Dancing with Fire's definitions
The BND is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinated to the Chancellor's Office. Its headquarters are in Pullach near Munich, and Berlin (planned to be centralised in Berlin by 2014). The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2005, the BND employed around 6,050 people, 10% of them Bundeswehr soldiers; those are officially employed by the "Amt für Militärkunde" (Office for Military Sciences). The annual budget of the BND for 2009 was €460,000,000.
by Dancing with Fire September 7, 2012
Get the BNDmug. by Dancing with Fire June 18, 2011
Get the Tachimug. A caged animal becomes a product of his environment; mankind however builds his environments to suit his needs. If someone claims that you are a product of your environment, it means the environment you live in, has become your accepted norm, and now it influences you, rather than you influencing it.
Being a product of the environment is no different than saying you are the product of your own thinking.
by Dancing with Fire July 8, 2011
Get the Product of the Environmentmug. The British domestic and foreign counterintelligence service responsible for national internal security.
Military Intelligence, section five; a former official and present-day popular name for the counterintelligence agency of the British Government. MI5 was formed in 1909 as the Secret Service Bureau.
by Dancing with Fire September 5, 2012
Get the MI5mug. Those times when you use your bathtub to heat your sink. A lot of times when one washes their hands at the sink and turns the water on hot, nothing but cold water comes out of the faucet. By letting the water in the bathtub run for about 10-15 seconds, the water heats up. Then you turn off the water in the bathtub, run your water on hot at the sink, and in a couple of seconds, you have hot water running at the sink.
Normally when the Bathtub Sink Effect is not done, you can run the sink water for minutes and get nothing but cold water even though you have it on hot.
by Dancing with Fire December 14, 2010
Get the Bathtub Sink Effectmug. Hamas, the main Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories, was born soon after the previous intifada erupted in 1987. The organization opposes the Oslo peace process and its short-term aim is a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Its long-term aim is to establish an Islamic state on land originally mandated as Palestine - most of which has been contained within Israel's borders since its creation in 1948. The grass-roots organization - with a political and a military wing - has an unknown number of hard-core members but tens of thousands of supporters and sympathizers.
It has two main functions: 1) it is involved in building schools and hospitals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and in helping the community in social and religious ways. 2) The military wing of Hamas - known as the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades - has carried out a series of bloody attacks against Israeli targets. In February and March 1996, Hamas carried out several bus bombings, killing nearly 60 Israelis. It was also blamed for attacks in 1997 in Jerusalem which killed 15 people, and brought the peace process grinding to a halt. Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) - the government-in-waiting if a Palestinian state is established - views Hamas as a serious rival, yet the Palestinian leader has tried to co-opt the movement into mainstream politics. But his insistence that Hamas recognize the PA as the only national authority in the Palestinian territories and cease military operations against Israel has been resisted. Hamas argues that to accept the PA would be to recognize the Oslo accords - which Islamist groups saw as nothing more than a security deal between the PA, Israel and the US, with the ultimate aim of wiping them out. Despite a fierce offensive against the group in 1996, when the PA arrested some 1,000 Palestinians and took over mosques in Gaza, the PA has been careful not to drive Hamas underground.
by Dancing with Fire January 22, 2011
Get the Hamasmug. South African Boer “pioneers” who trekked away from Cape Colony and civilization to settle deep inland on the South African frontier.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century thousands of trekboers were living permanently on grazing farms in the interior, some of them temporarily migrating each winter to the coast, so that their cattle might enjoy its sweet grass, but generally moving farther into the plains when their land was exhausted or when their journeys of exploration had revealed more attractive grazing or water. These people rarely put up permanent dwelling places; their homes were the wagons parked by a water point on the `loan places' they had registered with the Company. Their farms usually approximated to the conveniently-managed size (for Africa) of 6,000 acres, and they generally marked out this area in a rough and ready manner by trotting a horse from the wagon along all four points of the compass for half an hour.
by Dancing with Fire June 24, 2011
Get the Trekboersmug.