toucana

Trump has been convicted on all 34 indictments by a unanimous verdict of the jury. Sentencing will be in about 5 weeks time in mid July.

Fact Check: The Battle of Choisin Reservoir (장진호 전투) began on 27 November 1950 during the Korean war when a Chinese force of 120,000 men under the command of General Song Shilun (宋时轮) surprised a UN force of just 30,000 men under the command of Major General Oliver P.Smith - (N.B. UN = ‘United Nations’ *not* American. British Marines and two Regiments of the British 3rd and 7th Army were present, as well as American Marines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chosin_Reservoir Over the next 17 days, the UN force managed to break out of their encirclement and successfully withdrew to the port of Hungnam. Both sides suffered heavy casualties from battlefield action, and from the freezing weather with temperatures as low as -36F. The UN forces suffered around 13,000 casualties (c.1100 killed) while the Chinese are thought to have suffered almost 60,000 casualties (around 29,000 batttle casualties). For which reason the battle is usually evaluated as a ‘Pyrrhic Victory’ for the Chinese - i.e. one in which the losses substantially outweighed any possible military gains.

The Iranian security police were kept busy in Tehran on Sunday night trying to shut down firework parties thrown by opponents of President Raisi celebrating his disappearance - (lots of video clips on Twitter). One unsettling detail reported by Iranian sources was a claim by deputy foreign minister Mahdi Safari who said "Shortly after the accident, we managed to speak with Tabriz’s Friday Prayer Imam and he said that he was feeling bad and heard the sounds of ambulance cars" https://tass.com/emergencies/1790437 There weren’t any ambulances anywhere near the crash site at that point - there were however plenty of wolves..

The wreckage was located by a Bayraktar Ankinci UAV drone supplied by the Turkish government. They located a heat spot in the Dizmar forest area, and shared the coordinates with the Iranian search and rescue teams. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-69035051 It appears that one of the passengers Mohammad Ali Al-Hashem survived the crash for about an hour and even spoke briefly by phone to the authorities before succumbing. He was the Prayer Imam of Tabriz who was travelling as a personal envoy of Ayatollah Ali Khameni the Supreme Leader of Iran. [Bayraktar Ankinci UAV drone image of crash site] The Dizmar area is also known as the Hyrcanian Forest (Greek Ὑρκανία) - derived from Old Persian Verkâna meaning “Wolf Land” - not an ideal place to make a crash landing.

A helicopter carrying Ebrahim Raisi the President of Iran has gone missing in a remote region of NW Iran close to the border with Azerbaijan. Foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian is also said to have been onboard the same craft which was part of a convoy of three helicopters that were returning from a visit to mark the inauguration of a new dam in neighbouring Azerbaijan. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/5/19/iran-helicopter-accident-live-president-fm-on-missing-aircraft Various reports from Iranian news agencies say that the helicopter made a “hard landing” somwhere near the Iranian border town of Jolfa. Iranian rescue teams are struggling to reach the location because of the rugged terrain and heavy fog, with Iranian TV showing visibility down to 5m in places. Two other helicopters in the same convoy made a safe return, and some Iranian sources indicate that an emergency phone call was received from some of the people onboard the missing helicopter. Other sources say that Iranian TV is currently screening recitations of verses from the Quran, and that the VP has already formed an emergency government. The helicopters used to transport the Iranian president are ageing Russian made Mil Mi-17 military transports which date back to 1975. They have been involved in a number of incidents and crashes in recent years.

