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  • Book cover of Inside Jokes

    Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

  • Book cover of Sanctuary Lost: Portugal's Air War for Guinea 1961-1974

    From 1963 to 1974, Portugal and its nationalist enemies fought an increasingly intense war for the independence of "Portuguese" Guinea, then a colony but now the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. For most of the conflict Portugal enjoyed virtually unchallenged air supremacy, and increasingly based its military strategy and political pacification program on this singular advantage. The Portuguese Air Force (Força Aérea Portuguesa, abbreviated FAP) consequently played a crucial role in the Guinean war. Indeed, throughout the conflict, the FAP – despite the many challenges it faced – proved to be the most effective and responsive military argument against the PAIGC rebels, which was fighting for the colony’s independence from European rule. The air war for Guinea stands as a remarkable episode in air power history for several reasons. It was, for example, the first conflict in which a non-state irregular force deployed defensive missiles against an organized air force. Moreover, the degree to which Portugal relied on its air power was such that its effective neutralization doomed Lisbon's military strategy in the province. Ultimately, the FAP's unexpected combat losses initiated a cascade of effects that degraded, in turn, its own operational initiative; the battlefield effectiveness of increasingly air-dependent ground forces; Portuguese military morale and national resilience; and ultimately, Lisbon’s tenability as an imperial power. The air war for Portuguese Guinea thus represents a compelling illustration of the value – and vulnerabilities – of air power in a counter-insurgency context, as well as the negative impacts of overreliance on air supremacy. This, the second of three volumes in the Sanctuary Lost mini-series, examines the evolution of Portuguese air power and guerrilla air defenses during the conflict’s most active years, as both sides sought the means and methods required to counter the other’s efforts to control Guinea’s airspace. It is richly illustrated throughout with original photographs and includes specially commissioned color artworks.

  • Book cover of A Worker’s Way Of War: The Red Army’s Doctrinal Debate, 1918–1924

    Following the October 1917 Revolution, the leaders of the fledgling Red Army embarked on a debate concerning the nature, form, and function of military doctrine. A group known as the ‘military communists,’ including M.V. Frunze, M.N. Tukhachevsky, K. Voroshilov, and S.I. Gusev sought to formulate a ‘proletarian’ military doctrine based on the lessons of the Russian Civil War (1918-21) and purged of supposedly outmoded, bourgeois military thought. Their doctrine, they claimed, would be based overwhelmingly on maneuver and the offensive, which they felt best represented the ‘active’ nature of the working class. Against them stood Commissar for War Leon Trotsky, supported by ex-Tsarist military specialists, notably A.A. Svechin. Trotsky and his allies, noting the Soviet Union’s backwardness relative to the West, professed a policy of expediency in military affairs. Though Trotsky and Svechin proved their position correct both in reference to military affairs and orthodox communist thought, the ripening political struggle eventually secured Frunze’s and Tukhachevsky’s domination of the Red Army and Trotsky’s eventual ouster and exile.

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    Following the October 1917 Revolution, the leaders of the fledgling Red Army embarked on a debate concerning the nature, form, and function of military doctrine. A group known as the military communists, including M.V. Frunze, M.N. Tukhachevsky, K. Voroshilov, and S.I. Gusev sought to formulate a proletarian military doctrine based on the lessons of the Russia Civil War (1918-21) and purged of supposedly outmoded, bourgeois military thought. Their doctrine, they claimed, would be based overwhelmingly on maneuver and the offensive, which they felt best represented the active nature of the working class.

  • Book cover of Sanctuary Lost: Portugal's Air War for Guinea 1961-1974

    The Year 1932 was not only the year in which the famous carnival of Rio de Janeiro was organized for the first time, or the giant statue of the Christ the Redeemer was placed on top of the Corcovado mountain ridge: tragically, it was also the year of the last civil war fought in Brazil. On 9 July 1932, about 35,000 men from two Brazilian federal states - Sao Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul – rose in arms against the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, demanding the return to constitutionality and democracy. This movement became known as the ‘Constitutionalist’, while its members became known as the ‘Paulistas’. The Brazilian government reacted with brute force: it deployed over 100,000 troops supported by heavy artillery and combat aircraft. The result was the biggest war ever fought in Brazil: the first ever campaign to see strategic aerial bombardment conducted in the Americas; the first aircraft shot down in air combat, and the first to see night bombing operations. Following three months of bitter fighting – which often degenerated into trench warfare – the Paulistas were defeated. Indeed, the end of this conflict brought to the end a period of successive civil wars fought in Brazil since 1889. The Paulista War – the first authoritative account of this conflict ever published in the English language – provides a blow-by-blow account of both aerial and ground combat operations. It is lavishly illustrated with a collection of authentic photographs and exclusive colour profiles, and as such is an indispensable source of reference about this crucial moment in the history of the largest country in South America.

  • Book cover of Sanctuary Lost: Portugal's Air War for Guinea 1961-1974

    A detailed, blow-by-blow account on the operational history of Portuguese air power during the Colonial War in Guine (Guinea) of the 1960s and the 1970s, and of the guerrillas' reaction - by establishing organized and coordinated air defenses - to the complete enemy aerial superiority.

  • Book cover of NATO, Gender and the Military

    NATO as an institution of international hegemonic masculinity -- The long view: situating NATO's engagement with women, peace and security -- NATO women and "gendermen"--Gendering NATO's core tasks: collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security -- Military visions of a gender perspective -- Conclusion. engaging NATO's gender story.

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    Much of the information in this document has been derived from the reflections and first-hand recollections of combatants on both sides of the conflict. Additional data has been drawn from the archival record, particularly the Archivo Histórico da Força Aeérea outside Lisbon and satellite collections of PAIGC documentation in the United States. The collected evidence is presented as a narrative detailing the context and course of the conflict itself, the struggle for air mastery, and the aftermath. Additional contextual information is presented in separate chapters to frame the central narrative regarding the air and air defense war for Guinea.

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