panzer III with a pair of Molotov cocktails and a killer smile.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Nina Onilova was born in 1921 in a small town in the Ukraine, back in the days when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and everyone in town pretty much agreed on the idea of killing Germans and being afraid of Stalin.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t know who her parents are, because she was found on the doorstep of a dirt-poor orphanage and the first time we see her in history she&rsquo;s like fourteen years old leaving the house and going to work a shitty nine-to-five day job in a Communist textile factory.&nbsp; Despite the hardships of her early life, this chick always did what she could to stay pumped up and optimistic about the future, and always had a big infectious smile on her face.&nbsp; If you can read her write the phrase &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know my real parents, so all of the People are my family,&rdquo; and not get one of those furrowed-brow faces that the grumpy old war vet cranky grandpa gets before knowingly nodding his head at the end of a Hallmark movie then you&rsquo;re probably the kind of the douchebag who belongs on my <em>World of Tanks </em>Xbox Live team.</p>\r\n<p>Well one day Onilova&rsquo;s factory had a screening of the ultra-famous Soviet war movie <em>Chapayev</em>, a touching, heart-warming action-comedy-drama about a rag-tag band of Red Army soldiers who use thousands of bullets to rip a bunch of Fascists new assholes during the Russian Civil War.&nbsp; In one of the climactic scenes of the movie, a brave peasant girl sees that the entire White Russian Army is charging in at her comrades and decides, no, that will not abide, and this aggression will not stand, man.&nbsp; She runs up, takes over the gun from the wounded, dying crew, loads in a belt of large-caliber ammunition and starts pummeling the bayonet-equipped counter-revolutionary front lines with so much lead that you could have built a crappy aircraft carrier out of the corpses she left behind.</p>\r\n<p>Nina Onilova was in love immediately.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"398\" height=\"296\" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Comrade Onilova joined her factory&rsquo;s paramilitary club and spend every night for the next couple of months getting machine gun training.&nbsp; This is the sort of sentence that every history I read about her just lays out there as if they&rsquo;re like explaining that she learned to drive a car when her dad took her out to an empty lot behind a Safeway, yet for some reason I feel the need to stop for a second and be like, &ldquo;what the hell is going on here,&rdquo; because seriously what the hell kind of job has provisions to where your friggin&rsquo; co-workers can take you out and teach you how to fire a goddamn machine gun after work?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know if this is a Russia thing, like how they teach kids from birth how to play ice hockey and clear a jam on an AK-47, but dude how cool would it be if you could just go out with the AP guys after work, pound a couple brewskis and then lay into the brick wall behind your office with two boxes of ammo for an M249 SAW?&nbsp; I would want to work at that place.</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, I don&rsquo;t really need to keep saying this on the website but for those of you who haven&rsquo;t been paying attention there was this guy named Hitler once and he invaded Russia.&nbsp; Well when that went down Nina Onilova was so friggin&rsquo; pumped, because now it meant she could shoot people with a belt of 7.62mm, and she immediately enlisted in the Red Army.&nbsp; Since there was still a pretty tight &ldquo;no girls allowed&rdquo; rule on chick machine gunners, the Red Army Commissars made her a Medic, gave her a first aid kit, and sent her to the Crimean Peninsual with the 25<sup>th</sup> Rifle Division, 54<sup>th</sup> Rifle Regiment.</p>\r\n<p>They didn&rsquo;t have to wait long for the Germans to show up.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sevestapol is, by far, one of the most important cities in Russian history.&nbsp; A large port on the Black Sea, this city has historically been one of Russia&rsquo;s only warm-water ports, and since it&rsquo;s so valuable for trade, transportation, and military purposes, the Russians have fought a bunch of wars over it in the past couple hundred years.&nbsp; Hell, if you want to look at it as a pessimist, they&rsquo;re pretty much fighting a war for it <em>right now</em>.</p>\r\n<p>Well Nina Onilova was from around this area, and she wasn&rsquo;t exactly thrilled about coughing up the jewel of the Black Sea to Field Marshal Von Mannstein and a bunch of gun-slinging Nazi stormtroopers.&nbsp; She and her unit dug in around the city and then let the Panzers have it when they showed up.</p>\r\n<p>Medic Onilova didn&rsquo;t have a rifle in the opening engagement, but she positioned herself close to the machine gun just in case, and it wasn&rsquo;t long before she got her chance to show the idiots running things what she could do.&nbsp; At the height of a dangerous German attack, with Nazis blitzkrieging their asses into town all over the place, the company&rsquo;s M1910 Maxim Machine gun jammed and the raw recruit bumbling rookies assigned to the gun couldn&rsquo;t figure out how to get it shooting again.&nbsp; Onilova practically had a big-ass smile on her face when she ran over, told those fools to step back, opened the gun up, cleared the jam, fed in the belt, and hosed down an onrushing horde of Nazis like she was ordering a pizza.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For her heroism on the battlefield, Onilova was promoted to Sergeant and placed in charge of operating and maintaining her company&rsquo;s machine gun.&nbsp; She fought bravely in over three months of non-stop daily warfare, struggling relentlessly to hold the critical city against an entire Army Group of the rightly-feared Wehrmacht.&nbsp; Then, in November in 1941, she was thumping out rounds from a camouflaged machine gun nest when a Fascist mortar dropped in on her position, pummeling her with fire and shrapnel.&nbsp; She was rushed to the hospital and it was deemed that her wounds were so grievous she had to be invalided out of the fight.&nbsp; She was free to go home a hero.</p>\r\n<p>Except she didn&rsquo;t. &nbsp;&nbsp;She walked out of the hospital and rejoined her unit.</p>\r\n<p>Later that month, under heavy attack from Nazi Panzer tanks, Senior Sergeant Nina Onilova ran out of bullets for her heavy machine gun so she left the trench, crawled twenty meters over open, exposed ground towards a thirty-ton Panzer III tank, lit the fuse on a pair of Molotov cocktails, and threw them onto the enemy tank, burning the crew and then igniting the gasoline stores, blowing the damn turret off the Panzer.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While many true Russians may frown on the idea of setting booze on fire, Onilova&rsquo;s point-blank Molotov cocktail bombing of an onrushing Nazi tank was so damn awesome that she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a Soviet honor for bravery in battle.&nbsp; She would continue fighting and manning her gun for another four months, but during intense fighting in the Crimea on March 1<sup>st</sup> she was hit again and sent back into the hospital.&nbsp; While laid up, she started writing a letter to the actress who manned the gun in <em>Chepayev</em>, but died of her wounds before she could finish it.</p>\r\n<p>The story of Nina Onilova, the poor orphan peasant girl who adopted the Proletariat as her family, fought like a demon, and gave her life for the Motherland, was picked up by the Soviet media and she became such a celebrity that women and girls from across Russia rushed to be like her and offer their services to defend the homeland from the invaders.</p>\r\n<p>She was posthumously awarded the highest medal of bravery, the title Hero of the Soviet Union, in 1965.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/15674717049/onilova6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Downing, David.&nbsp; <em>Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty-Two Days that Decided World War II.&nbsp; </em>Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2009.</p>\r\n<p>Markwick, Roger D. and Euridice Charon Cardona.&nbsp; <em>Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War.&nbsp; </em>London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.</p>\r\n<p>Sakaida, Henry.&nbsp; <em>Heroines of the Soviet Union 1941-45</em>.&nbsp; London: Osprey, 2003.</p>','2014-12-12','15674717049','onilova.png','onilova-small.png','Nina Onilova','Ukrainian orphan girl emulates her favorite movie hero by wasting Nazis with a belt-fed machine gun.','“On the surface, of course, I seem weak, small, thin.  But I tell you the truth – my hand has never wavered.”'),('Douglas MacArthur','January 26, 1880','April 5, 1964','Little Rock, AR, USA','20th-century American Soldier','<p>You know who doesn&rsquo;t break out into hives and start sobbing uncontrollably into their pumpkin spice vanilla chai no-foam half-caf lattes when it comes to showing mass-murdering tyrannical North Korean terrorist dictators what a giant swinging pair of cast iron human testicles looks like?</p>\r\n<p>South Korea.&nbsp; And General Douglas Motherfuckin&rsquo; MacArthur.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s fitting that one of the U.S. Army&rsquo;s most famously-colossal super A-Holes was the dude who basically invented aviator sunglasses as a <em>thing that cool dudes do</em>, and MacArthur is honestly best summed up by biographers routinely describing him as &ldquo;controversial&rdquo;, which is just a fence-sitting diplomatic way for non-stance-taking historians to say &ldquo;he was an asshole but he <em>got. Shit. Done.&rdquo;&nbsp; </em>It&rsquo;s safe to say that Douglas MacArthur is basically your old pissed-off WWII-veteran mean uncle who irrationally hates Commies and the media and wears his pants too high, and you and your buddies all laugh about him behind his back, but the second some intruder comes knocking on your door in the middle of the night your run to his door becaue you know he&rsquo;s going to kick it down in his underwear with aviator sunglasses and a .45 busting caps and swearing like a motherfucker until every criminal in a three-block radius is coughing their own blood into their ski masks.&nbsp; In 52 years of unrelentingly, egomaniacially hardcore military service to the Red, White, and Blue, Mac fought in two World Wars, rode horses with Teddy Roosevelt, single-handedly wiped out a gang of banditos in Mexico with his forty-five, almost nuked the entire country of North Korea, and received a Medal of Honor, three Distinguished Service Crosses, seven Silver Stars, and seven Distinguished Service Medals for bravery in good, righteous, manly combat face-to-face with the enemy.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur1.gif\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>deal with it</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Douglas MacArthur was literally born in a military barracks.&nbsp; He came into the world on January 26, 1880 at an army fort in Little Rock, Arkansas where his dad, Medal of Honor recipient General Arthur MacArthur Jr., was stationed to fight off Apache attacks from badass dudes like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=723642411240\">Geronimo</a>.&nbsp; Growing up on the frontier made Mac tough as hell, and according to him, he could &ldquo;ride and shoot even before I could read or write&hellip; almost before I could walk or talk,&rdquo; which is about as American as if he\'d been breast fed by an apple pie and raised in a McDonald\'s PlayPalace.&nbsp; This was a dude who understood the concept of &ldquo;telling not spelling&rdquo;, and it served him well because he graduated first in his class at West Point as a combat engineer in 1903 and never looked back.&nbsp; His first posting was in the Philippines, where he survived malaria and fought off a hardcore bandit attack in the middle of the Philippine jungle.&nbsp; A couple poor fools sprung a trap and he responded by quick-drawing his pistol cowboy-style and sniping the jackasses who were dumb enough to think they could get the drop on him.&nbsp; After that he chilled in Panama to work on the canal, no bigs, and then served as <a href=\"/index.cgi?id=615018121978\">Teddy Roosevelt</a>&rsquo;s military aide in the White House for a year.&nbsp; The idea of those two awesome dudes smoking pipes in an Oval Office full of taxidermied animal heads talking about large-caliber rifles makes me so happy I could uppercut a bison.</p>\r\n<p>In 1914 MacArthur was sent to Veracruz to help provide stability at the height of the <a href=\"/index.cgi?id=26881782484\">Mexican Revolution</a>, and ended up getting himself in an insane running gunfight deep in the lawless interior of the Yucatan Peninsula.&nbsp; Apparently him and a couple other dudes were riding out along the railroad tracks searching for some missing locomotives, when suddenly they were ambushed out of nowhere by TONS of fucking banditos on horseback with rifles and pistols.&nbsp; Riding hard back towards the lines, Mac and his compadres were repeatedly hit by by these raiders, but every time the Americans shot their way out of there thanks to MacArthur&rsquo;s insane pistol marksmanship.&nbsp; In the recommendation for the Medal of Honor (he didn&rsquo;t receive it because the mission to find the locomotives was unauthorized), he&rsquo;s credited with whacking out six guys and a horse, and for escaping one part by hand-cranking one of those train cars like the dudes in the cartoons.&nbsp; When he took his uniform shirt off at the end of the night, it had three bullets in it, but not one scratch on his body.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur9.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>sorry, i didn\'t see you there.<br />i was too busy not giving a fuck.<br /></em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A few years later MacArthur volunteered to go to France to blow shit up in World War I, and helped organized the creation of the 42<sup>nd</sup> Infantry Division &ndash; a unit made up of National Guardsmen from New York, Iowa, and Alabama.&nbsp; As Division chief of staff, he trained his men hard in the rigors of trench warfare and got them to kick ass as a cohesive unit, which is a big deal because two of his regiments &ndash; the 4<sup>th</sup> Alabama and the 69<sup>th</sup> Infantry &ndash; had just fought against each other at the Battle of Antietam fifty years earlier. He led them through dozens of front-line battles over the course of a year and a half and showed the Europeans that the States could field a pretty decent group of heavily-armed asskicking motherfuckers.</p>\r\n<p>Once in France, MacArthur personally led three full-scale assaults on German trenches, as well a hundreds of scouting missions, and something known as &ldquo;trench raids,&rdquo; which are when you suicidally sneak through no-man&rsquo;s land in the middle of the night past barbed wire, machine gun nests, and dead bodies, jump into the enemy trench, beat the shit out of everyone, stab sleeping dudes with a knife (because it needs to be silent), and then somehow find a way to bring any survivors back to friendly lines as prisoners.&nbsp; MacArthur was an expert at this insane stuff, and in dozens of trench raids he received six Silver Stars, two Distinguished Service Crosses, and the French Croix de Guerre for bravery.&nbsp; He was also wounded three times, gassed a couple times, and ended the war as one of the most decorated soldiers in the United States Military.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In the boring break between World Wars when there weren&rsquo;t any enemies he could legally kill, MacArthur served as the Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, did a stint as the highest-ranking General in the United States Army, and randomly got called to head the 1928 Summer Games Olympic Committee &ndash; he famously told the athletes they&rsquo;d gone to the Netherlands &ldquo;to win medals, not lose gracefully,&rdquo; and they ended up pulling down twenty-four golds and breaking seven World Records.&nbsp; In 1932 he got in trouble for beating up some unemployed veterans who were protesting on Capitol Hill (he thought they were all a bunch of hippy Commies and needed to have a couple tanks rolled up on them&hellip; I don&rsquo;t know enough about the incident to comment one way or another) so they shipped him out to the Philippines, where he went to work basically creating the Philippine military and preparing them for their alread-agreed-upon independence from the United States.&nbsp; The President of the Philippines was so pumped he made MacArthur the first (and to date only) Field Marshal of the Philippine Army.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Japanese attacked the Philippines almost simultaneously with Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and, like almost everyone else in the U.S. military structure, MacArthur was completely caught off guard by the presence of a massive sea, air, and land invasion force suddenly humping his military district from every angle at the same time.&nbsp; His entire air force was destroyed on the ground in the first few hours, but this guy had been working hard on his cadre of dedicated, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=67090198072\">hardcore warriors,</a> and he brilliantly organized a fighting, never-say-die defense against impossible odds.&nbsp; Fighting every step of the way, he withdrew back to the Bataan Peninsula in late December (almost exactly 73 years ago today), and held back overwhelming, ferocious enemy assaults by personally running up and down the defenses during the thick of the fighting to direct troops and pump up his men.&nbsp; When it was obvious that Bataan was going to be a last stand, the President ordered MacArthur to leave the country and assume command of the Army in the Pacific.&nbsp; Reluctantly, he took his wife and baby and snuck his way through Japanese lines on a PT boat in the middle of the night.&nbsp; When he arrived in Australia, the first thing he did was radio his old command and tell them, &ldquo;I shall return.&rdquo;&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Then he went to work keeping his promise and exacting cold bloody delicious revenge.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Commanding&nbsp; all U.S. forces in the Southwest Pacific, Douglas MacArthur landed his troops on New Guinea and immediately started cracking skulls with a tack hammer.&nbsp; Using land, air, and sea power to &ldquo;leapfrog&rdquo; up and down the islands near Australia, MacArthur won battle after battle, smashing the Japanese with constant, aggressive attacks that hit them hard in the oil fields, airfields, and other bases they absolutely needed to keep fighting the war.&nbsp; Back home, he was a national hero, a larger-than-life dude who was beating in heads to save America, and he loved every damn second of it.&nbsp; Before long, this guy was personally overseeing the American landings at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, storming through the surf to the beach as wave after wave of assault craft around him headed in on their mission to liberate the islands.&nbsp; MacArthur had been tapped to command the U.S. invasion of mainland Japan, but when that didn&rsquo;t end up being necessary he got the honor of personally accepting the Japanese surrender aboard the USS <em>Missouri </em>as it was anchored in Tokyo Bay.</p>\r\n<p>After the war, rather than being a total asshole, MacArthur led the occupation force of Japan and started working surprisingly hard to help the country recover physically and economically.&nbsp; Thanks to his reforms and leadership, Japan quickly became an American ally in the Cold War rather than a bitter conquered enemy.&nbsp; Knowing what we know about WWII Japanese civilization, this could not have been an easy achievement.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Korea had been part of the Japanese Empire since the early 1900s, but after World War II it got split at the 38<sup>th</sup> Parallel, with the North being a Communist country allied with Red China and the Soviet Union and the south being allied with the United States and Taiwan.&nbsp; This lasted, oh, about five years before both sides started killing each other.&nbsp; In 1950, the North Koreans charged across the frontier like a bunch of bats out of hell, ripping through the unsuspecting defenders and tearing the American and South Korean lines apart.&nbsp; The United Nations (read: the U.S. and Britain) were called in to provide military assistance, and, naturally MacArthur was brought in to make sure shit got done.</p>\r\n<p>When Mac rolled up on Korea, the situation wasn&rsquo;t good.&nbsp; Desperate ad hoc American formationss had tried a couple times to stem the onrushing horde of enemy infantry, but every attempt to make a stand had been completely demolished and overrun.