A preliminary NTSB report on the collision of the MV Dali with the Francis Scott Key Bridge has been published. A detailed read-through of the provisional findings can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etCUog15pWA Fuel contamination was apparently not the cause of this accident. There were 3 different types of fuel in use onboard the Dali, and all the samples tested clear. The problem seems to have been entirely electrical in nature. The Dali suffered two major power failures in quick succession; the first took out the HR1 and LR1 overcurrent breakers either side of a large transformer which linked the 6600V diesel generator bus to the main low voltage 440V power bus. This failure disabled the lights, comms, navigation systems, and most critical of all, it took out the power to the oil pumps and cooling water pumps servicing the main engine. The loss of these pumps triggered an automatic shutdown of the main engine. The second electrical failure occurred as the crew attempted to restore power to the 440V bus. This time two current overload breakers DGR4 and DGR3 failed, which disconnected the two main diesel generators (#4 and #3) that were online and supplying the high voltage 6600V bus. (Two of the four main diesel generators have to be online to restart the main engine). An emergency generator re-powered the three steering pumps which enabled the pilots to exercise some degree of rudder control, but unfortunately with the main engine and propellor stopped, the steering effect of the rudder is very much reduced. With the Dali only 0.6 miles - or 3 ship lengths - from the Key Bridge when the first electrical blackout happened at 0125, there simply wasn’t enough sea room to avoid a collision. One relevant detail mentioned in the report was this: Which explains why they couldn’t simply ring up "Full Speed Astern" on the engine telegraph.

The large span of bridge still resting on the bow of the MV Dalis is due to be blown up by demolition charges. The detonation is timed to take place around 5PM local time - in about 45m. There are several live stream feeds running on YT to cover the event (although they are buffering quite badly atm). One of them is: Another more stable one by AP The amateur 'Minorcan Mullet' stream which has a better view (and a live commentary) had to be restarted, and is now on:

The title of the OP in this thread was “Why use the atomic bomb on Japan ?” which seemed to me to be about the strategic military thinking and realpolitik of using such a novel weapon to end WW2 in August 1945 - (as opposed to pursuing a devasting war of attrition that might not have ended until 1947). All of those points have already been answered in detail in this thread quite a while ago imho. At some point the discussion then seems to have became a version of the thought experiment known as ”The Trolley Dilemma”. It might be instructive in this context to read a recent study by Exeter Business School which evaluates how different cultural groups - especially Asian ones - evaluate sacrificial dilemmas of this type, and can come to markedly different conclusions and ethical judgements in doing so. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-trolley-dilemma-sacrifice-person-culture.html To me it seems that arguments about ‘Few’ or ‘Many’ deaths descend into a form of Sorites Paradox (Greek σωρός - ‘a heap’) which is a type of [N-1] problem. At what point does a ‘heap’ of sand stop being a ‘heap’ if you repeatedly remove one grain of sand from it ? It’s a type of argument that relies on vague predicates. At what point do ‘Many ‘ deaths become “Few’, and when do you reach a moral tipping point which renders that value ‘acceptable” ? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ Moral philosophers can pursue this type of debate almost indefinitely - but it’s rather different from the one raised in the OP.

Have you considered what would have happened if the allies had gone ahead with the alternative plan B of starving Japan into surrender by means of a naval blockade ? The 32,000 POWs and internees held by the Japanese were already on starvation diets - do you think the Japanese authorities would have made any effort to continue feeding those POWs when they were already making contingency plans to starve a significant proportion of their own non-combatant civilian population to death in order to continue the war ? I take some issue with the Gaza analogy too. The Pacific war of 1941 - 45 did not take place in the Middle East in 2024. It took place in the context of a lethal struggle against a violent and well armed expansionist Japan whose military leadership systematically ignored every clause of the Geneva Convention, and exhibited a total contempt for any concept of the intrinsic value of human life - an aggressor that routinely murdered captured nurses and other medical staff (as they did in Singapore in February 1942) and whose soldiers murdered upward of 250,000 unarmed Chinese civilians during a six week killing rampage in the city of Nanjing in December 1937, and also murdered another 150,000 unarmed Filipino civilians in Manila during the Battle of Luzon in February 1945. At a certain point when you are fighting a particular type of enemy, one (as previously noted) with no history of military compromise or surrender in its 2000 year history, then the finer points of moral argument become somewhat moot. You simply have to be prepared to take exceptional measures to break their will to carry on fighting you. I also take some exception to the implied suggestion that the targets selected for the atom bombs contained nothing but non-combatant civilians. Hiroshima was a major military command centre for the Japanese Second General Army in southern Honshu. It also had a large seaport at Ujina that was used as an embarkation centre for Japanese troops, and housed the Army Marine HQ. The city of Nagasaki was likewise a military seaport, and also the home of the Mitsubishi company who were the principal manufacturers of the deadly ‘Long Lance’ (酸素魚雷) Type 93 torpedo used by the Japanese navy throughout WW2. The Mitsubishi Urakami Torpedo Works were in fact one of the military sites that was completely destroyed by the Nagasaki atom bomb. https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/images/mitsubishi_image.htm

