Free Republic

I knew a man who survived the Bataan Death March and spent the rest of the war as a POW in Japan. He was not a fan of MacArthur. Apparently several hours elapsed between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese attack on the Philippines but MacArthur was still caught off guard.

Before yesterday, Indiana had lost 30 games in a row to Ohio State. Their total number of defeats by the Buckeyes is much larger but I don’t recall the number.

My father was a Marine stationed at Mare Island on Dec. 7, 1941. He and a friend had gone to the mountains to cut down a Christmas tree in a vehicle that did not have a radio. My father’s parents lived in Sacramento so maybe the tree was for them. At some point on the return trip, maybe at his parents’ house, he learned about the attack and that they had to get back to Mare Island immediately.

Didn’t someone in Washington deduce from intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages that an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent and send a telegram, but because of it being a weekend there were delays and the message was delivered to the commander at Pearl Harbor after the attack had already started?

Yes, Aeschylus in his play Agamemnon, put on in 458 B.C., has a system of signal fires by which the news of the capture of Troy is sent to Argos.

C-SPAN had an interesting interview with Enes Kanter Freedom, the former NBA star, whose career was ended prematurely because he refused to stop making statements about human rights abuses—especially those by China. He grew up in Turkey but is now a US citizen. He talked about how growing up he was constantly told how bad Americans, Christians and Jews were, and only learned otherwise after he came to the US. He would have played basketball in high school and college in the US but the Turkish government was able to prevent that. He would have earned another 40 to 60 million dollars more if his career had continued another 6 years.

For a long time (I think 1947 to 2001), the Rose Bowl game was played between a Big Ten university and a Pac Ten university. During that time Indiana played in the Rose Bowl game once (1968), and lost.

It wasn’t practical to go to the sun to get helium—too far away.

At most a handful of slaves found out they were free on June 19, 1865. The anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is already a holiday.

Instead of Juneteenth maybe they should have created a Civil Rights holiday and put it on the Friday before Labor Day (in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech on August 28, 1963)...giving people a four-day weekend.

As far as I know the old guy pass is still available but they increased the price quite a bit 5 years ago. I bought one before that but don’t know where I put it.

How many people visit a National Park in the middle of January anyway?

Is this Amal guy an Ostrogoth, like Theoderic the Amal?

Meanwhile, the American media and the Democratic Party are calling Trump a war criminal.

Didn’t “honky” start as an insult directed at Eastern European immigrants by native-born whites? (”Honky” from “bohunk” from “Bohemian”?)

"Arabic numerals" were invented in India. So only Indians should be allowed to use them in mathematical calculations?

Should Christians be barred from singing the psalms because the authors were Jewish?

I think the judge will be reasonable and let him count 100 hours working at his father’s bail bond business as community service.

So if he confessed does that mean he will strike a plea bargain? Maybe be fined $100 and ordered to do 100 hours of community service?

They were just shipwrecked sailors just like Adolf Eichmann was just an undocumented immigrant in Argentina.

Has anyone tracked Hillary’s whereabouts during the two days between when Kennedy was shot and when Oswald was killed?

They didn’t have any problem with Obama’s drone strikes even though a number of innocent civilians were killed who just happened to be near the target. Killing the people on the drug boats may deter others. But the Democrats want the people captured and then given trials at public expense, then set free by some Obama or Biden judge.