I think they just thought of the cars as oddly shaped bison, and they weren’t afraid at all.

We went to Yellowstone and were driving through the park at dusk... when a herd (!) of bison just wandered through the trees alongside the road, occasionally going onto the road and slowing traffic.

“Wrong number, dude. Wrong number!”

It’s not a great life - but if you’re moving, you’re earning.

A lot of ‘parents’ just phone it in, sadly - or depend on the schools to teach their kids what they should be learning at home.

Not really - they’re great if the sea’s nice and relatively smooth. Takeoffs and landings can be positively brutal on the airframe if it isn’t, and salt water immersion and spray does really wonderful things as far as corrosion goes... which weakens the airframe and does interesting things to sensitive avionics. By…

You cannot apply today’s academic sensitivities to the realities of total war 70 years ago, and get anything sensible out of it. Almost always all you see is a preening of their moralistic plumage on how THEY wouldn’t use that nasty bomb, anything else is totally irrelevant.

The emotions were running pretty high - and I can seriously see a ‘scorched earth/shoot on sight’ policy after the first invasion wave. You’d literally not know if that kid crawling out of a ruin was surrendering, or waiting for you to get close enough to kill you with a hand grenade or his mom to try to shoot or stab…

Looks like someone ‘knocked off’ the seeker head. That one on the wing seems to be missing it.

“Huh. This grad school paper completely proves that they were about to surrender, all other thoughts at the time to the contrary. Now, if I had a time machine and could only get it back to Truman, we could stop the use of the Bombs.”

Much, much worse. Think of the D-Day beaches spread across the entire area of Japan. The resistance would have been fanatical.

Sorry, no. They dropped the second one because the first one did NOT cause the Japanese to consider surrendering. They continued the firebomb raids, and cities were still being cremated. The firebombings would have continued until the fall, when Operation Olympic would have kicked off.

And all of a sudden you can go -here- but not -over there- and the open world just narrowed down to some defined paths.

Well, I’m one of the doofuses. If the plate’s indeed sizzling, or in a wooden holder, I ain’t gonna touch it. If it’s a standard ceramic plate (we got to the same Mexican place every Friday) and the server says “Be careful, it’s hot,” - I’ll brush it to see, if I don’t feel the heat radiating off it.

What I said: “Never confuse your prejudices with reality, or assume your feelings about some figure are shared by everyone.“

“ Its outright ridiculous that anyone- and I mean anyone- would take this guy at all seriously and even consider him as anything other than a flash in the pan. That many are doing so in the face of all possible means of rationality to me is outright ridiculous and shameful.”

Never confuse your prejudices with reality, or assume your feelings about some figure are shared by everyone. I think the Kardashians suck - but there’s people who love them immensely. Trump’s a blowhard, but he’s a blowhard with a whole lot of money - and that’ll get him on stage. Don’t think he’d make a good…

And then you can’t offer any rebuttal, because THAT is (fill in the blank).It’s a nice gig, keeping the people down - until they get tired of it and don’t play by the rules any more.

“One does not laugh at the Gods!”

And with the addition of restrictions - “That’d be racist, sexist, whatever-ist” you’ve precluded poking fun at them. With the best of intentions, I’m sure - but you’ve given their supporters the power to shut down any sort of criticism with the ‘-ist’ argument.