I came upon a passage the other day which reminded me of an issue now mostly forgotten, but one which was very important to Allied military planners back in 1945 as WW2 entered its endgame - and that was the fate of allied POWs and incarcerated civilians who were in the hands of the Japanese throughout the Far East. http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/liberation_photos.html Over 190,000 British and Commonwealth troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese during WW2 - many of them when Malaya, Singapore, and Burma were overrun, and some 32,000 Allied POWs were subsequently repatriated directly from Japan itself after the end of the war. The majority of these prisoners were kept in appalling conditions on starvation diets and and many were worked to death in slave labour camps, like those working on the Thai-Burma Railway at Kanu Camp Thailand, where 60,000 British, Commonwealth and Dutch prisoners worked on the railway, and 16,000 of them perished doing so. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-life-was-like-for-pows-in-the-far-east-during-the-second-world-war There is some vivid testimony from two such prisoners who later became very well-known novelists. One was the Australian born James Clavell who wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape (1963) and later wrote the first of his ‘Asian trilogy’ novels Shogun (1975) partially around his war-time experiences at Changi prison in Singapore. The other was the British writer J.G. Ballard whose family was interned in the Lunghua internment camp near Shanghai in China, and based his autobiographical novel Empire of The Sun (1984) on childhood memories of life there. J.G. Ballard incidentally claims that he and other occupants of the Lunghua camp actually saw the flash of the second atomic bomb when it detonated over Nagasaki 500 miles away across the East China Sea on the morning of August 9 1945. Both of these writers make the point that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 probably saved their own lives and those of countless other POWs and internees, because many of them simply could not have survived the effects of chronic malnutrition they were experiencing at the hands of the Japanese for much longer. They might well have been dead if the war had ended 6 months later. James Clavell who was living on 110 grams of rice per day, one egg per week and occasional vegetables in Changi prison camp was unable to talk about his wartime experience for 15 years, but later disclosed that for quite some time after, he kept a can of sardines in his pocket at all times, and had to fight the urge to forage for food in rubbish bins.

The passage about “Jesus and the woman taken in adultery” (John 7:53-8:11) is an interesting and problematic quotation, because it doesn’t appear in a number of early Greek texts; while some other variant texts place it in a completely different gospel - after Luke 21:38 instead. https://www.gotquestions.org/John-7-53-8-11.html It’s known as the pericope adulterae and is usually regarded as a pseudepigraphical interpolation into the text of John by a later scribe. It was apparently regarded with some misgivings by early christian fathers who thought it could imply that Jesus was sympathetic to adultery.

One recent YouTube video about Trump’s ‘God Bless The USA’ bible that has gone viral in the last week or so is a factual review of the product by a man called Tim Wildsmith, a devout christian who actually reviews bibles for a living on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6TVa7scKM Tim Wildsmith makes the following points: - This bible is advertised at $59.99, but actually costs $75 with tax and shipping. - In his opinion a Walmart style bible like this should probably cost around $20. - The website implies this bible is bound in real leather - but it’s actually bound in fake synthetic leather. - The text used is the copyright free King James Version, but without any notes or cross-references. - There is no copyright page or printer info - which usually means the bible was printed in China. - The page stock is too thin, so you get substantial bleed-through of text from the other side. - The gilt edge pages tend to stick together and tear easily. Another well known political satirist called Tea Pain USA cites Tim Wildsmith’s review, and calls attention to a remarkable omission in the MAGA material found at the back of this Trump bible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB32CR7Zc9s Although the Trump bible contains a copy of The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, and The Pledge of Allegiance, it *doesn’t* include any of the amendments from the 11th through to the 27th. Tea Pain suggests that these conspicuously missing amendments provide a damning vade-mecum as to which parts of the US Constitution Trump and his fellow Christo-Nationalist Fascists would dearly like to expunge - or at least pretend never to have existed - most especially: 12th Amendment - “Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for the President…” 13th Amendment - “Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude .. shall exist within the United States..” 14th Amendment - “ No person shall… hold any office .... have engaged in insurrection or rebellion..” 15th Amendment - “The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied … on account of race, color…” 19th Amendment - The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied… on account of sex…” 22nd Amendment - “ No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice..”