&nbsp; His guys were falling back towards a small pocket around the port city of Pusan, badly outnumbered, cut off, undersupplied, and like 95% of the Korean peninsula was in enemy hands.</p>\r\n<p>MacArthur cracked his knuckles, lit his corncob pipe, put on his shades, and decided<em> </em>it was time to <em>FUCK SHIT UP ASSHOLES!!!!!!1111<br /></em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur61.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>First he organized the shattered Korean and American forces in the Pusan pocked, pulling them together and launching a fearless series counterattacks into the teeth of the enemy onslaught.&nbsp; Then, while the North Koreans were on their heels, reeling from a stiff jab to the nose, he did a truly insane thing &ndash; he launched a massive amphibious assault at Inchon, a port that was probably among one of the worst places on earth to launch an amphibious assault -- to deliver a right hook and TKO the Koreans once and for all.&nbsp; He sent his troops &ndash; mostly badass U.S. Marines &ndash; into a crazy-turbulent wave-riddled harbor in the middle of an enemy-occupied industrial center hundreds of miles behind enemy lines and on the opposite coast from the rest of the UN forces in Pusan.&nbsp; Since the harbor wasn&rsquo;t really built for anything much bigger than a fishing boat, Mac had the attack go in at low tide, and then the Marines had to get out of the assault craft, throw ladders up on the sea wall, and scale it like they were attacking a medieval castle.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>You know what?&nbsp; It fucking worked.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur81.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Marines and Army took the city, held it, and then plowed the Pusan attackers from behind, ripping them a new one with artillery, tanks, and bayonets.&nbsp; The entire North Korean force was shattered without mercy, and MacArthur ruthlessly pursued them all the way to the Chinese border, way the fuck out of the peninsula -- not only had he defended the borders of South Korea, he\'d conquered North Korea as well.&nbsp; When President Truman was like, &ldquo;hey, don&rsquo;t you think it might piss off the Chinese if we have men so close to the Yalu River?&rdquo; MacArthur sent him an all-caps email from an AOL account that was like, &ldquo;FUCK CHINA&rdquo; and suggested just going in and taking out Mao while they were up there anyway.&nbsp; Truman wasn&rsquo;t super into starting World War III with China and Russia so he ordered MacArthur to halt his advance.&nbsp; He did, and was promptly counterattacked by the Chinese People&rsquo;s Liberation Army, who hit the Americans hard and started pushing them back away from the Chinese border and down the peninsula again.&nbsp; MacArthur suggested spraying China and North Korea with &ldquo;twenty to thirty&rdquo; nukes and then helping Taiwan invade Shanghai to create a second front, so Truman removed him from command because, let&rsquo;s face it, as much as we all hate North Korea, as a citizen of Earth I also realize that it&rsquo;s probably not a good idea to create, as MacArthur put it, &ldquo;a cordon of radiation\" simply as a means to prevent further Chinese reinforcements from arriving.&nbsp; After being removed from command, MacArthur gave a bunch of speeches about how politicians shouldn&rsquo;t get involved with War because they&rsquo;re all idiots anyways, and then he took a job at Remington where he made typewriters and Colt 1911 .45-caliber handguns LIKE A FUCKING AMERICAN because that&rsquo;s what he is.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>In his last public speech, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur simply told the American people that &ldquo;Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.&rdquo;<br /><br />Then he did just that.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/870377419767/macarthur7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-m/macarthr.htm\">http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-m/macarthr.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/353669/Douglas-MacArthur\">http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/353669/Douglas-MacArthur</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX96.html\">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX96.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.biography.com/people/douglas-macarthur-9390257\">http://www.biography.com/people/douglas-macarthur-9390257</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur</a></p>','2014-12-19','870377419767','macarthur.jpg','macarthur-small.jpg','Douglas MacArthur','Fifty-two years of service, seventeen medals for bravery, a half-dozen outlaw shootouts, two World Wars, and the battle for Korea. One of America\'s most famous, controversial, and badass generals.','There is no substitute for victory.'),('Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte','June 1942','January 1943','Berlin, Germany','20th-century German Supervillain','<p>I know I&rsquo;ve been kind of bombarding you guys with non-stop all-World War II all the time nonsense on this website over the past few weeks (don&rsquo;t worry, I&rsquo;ll be putting the Nazis on hiatus for a while after this one), but between defragging after the completely-insane production schedule on my WWII manuscript and the unhealthy obsession with <em>World of Tanks </em>that &nbsp;currently plagues my household, I can really think of no better way to spend my Christmas break than fanatically reading everything I possibly can about a completely mind-bogglingly demented concept straight of the Bond villain / Japanese video game designer playbook that is, quite honestly, equal parts badass and dumbass:</p>\r\n<p>In 1942 Hitler approved the construction of a thousand-ton tank that mounted twin-linked battleship cannons in a rotating turret and was so huge it included a vehicle bay that could accommodate a reconnaissance motorcycle squadron.&nbsp; Known as the <em>Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte</em>, this horrific monstrosity of modern engineering and ludicrous assault on all sanity was such a fucking travesty of reason that it makes Elon Musk&rsquo;s weird spaceship look like a reliable, logical mode of transportation for visiting your grandma during New Years.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s so goddamn awesome because even though this thing was so fucking heavy its treads would have shredded roads into asphalt chunks and collapsed bridges like a hand grenade through a wet paper towel, the Nazis still had a crazy huge boner for it and <em>may have even gone as far as to actually create the turret for it</em>.&nbsp; Shit, if you saw this luxury-yacht sized Mammoth Tank in a <em>Wolfenstein </em>game you&rsquo;d be like &ldquo;holy donkey sack it was more realistic when Robo-Hitler was running around with those chain gun arms and the latex werewolf SS babes because what the fuck,&rdquo; yet these dudes went out and threw lucidity to the wind and &nbsp;turned a badass-looking doodle in the back of an Iron Maiden sketchbook into half of an actual real-life thing.</p>\r\n<p>And yet&hellip; the gearhead kill-em-all badass possibly-dong-compensating nuke-the-earth voice in all of our heads just sees this and whispers one thing:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em>How fucking cool would this be?</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-1.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The idea for the Panzer 1000 (even the name sounds like something out of those cheesy 80s post-apocalyptic sci-fi flicks where all the chicks run around with feathered mullets in shiny silver leotards) was brought to Hitler in 1942 by a guy named Edward Grotte.&nbsp; Grotte was a German engineer who was completely obsessed with Japanese manga-style giant land vehicles, and this mad supervillain had spent most of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union trying to convince Stalin to build railroad-car-sized tanks that could morph into kaiju-combating robots with big space swords or some shit.&nbsp; Stalin bought one of Grotte&rsquo;s more normal-style tank designs, the TG-1, but once war broke out Grotte returned to Germany and got to work pitching Hitler on EPIC BADASSNESS mostly by mailing him a bunch of wicked <em>Warhammer 40K </em>concept art he&rsquo;d clipped out of the Games Workshop catalog and colored in with a highlighter.&nbsp; Well, in June of &rsquo;42 the once-unstoppable German Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs were starting to get fucked up in hardcore slugfest dogfights with equally-badass Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks, so Der Fuhrer was pretty pumped about the idea of making a gun-toting tractor the size of the Starship <em>Enterprise </em>that could kill the enemy by rolling over them like your dad&rsquo;s Camry backing over your G.I. Joe collection in the driveway.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hitler approved the design and sent it along to the Krupp to produce a prototype.&nbsp; Krupp was the hardcore German steel company that built the Tiger tank and the famous 88mm anti-everything cannon the Nazis used throughout the war, and the project was overseen by CEO Gustav Krupp, a man famous for being the only person to be put on trial for war crimes after both world wars.&nbsp; In &rsquo;45 he was put on trial for using massive amounts of slave labor in his factories, but charges were dropped because it was determined he was completely senile, which actually makes sense if they listed this project among his resume.&nbsp; Nowadays ThyssenKrupp is one of the largest steel producers in the world, but I&rsquo;m sure they&rsquo;re very nice these days and employ significantly fewer slaves in their manufacturing processes than they used to.</p>\r\n<p>Krupp, by the way, is also the company that made the Heavy Gustav, a ridiculously-humongous railroad-car-mounted cannon that chucked a shell the size of a school bus over twenty five miles and was so obscenely huge that it took a crew of like 600 guys to work it.&nbsp; This is a real actual thing that they produced and fired in combat:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Oh, right, and I forgot to mention that along side plans for the Panzer-1000, the Krupp folks also received a request for a prototype of the Panzer-1500, which was a self-propelled tank-style vehicle based on the Panzer-1000 chassis that would fire a fucking Heavy Gustav cannon along with a couple other types of heavy artillery.&nbsp; Basically, all the firepower of a planet-destroying artillery cannon without annoyingly having to build train tracks that lead straight to the thing you&rsquo;re trying to incinerate.</p>\r\n<p>In case you&rsquo;re curious, here&rsquo;s a photograph of a Heavy Gustav 800mm artillery shell next to a Soviet T-34 medium battle tank:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>it\'s kind of like throwing a football at your cat</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Panzer-1000 <em>Ratte</em> wasn&rsquo;t packing a shell this big, but it was supposed to mount two full-size 280mm cannons that were identical to the ones being used on Nazi WWII battleships.&nbsp; Packed into a turret housing that rotated a full 360 degrees, each of these guns was capable of ripping off a 400 pound chunk of armor piercing explosive&nbsp; that could punch through four feet of solid steel from 25 miles away.&nbsp; &nbsp;For a backup sidearm it also had one 128mm KwK L/55 main gun &ndash; a tank gun that was bigger and heavier than any weapon mounted on an Allied tank in all of World War II (the modern American M1 Abrams main battle tank has a 120mm gun).&nbsp; This was either mounted in the hull or on a rotating turret positioned near the back of the tank depending on which schematic you\'re looking at.&nbsp; Then, to round it all out, the vehicle was supposed to rock eight 20mm Flak-38 anti-aircraft guns and a pair of 15mm high-velocity autocannons for shredding stupid shit like fighter-bombers or light tanks or regular dipshits running around through the forest screaming in terror at the hideous behemoth about to demolish them and possibly also flatten the entire forest around them like the bad guy in <em>FernGully</em>.&nbsp; The tank was supposed to be a thousand tons (although realistically it would end up being WAY heavier than that), and have a 115-foot long hull, meaning that the <em>interior of this goddamn tank </em>was longer than a regulation NBA basketball court plus the length of a Ford F-150.&nbsp; It was to stand 36 feet tall, roughly the height of a four-story building, and would be made from an impenetrable chunk of anti-ballistic steel that was nearly a foot thick and angled to deflect enemy shells.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The guns themselves would require almost twenty guys to operate, and the full crew compliment would probably have been somewhere in the 40 to 50 range.&nbsp; This self-contained Land Battleship from Hell was designed to have a medical sickbay, a bathroom (!), sleeping quarters for the crew and a hangar big enough to accommodate a pair of those cool BMW motorcycles with the sidecars from <em>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</em>.&nbsp; It was designed with not one but three treads on each side of the chassis, each tread measuring four feet in width and powered by over a dozen gigantic steel wheels.&nbsp; The treads alone were so hardcore that driving the Panzer-1000 on a city street would puree the asphalt like a belt sander through meatloaf.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>Nazis.&nbsp; I hate these guys.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Moving the Landkreuzer with anything short of a nuclear fusion reactor or a ludicrous-speed-capable hyperspace drive was something of a challenge for most of the non-mad-scientists left in Germany, but apparently these guys were convinced that they could get this sucker up to twenty-five miles an hour.&nbsp; Which seems completely obscene and terrifying and honestly really fucking improbable considering that it was basically a mobile gun-toting apartment complex, but what do I know.&nbsp; Apparently to do this it would either take two full-size U-Boat engines or an eight-pack of Daimler-Benz twenty-cylinder diesel engines working together to rip out 17,000 goddamn horsepower of propulsion, which is about the same amount of power you&rsquo;d get from duct-taping together twenty-seven 2015 Lamborghini Aventadors or seventy 1980s IROC-Z Camaros.</p>\r\n<p>If you&rsquo;re wondering how you get anywhere in a tank that breaks bridges, the logical thing of course is to do what the Panzer-1000 designers did and make the entire thing completely water-tight and equip it with a snorkel like a U-Boat or a Scuba Steve or something.&nbsp; Basically this thing would plow the countryside at twenty-five miles an hour, then crash straight through a big river before re-emerging like Godzilla prepping a raid on Tokyo.&nbsp; Which may freak some of the enemy out just a little bit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Let me just say that it&rsquo;s totally super fucking amazing that the German government officially dedicated time, money, and energy into figuring out exactly how to make the Landkreuzer Panzer-1000 an actual real-life thing.&nbsp; I mean, you don&rsquo;t have to be goddamn George S. Patton Junior to realize that the second this thing rolled off the production line there would be a half-dozen squadrons of B-17 Flying Fortresses lining up to carpet-bomb this motherfucker and that merely producing it would have probably bankrupted the German economy and required enough raw steel to forge an aircraft carrier, but god damn I love the concept of a gigantic moving tank-city where dudes on bikes pop wheelies off ramps out the back and then a huge gun blows a chunk off of a volcano.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the kind of thing you&rsquo;d expect to see Captain America fistfighting a dude on top of while Zeppelins prepare to rain poison gas down onto New York City or something.&nbsp; Even the concept art on this thing looks like a Koopa Kid ship boss level on a Mario game, yet at some point in history a large group of intelligent, grown-ass man engineers looked at this in real life was were like, &ldquo;yuppppp, we&rsquo;re TOTALLY doing this.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>watch out for the Bullet Bill launchers</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Germans had been working on the Panzer 1000 project for about six months when finally the Reich Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, was like &ldquo;fuck this&rdquo; and shut the project down.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s believed that one of those twin turrets was actually produced, and that it was reappropriated to be used as a coastal defense battery either in Norway or Holland, but the paperwork is murky on it.&nbsp; I really hope it&rsquo;s true.</p>\r\n<p>Sadly (or luckily) the <em>Landkreuzer P.1000 </em>never saw the light of day, but the Germans did acutally finish one of their insane supertank projects &ndash; they built two working Panzer VIII <em>Maus</em> superheavy battle tanks.&nbsp; Weighing in at 204 tons, making it well over three times heavier than a modern M1 Abrams, this gigantic ugly square iron-plated beast is, to this day, the biggest and heaviest tank ever made in human history (and is likely to hold that title for the rest of warfare&rsquo;s existence).&nbsp; It sported the 128mm cannon that was supposed to be the secondary weapon of the Panzer 1000, although one of the two <em>Maus </em>prototypes never actually had the turret attached.&nbsp; The other <em>Maus</em> was fully armed and operational and went on a couple successful test runs, but was captured by the Russians without ever even firing a shot.&nbsp; So I guess Hashtag #SadTrombone or whatever.&nbsp; Nowadays it&rsquo;s on display in a museum outside Moscow.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-8.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-8a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Krupp, for their part, didn&rsquo;t give up the idea of using their resources to create the biggest and most insanely mind-blowing steel construction projects ever envisioned &ndash; in the 1970s they used the Fires of Mount Doom to forge the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288\">Bagger_288</a>, a humongous buzz-saw looking bucket-wheel excavator that I like to think of as the &ldquo;spiritual successor&rdquo; to the Landkreuzer.&nbsp; An utterly-awe-inspiring work of eco counter-terrorism, this behemoth stands over 300 feet tall, weighs thirteen thousand tons, and can strip mine a soccer pitch into a hundred-foot-deep hole in about eight hours.&nbsp; Oh yeah, and it can travel at like a tenth of a mile per hour on, you guessed it, a triple set of four-foot-wide tank-style treads, making it the largest self-propelled object ever constructed.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>And while the Bagger-288 isn&rsquo;t armed to the teeth with anti-ship cannons, it still looks scary as fuck:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/867340431878/panzer1000-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links/Sources</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.achtungpanzer.com/p-10001500-pzkpfw-ixx.htm\">http://www.achtungpanzer.com/p-10001500-pzkpfw-ixx.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://daily-steampunk.com/steampunk-blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/P__1000_Ratte_Tank_Cutaway_by_VonBrrr.jpg\">http://daily-steampunk.com/steampunk-blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/P__1000_Ratte_Tank_Cutaway_by_VonBrrr.jpg</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.unmuseum.org/ratte.htm\">http://www.unmuseum.org/ratte.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.militaryfactory.com/armor/detail.asp?armor_id=293\">http://www.militaryfactory.com/armor/detail.asp?armor_id=293</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte</a></p>\r\n<p>Parsons, Zack.&nbsp; <em>My Tank Is Fight!</em>&nbsp; Citadel, 2006.</p>','2014-12-26','867340431878','panzer1000.jpg','panzer1000-small.jpg','The Panzer 1000','In 1942 Hitler approved the construction of a 1000-pound tank so ginormous it mounted naval artillery and had a vehicle bay that carried a couple of motorcycles.  This is a real thing that happened.','\"Then [Hitler\'s] fantasy led him into the realm of the gigantic. The engineers Grote and Hacker were ordered to design a monster tank weighing 1,000 tons.\"\r\n\r\n- Heinz Guderian, WWII German General\r\n'),('Sundiata Keita','c. late 11th century','c. 1255','Mali','Medieval Mandingo Warrior','<p>Hey, Happy New Year&rsquo;s guys!&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s celebrate how roughly two thousand years ago some Roman astronomers from a centuries-old civilization looked at a clock and were like, &ldquo;welp ok let&rsquo;s just call it Day One,&rdquo; paving the way for us as a species to put way too much emphasis on the abstract concept as a way of documenting the speed to which we careen into the inevitable hour of our impending death.