Free Republic

If you were suddenly taken back in time to 1938, and had ONE CHANCE to kill Hitler with a hand grenade, would you take it?

That is one of the great paradox questions.

Most people would assume that had you assassinated Hitler prior to WW2, that you would go down in history as the greatest hero of all time who saved tens of millions of lives.

But the far likelier reality is that you would go down in history as an evil villain - just another assassin of a world leader.

So instead of being known as the man who prevented the Holocaust and WW2, you'd be lumped in with the John Wilkes Booths and Harvey Oswalds of the world.

Yes, we did the cloth diaper thing too. Just seemed like a better way to go as opposed to those humongous packages of disposables they sell at the supermarket. The Dydee man would pick up the used ones and drop off the fresh clean ones on our doorstep. Cotton breathes a lot easier than plastic and never had to deal with diaper rash issues.

The story of Apple is a fascinated one. Two young men basically invented an industry out of a garage in a sun-splashed California suburb. Only in America do things like this happen.

I wonder how often it will happen again going forward now that we are in the age of "helicopter parenting" where parents over-supervise every activity their children are engaged in. Kids today can't even go to Little League practice without their hovering parents sitting out there in lawn chairs cheering every time they properly field a ground ball. Then after practice, it's right into a mini-van for the obligatory trip to a ice cream stand where the parent carefully selects a treat that conforms to some specific caloric value that the parent deems appropriate.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were basically left to their own devices and did not get a lot of parental interference as they tinkered away and began to build their business.

My wife breast-fed our kids and got all kinds of grief from her family over it. They thought it was gross and low-class. I'm glad she did though and not only because I didn't have to get up that much in the middle of the night to fetch a bottle of formula.

Kids grew up healthy and never had a single health problem. No silly allergies to things like peanut butter, no ADD, no major sickness, nothing like that at all. They weren't even discipline problems though I like to take credit for some of that.

I certainly hope so. I guess one positive to take away from the last election is that watered-down conservatives did poorly and there were some true conservatives that won some key local races. Let’s hope that the lessons have been learned for 2014 and 2016.

Men and women used to wear the same clothes. Then something happened to change all that. Does anybody know what that something was? Something to ponder on a cold, raining Memorial Day Saturday afternoon.

High heels. Why do women wear them? They seem so uncomfortable. But they sure look good in them and when they are wearing them, you know they are coming by way of that that click-clack sound. I do appreciate the warning so that I have the opportunity to correct my own appearance as they approach.

Do the Republicans have anybody to run in 2016? It’s early but I’m getting concerned already. We cannot afford to run another stiff or a washed-up “my turn” old man like a Dole or McCain.

Somebody I know drove their car straight into a telephone pole when a bee got into the car through an open window. While she was swatting at the bee in a panic, she lost control of the car.

I think things like this happen more often than you think.

Don't you have an 18-hour-a-day job to report to? Why are you wasting time here among us libertines?

The fact that you have the idle time to come here puts the lie to your pompous assertion of being among those who work 18-hour days to keep a small business going. In fact, I don't think you even own your own business. Prove it to us! Give us the website for your business. Maybe some of us (with all this free time on our hands) will wander over there and purchase something.

This was more or less the reaction Bob Dylan got when he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival back in 1965.

Maybe it’s just me but I see no difference in the before and after photos. Both pictures feature a male.

Many people may not have picked up on this coincidence but it was exactly 34 years ago today (May 25) that a commercial airliner lost an engine shortly after takeoff.

However, the passengers on that aircraft were not so lucky. Every single one of them (including the crew and a few on the ground) perished.

This was over at the O'Hare airport in Chicago.

She obviously has no respect for human life...look at how she mutilated her own body.

Depravity will always seek a lower level. No matter how "tolerant" we become, the depraved will always find a new way to outrage us in an attempt to show us how intolerant we still are. And the vicious cycle continues as our civilization spirals ever downward.

It's like giving up a little bit of our rights to gain a little safety. We will end up incrementally yielding our rights until we suddenly realize we are no longer free. At which point, we will no longer be safe. But it will be too late to do anything about it.

OK, so now I can't get this out of my head.

I think MLB should do away with a pitcher as a dedicated position. Instead, they should have each of the 9 players pitch one inning per game.

That would make the game incredibly pure.

What I'm saying is that the starting pitcher would pitch just the one inning and in inning 2, he'd trade places with the catcher while the catcher pitched. Then in inning 3, the starting pitcher will move to 1st base while the 1st baseman pitches. And so on.

Each positional player would have to pitch the one inning every game with the "starting pitcher" rotating through all 8 other positions as the game progresses. No relief pitchers allowed.

