Gretchen Carlson is actually pretty damn smart, but she plays an idiot for her Fox gig.

I wonder who makes Gretchen feel worse: the people who think she's genuinely an idiot, or the people who know she's intelligent but willing to whore herself out.

Considering how much money she's making, I don't think either of those make her feel bad in the slightest.

She's laughing all the way to the bank.

I had to explain it to Thai students that didn't give the slightest fuck in my Lit class when the curriculum got to diary of Anne Frank. One answer on the test said the Americans were killing all the Jews and the Germans were saving then, another said that it happened in Indonesia and I had to repeatedly crack down of the Sieg Heils in class. Even when i pulled up the concentration camp pictures, they still just thought the Nazi uniforms were super cool.

World War I starts with the death of Napoleon, wherein the British, Austrians and Russians had to all agree to get the fucker. Things would've been alright had Queen Victoria not had so many children, all of which had to be married to the appropriate and matching member of aristocracy, which she conveniently did to all the various houses of European monarchy. This led to a bunch of people being related to each other but their countries not being officially allied, so those children of Queen Victoria got together making sure their countries were all on the same page. The problem with this was that there was no unilateral entity to make sure that all of the mutual defense treaties were going to be equally enforced.

Thus, when Franz Ferdinand was killed, regardless of who killed him (and it wasn't anybody actually involved in all of these treaties, it was an anarchist), it led to all of these treaties being called in at the same time.

The great irony of it all is that if Napoleon's plan to build a Bonaparte family dynasty on the continental houses of Europe had worked, it would've been more of a cold war detante than what it turned out to be. Most of these wars we fight are caused by things generations prior did without thinking, which is why we're fighting a war in Afghanistan because the wars of the 1880s left no cultural gatekeepers in the region to build the institutions necessary to stave off the tribalism. Plus oil. But whatever.

Gavrilo Princip forgot to pack a lunch that day. That's what caused WWI. Seriously, WWI could conceivably have been prevented, or at least delayed, with a baloney sandwich.

Slightly longer answer: when a Serbian national killed an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Austria-Hungary decided to make Serbia pay, and that ended up pitting Serbia's allies against Austria-Hungary's allies, pretty much all of which were colonial powers. None of the world powers really thought there would actually be an all-consuming war -- there are even telegrams between Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm (cousins!) during the run-up to the war, where they're both astonished at how bull-headed the other guy's allies are being. You'll notice, as well, that both sides thought they were just defending themselves against an aggressor; who voluntarily stops defending themselves?