Builders,
In my previous story: Thought for the Day: Idiocy on the airwaves. I tested the theory that your mind could remain neutral by subjecting it to equal amounts of NPR and Conservative radio. I found instead they combine to form a particularly strong mental poison. To validate my findings, I again conducted the same test while driving back to Florida. Please don’t try it, it has the same horrific results headed southbound as it did going northbound.
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Above, from the original Star Trek, episode “Dagger of the mind” where Dr. Simon Van Gelder has his mind destroyed by the “Neural Neutralizer.” I now understand that this future terror device will simply subject the victim to silmaltainiously listening to NPR and Conservative radio broadcasts. Do not try this on yourself, as Spock nor McCoy will show up to help you.
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NPR- They spent a lot of time covering tragic event where an Ohio police officer shot and killed a 12 year old boy who had a “pellet gun”.
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The story was repeated numerous times but failed to mention two critical elements: The Officer who shot the boy had previously been determined to be too emotionally unstable for duty by a different department, and the “pellet gun” was actually an Airsoft gun, which are intentionally made to look exactly like specific models of actual guns. Any intelligent writer or producer would understand that any story, even a brief one, should contain these salient facts.
When I was 12, we lived at Quarters ‘C’ Hale Alii drive, about 1/4 mile inside the main gate of Pearl Harbor. I walked through the gate every day on the way to school. My father warned me in the harshest terms, NEVER to goof around in any way near the Marines who guarded the Gate. While we were there, two people where shot and killed, one an Officer who refused to show ID, and the other was one of the Marines. He bet a fellow Marine he could kick an M-1 carbine out of his hands before he could close the bolt and shoot him. He wasn’t right. My father, who was acting base commander that night, used the event to reiterate to me, in harsh terms, that I must never fool around near the gate, and that not all Marines had perfect judgment. To this day, I am very careful around police officers and other armed people. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be needed, but we don’t live in that world.
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Conservative Radio: – They covered the story of the Korean and Japanese government’s coming to an agreement about “Comfort Women” They mentioned several times that the Japanese Government is going to pay a total of 8 million dollars to 50 women, over some type of complaint they have that is 70 years old. They made it sound that four dozen 90 year old women are trying to cash in of some government hand out reparation payment.
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In reality, what is euphemistically called “Comfort Women” was a Japanese Government program that systematically abducted women from their conquered lands, mostly 15-17 year olds, to be sex slaves servicing the Japanese soldiers in their expanding savage empire. It wasn’t 50 women, there are reliable estimates that it was two hundred thousand women who were abducted in a 20 year period. Also not mentioned, was the fact the program had a 75% fatality rate, and that the Japanese government has spent 70 years systematically lying and denying that any program existed at all. They used women as young as 12; on average, the slaves were raped more than 10,000 times, and then considered worn out, they were ‘disposed of on location’ (bullet to the back of the head, dumped in a ditch.) Many people consider this the largest single crime committed against women in history. If you think I am making it up, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women. I spent my childhood in Thailand, there Japanese tourists were detested, because this crime had affected countless families just 30 years earlier.
As horrific as the Holocaust was, everyone understands that the Germans of today, make absolutely no attempt to cover it up. The ‘own it’ and take responsibility for it. Today only a tiny group of people in the world are “Holocaust deniers”, and those people are considered sick. Conversely, the entire nation of Japan, it’s people and government, have engaged in an absolute denial of the holocaust they inflicted on Asia in WWII. I am not just speaking of sex slaves, but of the millions of civilians they intentionally killed. To this day in Japan, serious death threats are made against any individual who dares to criticize anything about the nations behavior from 1931-45. For this exact reason I have never owned a Japanese car. I have friends who own Toyota Prius cars, and they often state the made the purchase they believe it shows people they care about the environment. It might, but it also shows me that they either don’t read enough, or they are just fine with holocaust deniers, as long as the holocaust only involved Asians not Europeans.
