Arkady

happy neil day (20th anniversary edition?!?!!)

More rarer images of Neil, my beloved:

20 years.

I find it so beautiful that this little rat's life has been remembered with love for 20 years and will be hopefully for decades to come. Truly a marvel of the internet.

- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that: 

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56 

- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:

“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380

- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441

- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:

“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71

- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source

- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:

“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here 

- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:

“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source

- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:

“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145

So to recap: 

A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.

Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.

Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.  

buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell

leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist

put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.

when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!

plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.

if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge

if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.

Hobbits are mainly ruled by clan law. What family you’re officially apart of is very important and pretty much everyone has everyone else’s family histories memorized

Hobbits like reading very boring books full of information they already know about their own family lines

There’s hobbit wealth inequality. Rich hobbits live in holes because they can afford to make very big ones that fill up entire hills and it’s a way of showing off. Poor hobbits live in holes because they can’t afford houses so they just start digging into a hill. Middle class hobbits live in built structures made of wood.

A very long time ago there used to be a king in the area that gave the region of the shire to the hobbits if they promised to maintain the roads and bridges of the region

That king and kingdom hasn’t existed for over a thousand years but the hobbits still act like he’s around and follow his laws

They know he’s not there. They just act like he still is.

The hobbits claim they sent a bunch of archers to help in a war a long time ago but nobody else has this in their records of that war

Hobbits’ main methods of killing things usually involves either archery or throwing stones at things. Apparently they’re really really good at killing things by throwing rocks at them.

Bree hobbits live side by side with men and have lived there for a very long time

Bree hobbits call shire hobbits “colonizers”

They’ve got a leader called a thane but he’s only relevant during times of crisis to convene a moot of clan leaders but hobbits don’t generally have times of crisis so he’s mostly a figurehead

The thane is almost always from the Took family

There’s a mayor of the shire that’s elected. He mostly plans events and appoints the sheriff

There’s twelve police officers in the entirely of the shire that mostly act as animal control

Ask to borrow the kid's computer for a second, and use the AI. Pick a word, then pick a letter that is not in that word. Ask chatGPT how many times that letter appears in said word. (Avoid "how many Ns in Mayonnaise" because that went viral and got trained out.) Hell, give ChatGPT multiple tries. Ask it to demonstrate each time that letter appears in a word.

Let the entire class witness chatGPT fail. Because it cannot count. It cannot spell. It cannot think. Please put your lesson plans aside for a class and use it as a learning opportunity.

To add to your arsenal for educating these kids, please look into the concept of AI hallucination. AI cannot perceive things and has no ability to think critically, which means it cannot tell what's real and what's not. Really drill into these kids that they are better off asking advice from a toddler.