Re: Joan is making Shake and Bake

Mike Duffy wrote:

On 2025-05-11, gm wrote:
>

This is a $25 bottle of vodka [...]
although someone is selling an empty
bottle on eBay for $20 so there’s

>
Greg, you make no sense here. I can sort of understand
the poorly-planned theft of the vodka to sell it later,
maybe on the plane to other passengers, but why
>
(1) not just buy the vodka on the way to the airport?
>
(2) would anyone pay $20 for an empty bottle?
>
(3) are you into the sacramental wine-box again?

I am a serious student of history... this is what I am reading now:
'The Second World War’s Masters and Commanders' - NATIONAL REVIEW/Book
Review
Ungated link here:
https://archive.ph/sEb2H
The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler --
How War Made Them and How They Made War, by Phillips Payson O’Brien
(Dutton, $35.00)
"The world obviously does not lack for books on World War II or its
major leaders.
Yet such is the enduring interest in the subject that there is always
room for another one, and the newest book by the scholar Phillips Payson
O’Brien on Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler as
strategists is a worthy entry...
[...]
As for Stalin, he started catastrophically, aiding Hitler’s war effort
right up to the moment it was turned against him...
Necessity forced him to change...
The postwar return of his paranoid style of leadership meant that he
squandered what could have been one of the great victories of World War
II — the permanent anchoring of the USSR as part of the dominant
grouping of states...
Instead, he precipitated the Cold War that led, ultimately, to the
destruction of the Soviet Union...
Churchill, in contrast, had a clear postwar aim: the preservation of the
British Empire...
Despite his being a great captain of war and doing everything he
reasonably could to muster and preserve British power, the empire still
slipped away...
FDR was probably the greatest success of all the grand strategists in
the ways and means of modern warfare...
He bolstered the U.K. and Soviet Union with prodigious material aid,
while at the same time he crushed the economic life out of the Axis with
air-sea power...
All of this repays our attention and is a reminder of how there is
nothing inevitable in history...
The choices and predilections of leaders can bring national triumph, or
catastrophe and unfathomable suffering..."
--
GM
--