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Your Aviation Connection: Between TV and Radio, the average adult American male consumes more than 2 hours of programing per day, about 800 hours per year. If the exact same person made the willful decision to put that 800 hours into something productive, such as the construction of the homebuilt aircraft in their garage, they would make some real progress. As a side benefit, they would be a lot less negative and pessimistic, since the real goal of almost all “news” is to get the public to blindly mood swing between abject fear (Ebola, ISIL, Sharks, tornados, etc.) and righteous indignation at anything the other team (party) is supposedly doing. It is a hamster wheel that many people spend a life time running on, righteously indignant at the poo on their paws, not making the connection that it is the same substance that came out from beneath their own tail on a previous revolution, when they were told to be afraid and run faster.
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I wasn’t born yet, and my two sisters were too young to remember it, but my parents returned to China in 1940, landing in occupied Shanghai as neutrals in the war between China and Japan. They then made their way west, across China and across the battle lines between the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese and were quite fortunately with the Nationalists when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the U.S. went to war with Japan.
My father would only talk about that period in his life about 5 years before he died at 90. I now understand that my father was suffering from PTSD while I was growing up because of his experiences.
What the Nazis tried to hide (the Holocaust and the slaughter of innocent people in conquered lands), the Japanese did openly in their brutal conquest of lands. In Nanking, if I recall my history correctly, they held beheading contests to see who could kill the most Chinese with a sword.
When my father told of having something like 17 coolies carry the supplies and luggage for my parents, and not paying them, you would think that was slavery. Instead, he gave them something that was more valuable than money or gold. He fed them. They would have starved in Shanghai because the Japanese took almost all the food.
The ironic and cruel thing about China is that Mao probably killed more Chinese than the Japanese by not only attacking anyone who dared stand up to him, but also by his stupid economic policies based on Communist fantasies, and fueled by his lack of care for anyone else but himself.
It has been reported that the Japanese may have killed as many as 25 Million ethnic Chinese and other ethnic groups in China and Southeast Asia. They conducted medical experiments on prisoners, most of them eventually fatal, and treated most of the people in their conquered lands with a brutality that can only be imagined today. In revenge, it is fair to point out that genetic testing has confirmed that island Japanese are descended from mainland Koreans, a people the Japanese hold in the same inferior regard that American bigots hold for African-Americans. The Japanese approach is to wait until everyone from the war years is dead, and then rewrite the history books to cover up or water down the Japanese atrocities. And regrettably, this approach will likely succeed in the long run, since few keep up with history.
The problem with waiting until the original people who were attacked by the Japanese are dead is that there are descendants who are very much aware of the genocide. Look at the Armenians, who well remember the slaughter by the Turks.
People who are the descendants of victims remember very well.
As for the shooting of Tamir Rice, many of us have seen the video (who could avoid it on the news?), and it is obvious the cop came out of the car primed to shoot, since he started firing so quickly Rice would have had almost no chance to respond to any command to drop the weapon. Also unmentioned was the fact that Tamir Rice, though only 12, was 5’7″ and 175 lbs, and so looked more like an adult. And the driver of the squad car violated a basic principle of police response, to leave some room for maneuvering – the car was almost on top of the kid when it stopped. If Rice had been a real criminal and started returning fire, he couldn’t have missed the car, he was that close to it. Frankly the officers acted as though they were terrified, and if most cops today are terrified in their jobs, we as a nation are in very big trouble. It’s just sad…..
You know, one turns 75 and the brain turns to mush….. I left out the most important detail in my above comment about the Tamir Rice case. The person who called in the report to the police noted that the individual in the park (Rice) was a juvenile and the gun he was carrying was probably not a real gun. The police dispatcher did not pass on that information to the responding officers, another broken link in this sad chain of events. No doubt Cleveland will pay a price for that lapse, but not nearly as much as Tamir Rice’s family did. Again, just sad…..
I have little to say about the content of the sampled talk programs. Both are examples of poor journalism. My 10th grade journalism class taught me what to expect from news in 1969. I have seen few programs since that were true to news reporting as I was taught.
As to NPR radio programing, I listen for the music as most programming on the State of Jefferson NPR stations is eclectic and brings me music from all types and most of the world.