&nbsp; I say this of course as a guy who had a Verizon customer service rep horrifically reveal to him without any provocation that she was born the same year that <em>Billy Madison </em>came out in the theaters, but still, hooray for the inexorable march of time towards our own inescapable mortality and all that.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The point here is that I don&rsquo;t really care what your dumb New Year&rsquo;s resolution is.&nbsp; Because it doesn&rsquo;t matter whether you want to spend more time with your lame family, get less fatter solely by building gym-related excel spreadsheets and cutting all gluten-related particles out of your Fascist two thousand calorie diet, or if you just don&rsquo;t want to (once again) spectacularly screw it up when some marginally-attractive girl lets you mash your lips against her face.&nbsp; It will all pale in comparison to the new beginning forged by the epic thirteenth-century Mandingo warrior Sundiata:</p>\r\n<p>Overcome double paralysis in both legs, avenge the massacre of your family by an evil warlord, and liberate your people from the chains of brutal slavery.&nbsp; And then become the basis Disney&rsquo;s <em>Lion King </em>because <em>why the fuck not</em>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The hero of the national epic of Mali and a cultural hero of the Mandigo people in West Africa, Sundiata is what historians call a &ldquo;semi-legendary king,&rdquo; which is boring history professor talk for a dude who almost certainly existed in real life but is credited with doing balls-out works of heroic awesomeness so over-the-top heart-devouringly badass that it makes the jerks at those pretentious academic journals all uncomfortable and shit on account of the huge murder-boners they pop when they hear about it.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sundiata was born in Mali in the late 12<sup>th</sup> century, back when Mali was just a small little city-state style power on the fringes of the once-powerful Ghana Empire in West Africa.&nbsp; His dad was the King of Mali, which was cool and everything, but Sundiata was the youngest of twelve sons and his mom wasn&rsquo;t the Queen &ndash; who was the mother of all 11 other boys and was rumored to be the most beautiful woman in all of 12<sup>th</sup>-century Africa &ndash; but to some concubine known as &ldquo;Kediougou,&rdquo; which I shit you not some encyclopedia I read simply translated to mean &ldquo;very unattractive,&rdquo; without offering any further explanation.&nbsp; Sure, if you believe the Epic, Sundiata&rsquo;s birth was foretold by prophesy and all that, but what we&rsquo;re more sure of is that he had crippling paralysis in both legs, couldn&rsquo;t walk on his own, required constant attention from his mother in order to survive, and was ridiculed and heckled by his brothers and everyone else in the village.&nbsp; The whole thing is very <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shakazulu.html\">Shaka Zulu</a>, and, like his sub-Saharan conqueror counterpart, it wouldn&rsquo;t be long before Sundiata was back on top beating the fuck out of anyone who opposed him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Well one day when Sundiata was still a boy some fucking jackass was talking shit to Sundiata&rsquo;s mom, and this kid got so pissed that he stood up, walked over to a big heavy iron bar, grabbed it with one hand, and stormed over towards the motherfucker so furiously that the idiot ran away.&nbsp; From that point on, the young prince dedicated his life to overcoming his disability and kicking ass old-school like people did when they lived on the edge of the goddamn Sahara Desert in the Middle Ages.&nbsp; He joined a community of hunters, helped bring down mighty beasts for food and profit, honed his skill, and soon became so highly-regarded that he became known as the Simbo, meaning &ldquo;master of the bush,&rdquo; and yeah Disney can say it&rsquo;s Hamlet all they want but we know the truth.</p>\r\n<p>After Simbo&rsquo;s dad dies, his oldest brother takes over the throne, and all the bros tell Sundiata he has to get the fuck out of there and go Hakuna Matata his shit out in the wilderness because he doesn&rsquo;t even really count as a brother anyways.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, as I said, Mali was located on the edge of the Ghana Empire, but shit was getting intense in West Africa around 1203 AD.&nbsp; The Empire of Ghana had been &ldquo;the shit&rdquo; for like a couple centuries, but a bunch of incompetent moron-kings were screwing things up all over the place, and before long they found themselves locked in a war against the Sosso people, who were ruled by a hardcore beard-wielding warrior from hell known as Sumanguru, the &ldquo;Invincible King,&rdquo; and a dude so fucking spleen-rupturingly unstoppable in man-to-man combat that everyone in Africa believed he was an evil sorcerer who could call on the dark powers of voodoo and Whoopie Goldberg.&nbsp; Sumanguru ravaged what was left of the Ghana Empire with torch and steel, burned their capital into a heap of molten rock by urinating lava on its ruins, murdered their ruling family, and enslaved huge portions of their population.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Once that was done, he turned his attention to Mali and prepared to crush it with extreme prejudice all the way up its ass.&nbsp; The new King of Mali, Sundiata&rsquo;s oldest brother, pimped out his own sister as a bride for Sumanguru the Invincible, but it didn&rsquo;t work &ndash; Sumanguru married the sister, then conquered Mali, had every single brother ritualistically and brutally executed, sold the population into slavery, and then married the sister anyway because he was just super diabolically mega-evil like that.</p>\r\n<p>Word reached Sundiata a few weeks later &ndash; your family is dead.&nbsp; Your people are enslaved.&nbsp; Your father&rsquo;s throne is in the hands of a foreign tyrant.&nbsp; And only you, the rightful King of the Mandingo People, can save them.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Fun fact, Mr. T first cut his hair into a Mohawk<br /> after seeing a picture of a Mandingo warrior.<br /> This is actually true.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sundiata, once the crippled youngest son of the ugliest girl in Africa, was now a hardcore Charles Bronson motherfucker on a vengeance quest to save his entire civilization from the ruinous choke hold of a diabolical evil sorcerer-king so unstoppable that his epithet was literally &ldquo;the Invincible.&rdquo;&nbsp; He went to work immediately.</p>\r\n<p>The Prince&rsquo;s first insurmountable task was to build an army out of warriors from across Western Africa, unite them, and then lead them as a fighting force against a hardened enemy military with tons of battle experience.&nbsp; Now, if you follow the news in Africa these days, you&rsquo;re probably aware that it&rsquo;s not exactly super easy to get a bunch of rival tribes to agree and work together on anything, but Sundiata had the balls and the charisma to pull it off.&nbsp; Appealing to honor, pride, wealth, and a mutual Muslim faith (the vast majority of this region had been converted by the Moors several centuries earlier), Sundiata quietly assembled warriors from twelve tribes along the Niger River and Sahara Desert &ndash; noble-born cavalrymen in imported chainmail riding mighty Arabian steeds, desert nomads with fire-tipped arrows, and river-going hunters armed with spears and shields fashioned from reeds.&nbsp; He found tribal medicine men who could fashion him custom homemade poisons to smear on his weaponry and veteran blacksmiths from the iron-producing region of Mali that were skilled in creating armor and blades.&nbsp; He freed slaves to fight for him and even promoted some of the more competent soldiers to high-level command positions (one even became Emperor later on).&nbsp; Then, after he assembled sixteen clans and cherry-picked the most badass warriors and equipment he could find, he took the war to his enemy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata5.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>The Mandingo and the Sosso fought in five epic battles across Mali, each time clashing in a huge bloody engagement that littered the desert with broken bodies and sprayed blood like seriously all over the place everywhere.&nbsp; Sundiata took a few hard losses but fought on, finally engaging Sumanguru the Invincible in a furious fight at the Battle of Krina in 1235.&nbsp; The Epic tale itself describes Sumanguru as an evil wizard who invented the xylophone (you just <em>know </em>the xylophone was invented by an evil wizard) who could only truly be killed after Sundiata shot him with an arrow fletched with a rooster&rsquo;s feathers, but in real life history it probably involved a little less cock action and a little more face-shanking awesomeness.&nbsp; The Sosso army was destroyed, Sundiata stood atop a pile of massacred enemy soldiers that included the once-Invincible enemy king, re-claimed his throne, and then went on to conquer all of the Sosso lands including the shit they&rsquo;d taken from Ghana.&nbsp; It was pretty much a fifty-fifty toss-up whether Sundiata would be merciful with captured Sosso lands or just enslave/murder everyone, which is pretty much standard operating procedure in the Medieval period of human history<em>.</em></p>\r\n<p>Once all that was done he went home to his awesome palace, had like a hundred kids, and spent many long nights on top of piles of gold with many beautiful women.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Known as &ldquo;The Lion King&rdquo; for his heroism, bravery, and sense of justice, Sundiata took the title Mansa, meaning &ldquo;King of Kings.&rdquo;&nbsp; He built a new capital for his people, constructed mosques, opened his borders to Muslim traders from North Africa (an act that<em> </em>put Mali on world maps from as far away as Europe), opened up gold mines, maintained West Africa&rsquo;s first standing army, and continued expanding an empire that would last for the next two centuries.&nbsp; At the height of his power, the Mali Empire would sprawl across about 435,000 square miles of territory &ndash; twice the size of fucking France.</p>\r\n<p>Sundiata would die in 1255, but his legacy would live on &ndash; in 1324 Sundiata&rsquo;s grandson Mansa Musa would make his religious pilgrimage to Mecca.&nbsp; When he passed through Cairo, Mansa Mursa was preceded by a parade of 500 slaves, dozens of wild animals, and was decked out in a golden robe carrying a huge staff of solid gold.&nbsp; He gave out so much gold, especially to the poor of the city, that the fucking currency of gold was devalued in Egypt for the next twelve years.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Not a bad legacy if you ask me.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/467740010838/sundiata7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>A mosque built during the reign of Sundiata</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Asante, Molefi Kete and Ama Mazama.&nbsp; <em>Encyclopedia of Black Studies</em>.&nbsp; SAGE, 2005.</p>\r\n<p>Juang, Richard M.&nbsp; <em>Africa and the Americas</em>.&nbsp; ABC-CLIO, 2008.</p>\r\n<p>Meri, Joseph W.&nbsp; <em>Medieval Islamic Civilization</em>.&nbsp; Psychology Press, 2006.</p>\r\n<p>Shinnie, Margaret<em>.&nbsp; Ancient African Kingdoms</em>.&nbsp; New York: Mentor, 1965.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2015-01-02','467740010838','sundiata.jpg','sundiata-small.jpg','Sundiata','13th-century West African Mandingo warrior must avenge his family and retake his rightful throne from the invincible evil sorcerer who invented the xylophone.  His story becomes the basis for Disney\'s Lion King.',''),('GIGN','c. 1972','N/A','France','21st-century French Soldiers','<p><em>This article was originally posted on January 9, 2015.&nbsp; After spending all day Friday glued to the news feeds, I feel it\'s appropriate to re-post it now.&nbsp; <br /><br />The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Paris\">Coat of Arms of the City of Paris</a> contains the Latin phrase \"Fluctuat nec mergitur\". &nbsp; It means \"She is tossed by the waves, but does not sink.\"<br /></em></p>\r\n<p>The Group D\'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale is one of the world\'s oldest and most combat-experienced counter-terrorist organizations on earth.&nbsp; Trained with some of the most intense firearms qualifications this side of a <em>Call of Duty </em>weapon select screen, these ski-mask-wearing terrorist-annihilating police commandos are also the only CT force to carry motherfucking revolvers as their official sidearm, parachuting into combat situations or raiding terrorist-held container ships while packing a respectable-ass .357 magnum revolver that can rip off something like 200,000 rounds before needing to have its barrel switched out for a new one.&nbsp; Founded after the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972, GIGN operators have performed over a thousand operations in the last 43 years, have rescued over five hundred hostages, arrested a thousand suspects, and wiped the floor with more tangos than a dance instructor.</p>\r\n<p>If you fuck with the people of France, these guys are going to find you.&nbsp; They\'ll hunt you down Wild West cowboy style, attack you from land, air, and sea, and they won\'t reset until they\'ve Clint Eastwooded a magnum round into you and every person you\'ve ever cared about.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>GIGN, the Frenched-out way of saying \"National Gendarmerie Intervention Group,\" is considered a <em>gendarmerie</em>, meaning that it\'s basically soldiers who are allowed to arrest you.&nbsp; The closest thing we have in the States is the Coast Guard, in that it\'s a military organization but they deal largely with policing American waters rather than leading attacks on enemy forces.&nbsp; They\'re like the SWAT team meets the Navy SEALs, and while their primary responsibility is counter-terrorism (performing everything from hostage negotiations to tactical assaults) they do a little bit of everything &ndash; they guard all of France\'s nuclear installations, they provide security when the Olympics are in town, and they go on insane HALO parachute night drops to extract hardened war criminals from downtown fucking Sarajevo.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and don\'t give me this shit where we talk about French cops having a \"hard day at the office\" when the caf&eacute; down the road only has two different scone options available and is full of cigarette-smoking mimes or whatever. &nbsp;France is one of the top countries for civilian gun ownership worldwide, has a homicide rate per capita that\'s better than Croatia, and pretty much every time the cops take down a Parisian street gang they seize a half-dozen Uzis and AK-47s.&nbsp; These dudes have no idea what they\'re rolling up on, and are prepped for anything, and are so goddamn hardcore with their weapons training that we send SEALs, Rangers, and SWAT guys over there to cross-train with their small arms and hand-to-hand combat experts.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Training for GIGN is some of the most intense in the world, rocking a washout rate of nearly 95%.&nbsp; Designed primarily to weed out non-insane people who don\'t have a death wish and an intense urge to put their life on the line for France, on like the first day of training they make you bungee jump off a bridge and then swim through a tunnel with your hands and feet bound.&nbsp; Later on you get to lay at the bottom of the Seine River in downtown Paris while barges pass just feet above your head, go one ten-mile runs in full kit, and spend a decent chunk of your afternoon undergoing grueling memorization and reasoning tests to gauge your intellectual badassitude.&nbsp; Then they take the guys who are left over and literally have them fight each other hand-to-hand to see who\'s the toughest and wash out the guys who can\'t hack it.&nbsp; If you pass all that and manage to make it through, GIGN training takes ten months and covers hostage negotiation, ship assault, high-altitude low-opening parachute drops, sniper marksmanship, desert ops, Krav Maga, combat skiing (yes, combat skiing), desert operations, rappelling, and how to disarm a shotgun-wielding terrorist with their bare hands.&nbsp; They also get more gun training than any other CT group in the world, since their organizational doctrine says that every guy in the unit should be able to not only use his own shit, but also how to disarm a motherfucker and kill him with his own gun.</p>\r\n<p>The unit originally had 100 guys who could hit anywhere in the former French Colonial Empire at a moment\'s notice, though over the years it\'s been reorganized to include about 420 guys.&nbsp; They carry MP5s, HK assault rifles, SPAS full-auto twelve-gauge shotguns, and the type of French <em>espirit d\'corps </em>and military <em>elan </em>that just screams \"Fuck to death anyone who isn\'t French.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Their insanely-diverse skill set (kill, negotiate, capture, destroy, parachute into your house in the middle of the night and handcuff you like a dominatrix Santa Claus) means these guys get called on about sixty operations a year (more than once a week!), but for the most part these generally don\'t result in dead terrorists.&nbsp; But sometimes they do.&nbsp; Like, in 1976 some super-evil rebels in Djibouti hijacked a school bus with thirty French kids on it and threatened to kill everyone if France didn\'t release some imprisoned rebels or something, but France doesn&rsquo;t fucking negotiate with terrorists and they had like four snipers simultaneously open fire on a school bus full of children and manage to only pick off the bad guys.&nbsp; GIGN dudes with Uzis stormed the school bus, killed the other dude, and freed all the kids.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A few years later, in 1979, like four hundred Saudi rebels celebrated Eid by taking over the Grand Mosque in Mecca during the Hajj, taking thousands of people hostage, and putting snipers in the minarets, so the Saudi government responded by bringing in GIGN guys to help figure out how to handle this shit.&nbsp; GIGN sent in three dudes who planned an assault, which was carried out by Saudi and Pakistani commandos (non-muslims aren\'t allowed into Mecca).&nbsp; They used knockout gas, flashbangs, and explosives, assaulted through the tunnels under the mosque, wiped out the terrorists, freed the surviving hostages, and then had 63 captured terrorist leaders publicly beheaded for their crimes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1988 around thirty guys with machine guns in New Caledonia, a French-controlled island in the South Pacific, got all pissed off and took some local cops hostage, loaded them into a cave, and then positioned a heavy belt-fed machine gun at the entrance of the cave.&nbsp; The GIGN deployed halfway across the globe in a matter of hours, rappelled in by helicopter in broad daylight, cleared out the fucking machine gun with a goddamn flame thrower, shot up the place, freed the hostages, then allegedly executed a few of the wounded enemy ringleaders.&nbsp; GIGN lost two guys but killed 19 terrorists and took 11 more into custody.</p>\r\n<p>Their most high-profile raid came in 1994, when terrorists armed with AK-47s, hand grenades and dynamite hijacked a passenger plane in Algiers and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower.&nbsp; The French were able to force the plane down in Marseille, where GIGN rolled up in a damn stair car and stormed the cockpit, engaging assault-rifle toting psychos at point blank range with 220 civilian lives hanging in the balance.&nbsp; Final count &ndash; all terrorists dead.&nbsp; No civilian casualties.&nbsp; No GIGN fatalities.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s a good example of the GIGN being badass and going that extra mile to kick fucking ass just for the principle of it &ndash; in 2008 a group of Somali pirates took over a huge French luxury yacht and held the 30 crew members hostage.&nbsp; The owner of the insanely-big multi-billion dollar yacht paid a huge ransom, so the pirates let everyone go and went home with their cash.&nbsp; On their way back to their base, their car was shot to shit when a GIGN sniper fired a fucking Barrett M82 .50-caliber sniper rifle from a goddamn helicopter right through their engine block, then a team of commandos in ski masks went in, grabbed six pirates, and recovered the ransom money.&nbsp; Because fuck you guys.</p>\r\n<p>So, when all that horrible shit went down earlier this week with gunmen shooting up newspaper offices in downtown Paris, you knew GIGN was the team that was going to be brought in to regulate.