That would make the game very entertaining, that is for sure.

I totally agree with you that the cuisine of Europe is vastly overrated. Now it might have been true 20-30 years ago that the Europeans had it over us in the culinary department. But we've made huge strides since then.

The quantity, quality and affordability of fine cuisine has literally exploded here in America over the past quarter century and I'm not even talking about the casual dining super-chains like Olive Garden, Longhorn and TGIs, that have popped up in our suburban sprawl areas like fire ant hills. Though even those places represent an overall improvement what existed on the American landscape before the 1980s as now even low-income people can take their families to a decent sit-down meal now and then without golden arches and creepy clown mascots being involved.

Many of our cities, including New York, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, have so many fine-dining establishments that people that live in those cities can go out to eat every night of their lives and never see the same restaurant twice.

Las Vegas, yes, Las Vegas is now the fine-dining capital of the world. Paris, Rome and Tokyo don't even come close to Las Vegas. Forget about London, might as well put a dome over that entire city and just call it a Ground Round.

Most of the world's fine wines now hail from the Americas (sorry France and Italy) and California all by itself will provide sommeliers with a lifetime of discovery.

And if you get sick of going to restaurants, our supermarkets and specialty markets here in America have an an astonishing array of quality foods that you can prepare at home.

It probably goes back to cavemen days and is wired in our DNA...women are going to seek out strong men who can be a reliable provider and men are going to seek out strong women who can bear their children and nurture them to adulthood.

Once the children are raised, there is no good reason for the man and woman to stay together unless it is their choice to do so. That's why I believe that marriages should last until the children are raised. Once they are raised, the main reason for them getting together is gone and they should be free to "move about the country" like they say in the commercial. Of course, they have the option to renew their vows and grow old together if they like - and there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Remember that for most of human civilization, the average adult only lived until his/her offspring was ready to take over as heads of the family. As soon as they became a burden to the family unit, the older people would quickly be left by the side of the road to die. I mean, what else could be done? It wasn't like they had an Happy Acres Retirement Community back in ancient days, where nurses would empty your bedpan and bingo would get played on Tuesday nights.

But I suppose I digress.

Getting back to the point, I don't think the main problem with young men these days is that they are "pansies" or otherwise effeminate. True, some men are fairies, always have been, just like some women are dykes and are as mean as bulls.

I think it's more of a "mama's boy" syndrome going on here with the young men of today. This is the age after all of the "helicopter parent" who insist on structuring every moment of their offspring's day, filling them up with absurd organized activities such as soccer and karate. Karate? Has anybody ever heard of a picked-on kid win a fistfight because his mother sent him to karate?

But I digress...again.

All this helicopter parenting has helped to create a generation of young males who simply do not have the confidence to strike out on their own. As a result, they end up spending their 20s and even 30s in the basement of their parents homes, playing videogames and bouncing from dead-end job to dead-end job (no pressure to pay the rent or purchase business suits).

Now there was Little League around when I was a kid but in those days, parents didn't drive their kids to practices in mini-vans and sit in lawn chairs shouting encouragement everytime a pop fly was shagged or a ground ball fielded. I don't think I had a parent attend a single practice and only rarely would they even attend an actual game. Back then, we would walk the 10 blocks or so to the practice field on our own and walk back in the growing darkness after it was over. If I had ice cream at all, I bought it myself with my newspaper route money.

Anyway, all I'm saying here is that men need to establish independence (away from mommy and daddy) and have their own pad and drive a decent set of wheels that they themselves purchased. They also need to know when a sports jacket and slacks is more appropriate then sneakers and jeans. They also need to lose the ball caps. Ball caps are for Little Leaguers and old men with time on their hands (or when you are out fishing). And when you are dating women, don't talk about sports. Most women don't give a crap about sports.

So having effeminate qualities really has nothing to do with it. After all, many women are "tomboys" and that can be endearing. There's nothing wrong with a woman who can properly hit a fastball or kick a man's butt in tennis, so long as they know how to look good in a dress and heels and otherwise retain their feminine qualities.

So if men want to show some feminine traits, it can actually be perceived by women as signs of confidence in one's masculinity, especially when those men back it up by being a man where it counts - absolute financial and emotional independence. The real "pansies" are the men who are insecure about their masculinity so they overcompensate by acting like obnoxious jerks all the time and dress and act like they are still jockeying for social position in the high school hallways.

There is a giant hand in that cloud and it’s wearing a ring on the middle finger. Not sure what that means but people in Wichita should hunker down.

I would invite them into my backyard for a barbeque. I'd grill rib-eye steaks and put some premium beer on ice.

