I send donations to several non-profits, but before starting, I called them up or sent email and asked them if it were possible to donate and NOT be dunned for anything more. The answer was yes, and that worked for a while, then I got some junk mail from one. I sent off a pissed off email and mentioned that I didn't appreciate my monthly donation being wasted like that, and if they wanted next month's donation, they had better stop. I haven't got even thank yous for the past few years, and I likes it like that.

Others have ignored me, so the donations stopped. It's not very good feedback, but it sometimes works.

The three he attacks are playing both sides of the withdrawal game. They all make noises as if they intend to withdraw from Iraq, but when you look at the fine print, they mean only from direct combat, leaving half the forces there with no exit strategy.

Richardson and Ron Paul are the only two candidates I know of (Kucinich, maybe?) who actually mean get out, entirely out.

If this is the first attack ad, what do you call all the ads from the big three which don't tell the full truth about their withdrawal plans? Truthiness?

Anyone interested in the Jim Crow bigotry aspects ought to educate themselves about the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group of black manual laborers for the most part, who were also WW II and Korean war veterans, who decided to defend themselves against the KKK night riders and protect boycott picketers and civil rights marchers from KKK mobs who beat them. Right wingers avoid mention of them because the idea of blacks using the second amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms against whites makes them uncomfortable, and left wingers avoid the subject because using guns for self defense makes them uncomfortable.

There's an excellent book on the Deacons, and a pretty good movie, starring, I believe, Forest Whitaker. The movie consolidates many true events into a few fictional events, but get the spirit down pat.

It's been a while since I watched Japanese baseball on TV, 15 years I guess, but I remember umpires and announcers giving the count in pure English, numbers included. Instead of "Ichi baru, ni sturaiku" it was, literally, "wan baru, tu sturaiko". Whether that was the norm, or whether it was only some artifact of the few games I watched, or whether I have the umpires wrong and the announcers right, I don't know, but I remember dropping my jaw when I first heard that.

I read somewhere that during WW II, they invented Japanese words for all the American baseball terminology, but kept on playing. After the war, they ditched them. I doubt ordinary people used the new words when they didn't have to.

... "and" was perfectly fine and indeed sounded (and still does sound) much better. I don't think too many people accused Abraham Lincoln of writing bad English.

The Nazis didn't decide until January 1942 to explicitly kill all undesirables on a mass scale; before then it had not been some coordinated national policy, and I don't think they even built the mass production gas rooms and ovens until after then. The camps certainly existed much earlier, but they were not intended as mere holding pens for the slaughter, more along the lines of the internment camps built in the US for Americans who had Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry.

The logic for bombing the camps is that even if the bombing raid killed every single inmate, that would have put the gas chambers and ovens out of commission until rebuilt. But I doubt it would have taken very long to rebuild those, so any saving of life would have been merely temporary and probably no different in the end.

There is also a good question as to how much FDR and Churchill actually knew about the camps. All I have ever seen is that they knew of their existence, but nothing that says they knew of the mass murders that went on. Even if there had been a few reports from escaped inmates or spies, the killing was on such an unprecedented mass scale that it would have been pretty easy to think the reports as being exaggerated. To paraphrase Monty Python, no one expected the Holocaust.

Would he think that a state's right? The confederacy seceded because the federal government would NOT force free states to return runaway slaves, among other federal rights complaints. The stars and bars is a pure pro-slavery flag. States rights was what they opposed. And it wasn't northern aggression either; the south started it with their bombardment of Fort Sumter. Secession? They opposed the very polite, well-mannered, slow path to secession explored by the New England states during the War of 1812, called it treason in fact. There was nothing careful and cautious about their own treasonous secession.

The stars and bars is a treasonous pro-slavery anti-states rights flag. Is that the message Huck wants to deliver?

I recycle my plastic bottles by way of filling them with water and shooting them, then packing the remnants off to the recycling center. Very satisfying. Lots of water all over and they get a second use. Can't do as well with cans, they just fall down and jump around, which plastic bottles do better.

I think it is Bobby Knight who throws things.