&nbsp; The details at this point are still really sketchy (it just went down a few hours ago), but my understanding of it at this point is that the four terrorists responsible for the attack were tracked down and cornered into two separate locations &ndash; a printing press northeast of Paris and a Jewish market in a different part of town &ndash; and both groups reacted by taking hostages and legitimately threatening to kill everyone and die a martyr\'s death in the process.&nbsp; Operating in two intense high-profile, very public hostage situations in two different parts of the city, GIGN flexed their Kevlar-plated nuts and stormed both terrorist strongholds almost simultaneously, killing three of the four terrorists without losing a man. &nbsp;&nbsp;Like I said, there isn\'t much available on this at the time of posting, but it\'s also hard to argue with this being one of the most badass fucking things I\'ve ever seen.</p>\r\n<p>Vive la France.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/37219222937/gign6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p>http://www.gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr/gign</p>\r\n<p>http://rt.com/news/221239-gunshots-hostage-dammartin-france/</p>\r\n<p>http://www.tactical-life.com/magazines/special-weapons/frances-gign-anti-terror-unit/</p>\r\n<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie_Intervention_Group</p>','2015-11-16','37219222937','gign.jpg','gign-small.jpg','The GIGN','One of the world\'s oldest and most combat-experienced counter-terrorist organizations.','\"To save lives without regard for one\'s own.\"  - GIGN Motto'),('Unknown','c. 1530','Unknown','Unknown','16th-century Japanese Ninja','<p>At Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima on September 10, 1561, the blood-raging forces of rival samurai asskickers Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin squared off in an epic between two ultra-powerful Japanese warlords who despised each other with a ultra-unstoppable life-long hated so ridiculously intense that it was in danger of taking physical form through some weird anime-inspired explosion and rift a portal between the mortal realm and the raging fires of hell itself.&nbsp; Eighteen thousand screaming, furious, katana-wielding warriors in badass-looking samurai armor ruthlessly hacked and sawed at each others&rsquo; faces, hosing around enough arterial blood spray to make the entire battlefield look like one of those really fun play areas at an awesome water park.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>By the time it was over, nearly ten thousand brave heroes would lie dead, cut into variously-sized pieces of humanity and scattered around with so much steel it looked like one of those medical planes that carry human transplant organs had crash-landed and exploded.&nbsp; Among the Takeda dead, heaped alongside a pile of slain enemies, was a thirty-six year old man named Moritoki.&nbsp; Moritoki was a nephew of Takeda Shingen, and had asked his uncle to make him a promise &ndash; if I die, please make sure my wife is taken care of.</p>\r\n<p>Takeda Shingen didn&rsquo;t just honor his promise.&nbsp; He gave Moritoki&rsquo;s wife the chance for vengeance.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>If you thought female ninjas were the sort of thing that only existed in <em>Mortal Kombat</em> games and the bizarre sexual fantasies of teenage boys, you&rsquo;re only half right.&nbsp; By default, Mochizuki Chiyome is the most badass and famous female ninja in Japanese history &ndash; because she&rsquo;s the only one we know by name &ndash; but she was just the beginning of what was known as the <em>kunoichi</em>, an insanely-hardcore cadre of female secret agents, intelligence operatives, and old-school cloak-and-dagger-to-the-balls espionage experts who spent a decent chunk of the Warring States Period completely fucking shit up and ROFLstomping nubs in the name of their feudal samurai lord.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>This was the woman who founded the fucking school that trained them.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Although we know basically nothing about her past, it&rsquo;s probably safe to say that when Takeda Shingen took Mochizuki Chiyome under his wing, he knew he wasn&rsquo;t just getting some trophy wife niece-in-law who wanted to chill out sipping green tea and writing calligraphy in a temple somewhere.&nbsp; This woman was tough, calculating, and iron-willed, and it&rsquo;s believed that she was a direct descendent of the already-legendary Mochizuki Izumo-no-kami, the insanely-epic ninja master who founded the Koga Ninja Clan that used to feud with <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hanzo.html\">Hattori Hanzo</a>&rsquo;s Iga Clan.&nbsp; Izumo-no-kami is a guy I&rsquo;ll do an article on at some point down the line (I actually first heard about Chiyome while researching him and just decided to run with it), but basically he founded one of the two major Japanese ninja clans in the 1400s, invented smoke bombs, and could pretty much kill you so hard that your kids would also die thanks to the Transitive Property of&nbsp; Asskickings.</p>\r\n<p>As a descendent of the mighty master ninja, Chiyome was a natural choice to come in and set up an academy to train women in the art of sabotage, intel gathering, and badass ninja shit.&nbsp; Takeda was at war with the Kenshin (and later with Ieyasu Tokugawa, who had access to the hated rival Iga Ninja Clan) and, even worse, he had recently had a couple of his relatives try to assassinate him.&nbsp; Takeda wasn&rsquo;t super excited about having to thwart another asshole lunching at him with a knife, so the mighty samurai set Chiyome up to serve as his eyes and ears and flex proverbial nuts throughout Japan like a medieval mix between Charlie&rsquo;s Angels, the CIA, and a meat cleaver.&nbsp; &nbsp;She went to work right away, opening a school in the heart of Koga Province and bringing in women to be trained in the fine art of beating the fucking hell out of your enemies and burning their castle to the ground.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Badass ninja training.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Chiyome&rsquo;s ancestor had initially set up his Badass Secret Ninja Training Facility to look like a pharmaceutical company, buying a large unassuming structure known as the &ldquo;Medical Company&rsquo;s House&rdquo; that was stocked with booby traps, hidden weapons, and some pretty plants that oh yeah maybe just so happened to be super toxic and really helpful if you were, oh, I don&rsquo;t know, thinking about making some ultra-deadly undetectable poisons or something.&nbsp; Chiyome, however, awesomely decided to set up her dojo to look like a charitable school to give religious training to young girls that had been orphaned during the war.&nbsp; Which kicks ass.</p>\r\n<p>Basically, Chiyome would travel the countryside, stopping everywhere from big bustling cities to burned-out ruins of ravaged little villages, constantly keeping an eye out for promising young girls who were down on their luck but still had fire in their eyes.&nbsp; Prostitutes, orphan farm girls, young widows and dirt-poor street urchins alike were brought back to Koga Province, ostensibly to be given a fresh start on life, and people from the village were all like &ldquo;aww how cute, what a nice charitable, kind woman that Chiyome is&rdquo; or whatever when in actuality she was training these girls how to draw a blade and stab a dude in the fucking neck with one fluid motion.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, as much as I love those amazing <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaH_u3VlGjg\">1980s black pajamas ninja</a>s who jump in through the ceiling and then politely attack Bruce Lee one at a time (and have been milking that visual for all its worth so far in this article), it&rsquo;s important to note that these women weren&rsquo;t running around looking like Taki from <em>Soul Calibur </em>dishing out flying side kicks in front of explosions or anything.&nbsp; Sure, hand to hand combat was a critical aspect, and these women were taught how to defeat a larger enemy in battle and how to use all manner of weaponry, but in reality female ninjas were used primarily as spies and intelligence gatherers, and the main focus of their training was on improving their mental fortitude.&nbsp; Women were drilled in etiquette, dance, singing, disguise, and infiltration techniques to blend in with regular society, and could convincingly masquerade as traveling entertainers, religious pilgrims, noblewomen, priestesses or prostitutes.&nbsp; They were taught what they needed to look for in the enemy base, and taught memorization techniques to remember it down to the slightest detail.&nbsp; They were trained in how to get drunk military officers to cough up good information, how to hold out under torture, and how to problem-solve and improvise on the fly so you don&rsquo;t need to fish in your pocket for a smoke bomb every time a bunch of sword-swinging samurai are chasing you through a burning building.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So, while most Google Image searches pull up pictures of glove-wearing leather-booted women that bizarrely feel the need to conceal their nose and mouth and hands but not their upper thighs and collarbone, these women didn&rsquo;t need a face mask to show how huge their balls were &ndash; they just walked right in the front door of your castle, giggled at your idiotic jokes, politely excused themselves after you passed out drunk on the floor, made exact copies of battle plans while you were asleep, and then walked right back out the way they came in.&nbsp; Since most men in feudal Japan thought about women roughly the same way that modern-day Internet forum commenters do, the guards didn&rsquo;t even consider stopping to question them on their way out of town.</p>\r\n<p>And since their favorite disguise was that of a Miko, a wandering pilgrim holy woman, the <em>kunoichi</em> looked more or less like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <br /> <img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome4a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Dispersed across the provinces of Japan seamlessly disguised as everything from high society noblewomen to bar girls at soldiers&rsquo; drinking establishments, Chiyome&rsquo;s ninja squad went to work doing badass shit for Takeda Shingen.&nbsp; They stole secret information, listened in for assassination plots, scoped out city defenses and made notes of how many soldiers were stationed in town garrisons.&nbsp; They planted forged documents, passed messages to undercover agents, and spread false rumors to throw off the enemy.&nbsp; Occasionally they&rsquo;d sabotage an operation, poison a water supply, or slit a nobleman&rsquo;s throat in his sleep.&nbsp; In short, they fucked shit up.</p>\r\n<p>We don&rsquo;t know too many details of their operations (because if we did then they wouldn&rsquo;t have been very good ninjas), but before long rumors began circulating, and Takeda&rsquo;s rivals started getting really freaked out.&nbsp; As their legend grew, a bunch of insane stories started popping up all over the place, and since these rumors were spread by guys they unsurprisingly read like the back cover of some freaky weird Japanese cartoon porno.&nbsp; They had iron junk and could snap your dick off.&nbsp; They used a technique called &ldquo;Reverse Egg Flow&rdquo; that cursed you so that every time you boned a Geisha you&rsquo;d be presented with an ultra-realistic vision of your own death and freak out.&nbsp; They could take babies out of pregnant women in the middle of the night, fuck it up, then put it back without the woman noticing.&nbsp; Honestly the only one that really makes a lot of sense is that they had techniques to brainwash men and/or make them demented in the brain, and if you&rsquo;ve ever seen a bunch of dipshit bros fall all over themselves trying to flirt with the only girl at your Super Bowl party you probably know that technique is still alive and well.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chiyome6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s believed that between 1561 and 1573 Mochizuki Chiyome had around 300 agents spread out throughout the Japanese countryside, all feeding info directly back to her so she could present it to Takeda Shingen.&nbsp; Their network was efficient, reliable, and all-encompassing, and if Takeda was looking for any kind of mission carried out Chiyome was the person who could get it done.&nbsp; Again, we don&rsquo;t know much about the details of the missions or how effective they are, and as much as I&rsquo;d love to bring you the story of a <em>kunoichi </em>doing a triple backflip and flinging six ninja stars with deadly accuracy, you can also kind of understand why Takeda wouldn&rsquo;t really want a covert op like that written down on official company letterhead.&nbsp; So it&rsquo;ll have to suffice to say that turning a convent and a group of orphans into a 300-woman-strong cadre of badass assassin saboteurs that infiltrated every level of Japanese society for over a decade is fucking badass and let&rsquo;s just deal with that.</p>\r\n<p>Despite the work of the kunoichi, Takeda Shingen died in 1573 under mysterious circumstances that could be anything from choking on a tuna roll to being assassinated by a Tokugawa agent.&nbsp; Awesomely, Mochizuki Chiyome is never again mentioned in history after his death.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no epilogue, no death, no capture, no anything.&nbsp; She simply disappears into thin air, along with all of her agents, and nobody has any idea what became of them.</p>\r\n<p>Ninja style.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/33837513055/chioyome7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p>Alt, Matt and Hiroko Yoda.&nbsp; <em>Ninja Attack!</em>&nbsp; Tuttle, 2013.</p>\r\n<p>Hayes, Stephen K.&nbsp; <em>Legacy of the Night Warrior</em>.&nbsp; Black Belt Communications, 1984.</p>\r\n<p>Man, John.&nbsp; <em>Ninja</em>.&nbsp; Random House, 2012.</p>\r\n<p>Warner, Jennifer.&nbsp; <em>Ninja Warrior</em>. &nbsp;BookCaps, 2014.</p>','2015-01-23','33837513055','chiyome.jpg','chiyome-small.jpg','Mochizuki Chiyome','After her husband dies in battle, this woman creates a school to train badass female ninjas in the fine art of espionage and face-stabbing.',''),('Big Wind','c. 1990','n/a','Budapest, Hungary','20th-century Hungarian Firefighter','<p>In late February of 1991, what had once been the third-largest Army on earth was now reduced to little more than a charred smoking pile of burning garbage strewn out across the desert in mangled heaps of failure and the scorched chassis of cast-off Soviet hand-me-down armored vehicles.&nbsp; The vaunted, hardened veterans of Saddam Hussein&rsquo;s Republican Guard had been epically bombed-to-hell by a multinational coalition of pissed-off world powers, who had pretty vigorously responded to his hostile military takeover of Kuwait by direct depositing a literal assload of high-explosive ordinance all the way up his army&rsquo;s collective rectum, and the whole humiliating ordeal had gone down live on CNN in front of everyone in the world.</p>\r\n<p>But here&rsquo;s the thing about Saddam Hussein.&nbsp; You can say what you want about his horrific track record as a terrifying military dictator tyrant motherfucker, but this was also a guy who knew how to say &ldquo;screw you guys I&rsquo;m outta here&rdquo; in a way that makes <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkcoobYUu8g\">that scene from <em>Half Baked</em></a><em> </em>look like a Yale University acceptance letter.</p>\r\n<p>He <em>burned the entire multi-billion-dollar fucking Kuwaiti oil industry to the goddamn ground on his way out of town.</em></p>\r\n<p><em>&nbsp;</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>This is kind of like the military equivalent of getting kicked out of your neighborhood hoops game for being an aggro dickhead and then popping the ball before you leave for home.&nbsp; Using awesomely-short-sighted scorched earth tactics so absurdly diabolical they <em>literally had the potential to end all life on earth</em>, Saddam ordered his men to take Zippos to every fucking oil derrick in a country that currently sits on like 90 billion gallons of crude.&nbsp; 600-700 oil drilling sites were morphed into 200-foot-tall pillars of 2,000-degree like some kind of Old Testament Dungeons &amp; Dragons shit.&nbsp; All along the horizon, humongous spikes of fire roared twenty-four hours day and night like Lucifer shooting a flamethrower straight up from hell, permanently darkening the sky with choking, noxious amounts of pitch-black smoke.</p>\r\n<p>4.6 million gallons of crude oil burned <em>every goddamn day for six months straight</em>.&nbsp; The 3,400 tons of smoke released each day were causing photochemical smog and acid rain in places over a thousand miles away.&nbsp; It was an environmental and economic catastrophe of Bond villain proportions.&nbsp; According to some engineers it was going to take between two and five YEARS to put out the never-ending blazes, and scientists predicted it would churn out enough evil smoke to encircle large portions of the earth, drop temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by up to ten degrees, and create what one asshole called &ldquo;nuclear winter like conditions.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>That&rsquo;s bad.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It was a world crisis.&nbsp; Not only were companies losing literally billions of dollars over it, but this saddamn nightmare was in danger of permanently fucking up the entire planet on an unprecedented scale.&nbsp; If humanity wanted to (once again) prevent ourselves from suiciding out our own species, we were going to have to pull out all the stops and go into full-on Crazy Shit Mode.</p>\r\n<p>Luckily for us, the Hungarians had already punched the throttle on that mode a long time ago.</p>\r\n<p>What do you get when you cross a World War II T-34 main battle tanks with a pair of supersonic Soviet MiG-21s fighter jets, a low-budget Gundam, the most awesome water slide ever, your mom, and the imminent threat of badass Cold War 1980s thermonuclear holocaust?&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Meet BIG WIND.&nbsp; Sure, she might look like an armored railgun ripped straight out of Michael Bay&rsquo;s secret porn stash, but in reality it&rsquo;s probably the most badass non-lethal tank in human history.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The concept of BIG WIND began in the late 80s, when pretty much everybody worried about an impending life-or-death Patrick Swayzian murder-war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact with nothing less than the fate of Earth hanging in the balance.&nbsp; Sure, most of these scenarios involved thermonuclear mutually assured destruction, but another possibility both sides had to consider was what to do if the armies fought an old-school badass land war in Europe, only, you know, every once in a a while someone dropped a tactical nuke or two and atomized a couple tank divisions.&nbsp; Well the Hungarians decided it would probably be useful to have some iron-clad way to decontaminate surviving armored vehicles and clean off all the nuclear waste, so they decided to strap two hulking MiG-21 jet engines onto an obsolete T-34 tank chassis and hook it up to six hoses that could inject water and disinfectant into the blast.&nbsp; </p>\r\n<p>The war never actually happened, but it turned out that BIG WIND had another, equally-rad use &ndash; you could fill it up with water and fire-controlling chemicals and use it to blow the fucking shit out of Kuwaiti oil field fires with twin-engined jet streams of turbocharged hydraulic awesomeness.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Created by MB Drilling, a company based out of Oman, BIG WIND was built by Hungarian crews outside Budapest in a facility I like to envision as looking a lot like Nikola Tesla&rsquo;s mad scientist laboratory.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s two 10-foot-long jet engines cranked onto a 46-ton tank with 90 millimeters of sloped frontal armor, and even though it can&rsquo;t break ten miles an hour on the highway it fucking generates 27,000 pounds of thrust and can crank out 8,000 gallons of water a minute while its engines scream at a volume so insanely loud that it can literally make blood start running out of your goddamn ears.</p>\r\n<p>And, uh, if you were wondering what Satan&rsquo;s super soaker would perform like on the front lines, this double-barreled self-propelled aquatic artillery barfs out so much water that it can smash your face with enough high-velocity liquid to fill this awesome New Jersey-style above-ground swimming pool:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In about ten seconds.<br /><br />Oh yeah, and not only are you filling a regulation-size swimming pool in the amount of time it takes you to get zero to sixty in a late-80s IROC-Z Camaro, but the water is traveling at a bone-shattering 770 miles an hour when it comes out of the barrel.