Then I'd write off the meal as a business expense.

What would the IRS be able to do about that? Their own agents, chewing on steak and sloshing back beer in my back yard...I'd have them right where I want them.

It would be a quick death for us all if it hit Earth.

I guess we all have to go someday and there are many worse ways to go...bone cancer; drowning; suffocation; hanging; gunshot; car accident; heart attack; lung cancer; liver failure, etc.

Getting smacked by a giant asteroid is definitely a painless and exciting way to go out. As soon as it hits, we will be rendered unconscious in the blink of an eye. But as it hurtles towards us, it will be quite a sight to see. Speaking for myself, I will get extremely drunk as the night sky gets brighter and brighter.

As the owner of a dog, I can appreciate the futility of obeying the 35mph speed limit on a fast-moving highway.

I should have been more specific...ex-wives and mother-in-laws have a zero percent chance of heart attacks and they will outlive us all!

WordPerfect 5.1 brings back good memories for me. The early 1990s when computers were still new-fangled contraptions that hardly anybody had in their homes and the Internet was still some mysterious place that you accessed through CompuServe or Prodigy @ $3.60 an hour.

White text against a dark blue background. That was WordPerfect.

Another sign of the coming police state: Cameras at traffic intersections that snap photos and mail moving violation tickets to your house.

I was in Long Island a few weeks ago and received a ticket in the mail for $80 for taking a right turn on a red light without coming to a complete stop. The ticket had three photos of my car. Apparently I did not come to a stop for a full three seconds before beginning my right turn.

What can you do when you get an $80 ticket from Long Island when you live in Massachusetts? It would cost me way more than $80 to drive back to Long Island to contest it so I just went ahead and paid it.

I'm thinking that people with out-of-state plates are especially targeted for these kind of tickets because they know that they will likely not be contested. This must drive a lot of revenue back to the town.

So what should should be done when a child is born with both male and female characteristics? Wait until puberty and let the child decide?

Heart attacks suck.

Do women ever get heart attacks? You never hear about women having heart attacks, only men. Not that I wish heart attacks on women but I wonder why they don't get them nearly as much. What is their secret?

This is not abortion. This is murder. How can this guy get away with doing this?

It’s actually a large rocket ship that will someday launch the Coneheads back into space to the planet Remulak (France).

You mean no more Alec Baldwin?

If we could put Tim Tebow in a time machine and bring him back to 1984, besides listening to “Colour By Numbers” and voting for Reagan’s re-election, Tebow would be able to team up with Doug Flutie and been part of the greatest 1-2 QB punch in NFL history. Those two would have been fun to watch.

I just read a book on how Lorne Michaels started SNL back in 1975 and introduced us to all the Not Ready For Prime Time Players such as Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd. Now during that time, it was alleged that Gaylord Perry was doctoring the ball (spitballs) with everything from Gatorade to K-Y jelly. Now interesting tidbit on Gaylord Perry, he was not known for being a very good hitter and one of his managers stated that men would land on the moon before Gaylord ever hit a home run. Strangely enough, Gaylord would actually hit his first major league home run on July 20, 1969, just an hour after men landed on the moon for the first time.

If the population of the United States was scrunched into an island roughly the size of California, then we too would have a history of trying to expand our empire to acquire more land mass and natural resources.

The main thing preventing another world war is free trade. The fact that countries like Japan and Germany are able to obtain goods and resources through peaceful trade has so far prevented the spectre of WW3.

Belichick is a genius and his comments on Tebow are designed to throw competing teams away AND lower the price to obtain Tebow.

The Tim Tebow situation reminds me a little bit of Doug Flutie. He was also a Heisman trophy winner who was never given a real chance in the NFL because he was "too short." However, he went up to Canada and rewrote the record books up there.

During his short stints in the NFL, he always performed well on the field but often rode the bench and just never got the opportunity he deserved.

I like The Rolling Stones but prefer to focus on their 1964-1978 period!

1981 should have been their last tour!

Most successful rock bands need to let it go after a certain point. Take the money they earned and spend the rest of their lives on a sandy beach sipping margaritas.

It's a tough world out there, especially in the Internet age, where any comment you make can be instantly made available to millions of people. If you take a stand on anything, approx 50% will praise you for it and the other 50% will hate you for it and try to destroy you.

We must all develop extremely thick skins if we are to survive in this new digital world of instant communication.

Call me crazy but I have a feeling he’ll end up with the New England Patriots football club. Might even give Tom Brady a run for his money.

Actually I don't support the death penalty for women, nor even prison for that matter. Women are the "gentle" sex and simply are not capable of the kind of violent behavior that some men (not all) are known for.