Media coverage of Monday’s total solar eclipse took an unexpected and distinctly X-rated turn when a Spanish language Mexican TV station RCG incautiously began broadcasting video clips of the event that had been sent in by their viewers during the live coverage of the totality. https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/10/news-channel-accidentally-airs-testicles-instead-eclipse-live-tv-20619945/ The RCG production team apparently didn’t examine the videos too closely, and succeeded in broadcasting one clip sent in by a prankster which shows the sun being eclipsed by a descending pair of testicles.

The omnipresent QR (Quick Response) codes found everywhere these days from restaurant menus, to adverts on bus stops, festival passes, or museum exhibits were first invented back in 1994 at a Japanese company called Denso Wave (デンソーウェーブ), a manufacturer of automobile parts based near Nagoya in Japan. Masahiro Hara, the man who invented QR codes was an engineer at Denso Wave who also happened to be a Go player. One day he was playing a game of Go during his lunchbreak when he stumbled on the idea of using the 19 x 19 matrix of a Go board as a new way of encoding the information of the Kanban (カンバン ) system for tracking components and spare parts which is extensively used in the Japanese car industry. It occured to him that a 2-dimensional matrix system of encoding with inbuilt error correction could store and process information far more efficiently than the linear bar code systems currently in use. A new YT video gives a concise explanation of quite how all those hieroglyphic symbols in a QR coding system work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb4wq2auXXk It’s basically a formatted bit-stream of text. Version 1 is a 21 x 21 matrix that can store up to 17 UTF-8 characters when using low error correction. Version 40 is a 177 x 177 matrix that can store almost 3K of text. The error correction system is based on Reed-Solomon Codes which is a method widely used in CD, DVD and Blu-ray disks - it also allows you to place a trademark logo or image in the middle of a QR glyph without compromising the readability of the information. The coloured image below gives a handy guide to what the different bits of of a QR code do - The mauve #6 area is where the data is actually written. and the yellow #7 area is the Error Correction data.

He's also facing the wrong way, towards the back of the pew !

Clear skies and excellent viewing in Dallas atm - (I'm watching live coverage on Sky/NBC) Welp - Carbondale Illinois has been and gone, and we're still here. Guess they must have meant the next one ?- in 129 years !

Not to be outdone by Nineveh and Carbondale Illinois, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the embattled MAGA Governor of Arizona has declared a 14 day state of emergency in Arizona on account of the total solar eclipse today 8 April 2024, and has released $100,000 from the state’s emergency Response & Recovery funds to ensure that the 2m of darkness during the totality doesn’t cause a collapse of Arizona’s transportation system. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/apr/05/sanders-declares-state-of-emergency-in-arkansas/ $100,000 would also be enough to cover the costs of another 5 ‘Lecterns’ should the former WH press secretary find herself running short during the eclipse. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/sarah-huckabee-sanders-arkansas-lectern.html

According to your friendly neighbourhood conspiracy theorists, the solar eclipse on Monday 8 April will also mark the end of the world, and it will all start in Carbondale illinois. https://news.sky.com/story/armageddon-in-illinois-nefarious-scientists-warning-signs-from-god-marjorie-taylor-greene-alex-jones-and-influencers-peddle-conspiracy-theories-about-solar-eclipse-13110035 Why there you may ask ? Well it’s quite simple. The predicted path of the solar eclipse will pass over at least six places called Nineveh (modern day Mosul in Iraq), which is an ancient city mentioned in the bible where the prophet Jonah once preached against the wickedness of its inhabitants, and called for its total destruction. When combined with the path of the US eclipse in 2017, the path of totality on Monday will form a cross with its centre located on Carbondale Illinois - so If you live in Carbondale, that means you will be lucky enough to see the full eclipse twice in seven years. According to influencers on TikTok, it also means doomsday starts in your city - quite obvious really.