I started listening to public radio when building my first plane. It had fewer repeats of pop music and minimal commercials. I contribute as a member. NSTAAFL. News here as well as on the internet and cable is subpar from what I was taught and I don’t recommend any program as being better that any other. The BBC should be listened to as another source. Talk shows have very little value either in politics, news or celebrity interviews.
For history I read as much as I can. I have read “Flyboys: A True Story of Courage” by James Bradley about the WWII island attack on Chichi Jima and how George Bush was nearly captured and how others were captured and eaten. The Cold War was the reason many terrible facts were withheld from the American people.
As I wait for engine parts and the resumption of epoxy curing weather, I have been reading about three books per week. “Hell in a Very Small Place” was a very good read. I am currently reading Peter Garrison’s book on long distance flying.
I love FlyCorvair….but I have to admit…although I’m proud of you for being a staunch American, I’m steeling myself up a little bit for when I show up at a college with inferior asian tools (I’m working on this and don’t plan to build anything with them, maybe just carefully take an engine apart), and driving my ’04 Xterra, (as there will still be too much snow out here in 81423 at 7200 feet for my ’98 Venture to safely begin the trip to So Cal). I reckon I can take the possible imagined (my responsibility) shunning. Yep, it’ll be worth it. As far as that truly sad story about the Nipponese malefactors, my parents’ generation quick fried 200K or so of their citizens and scared hell out of the rest of the world and themselves. They also interned innocent Japanese Americans, took their property. I don’t really blame them for that, they were paranoid, I get it. The Japanese sumbitches that did the filthy rotten deeds are dead by this time. As are most of the brave warriors from our 442d Inf Reg who kicked Kraut ass (and bled red just like I do) back in the day. As far as I’m concerned, I like historical truth, but I’m not going to let things that took place that long ago cause me to pre judge someone or their products (good ones are good, bad ones are not) by their race or nationality. If they make me a better car, I’ll buy it if I want to. I’m all for Americans making good stuff with as much American material as is available (getting rarer every day). And although Snap-On tools still impress me, $2500 used tool boxes do not. Neither do American legacy companies like Milwaukee who say in fine print on their tool labels “engineered by Milwaukee, assembled in Mexico.” Some Craftsman tools still say ‘u.s.a., many do not. Just about every other American ‘brand’, as well as some European ones (Bosch comes to mind) do similarly. It’s all about how governments (ours for sure) and corporations do business that sucks. The only antidote I see is “Hail fellow, well met” to every individual I encounter, at least to the best of my ability, and to flush the rest of the global sewage. (Of which I’ll take note, assess for threat, and disregard until I’m called to take severe action to defend and protect.) {;^)
Remembering the late, lamented Cold War, I recall sitting on alert in B-52s in the Strategic Air Command. Every so often on the entire perimeter fence surrounding the facility were signs and the last sentence in red on the signs was “Use of deadly force authorized”. I have absolutely no doubt of the veracity of those signs since the 19 year old kids with locked and loaded M-16s were not taught any situational nuances.
When I was young and learning to drive my father wisely instructed me in how to survive a roadside encounter with law enforcement and I have wisely followed that advice. If more of the people who have made the headlines lately had shown some common sense in that regard then those headlines would have never been made. Several of the people I was aquainted with in High School went on to careers in Law Enforcement and that only underscores my understanding of the need for caution when dealing with the police.
As for Japan and WWII, it is just unthinkable that it could ever be “Forgive and Forget” with a country and its people who committed such attrocities against the Peoples that they conqured. As I recall some half million Chinese were killed in retribution for the assistance given to the Doolittle Raiders. I was driving once and noticed a Toyota vehicle plastered with bumper stickers proclaiming the driver/owners long and dedicated carreer with the U.S. Marines and could not help but be shocked by that sight. Personally I follow the WW philosophy of buying US cars and will never willingly take the wheel of a foreign car.
You better stop my friend before you become un- comfortly numb, dan-o
NPR still wins with science Friday