Now that said, there are some women, like this one, who definitely need to be removed from society. But they should not be locked away in steel cages in some harsh prison-type environment. I'm thinking more of a softer, campus-like environment, sort of like a dorm at a college, only with a barbed wire fence around it (no woman would attempt to scale a barbed wire fence). We could put them four to a room but make sure they have plenty of throw pillows and soft mattresses to sleep on.

Green Day has been called "has-beens" for 20 years now and yet they continue to sell out arenas and millions of records.

I'm not a fan of Green Day and I'm familiar with only a handful of their songs but I do remember them being called a "flash in the pan" way back in the early 1990s when even those Nirvana people were still around.

Well the Green Day people are definitely having the last laugh and they continue to cash very large checks down at the bank.

Don't know anything about this "Psy" fellow except he apparently got a billion views on YouTube for some electronic "dance" number of his. Well, maybe that guy really is a flash in the pan. I guess we'll know for sure in 20 years. But I have a feeling that Green Day will still be doing concerts in 20 years regardless.

The Rolling Stones...now that is a band that hasn't had a creative thought for the past 30 years but they continue to tour and sell records for aging Baby Boomers at $200+ per ticket. I remember seeing the Rolling Stones on the 1981 tour at the L.A. Coliseum and even then they were considered a dinosaur rock band. At least back in 1981, they jumped around on stage a little bit and did not have too many wrinkles.

I don't know which is sadder: Some Korean guy getting a billion YouTube views for an electronic "dance" number or Mick Jagger at age 70 prancing around on stage to a bunch of toothless, drooling senior citizens trying to relive the 1960s.

You would think a retailer would get rich focusing on larger size clothing. I wonder why nobody has come up with a successful business model yet for a clothing chain that caters exclusively to fat people.

By the way, I'm totally serious. There is a huge untapped market out there for stylish clothing that can be worn by fat people.

Those darn fish. They'll do it everytime. Not only are they slipping off my hook, stealing my bait and costing way too much at the fish market, but now they aim to deny me nutritional benefit obtained from their oils.

It's as if all these fish were conspiring against me. I wish fish never existed.

All this yakety-yak about how life was so much better in the 1950s than now...

Well just this week, I was in a suburb of Chicago and we wanted to find a good place to eat. So we opened the "Local" app on our smartphone and immediately 40-50 restaurants popped up in our local area. We chose a German restaurant based on the ratings and headed over there - just 2.3 miles away. We gorged on beer, wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut. Who would have known such a German restaurant was so close by back in the 1950s?

That alone is reason enough not to go back to the 1950s.

All this howling and caterwauling over a silly operating system that a 9-year-old can figure out in about eleven minutes. Don't like the tile interface? Click of a mouse puts it back to the Windows 7 look and feel. Can't open a document? Open a browser window and type "how to open document in Windows 8" into the search bar (about 359 million results are obtained).

But I am not surprised. After all, we've been driving automobiles for a century now but still you have people freaking out because the hazard lights button or the heat controls are in a slightly different place on their dashboard than their old car.

Yes, most people are dumb. I thank myself every day because I'm one of the smart ones and I do not have to suffer daily as a result of my incompetence and stupidity.

But they do. We now have welfare mamas and the chronically unemployed with big screen televisions and all the movies ever made at their disposal and they can consume such with copious amounts of food and drink purchased with food stamps.

All this talk of "bringing back jobs"...what kind of jobs are you referring to? Manufacturing jobs?

We don't live in a "Laverne and Shirley" world anymore, where "blue collar" types hang out on an assembly line for 7.45 hours a day (minus breaks) stamping bottle caps on bottles or hammering a widget into place as the product moves down the conveyor belts. Then they go home at night with an empty lunchpail where they sit in their chairs all "Archie Bunker" style while their spouse runs to the kitchen to get them a beer.

That America doesn't exist any more and never will again.

Knowledge or service workers are what is needed now and there are huge opportunities in both areas. All manufacturing has been outsourced so that they can be made more cheaply, without unions being in the way, and Americans can continue purchasing luxury items on more or less fixed wages.

This is from the Onion, right? It just seems too perfect to be true.

If this is actually true, then I think this pizza shop is going to experience booming business from this point on.

What do you mean by "moral degeneration?"

As if this type of thing didn't go on in the past...go back to the days of the Puritans and you will see that teachers had sex with their students even back then.

In fact, people have been doing wicked things since the days of Adam and Eve.

Fortunately this can never happen to me as I do not have a ponytail.

I wanted to join the mile-high club but I don't like to fly.

So I rented a motel room in Denver.