Part of the soundtrack to the film 'Perfect Days' (2023) by Wim Wenders.

You could probably start with some of these: Reader discretion is advised, especially for Judges 19-21 (it's rather graphic).

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan did so in August 2023 while dimissing a counterclaim by Donald Trump for defamation in the E.J Carroll case. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-rape-language-e-jean-carroll Kaplan had already outlined why it was not defamation for Carroll to say Trump raped her. “As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.” The title of my post was satirical - (one reason it was in quotes), and took aim squarely at the rampant hypocrisy of a grifter and moral imbecile like Trump attempting to wrap himself in the American flag while hawking overpriced GBA themed bibles in the middle of holy week.

Many unusual and curious versions of the English bible have been printed since the reformation. The ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631 found its way into history by omitting the word ‘not’ from the 7th commandment (Exodus 20:14) and enjoining its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery. Others include ‘The Treacle Bible’ of 1568 (Jermiah 7:24 - “Is there no treacle in Gilead”), The Printers Bible of 1702 (Psalm 119:161 - “Printers have persecuted me without a cause” - [instead of of ‘Princes’], and ‘Rebekah’s Camels Bible’ of 1823 which gives Genesis 24:61 as “Rebekah arose, and her camels” instead of “her damsels”. But few of them are quite as odd as the ‘God Bless The USA Bible’ currently being touted by former president Donald J. Trump for $59.99. This edition of the King James translation (conveniently out of copyright) also includes a copy of the US Constitution, The Bill of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance - along with a handwritten chorus to ‘God Bless America’ by Lee Greenwood. One thing that all of these have in common of course, is that Donald Trump has never read or paid the slightest attention to any of them. The Lee Greenwood referred to is the person who first initiated this project back in 2021. At that time it was being marketed as a new bible “Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks”. This edition was meant to contain the NIV version of the English bible, but the NIV copyright holders Zondervan abruptly withdrew their consent, so the royalty-free King James text was used instead. That version incidentally cost only $49.99 back in 2021. A Meidas Touch YT investigation reveals that this bible has a long history of negative reviews from purchasers who faced such problems as long delays, or complete non-delivery of the product, to struggling with gilt-edged pages that had glued themselves together, rendering the text unreadable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZp0zjobSK8

Oppenheimer has just been released in Japan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-68691883 The BBC’s Japan correspondent Shaimaa Khalil spoke to residents in Hiroshima who had watched the film in a cinema located in the ground-zero area of the 1945 blast, and asked them what they thought of it. One young person responds to the question of ‘Saved lives’ raised by TheVat.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the plan was to cripple the US Pacific fleet for just long enough to allow Japan to seize control of other southeast Asian countries such as British Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies, and consolidate them into their ‘Greater East Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The Japanese hoped they could force the USA to negotiate a political settlement from a position of weakness that would validate Japan’s seizure of these territories, and leave them in control on much more favourable terms than existed in the 1930s. Perceptive Japanese strategists like Admiral Yamamoto who planned the Pearl Harbour attack knew full well that Japan could never defeat the USA in a prolonged war of attrition - so a negotiated diplomatic ending to hostilities with the allies was always a key part of the original Japanese war plan. It went wrong from the outset because the Japanese failed to destroy the 3 main US aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour (they were all at sea). The US carriers subsequently inflicted terrible damage on the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Meanwhile the USA’s war aims became the total destruction of the Japanese military machine, and the unconditional surrender of their nation. In the summer of 1943, Japanese Navy chiefs asked Admiral Sokichi Takagi who was one of their best strategists to carry out an independent survey of the course of the war. His report concluded that Japan must sue for peace if the USA captured the Solomon islands. The Japanese subsequently lost control of the Solomon Islands at the end of 1943, but the Japanese Army leadership defied all warnings from the Navy and carried on fighting - refusing to countenance any possibility of diplomatic negotiation or surrender.