&nbsp; So you&rsquo;re basically pissing out a Gulf War oil field fire with water that is traveling faster than the fucking speed of sound.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind7.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s the way BIG WIND works.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s crewed by three badass middle-aged Hungarian firefighters &ndash; a driver, a turret operator, and the team commander &ndash; all wearing fire-proof suits that make them look like they&rsquo;re Hollywood stunt men portraying sci-fi space marines.&nbsp; After being unloaded in the Persian Gulf off a C-130 in August, 1991, this thing would drive straight up to an endless 200-foot-tall geyser of white-hot burning gasoline and then plug their hose into the nearest lake, well, or groundwater hole.&nbsp; Then this trio of Hungarian madmen would drive the tank to within an insane 25 feet from the flame-belching wellhead, a distance at which the heat-shielded controls still get so screaming hot that you can only touch them with military-grade oven mitts, and crank up the twin jet engines to nearly full power.&nbsp; With a deafening whine the MiGs would start launching 220 gallons of water per second out like a Doom Super Shotgun of fire-quenching justice, blowing so hard that it destroyed the steady stream of oil and kept it from feeding the fire.&nbsp; The water and chemicals would simultaneously blow out the fire in the general area, and turn what was once a Dante&rsquo;s Inferno of flame into a geyser of liquid gold.&nbsp; Teams out then run in, cap the wellhead, and move on to the next one.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Before BIG WIND arrived, crews in the Persian Gulf were putting the oil field fires out at a rate of two to three per day.&nbsp; After August, that rate increased to four or six per day.&nbsp; Sure, BIG WIND wasn&rsquo;t doing it all herself, but for 46 days in the sandbox she definitely made a name for herself.</p>\r\n<p>By November 6, 1991, the last of the fires was finally out.&nbsp; Engineers had predicted it would take five years.&nbsp; The fire crews on the ground had accomplished their mission in less than nine months.</p>\r\n<p>Gulf War firefighting was BIG WIND&rsquo;s biggest and most badass test, but you&rsquo;d be surprised to find out how many uses a person can find for a 46-ton leaf blower tank that shoots water at 770 miles an hour.&nbsp; In the years since Desert Storm, the most badass fire extinguisher ever made has been sent around the world to fight oil fires, and has even been brought in to clear snowed-in airplane runways of ice and debris on occasion.&nbsp; Because why not.</p>\r\n<p>She&rsquo;s still in service today.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/652736728443/bigwind9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nzblokes.co.nz/this-jet-engine-fire-fighting-tank-is-a-beast/\">http://www.nzblokes.co.nz/this-jet-engine-fire-fighting-tank-is-a-beast/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://gizmodo.com/how-to-fight-fires-with-decomissioned-jet-engines-strap-1577704679\">http://gizmodo.com/how-to-fight-fires-with-decomissioned-jet-engines-strap-1577704679</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.caranddriver.com/features/stilling-the-fires-of-war-big-wind-page-2\">http://www.caranddriver.com/features/stilling-the-fires-of-war-big-wind-page-2</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EYRPJgZdp4\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EYRPJgZdp4</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Other Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Grace, Robert D.&nbsp; <em>Blowout and Well Control Handbook</em>.&nbsp; Elsevier, 2003.</p>\r\n<p>Hirschmann, Kristine.&nbsp; <em>The Kuwaiti Oil Fires</em>.&nbsp; Infobase, 2009.</p>\r\n<p>Ross, Jeffrey Ian.&nbsp; <em>Controlling State Crime</em>.&nbsp; Transaction, 2000.</p>','2015-01-30','652736728443','bigwind.jpg','bigwind-small.jpg','BIG WIND','Two MiG jet engines mounted on a T-34 chassis to become the most badass firefighting vehicle ever created. ',''),('Aaron Burr','February 6, 1756','September 14, 1836','Newark, NJ, USA','18th-century American Politician','<p>This is a weird Friday here in the good old United States of the USA, because between now and Monday we&rsquo;re getting ready to rock a Friday the 13<sup>th</sup>, Valentine&rsquo;s Day, and President&rsquo;s Day all one right after another like some kind of dissonant mental institution conga line led by a hockey-masked Cupid in an Abe Lincoln hat packing a red white and blue machete.&nbsp; With a party-heavy three day weekend ahead of us, surely it would be cool to write something this week that would tie in to one of those events&hellip; but what if there was a way to combine them all together?&nbsp; To find a guy who combines the patriotic fervor of a NASCAR tailgate with the smoothness of rose-petal chocolate fondue and the unrelenting violent determination of a hardcore slasher movie villain?</p>\r\n<p>Well, how about a badass founding father presidential candidate war hero, born in early February, who was notorious for being hella pimp, pissing off four different U.S. Presidents, charging into battle alongside George Washington, defending his honor with bullets rather than flowery speeches, then stone-cold busting caps in a dude who currently appears on U.S. currency before bolting to Europe to have legendary boning sessions with hundreds of hot Euro babes?</p>\r\n<p>I&rsquo;ve done a handful of American Presidents on this website, but it&rsquo;s high time we talk about the most badass Vice President in American history &ndash; <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JrB7Ygu6zk\">Aaron Burr</a>.&nbsp; A grim-faced, hard-fighting warrior so hardcore that THIS is what the statue of him that currently stands in the damn Museum of American Finance on Wall Street in New York City, just blocks from the New York Stock Exchange:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The third Vice President of the United States of America, Aaron Burr was an old-school tea-chucking Founding Father motherfucker, but whenever those dudes got together Burr was like the one who wore a leather jacket, smoked a cigarette , casually leaned on his Ford Fairlane giving James Madison the finger while all those other guys were off signing the Declaration of Independence like a bunch of nerds.&nbsp; A raging ultra-brilliant egomaniac who feared no man on Earth, Burr was a Colonel in the American Revolution, a war hero, an elite businessman, and the only sitting Vice President of the United States to ever openly kill a man <em>while he was still in office</em>.&nbsp; Sure, he&rsquo;s divisive and hot-headed, and a lot of people think he&rsquo;s a super mega asshole, but haters gonna hate and nobody that reads this website can (I assume) look me in the eye and tell me they wouldn&rsquo;t have respect for a titanium-nutsacked world leader who looks vaguely like Gaston from <em>Beauty and the Beast </em>and doesn&rsquo;t mind blowing away the Secretary of the Treasury for no better reason than to defend his personal honor.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Aaron Burr was born February 6, 1756, in Newark, New Jersey.&nbsp; He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but both his parents were dead before he was two and Burr grew up an orphan.&nbsp; At thirteen &ndash; THIRTEEN &ndash; this self-taught ultra-genius applied and was admitted into Princeton University as a sophomore.&nbsp; By sixteen he had a Law Degree, summa cum laude, from a goddamn Ivy League institution and was already on his way to becoming a successful New York City Doogie Howser attorney.&nbsp; Just three years into his career, however, shit went down in Colonial America, and the tensions between the colonists and the English King ended up ripping out into a shooting war.&nbsp; The second he received word that shots had been fired at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, nineteen year old Aaron Burr quit his lawyer gig, walked straight down the street to the recruiting office, and volunteered to fight for his country&rsquo;s freedom against the British Empire.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Thanks to his unstoppable single-minded determination and utter fearlessness in the face of enemy bayonets, Burr rose quickly through the ranks, becoming one of the youngest Colonels in the Continental Army.&nbsp; He fought alongside Benedict Arnold back when Arnold was still on our side, and then later on he cemented his place as a Real American Hero when he participated in a massive expedition to invade Quebec in the dead of winter and beat up a bunch of Canadians.&nbsp; He commanded a company in the American assault on the heavily-fortified city of Quebec on New Year&rsquo;s Eve 1775, and even though the Canadians kicked our ass (<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=312478119684\">it wouldn&rsquo;t be the first time</a>), Burr was cited for bravery for a heroic action where he cut his way through a swarm of enemy forces to rescue his badly wounded commanding officer.&nbsp; Slashing and firing around him with a sword and pistols, Burr stormed into knee-deep, blood-stained snow, hoisted General Richard Montgomery on his shoulders, and fireman-carried his mortally wounded friend and comrade&nbsp; back to relative safety to be treated.&nbsp; The expedition was a disaster, but Burr was tough as shit and was one of just 500 American soldiers to trudge out of the frozen Canadian wilderness with his life.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /> <em>&ldquo;He had served in the army, and came out of it with the </em><br /><em> character of a knight without fear and an able officer.&rdquo;&nbsp; </em><br /><em> -John Adams, Second President of the United States</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After the Canada invasion, Burr was transferred to George Washington&rsquo;s command, leading a regiment alongside <a href=\"/index.cgi?id=57276631074\">Fat Henry Knox</a> at the Battle of Monmouth, and then later fought off a British amphibious invasion of Manhattan (!) when the redcoats stormed ashore right in the heart of downtown New York City.&nbsp; Burr and Washington didn&rsquo;t get along too well, however, and after pissing off the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, Aaron Burr found himself transferred to garrison duty in southeast New York.&nbsp; Even this didn&rsquo;t slow down his unremitting pace of non-stop asskickings.&nbsp; Leading rag-tag militia troops, Burr fought loyalist guerillas outside NYC, stormed British fortifications on Long Island, and once ran into Yale and recruited a company of Ivy League students to help him and 1,000 other hastily-assembled volunteer citizen-soldiers drive back a massed attack by over two thousand well-drilled veteran British infantrymen outside New Haven, Connecticut.&nbsp; Which is fucking awesome as hell.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /> <em>&ldquo;He never penned a declaration of independence, but he has done much more &mdash; </em><br /><em> he has engraved that declaration in capitals with the point of his sword.&rdquo;</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After four years of war finally secured America&rsquo;s independence, Burr went back home, re-opened his law firm, got into politics, and, awesomely enough, married the widow of a British officer killed during the fighting.&nbsp; His wife was ten years older than him, but Burr was super attracted to her wit and her intelligence, and was basically nuts for this girl and ultra-devoted to her for the rest of her life (she died of illness after fifteen years of marriage).&nbsp; They had a daughter together, and Burr demonstrated his forward-thinking awesomeness by putting his girl into good, typically-male-only schools, teaching her to speak four languages, training her to accurately shoot a rifle from horseback, and generally just making sure his girl received a level of education that women weren&rsquo;t really supposed to have access to in 1776.<br /> Burr applied this sort of attitude to his political life as well.&nbsp; As the New York Attorney General, he worked to promoted racial and gender equality, gave speeches advocating equal voting rights for women and ex-slaves, and was a big part of the (ultimately successful) movement to completely abolish slavery in New York State. &nbsp;&nbsp;He eventually grew so popular for his awesomeness that his fellow asshole New Yorkers elected him to one of the state&rsquo;s U.S. Senate seats in 1791.</p>\r\n<p>This election, however, really pissed off another dude who was a pretty big-time political figure of early America &ndash; the country&rsquo;s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.&nbsp; Now, Hamilton is actually pretty fucking awesome.&nbsp; Coming from virtually nothing, the man on the ten dollar bill was a career soldier who once led an army into the field while still a sitting member of the Cabinet, basically invented the American banking system, and once called Thomas Jefferson &ldquo;womanly&rdquo; because he thought it was super lame that Jefferson liked French people so much.&nbsp; But Hamilton was a Federalist (meaning he supported big, centralized American government) and Burr was a Democratic-Republican (meaning he didn&rsquo;t), and, more personally, Burr&rsquo;s senate seat had come at the expense of Hamilton&rsquo;s father-in-law.&nbsp; The political defeat pissed Hamilton&rsquo;s family off so hard that Hamilton&rsquo;s brother-in-law challenged Burr to a duel &ndash; pistols at dawn &ndash; a manly challenge to which Burr of course didn&rsquo;t even fucking flinch.&nbsp; Burr got a button shot off his shirt in the ensuing gunfight, but both men emerged from the showdown unharmed and with their honor still firmly intact.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The rivalry continued throughout the years, with each guy continually trying to troll the other harder and harder.&nbsp; Now, Alexander Hamilton was a powerful banker who owned the Bank of New York, the oldest bank in the United States, but since the assholes at that bank were really only lending money to rich people and Federalists, Burr countered him by creating his own bank &nbsp;as an awesome corporate &ldquo;fuck you&rdquo; to his hated foe.&nbsp; That became, uh Chase Motherfucking Manhattan, which you&rsquo;ve probably heard of before, seeing as how it currently operates in 85 goddamn countries throughout the world and is currently the second largest in the United States of America.&nbsp; It should say something about Aaron Burr that founding one of the planet&rsquo;s biggest financial institutions is so far down his list of awesome accomplishments that it barely warrants two sentences in his biography.</p>\r\n<p>Burr eventually got tapped to run in the Presidential Election of 1800 as Thomas Jefferson&rsquo;s Vice President candidate, but shit got pretty weird with that pretty quickly.&nbsp; Apparently, the Electoral College worked a lot differently than it does today, because even though the political ticket was for Burr to be VP and Jefferson the President, some weird shifty shit went down and the Electoral College ended up splitting their votes so that when everything was counted up Burr and Jefferson were tied for President. Jefferson was all like, &ldquo;dude, just be cool and let me have it,&rdquo; but Burr told him to fuck off and took the debate to the House of Representatives to serve as a tiebreaker.&nbsp; This, of course, pissed Thomas Jefferson right the hell off, and then professional Burr-troll Alexander Hamilton came out onto the House floor and started dropping sick burns on Aaron Burr until all of his Federalist homies were like, &ldquo;Yeah, good point, Jefferson should totally be President.&rdquo; This of course left Aaron Burr to be the Vice President to a dude who pretty much hated his guts now.&nbsp; The whole thing was such a nightmare that the government passed the 12<sup>th</sup> Amendment to make sure nothing like that happened again, thus proving that Aaron Burr was such an awesome over-the-top pain in the ass that it he incited constitutional motherfucking amendments that fundamentally altered the way the United States elects it&rsquo;s presidents.&nbsp; God damn Burr owns so hard.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Vice Presidency was boring and shitty because Jefferson was all butthurt about almost losing the election, and when it was pretty stinkin&rsquo; obvious Burr wasn&rsquo;t going&nbsp; to be on the ballot in 1804 he decided to run for Governor of New York instead.&nbsp; He did, and <em>guess who was fucking there one goddamn more time to torpedo Aaron Burr&rsquo;s fucking shit</em>.&nbsp; Hamilton.&nbsp; Always Hamilton.&nbsp; This time the former Secretary of the Treasury came out in the newspapers talking smack and writing columns about Aaron Burr being an incompetent asshat or whatever, and that was fucking it.&nbsp; Burr wrote Hamilton a letter telling him to shut his dumb face before Burr shuts it for him.&nbsp; Hamilton wrote some equally-toxic hate mail back.&nbsp; The correspondence quickly started reading like a YouTube comment flame war until finally Burr challenged Hamilton to take it outside, meet on a field in New Jersey, and settle this like two drunk bros pummeling each other senseless in an alley behind a strip club at two in the morning.</p>\r\n<p>Burr and Hamilton met on July 11, 1804.&nbsp; Hamilton provided the dueling pistols.&nbsp; The two men stood back to back, walked ten paces, stopped, turned, took aim, and fired.</p>\r\n<p>Alexander Hamilton&rsquo;s bullet sailed so far wide that it struck a tree twelve feet away from Burr.</p>\r\n<p>Burr&rsquo;s shot didn&rsquo;t miss.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /> <em>Niggas be shootin\' the gif like they for real<br /> But when it jumps, they ain\'t got no murder skills.</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Did I mention that dueling was illegal in the United States at the time all this went down?&nbsp; Because it totally super was.&nbsp; Warrants were immediately issued in New York and New Jersey for the arrest of Aaron Burr on charges of premeditated first-degree murder.</p>\r\n<p>Not only did Aaron Burr NOT turn himself in, he fled the state, took a train to Washington, D.C., and <em>went right back to being the motherfucking pimp-ass Vice President of the United States of America</em>.&nbsp; Just a few months after shooting a Founding Father to death, Burr was sitting in the House presiding over a high-profile case where Jefferson was trying to impeach the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase, on the bullshit grounds that Jefferson didn&rsquo;t like Chase&rsquo;s political leanings.&nbsp; Burr knew this was a steaming load of crap, called Jefferson on it, threw out the impeachment charges, and basically set a vitally-important precedent limiting a President&rsquo;s ability to cherry-pick Supreme Court justices for political reasons.</p>\r\n<p>Burr was out of a Vice President job in 1804, and since, you know, straight-up capping a political rival to death in a field was kind of frowned upon in society at the time, he didn&rsquo;t really have an easy time continuing on with his career.&nbsp; So, ruined politically, Burr did something so completely awesome it probably isn&rsquo;t even true &ndash; he moved out west and conspired with the U.S. Army chief-of-staff to break the Louisiana Purchase off from the rest of the United States, turn it into an independent Empire led by Aaron Burr, and then fucking launch a full-scale invasion of Mexico.&nbsp; When his letters to England, Germany, and France requesting troops and money weren&rsquo;t super successful, Burr tried to recruit a mercenary army to help him become the ultimate 18<sup>th</sup>-century James Bond villain, but eventually someone got wind of it and Burr was brought back to D.C. and tried for Treason.&nbsp; He was acquitted because literally nobody testified against him and there was basically no evidence suggesting he&rsquo;d done anything even a little bit treasonous, which leads a lot of people to wonder whether the whole thing was made up by Thomas Jefferson just to screw with Burr.&nbsp; Fans of Aaron Burr like to say it&rsquo;s all bullshit, but the fact that this convicted-murdering war hero ex-VP might have tried to become the iron-fisted military Emperor of Texas actually makes me like him even more.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After getting off on treason charges, Burr went to Europe, where he spent the next twenty years banging TONS of chicks.&nbsp; Like, so many crazy sex orgies and freakshow RedTube shit that there were seedy Fifty Shades fanfic romance novels written about it in the 1800s where he&rsquo;s depicted on the cover surrounded by tons of naked babes (try searching Barnes &amp; Noble&rsquo;s website for &ldquo;Amorous Intrigues and Adventures of Aaron Burr&rdquo; some time when you&rsquo;re not at work).&nbsp; Later in life he moved back to the United States, became a lawyer in New York again, married a chick half his age who also happened to be the richest widow in America, divorced her less than a year later, and died in 1836.</p>\r\n<p>He never faced charges for the murder of Hamilton.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/804252012663/aaronburr-sm.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/peopleevents/pande01.html\">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/peopleevents/pande01.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.ushistory.org/valleyforge/served/burr.html\">http://www.ushistory.org/valleyforge/served/burr.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Lepore-t.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0\">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Lepore-t.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85757/Aaron-Burr\">http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85757/Aaron-Burr</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Sculpture_22_00003.htm\">https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Sculpture_22_00003.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.aaronburrassociation.org/\">http://www.aaronburrassociation.org/</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Books:</p>\r\n<p>Genovese, Michael A.&nbsp; <em>Encyclopedia of the American Presidency</em>.&nbsp; Facts on File, 2009.</p>\r\n<p>Isenberg, Nancy.&nbsp; <em>Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr</em>.&nbsp; Penguin, 2007.</p>\r\n<p>Lynch, Timothy J.&nbsp; <em>The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History</em>.&nbsp; Oxford University Press, 2013.</p>','2015-02-13','804252012663','aaronburr.jpg','aaronburr-small.jpg','Aaron Burr','The most badass Vice President in American history.','“I leave to my actions to speak for themselves, and to my character to confound the fictions of slander.”'),('Michael A. Healy','September 22, 1839','August 30, 1904','Macon, GA, USA','19th-century American Sailor','<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">One part Wild West lawman busting up murderous outlaw gangs in the most remote, inhospitable tendrils of the American wilderness, one part high-seas adventurer bravely charging his lone vessel into certain death to explore uncharted new lands, one part heroic rescue diver plunging into sub-zero waters in hopes of saving shipwrecked sailors, and one part humanitarian aid worker bringing vital life-giving supplies to underserved communities.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>As the only real representative of the United States government in the newly-purchased territory of Alaska in the 1880s, United States Cutter Revenue Service Captain &ldquo;Hell Roaring&rdquo; Mike Healy was a hardcore salty dog motherfucker who spent the better part of two decades single-handedly patrolling 20,000 miles of largely-unexplored coastline serving as sheriff, coast guardsman, firefighter, lead scientist, chief negotiator, aid worker, EMT and mail carrier.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He&rsquo;s the first man of African-American descent to ever command a vessel in the service of the United States government, a legend in the state of Alaska, and one of the most badass men in the history of the United States Coast Guard.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>A hard-drinking, hard-fighting sea dog who was a crack shot with a harpoon, had a gaze that could stare down polar bears, and worked a job that makes ice road trucking look like an afternoon at the go-kart track.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Oh, and if you whining complainers think you&rsquo;re a little chilly now just because motherfucking Niagara Falls iced over this morning and most of the northeast is starting to look like a <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Day After Tomorrow </em>post-apocalyptic nuclear ice age frozen-over wasteland nightmarescape so soul-crystallizingly frigid that Schwarzenegger&rsquo;s character from <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Batman &amp; Robin </em>would double-middle-finger NOPE the fuck outta there, try navigating a goddamn three-masted wooden sailing ship through the Bering Sea in 1885 with only a wool coat and your own manly chest hair to keep you warm amid twenty-foot raging seas and negative-thirty-degree wind chills.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy1.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Born in Macon, Georgia in 1839, Mike Healy&rsquo;s dad was an off-the-boat Irish immigrant who had fought alongside the Brits in the War of 1812 but decided he liked America enough he wanted to stick around for a while, and his mom was a black plantation slave who may or may not have been freed by the time Healy was born (there are conflicting stories on this).<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Whatever the case may be, Healy and his nine brothers and sisters were pretty much fucked in terms of opportunities in pre-Civil War rural Georgia, where children of African-American descent weren&rsquo;t really allowed to go to school or have rights or basically do anything except perform a lot of backbreaking labor for free.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Hoping to give their kids a chance to become something great, Mike&rsquo;s mom and dad told their children to try and &ldquo;pass for white,&rdquo; sent them north of the Mason-Dixon, and enrolled them in Catholic school at Holy Cross College.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">All nine of Mike&rsquo;s brothers and sisters entered the religious service.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>One brother became the first black bishop in North America.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>One sister was Mother Superior at a convent.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Another brother became president of Georgetown University.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Another one was a priest at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Mike ditched school, enlisted as a cabin boy on a British merchant ship, and spent the next decade sailing the East Indies in search of awesome high seas adventures that spanned the entire meridian of the globe.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Because fuck yeah, that&rsquo;s awesome.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em></em></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Healy worked basically every single job you can possible work on a sailing ship over the next ten years.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Eventually, with the country hurting for manpower thanks to the Civil War, Healy put in an application at the United States Revenue Cutter Service, the agency that would eventually become the Coast Guard.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>His commission as a Third Lieutenant in the USRCS was signed by Abe Lincoln in 1864, and he spent the next nine years working on various cutters operating out of Boston harbor.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Ok, fine, whatever, but in 1875 some crazy orders came down and Healy was transferred to the recently-purchased-from-Russia middle-of-nowhere territory of Alaska, a frozen arctic wasteland nobody really knew that much about yet except for that it was fucking cold as shit there and they got seals and whales and gunslinging booze smugglers and the largest motherfuckin&rsquo; bears on earth and not much else in the way of things that aren&rsquo;t going to horrifically, brutally kill you and mash your mangled corpse into a bloody red streak on the ice until the whole thing vaguely resembles a cherry snow-cone at the county fair.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">It takes a certain kind of man to be even marginally successful in a posting like that, and, incidentally, that sort of man is also the sort of motherfucker who goes down in history with badass nicknames like &ldquo;Hell Roaring Mike Healy.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Captain Healy would command five cutters during the next twenty years, and he would be the first African-American to ever command a U.S. military or government vessel (although nobody made a big deal about it at the time because nobody realized he was half black).&nbsp; His most famous command would be the <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Bear</em>, a 198-foot, 700-ton three-masted steamer known to pretty much everyone in Alaska as &ldquo;Healy&rsquo;s Fire Canoe.&rdquo;<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>At the helm of the flagship of the Bering Sea Force (an impressive-sounding squadron that pretty much included <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Bear </em>and not much else), Healy and his crew of fifty were the only presence the United States government had in basically all of Alaska.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>They were responsible for a brain-crushingly immense swath of coastline &ndash; everything from Barrow<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>to San Francisco &ndash; and their tasks included everything from hand-delivering mail to busting up bootlegging rings of people trying to run everything from guns to opium into the country.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Shouting commanding orders to some of the saltiest sailors on earth in life or death situations was a daily occurrence for this hardcore captain, and his posting required him to face constant danger from every direction.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>One day he&rsquo;d be rushing food supplies to native Inuit Indians while plowing through fifteen-foot waves and iceberg-infested waters, the next day a group of mutineers would take exception to his attempts to bring them to justice, and later that week he&rsquo;d be sledding across pack ice into thirty mile-an-hour winds to bring medical supplies to whaling crews who&rsquo;d been trapped in the ice.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Constantly ready to fight brutal weather conditions, Healy had his crew disciplined, well-trained, and ready for anything, as they bravely &ndash; and routinely &ndash; patrolled some of the most dangerous waters on earth .<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>This is <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Deadliest Catch</em> shit, but back before the invention of Gore-Tex and space heaters, when the difference between saving lives and having your wooden ship smashed into toothpicks depended on the captain climbing forty feet of rigging in blistering sub-zero winds to adjust the rigging before your fucking ship gets a face-first of iceberg and decides to reenact DiCaprio&rsquo;s final scene in <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Titanic</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">We&rsquo;re talking about navigating this:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">With this:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">P.S. dude I&rsquo;m killing it with the 90s movies references today.</em></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Alaska had just been purchased in 1867, so by the time Healy got there it had only been a territory for eight years.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>It was dangerous, lawless, and uncharted, and it was Healy&rsquo;s job to bring peace, order, and, uh, charts to it, and to do it pretty much at his discretion.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>And he found some pretty awesome ways to prep Alaska to go from being just a big white space on the map with the word &ldquo;Russia&rdquo; erased and scribbled over in pencil with the word &ldquo;SNOW,&rdquo; and turn it into the 49<sup>th</sup> star on the American flag.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>For starters, he established way more of a presence than any single man should be able to do in a strip of land that is 20,000 goddamn miles long.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He curbed smuggling.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He arrested pirates, mutineers, and crooked traders.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He brought vital supplies to remote whaling depots, refueling stations, and native Inuit tribal villages.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He worked with John Muir to document wildlife and ecology of the region, establish friendly relations with the Inuit, and perform vital scientific research.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He brought missionaries to preach to miners and locals.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He helped dig vessels out of pack ice, fished overboard sailors out of the hypothermia-inducing waters of the Bering Sea, and raced injured fishermen to the hospital at a time when broken bones, influenza, or appendicitis were ultra-serious life-threatening situations.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He even delivered the fucking mail, and he did it all without ever losing a ship to the perils of the Arctic.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>And by the time he was done, there were a lot of new charts and freshly-pioneered sub-zero sailing techniques courtesy of Captain Hell Roaring Mike Healy.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Oh yeah, and one time the Inuit were starting to starve to death because asshole poachers were over-hunting the whales and seals they depended on for survival, so fucking Hell Roaring Mike sailed his ass across the Sea to Russia, bought sixteen reindeer, hand-loaded them onto <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Bear,</em> sailed back to the Inuit, and taught them the intricate details of how to breed reindeer for food and dairy products.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Because sure why not right?</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy6a.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Hell Roaring Mike performed literally hundreds of life-saving rescue operations during his career with the Revenue Service, but his biggest operation came in 1888 when the Alaskan Whaling Fleet was smashed by a huge gale and was forced to take refuge in Point Barrow, which is the extreme furthest north point on Alaska (it&rsquo;s the place where <em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">30 Days of Night </em>takes place).<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Just for reference, here&rsquo;s this weekend&rsquo;s weather forecast for the region:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy7.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>lol</em></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Undeterred by the ball-freezingly excruciating what the fuck temperatures, Healy raced head-on into the danger like he gave zero fucks whatsoever about anything except saving lives.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>The storm hurled up towering waves and the winds were changing direction almost hourly, flipping even some of the larger ships over, smashing the smaller ones to driftwood, and forcing terrified crews into lifeboats or simply just dumping guys into the swirling black ocean.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Healy raced from wreck to wreck, throwing lines and hauling in dudes, finally pulling 160 men out of the water and then somehow navigating through the storm in one piece.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>A few years later he&rsquo;d be the guy that dispatched <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=169179827555\">David Jarvis</a> on the Overland Relief Expedition, and if you&rsquo;re getting a boner for this story then that&rsquo;s another one you should probably check out as well.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Hell Roaring Mike was basically the king of Alaska for twenty years, but everyone in San Francisco hated his ass because he drank way too much rum and kind-of-illegally used to discipline crewmen and criminals by handcuffing dudes and then stringing them up from the yardarm of his ship, and even in the 1890s people from San Francisco were weird about that sort of thing, and they complained like crazy all the time about him.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Since it technically was sort of against the rules to brutalize your crew while drunkenly commanding a U.S. government ship, Healy was court-martialled and stripped of command in 1896.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>But, naturally, one year later some serious shit went down and a couple hundred stranded sailors needed desperate life-saving help, and wouldn&rsquo;t you fucking know it the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter to President McKinley requesting Healy be reinstated to go save those guys&rsquo; asses (which he did, of course).<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>He&rsquo;d then be fully reinstated in the Revenue Service and retire in 1903 at the age of 64 as the third most senior Captain in the service.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">A U.S. Coast Guard polar icebreaker cutter named after him still operates in the Bering Sea today.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\" align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/234593721988/mikehealy8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>\r\n <o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n  <o:AllowPNG/>\r\n </o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n</xml><![endif]--></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>\"Capt. Mike Healy is a good deal more distinguished person in the waters of the far Northwest </em><br /><em>than any president of the United States or any potentate of Europe has yet become.&nbsp; </em><br /><em>He stands for law and order in many thousands of land and water, </em><br /><em>and if you should ask in the Arctic Sea, \'Who is the greatest man in America?\' </em><br /><em>the instant answer would be \'Why, Mike Healy.\'&nbsp;&ldquo;&nbsp; </em><br /><br /><em>- New York Sun, January 1894</em></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Links:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://www.uscg.mil/history/people/Healy_ODell_Article.asp\">http://www.uscg.mil/history/people/Healy_ODell_Article.asp</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://www.uscg.mil/history/people/HealyMichaelIndex.asp\">http://www.uscg.mil/history/people/HealyMichaelIndex.asp</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://www.alaskatravelmagazine.com/11Alaskans/Captain-Healy/captain-healy.html\">http://www.alaskatravelmagazine.com/11Alaskans/Captain-Healy/captain-healy.html</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://explorenorth.com/library/yafeatures/bl-healy.htm\">http://explorenorth.com/library/yafeatures/bl-healy.htm</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://voyagetodiscovery.org/healy.htm\">http://voyagetodiscovery.org/healy.htm</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Healy\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Healy</a></p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Books:</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Helvarg, David.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America&rsquo;s Forgotten Heroes</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>New York: St. Martins, 2013.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Noble, Dennis L. and Truman R. Strobridge.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Captain &ldquo;Hell Roaring&rdquo; Mike Healy</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2009.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Reef, Catherine.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">African Americans in the Military</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>New York: Facts on File, 2010.</p>\r\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Strobridge, Truman R. and Dennis L. Noble.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span><em style=\"mso-bidi-font-style: normal;\">Alaska and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service 1867-1915</em>.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">&nbsp; </span>Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1999.</p>\r\n<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>\r\n <o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n  <o:AllowPNG/>\r\n </o:OfficeDocumentSettings>\r\n</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>\r\n <w:WordDocument>\r\n  <w:View>Normal</w:View>\r\n  <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>\r\n  <w:TrackMoves/>\r\n  <w:TrackFormatting/>\r\n  <w:PunctuationKerning/>\r\n  <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>\r\n  <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>\r\n  <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>\r\n  <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>\r\n  <w:DoNotPromoteQF/>\r\n  <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>\r\n  <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian>\r\n  <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>\r\n  <w:Compatibility>\r\n   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Heading\"/>\r\n </w:LatentStyles>\r\n</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]>\r\n<style>\r\n /* Style Definitions */\r\n table.MsoNormalTable\r\n	{mso-style-name:\"Table Normal\";\r\n	mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;\r\n	mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;\r\n	mso-style-noshow:yes;\r\n	mso-style-priority:99;\r\n	mso-style-parent:\"\";\r\n	mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;\r\n	mso-para-margin:0in;\r\n	mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;\r\n	line-height:115%;\r\n	mso-pagination:widow-orphan;\r\n	font-size:8.0pt;\r\n	font-family:\"Arial\",\"sans-serif\";}\r\n</style>\r\n<![endif]-->','2015-02-20','234593721988','mikehealy.jpg','mikehealy-small.jpg','Hell Roaring Healy','A life-saving legend in the Coast Guard, the first African-American to command a U.S. government vessel, and the man who single-handedly patrolled the Alaska coastline for over 20 years.','\"When I am in charge of a vessel, I always command; nobody commands but me. I take all the responsibility, all the risks, all the hardships that my office would call upon me to take. I do not steer by any man’s compass but my own.\"'),('Unpronounceable','c. 2230 AD','c. 2285 AD (sort of)','Shi\'Kahr, Vulcan','Fictional Vulcan Scientist','<p>I&rsquo;ve already talked about badass starship commander <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kirk.html\">James T. Kirk</a> on this site (and in one of my books), but I&rsquo;ve been massively remiss in my duties as webmaster by not singing the all-too-deserved praises of one of science fiction&rsquo;s all-time greatest First Officers and perhaps the greatest paragon of nerd hero awesomeness to ever drop a fucking telepathic mind-meld on a polar bear and then go off to Vulcan nerve pinch space Nazis unconscious while surreptitiously hitting on evil Romulan space babe military commanders.&nbsp; The only alien on the crew of the Starship <em>Enterprise, </em>this master of the Vulcan Bladed Q-Tip Death Implement was a stoic iron-jawed green-blooded logic machine who hated babies and idioms, looked good in a fedora, mastered the fine art of shit-talking and adamantly refused to suffer fools who thought they could try and match wits with his razor-sharp alien space brain.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Even fifty years after he stomped balls all over the Styrofoam sets of outer space, this time-traveling battle scientist is still the most chill emotionless automaton in all of sci-fi.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s the guy you call when you need exposition on what the hell is going on with the story plot.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s the guy you call when you need someone to build you a thermonuclear warhead out of alien materials you found on a planet nobody has ever heard of before.&nbsp; And he&rsquo;s also the guy you call when you&rsquo;ve been accidentally teleported back to 13<sup>th</sup>-century Mongolia and you need an alien commando to quickly take out three of Genghis Khan&rsquo;s henchmen in a series of badass open-hand Vulcan Pimp Slaps before they can raise the alarm.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s Gandalf, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macgyver.html\">MacGuyver</a>, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\">Snake Eyes</a> and Neil Degrasse Tyson with pointy ears, green blood, and a super-strong musculo-skeletal system that lets him punch through lead pipes with his fists.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em>&nbsp;</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em><img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> &ldquo;If this is your god, he&rsquo;s not very impressive.&rdquo;</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em>- Spock, after meeting God</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Spock was born on the planet Vulcan to a Vulcan father and a Human mother, but like a good badass he did everything he could to suppress his human nature and live as a single-minded ultra-stoic Lawful Neutral stoicist who based life-or-death decisions on logic, reason, and stone-cold badassitude.&nbsp; The first Vulcan in Starfleet, he was posted on the <em>Enterprise</em> under James T. Kirk, where he served as First Officer, Science Officer, computer expert and the dude everybody runs to when they need to figure out how to time-travel using nothing more than a warp drive and the materials available to the United States Air Force in 1969 (Answer: You slingshot around the moon, reach Warp 10, and teleport forward in time to 2200 AD&hellip; no bigs).&nbsp; He discovered that you could cold-start a warp drives by blowing it up with a controlled explosion, which is every bit as insane an idea as you might think, beat everyone&rsquo;s ass in 3D chess, shredded the Vulcan lute like a cold-blooded Yngwie Malmsteen, and once flew a shuttlecraft into a space amoeba so he could detonate an antimatter bomb inside it and save billions of people from being devoured by a star system-sized space-born parasite.&nbsp; When Khan, an ancient evil dictator, took over the Enterprise, he flooded the ship with gas to knock him out.&nbsp; When Khan came back, Spock sacrificed himself by going into a plasma core to save the ship, died a slow agonizing death, then came back from the dead like some kind of post-Transcendental literature symbolic Christ-like figure or Optimus Prime.</p>\r\n<p>He also has a Mirror Image Evil Twin that rocks an awesome diabolical goatee and becomes the Emperor of Earth.&nbsp; This version of him basically <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-rhcFfOEA\">fights the entire crew</a> at the same time using Spock&rsquo;s time-honored hand-to-hand martial arts system of double backhand bitch slapping everyone in the face, throwing them into tables, and then ripping off flying double-hammerfists to everyone from Kirk to Uhura, and only gets taken out when Kirk clubs him in the back with a marble bust of some old composer or some shit.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><em><img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> \"Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical Humans.\"</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well sure, Vulcans are emotionless and awesome and don&rsquo;t scream out like whining crybabies just because they&rsquo;re being horrible mutilated and tortured to death, but they&rsquo;re also a savage people who kick balls even when the balls they&rsquo;re kicking aren&rsquo;t located in the same spots most species keep their balls.&nbsp; Spock rules because he gets pissed, hits on chicks, and cracks jokes, then ascends to Ultimate Hipster God Mode by ruthlessly shit-talking Humans who do the exact same thing but with less style and class.&nbsp; Sure every once in a while he gets captured and tortured, or some alien babe pulls out his brain, but even when he and Kirk were abducted by the Fascist Space Gestapo he fucking made a laser beam out of a transponder and a lightbulb and burned his fucking way straight into the Fuhrer&rsquo;s skull with it.&nbsp; Then he negotiated a peace treaty with some other race, ended a centuries long war, and ran the underground resistance against the Romulans before packing up his six string and heading to the bikini beach party planet for shore leave just for the hell of it.&nbsp; In his decades-long career with the Federation he received a chest full of medals, was made a Federation Ambassador, killed his evil brother and told Space God to shut the fuck up and suck on some photon torpedoes.</p>\r\n<p>I mean, there&rsquo;s a reason the Vulcan sexy time death match is called <em>Pon Farr</em>, and it&rsquo;s because you travel a far distance to get Powned by Spock after he pummels you with an American Gladiators implement to impress some Vulcan space chick in a skimpy outfit.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock3.jpg\" alt=\"\" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock5.jpg\" alt=\"\" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <img src=\"../images/83705531158/B-3hcVhVIAIEz7G.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"../images/83705531158/spock6.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Spock was portrayed by Leonard Nimoy, who passed away today at the age of 83.&nbsp; A badass in his own right, Nimoy was a poet, musician, photographer, and life-long actor who invented the Live Long and Prosper sign, served two years in the Army, wrote two books, produced a half-dozen albums and directed <em>Three Men and a Baby</em> of all things.&nbsp; <br /> <br /> But rather than sit around feeling sorry and being all sad and everything, let&rsquo;s go full Vulcan instead and watch a badass supercut of the greatest episode of Spock&rsquo;s long and badass career, then spend the rest of the day humming the awesome Kirk-Spock Ultimate Cage Match battle song every time we attempt to do something even a tiny bit cool:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-VBJsCBU0a8\" width=\"427\" height=\"320\"></iframe><br /> <em>&ldquo;What is it in you humans that requires such an overwhelming <br /> display of emotion in a situation such as this?&rdquo;</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.startrek.com/database_article/spock\">http://www.startrek.com/database_article/spock</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Spock\">http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Spock</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/arts/television/leonard-nimoy-spock-of-star-trek-dies-at-83.html?_r=0\">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/arts/television/leonard-nimoy-spock-of-star-trek-dies-at-83.html?_r=0</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2015-02-27','83705531158','spock.jpg','spock-small.jpg','Spock','The most badass first officer in science fiction history.','“I find your argument strewn with gaping defects in logic.”'),('Abdullah bin Hussein bin Talal bin Abdullah bin Hussein bin Ali','January 30, 1962','N/A','Amman, Jordan','21st-century Jordanian King','<p>You don&rsquo;t need a hard-hitting behind the scenes indie bullshit direct-to-Netflix documentary expose to know that ISIS is pretty much the most fucked-up horrible thing since the series finale of <em>Battlestar Galactica</em>.&nbsp; In a lot of ways these assholes are like the perfect villains for our time and place, because ISIS is to Muslims what the Nazis are to modern-day Germans &ndash; even the people they&rsquo;re supposed to be fighting for fucking hate their guts with the unrivalled fury of a thousand burning intergalactic supernovas.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re like the villain in a movie who is so insanely over-the-top evil that you&rsquo;re sitting there watching the movie rolling your eyes because it&rsquo;s like what the fuck I get it this guy is evil I don&rsquo;t need to see him kick the hero&rsquo;s pet terrier for another twenty minutes.&nbsp; They decapitate civilians in the street, throw POWs off buildings, behead journalists, employ child soldiers, and sell women into sexual slavery, then post the entire fucking thing on Jihad MySpace with bullshit SEO clickbait titles like &ldquo;The 10 Most Awesome Ways to Horrifically Execute Infidels &ndash; You Won&rsquo;t Believe Number Seven!&rdquo; just to troll everyone who doesn&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s totally rad to throw a punch of unarmed people in a hole and then hose them down with an AK-47.&nbsp; They torture minorities, bulldoze priceless ancient Persian and Babylonian archaeological research sites, and wear black after Labor Day.&nbsp; Are you thinking you might want to go to Syria to help alleviate the brutal realities of war among the populace by providing food and warm clothing to starving underprivileged homeless children?&nbsp; They&rsquo;ll fucking kidnap you and saw your head off with a pocketknife live on their Twitch channel.&nbsp; Got a problem with that being the official decree of some random self-appointed Caliph who preaches a psychotic radical doctrine that goes against everything you know about your own religion?&nbsp; Well now you&rsquo;re no longer a Muslim, you&rsquo;re a fucking heretic, which is punishable by death.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The United Nations has declared them a terrorist organization.&nbsp; Amnesty International accused them of crimes against humanity. &nbsp;Israel and Saudi Arabia are bizarrely in agreement that ISIS sucks.&nbsp; So are Serbia and Albania.&nbsp; So are the USA and Russia.&nbsp; Even the goddamn Taliban and Al-Qaeda are at war with these assholes.&nbsp; In fact, the only people who have shown them even the slightest bit of public support are the goddamned Boko Haram in Nigeria, and only then presumably because both organizations are in agreement that it&rsquo;s really fun to punch semi-literate ten year old girls in the face and then try and turn them into suicide bombers.</p>\r\n<p>Fuck ISIS.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/abdullah1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>At the forefront of the battle against ISIS are the heroic people of Jordan &ndash; a powerful, determined nation that has somehow managed to survive the modern Middle East despite sharing borders with Syria, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip.&nbsp; While most Jordanians oppose ISIS, they&rsquo;ve been more or less split down the middle on whether or not they should get themselves involved with a horrifically brutal war in Syria, which makes sense to me.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve been great about taking in nearly a million Syrian (and Iraqi) refugees over the past few years, though, and with the war starting to threaten Jordan&rsquo;s borders the government decided to launch a few airstrikes against ISIS targets and defend their country.&nbsp; Well, on December 24<sup>th</sup> of last year, one of their F-16s went down over the ISIS capital in Raqqah, Syria.&nbsp; The pilot ejected, landed in a river, and First Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh was captured by ISIS.</p>\r\n<p>Jordan temporarily halted airstrikes and attempted to negotiate the POW&rsquo;s release.&nbsp; ISIS wanted to trade him for a woman who had been imprisoned by Jordan for being part of a suicide bomb plot that killed 60 people in Amman in 2005.&nbsp; Jordan couldn&rsquo;t make that trade, so ISIS locked their prisoner of war up in an animal cage, burned him alive, and posted the video of it online.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, it turns out you shouldn&rsquo;t fuck with King Abdullah II of Jordan.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>King Abdullah II is 53 years old, and has spent 35 years of his life in the military.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a trained Cobra attack helicopter pilot, an armored warfare tank commander, a graduate of the British Military Academy, and the founder of Jordan&rsquo;s Special Operations Command unit of elite counter-terrorism commandos. &nbsp;He&rsquo;s performed hundreds of drops as a front-line paratrooper, collects ancient military weaponry, takes princesses skydiving in his spare time, has won a couple international Rally Car races, and once went dynamite fishing with Uday and Qusay Hussein just for the hell of it.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The King was in Washington, DC, attending a meeting with a U.S. Marine when he received word that his pilot had been brutally executed in cold blood.&nbsp; According to the Marine, King Abdullah of Jordan immediately fucking launched into Clint Eastwood&rsquo;s badass &ldquo;I&rsquo;m gonna kill his wife and burn his house down&rdquo; speech from <em>Unforgiven, </em>then told the guy the only concern he has with the fucking epic torrent of destruction that&rsquo;s about to happen is that he might run out of fuel and bullets in the process.&nbsp; <br /><br /> There aren&rsquo;t many Kings out there that possess the knowledge, skill, and epic timing to break out Clint Eastwood quotes in moments such as these, then follow it up by posting a picture of you looking like a hardass in full military fatigues on your Official Facebook Page while swearing vengeance.&nbsp; But these are the Kings you want overseeing your country.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>King Abdullah promised to make it rain horrible death in the general vicinity of all things terrorist-related, vowing to his people that &ldquo;our response will be on the level of disaster.&rdquo;&nbsp; His first action was to take that prisoner ISIS wanted and have her publicly hanged.&nbsp; Then he hung some other asshole who was also arrested for plotting to bring ISIS to Jordan.&nbsp; Then he went to the home of the murdered pilot, personally consoled the family, and promised them he would avenge their son for his sacrifice.</p>\r\n<p>Initial reports out of Jordan claimed that when the first (of many) flights of badass F-16 attack aircraft streaked over the skies of ISIS&rsquo;s capital that night, laying out a carpet of high-explosive ordinance directly up the urethra of the terrorists&rsquo; leadership, King Abdullah II was flying the lead aircraft.&nbsp; Jordan has officially denied this.&nbsp; Which is what they would have to do even if it were true.</p>\r\n<p>On the way back to base, the squadron flew a Missing Man Formation over the home of the pilot&rsquo;s family.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A member of the Hashemite Dynasty, the traditional guardians of Mecca and Medina, King Abdullah has been genetically confirmed as a 41<sup>st</sup>-level direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad.&nbsp; He graduated the UK Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, served as a Second Lieutenant of the 13/18<sup>th</sup> Royal Hussars Cavalry Regiment in Northern Ireland, flew Cobra helicopters in North Africa, became a Lieutenant Colonel in the Jordanian Third Armored Division, and then ultimately was appointed Commanding Officer of the Jordanian Special Forces in 1993.&nbsp; Abdullah&rsquo;s forward-thinking policies and commitment to &ldquo;quality over quantity&rdquo; led him to completely reorganize the unit into a unit that is now universally recognized as the most over-the-top hardcore special operations unit the Arab countries have to offer.&nbsp; These guys are trained in counter-terrorism, reconnaissance, interrogation, and close-quarter combat in urban environments, can deploy anywhere in the Middle East at a moment&rsquo;s notice, spend their summers in the USA training with Rangers and SEALs, and operate deep behind enemy lines for extended periods with little to no support.&nbsp; They are also believed to have agents who have infiltrated at all levels at ISIS, and their operatives proved a ton of vital information on what the hell is going on over there.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here&rsquo;s what these guys look like in action.&nbsp; Just remember that they weren&rsquo;t much to look at before Abdullah showed up on the scene.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/abdullah5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/206886827770/abdullah5a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/206886827770/abdullah5b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><img src=\"/images/206886827770/abdullah5c.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Yeah, that&rsquo;s a group of CTs deploying from helicopter to an airliner wing to kill hijackers.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not sure how practical this is in a live-fire scenario, but it&rsquo;s fucking awesome to look at.</p>\r\n<p>So when King Abdullah II of Jordan says he&rsquo;s going to &ldquo;open the gates of Hell on them,&rdquo; this is what he&rsquo;s working with.&nbsp; He immediately ordered 50+ airstrike missions to hammer ISIS positions non-stop for the next several weeks, then had his PR folks make it into a music video showing the men and women of his military (and implementing women into combat arms was a highly-progressive move initiated by the King himself) kicking some serious air-to-ground asshole.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/kpv9EzqaXCY\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>We&rsquo;ll see what happens with this war (I am assuming it ends with this guy publicly beheading the ISIS leader on national television with a sword that was once owned by Darius the Great), but even when King Abdullah isn&rsquo;t PERSONALLY dive-bombing enemy positions at motherfucking Mach One he&rsquo;s also a super cool as hell dude.&nbsp; Since taking over as King in 1999 he&rsquo;s done a lot of work to grant freedom to the media, improve the economy, advance women&rsquo;s rights, and build peaceful political relations with Israel.&nbsp; He kept his country together despite war and revolution literally all around him, and has chill ideas about religion as well &ndash; in 2004 he gave the Amman Message, a speech he issued after he organized a convention for 200 Muslim clerics (both Sunni and Shia) from over 50 countries.&nbsp; He told his fellow Muslims they should strive for compassion, mutual respect, tolerance, and acceptance, and stop declaring everyone apostates and heretics and infidels and all that shit.&nbsp; His message was resoundingly applauded by everyone from the Grand Mufti of Egypt to Iran&rsquo;s Ayatolla Khamenei to the Pope in Rome.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Oh right, and he also lives in a half-dozen multimillion-dollar palaces across Jordan, once rode a Harley across California, drives a bunch of awesome muscle cars, and his super hot wife was voted &ldquo;the Most Beautiful Queen or First Lady on Earth by <em>Harper&rsquo;s</em> magazine,&rdquo; has like <a href=\"https://twitter.com/queenrania\">four million followers</a> on Twitter, and served as the head of the United Nations Girls&rsquo; Education Initiative.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He also is a big-time science fiction nerd, to the point where he asked to be in an episode of <em>Star Trek: Voyager</em>.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>From a political standpoint, the King has provided the third-most troops to international United Nations peacekeeping operations, once again illustrating that he rocks the fine line between \"kicking fucking nutsacks up and down the Middle East\" and \"being a totally chill dude who will come to your aid when you need him\".&nbsp; Jordanian soldiers have helped stabilize the situation during the Yugoslavian Wars, set up medical facilities in Afghanistan and the Congo, dispersed aid after the natural disasters in Indonesia and Haiti, and ran a neutral field hospital during the Gaza Strip war.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve trained women MP soldiers in Iraq, helped Libyan rebels transform into an organized police force, and run refugee operations during the Syrian Civil War.</p>\r\n<p>Yet, despite all that, the thing that actually impressed me the most about this guy is that he drives his own fucking car when he goes places and doesn&rsquo;t get chauffeured around by some chump who can&rsquo;t handle a car as well as he can.&nbsp; There should be more world leaders out there who don&rsquo;t have a problem doing shit themselves &ndash; whether it&rsquo;s navigating a Suburban or dropping JDAMs on terrorists.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><br /> <img src=\"/images/206886827770/kingabdullah7a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://kingabdullah.jo/index.php/en_US/pages/view/id/148.html\">http://kingabdullah.jo/index.php/en_US/pages/view/id/148.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.businessinsider.com/king-abduallh-of-jordan-is-a-total-badass-2015-2\">http://www.businessinsider.com/king-abduallh-of-jordan-is-a-total-badass-2015-2</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/after-isis-execution-angry-king-abdullah-quotes-clint-eastwood-to-u.s.-lawmakers/article/2559770\">http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/after-isis-execution-angry-king-abdullah-quotes-clint-eastwood-to-u.s.-lawmakers/article/2559770</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/jordan-military-jets-pound-islamic-state-king-comforts-004435738.html\">http://news.yahoo.com/jordan-military-jets-pound-islamic-state-king-comforts-004435738.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.businessinsider.com/jordans-special-forces-are-some-of-the-regions-best-2015-2\">http://www.businessinsider.com/jordans-special-forces-are-some-of-the-regions-best-2015-2</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31125835\">http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31125835</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_II_of_Jordan\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_II_of_Jordan</a></p>','2015-03-06','206886827770','kingabdullah.jpg','kingabdullah-small.jpg','King Abdullah II','When ISIS killed one of his pilots, the King of Jordan is rumored to have flown the lead F-16 on the mission for revenge.','\"The blood of martyr Moaz al-Kasasbeh will not be in vain and the response of Jordan and its army after what happened to our dear son will be severe.\"'),('Joseph W. Boyle','November 16, 1867 ','April 14, 1923','Toronto, ON','19th-century Canadian Adventurer','<p>Klondike Joe Boyle was a Yukon Lumberjack Commando Secret Agent who managed a Stanley Cup hockey team, outfitted a World War I machine gun company, received astronomically high military honors from England, Canada, France, Romania, and Russia, stole the Romanian crown jewels from a vault in Moscow, hijacked a train, probably banged a Romanian princess, and once fought a shark in hand-to-hand combat armed with nothing more than a hunting knife.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I know it&rsquo;s been a while since I&rsquo;ve posted anything on here, but how&rsquo;s that sound for a comeback?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe1.png\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Joseph Whiteside Boyle was born on November 16, 1867 in Toronto, Ontario.&nbsp; His dad bred racehorses in a town called Woodstock, and his super-loaded parental units had a bitchin-ass huge farm where young Joe could spend his days swimming, riding horses, shooting guns up in the air for no reason at all, and discovering how many times he had to bash a Maple tree with his boner before the trunk would explode into a stack of identical two-by-fours and a jar of Aunt Jemima&rsquo;s.&nbsp; When he was 17, Joe went on a business trip to New York City with his father, and while they were hanging out there Joe went down to the docks and made friends with a salty, badass old sea captain.&nbsp; The captain was like, &ldquo;hey buddy, wanna go spend the next three years on a wooden sailing ship in the middle of the goddamn Atlantic&rdquo;, and Joe was like, &ldquo;fuck yeah&rdquo;, so he jumped on the ship immediately and had some random nearby dude bring a letter to Joe&rsquo;s dad saying, basically, &ldquo;hey, I&rsquo;m a sailor now, so don&rsquo;t wait up for me.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>Even though he probably hadn&rsquo;t been on a shitload of boats in his lifetime, Joe Boyle immediately endeared himself to the crew when he chucked a knife between his teeth and jumped overboard in the middle of a thunderstorm to save a shipmate who was being eaten by a motherfucking shark.&nbsp; A few years later, Boyle survived a nasty shipwreck and ended up being washed ashore in Cork County, Ireland, and because he had no cash to buy a trip home he ended up working as a Cork County tour guide for several months until he could save up the dough.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t imagine it&rsquo;s an incredibly easy job to become a tour guide in a foreign country you only visited because your ship was demolished by gigantic ship-murdering rocks, but when you&rsquo;re talking about a dude who knife-fights fucking sharks and crawls his way out of devastating shipwrecks I guess you have to readjust your expectations for what would be considered impossible.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Boyle eventually earned enough cash to get back to NYC, and when he got there he ended up marrying a woman he&rsquo;d known for less than a week &ndash; because if there&rsquo;s one thing that kind of defines Joe Boyle, it&rsquo;s that when he saw or thought of something he wanted, he went after it one thousand percent.&nbsp; Building a life in New York City, Boyle started an animal feed business, had seven kids (!), and managed a boxing club full of up-and-coming boxers.</p>\r\n<p>Well I guess Boyle&rsquo;s marriage flamed out like a supernova, because when word came down in 1897 that gold had been discovered in the Yukon, Boyle left his family behind, divorced his wife, and went out on an insane life-threatening overland journey to take part in the Klondike Gold Rush.&nbsp; Leaving his family with his business, Boyle and an Aussie boxer named Frank Slevin became some of the first men to survive a hellaciously-terrifying frozen passage known as White Pass, making money along the way by setting up Fight Club style boxing exhibitions and earning cash with their ability to face-punch jackholes for sport.&nbsp; When the two men arrived in Dawson City, Yukon, they had 22 dollars between them.</p>\r\n<p>By the time they left, they&rsquo;d both be up to their balls in Klondike Gold.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>White Pass</em></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>badass Klondike cowboy bar</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Living in a cowboy-style frontier town in the middle of a mountainous, unsurvivable permafrosted glacier, Joe Boyle scrounged cash by working as a manual laborer, boxer, and horse jockey, then blew all that cash on his attempt to try and mine some of the gold that was hidden underneath several feet of rock and ice at the top of a snow-covered mountain.&nbsp; He tried panning for gold, but that didn&rsquo;t really work out, so instead he decided to use a technique called dredging, which is where you build a huge-ass machine that drags the river bed and sifts out more gold than any one man could pan by hand.&nbsp; Naturally, this worked, Boyle found gold, used that gold to buy a logging business, set up a hydroelectric power plant, and become so goddamn rich that he was known as &ldquo;The King of the Klondike&rdquo;.&nbsp; Not bad, especially when you consider that the vast majority of people who tried their hand in the Klondike Gold Rush either froze to death or went broke.</p>\r\n<p>A rabid sports fan and endless promoter, in 1905 Klondike Joe put together a crew of hockey players and took them all the way to Ontario to play for the Stanley Cup.&nbsp; Which sounds bizarre as shit, but back in this time basically any jackass team could challenge the champs for the Cup, which is such an awesome concept that I kind of wish it was still the way shit went down today.&nbsp; Could you imagine some beer league pub team from outside Edmonton drunkenly challenging the Pens to a best-of-seven, only to have their team captain barf on Sydney Crosby halfway through the first period?&nbsp; I&rsquo;d finally fucking pony up for Center Ice if they aired shit like that.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>The Dawson City Nuggets.<br /> Klondike Joe is the guy seated in the middle.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Anyway, the insane thing here is that Dawson City is 4,000 miles from Ottawa, and this is a trip that was going to be undertaken through vastly uncharted territory at a time before the automobile was invented.&nbsp; It took the Dawson City Nuggets 23 days to reverse-Oregon-Trail their shit over mountains, rivers, and forests, traveling by dog sled, train, steamer ship, and then train again.&nbsp; They battled seasickness, rain, and iced over roads in an epic journey just for the chance to challenge one of the most unbeatable super-teams in hockey history, and the sheer determination involved was impossibly epic.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe5.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>The route.&nbsp; It\'s basically the Oregon Trail in reverse,<br />undertaken by men whose parents were old enough to have made the original Trail ride.<br /></em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Nuggets got the shit kicked out of them, naturally, because how much gas can you have left in the tank when you&rsquo;ve been riding a fucking dog sled for three weeks and then hurling over the side of a steamer ship.&nbsp; In a best-of-three series, the Dawson City Nuggets lost the first game 9-3, but made up for it by getting into a shitload of fights on the ice and having a few of their players ejected &ndash; from a <em>hockey game </em>&ndash; for <em>being too violent</em>.&nbsp; They lost the second game 23-2, which to this day is still the record for the worst defeat in the history of the Stanley Cup.&nbsp; Ottawa&rsquo;s star was Frank McGee, whose 14 goals is still an NHL record for most goals in a Stanley Cup series.&nbsp; McGee was a badass himself &ndash; he was one of the original nine members of the Hockey Hall of Fame, but was killed in action in France a few years later, fighting the Germans in World War I.</p>\r\n<p>As an awesome side note to this Stanley Cup story, the day after the finals were over the Ottawa team invited Dawson City to come hang out and party with them&hellip; the two teams slammed a billion beers, got hammered out of their minds, and got in trouble because they were taking turns trying to drunkenly drop-kick the Stanley Cup across the Rideau Canal in downtown Ottawa.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, so World War I began in 1914, and even though he was 49 years old you can be damn sure Klondike Joe wasn&rsquo;t going to miss out on the action.&nbsp; When the war started he used his own money to recruit a 50-man machine gun company of the Canadian Militia, outfitting them with uniforms, equipment, and guns he paid for himself.&nbsp; The Canadian militia made Boyle an honorary Lieutenant-Colonel, and he was so proud of this that he would never be seen in public again without his dress uniform &ndash; even when he was supposed to be performing spy missions and special operations behind enemy lines, and even when the British and Canadian command pleaded with him to take the fucking uniform off before he got himself executed.</p>\r\n<p>In July of 1916 Boyle headed for England, but he was deemed too old to fight in the Infantry so he was appointed an officer of the Royal Engineers.&nbsp; He was sent to Russia to aid the Nationalist cause in their struggle against the Germans and the Communists, taking over the Russian Transportation Department in 1917 and immediately opening up rail lines between Petrograd and Odessa.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe7.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><em>Joe\'s dominion.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But, yeah, you can&rsquo;t put Joe Fuckin&rsquo; Boyle that close to the action without expecting him to get his hands dirty, and in August of 1917 he &ldquo;somehow&rdquo; found himself in the middle of the Battle of Tarnapol.&nbsp; With the German army overrunning Russian positions all throughout the area, and no Russian officers taking charge of the action, Boyle pulled out his nutsack, organized the defenses of the city, and personally commanded the successful defense of the important rail hub city from enemy attack.&nbsp; For his heroism on the front lines, the Tsar of Russia awarded him the Order of St. Stanislaus, inducting Boyle into an order of knighthood that dates back to the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.</p>\r\n<p>The Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Tsar in 1917, but even though Boyle was a Westerner the Reds knew a good thing when they saw it.&nbsp; Not only did Boyle stay in Russia, but he got <em>promoted</em> to the awesome-sounding title of Railway Commisar and was tasked with getting 10,000 train cars full of men, weapons, and gear to the front lines of the war.&nbsp; Boyle took charge, had some of the train cars <em>dragged down the sides of mountains</em>, engineered some crazy shit, and got all the cars moving in under three days.&nbsp; Lenin was so happy that he gave Boyle another mission &ndash; delivering food and clothes to the war-torn people of Romania.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> <em>Klondike Joe chilling with the Queen of Romania.</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But, as you might expect, Klondike Joe Boyle was no big fan of the Marxists, and he decided he was going to deliver a hell of a lot more than just food and clothes to the Romanians &ndash; he knew that the Bolsheviks were holding the Crown Jewels of Romania and a large portion of that country&rsquo;s gold in a bank in Moscow for &ldquo;safekeeping during the war.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>Yep.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s right.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s where this is going.</p>\r\n<p>In 1918, Joseph Motherfuckin&rsquo; Boyle stole hundreds of pounds of gold and the crown jewels of Romania out of a secure facility in Moscow, loaded it onto two commandeered railway cars, and charged that shit 2,500 kilometers through a fucking Civil War to deliver it back to the Romanian people.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>At one point along the way, the Communist station manager at Vapnyarka refused to let Boyle pass, even though Boyle was still officially a senior official in the Russian Transportation Department, but Boyle didn&rsquo;t panic.&nbsp; In fact, he organized a party &ndash; he put on a huge concert, invited all the guards and train employees to attend, then fed them a bunch of tea spiked with 151 whiskey until a bunch of them passed out.&nbsp; Then he cut the telegraph wires, hijacked the train, and peeled the fuck outta there.</p>\r\n<p>If that&rsquo;s not good enough for you, when this guy got to Romania and delivered the goods, he also quite possibly hooked up with the Queen of Romania.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Queen Marie of Romania was a granddaughter of England&rsquo;s Queen Victoria, and she was a big fan of Joe right from the very beginning.&nbsp; She&rsquo;d hang out with him at parties, wrote a lot of really nice stuff about him, and had a personal correspondence that she kept up for the rest of his life.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s speculation about whether she and Boyle actually banged &ndash; they sure liked each other, but she was also, you know, technically married to the King of Romania and it would have been super super fucking not cool for them to hook up, but if you held a <a href=\"http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=997\">Dacian falx</a> to my head I&rsquo;d guess that these two at least had some pretty spicy DMs going on from time to time.</p>\r\n<p>Well, Joe couldn&rsquo;t really go back to Russia after this, so he ended up working with British Intelligence, helping the proto-SOE help run badass undercover spy rings in Southern Russia and Romania.&nbsp; His agents spied on the Germans, the Bolsheviks, and others, relaying crucial intel back to London about that the Enemies of Democracy.&nbsp; His crowning achievement was when he personally negotiated the release of 50 Romanian nobles who had been taken prison by Bolsheviks in Odessa &ndash; his role in freeing these high-ranking Romanians without bloodshed earned him the Star of Romania, the country&rsquo;s highest honor.&nbsp; He became a national hero, and was declared by the King to be a &ldquo;Saviour of Romania&rdquo;.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe10.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Klondike Joe Boyle attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I, and after the war he personally secured and oversaw the distribution of nearly $25 million in humanitarian aid to the people of Romania.&nbsp; He was awarded the Star of Romania, the British Distinguished Service Order, the Russian Order of St. Stanislaw, and the French Croix de Guerre for his service during the war.&nbsp; He died in England in 1923 at the age of 58.</p>\r\n<p>Every year, on the anniversary of his death, a woman dressed in all black would appear at his gravesite and leave a handful of flowers.&nbsp; This woman was seen every year from his death until 1938, which is the same year that Queen Marie of Romania passed away.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"https://www.patreon.com/badassoftheweek\"><img src=\"/images/495355030710/klondikejoe-patreon.png\" alt=\"\" /></a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=7794\">http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=7794</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joe-boyle-king-of-the-klondike-feature/\">http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joe-boyle-king-of-the-klondike-feature/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/projects/canadianhistory/josephboyle/josephboyle.html\">http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/projects/canadianhistory/josephboyle/josephboyle.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/joe-boyle-was-one-of-the-yukons-most-heroic-figures/\">http://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/joe-boyle-was-one-of-the-yukons-most-heroic-figures/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_W._Boyle\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_W._Boyle</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2016-09-23','495355030710','klondikejoe.jpg','klondikejoe-small.png','Klondike Joe Boyle','Yukon gold-mining Secret Agent who managed a Stanley Cup hockey team, outfitted a WWI machine gun company, stole the Romanian crown jewels from a vault in Moscow, one fought a shark with a knife.','\"A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing.\"\r\n- Queen Marie of Romania\r\n'),