You always have the choice, whether it be the light or darkness, that is your choice, if you chose not to decide you still have made a choice. We believe in the right to choose, they believe in the right to choose for you. It is no more complicated than that.
1000 years in the future, humanity will be speaking in memes, and will be unintelligible to all other races in the galaxy. But don’t worry, we won’t have lost anything galactically; we’re already unintelligible to the rest of the galaxy.
An episode devoted to a race that speaks via allegory.
American Heritage Dictionary has allegory defined as:
The representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form.
A story, picture, or play employing such representation. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick are allegories.
A symbolic representation. “The blindfolded figure with scales is an allegory of justice.”
Wikipedia says:
As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a meaning with moral or political significance.
What I found interesting is that the Wikipedia article on memes doesn’t mention the word “allegory” even once.
“Things, will have to be what they must be, from what they were and are. And we are who we are, because we are and will also be who we are. And the things we are, and we the ones who do things, will be there and again!”
Liberal Task; I’ll do it the way the experts say and then when it fails blame it on the people it was supposed to help and the people who had nothing to do with it while my buddy’s get rich off it pretending to help the people it was meant for by over charging everyone involved especially the government.
Archduke AC/DC sounds like a Steampunk riff on some of the Nikolai Tesla memes. (Serenity has an album thats steampunk WWI, with Tesla as the villain. I will NEVER look at portraits of Franz Josef in quite the same way after hearing that album.)
Showing my age when “post punk”, my favorite era of rock music (think early U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, Joy Division/New Order, Jesus and Mary Chain, XTC), has spawned “post punk revival” bands that have been around for over twenty years. 😳
Baking and cooking all afternoon, but this was a welcome break, thank you! The twelve-fingered reactor employee, the possum, and the soda fountain person had me nodding along.
Orphiusyian task – you will do the impossible, you will preform so well the gods will be moved to tears, you will screw up right at the end and have the whole thing fall apart.
The Italics one is a good one. I’m saving that one. Reminds of the one about “only”
“She said she loved him” Now, insert the word “only” at any point in that sentence.
Only she said she loved him
She only said she loved him
she said only she loved him
she said she only loved him
she said she loved only him
she said she loved him only
I thought of the ‘only’ one, as well; can’t wait to try that with my grandchildren!
As to poisoning alcohol, my high school chemistry teacher, circa 1966, told us he knew chemists who had that task, They were then hired by the bootleggers to take the contamination back out.
The coke machine, yes, that’s me. And FDR – yes, I can name three off the top of my head, although I’m not sure the ones for interning Germans and Italians count, since that is customary when war is officially declared.
Interning foreign nationals in times of war is/was very common.
The problem with the interning of the Japanese was that they were American citizens (with many born in the US).
Oh, it’s very interesting to read about the interning by Canada of the Japanese Canadians. While it started sooner that the American internment because Canada was at war with Japan sooner, it lasted long after WW2 was won.
Two Japanese internment camps come to mind: Tule Lake and Manzanar. The first is fairly close to Flyover Falls, and might explain the dearth of Japanese-Americans living around here. West of the Cascades, there’s a small but noticeable Japanese presence in Medford. OTOH, you still have to go looking for it. Not like San Jose with an honest Japantown. (Recollection relevant as of 2002. YMMV. Set seats in the upright position. Set phasers on stupify.)
And a friend of mine’s parents, now passed on, were both interned from what is now Silicon Valley to up at Tule Lake, because a concentration camp (since that‘s what they called them in official US government planning documents, before the German use of the term spoiled that name) wouldn’t be a concentration camp without little kids behind the barbed wire.
FDR did so much that’s impossible to not call evil…
Many years ago, the Murky News did some articles about the internment. I don’t recall if divestiture was required or simply “made sense”, but a lot of the internees from the Santa Clara Valley had flower operations in greenhouses. When the internment order hit, those got sold off (for pennies on the dollar, as I recall) to people who made a killing.
A few buildings are left of the camp at Tule Lake as a museum. We drove by when we were going to Lava Beds Nat’l Monument, but declined to stop. I am decidedly not psych-sensitive, but one got a very bad vibe from that place.
That trip, we hiked part of the Modoc War era “Captain Jack’s Stronghold”. Somebody had a huge sense of irony to locate an internment camp near a site where a rebellion against internment (so to speak) of the Indian tribes had taken place.
Side note: As memory serves, the camps were the source of the Nisei army groups deployed in Europe. “Nisei” == the offspring of the immigrants. One of my coworkers at HP was “Sunsei” == grandchildren of the imigrants.
(Spelling is approximate. The past few days were long and strenuous. The patio project is now in the easy cleanup stage (Yay!) and I’m not up to looking up anything this morning. Ask me after the coffee IV finishes. :) )
Not a lot of stories, even told to my friend as their son, but basically when they eventually were released and came back “home” those families had absolutely nothing, and had to start from absolutely zero.
That includes those Army vets from the 442nd and the other segregated units who had been recruited from the camps coming home from combat in Europe.
It is said some had a very, very few neighbors who had grabbed what were obviously family heirlooms in the general looting of their “abandoned” properties, kept it safe, and brought that stuff back, apologizing that they could not save more. But as a story that may be comforting urban legend. In general everything was just gone, all taken by their own neighbors.
Amazingly enough to me, instead of forting up in Japantown, most families moved out in to the suburbs as the valley grew and completely integrated. My friend’s dad worked for the post office for his entire career, and had a house a couple miles from where I lived in South San Jose.
Empirically a lesson learned may have been that the Japanese community were perhaps too insular, and if they were staying they needed to be as fully and completely integrated into the community as possible instead of a separate group. That’s how we got Norman Mineta, a camp internee himself who was sent to one of the camps in Wyoming, as first San Jose’s Mayor, then a Congressman, and then cabinet member in DC for both Clinton and GWB.
Quite a path for the little kid walking into the internment camp in 1942 who had his baseball bat taken away by the Army guards as a potential weapon.
There was a either a book or magazine article I read several years ago that chronicled a few people that got rich from the properties that were seized. I think one gentleman that became a federal judge. Darned if I can find the reference now…
Interning the actual Japanese would have been fully legal, and after the Imperial Japanese Navy getting caught lurking around the port of Los Angeles, no surprise. Especially after some Japanese citizens in Hawaii provided assistance to downed Japanese pilots.
The US citizens? If they had to be interned, they probably should have been released once the immediate danger passed. I say probably because of the anti-Japanese propaganda that whipped some people up to the point that they went after American citizens of Asian ancestry, Japanese or Chinese. (A colleague of mine did his dissertation on the lead up to the internment, including discussions inside the US government and what was in the West coast media at the time. He found some very interesting and depressing stuff.)
It’s even more complicated, as there were laws that prevented prior generations from naturalizing as U.S. citizens (search for “Asian Exclusive Act” or “Immigration Act of 1924”).
It would not have mattered in actual practice in 1942 since they just interned everyone of Japanese ancestry on the west coast (because Japanese spies were no possible problem around Norfolk or the other east coast naval ports?), but it is an interesting question when the law basically suspends people in resident alien status by forbidding naturalization and then says “we can intern those people the law forced to remain as enemy aliens in time of war.”
The whole thing about arbitrarily extending internment to natural born U.S. citizens, including minor children, “because we say so” is a whole ‘nother issue.
because Japanese spies were no possible problem around Norfolk or the other east coast naval ports?
Basic demographics: there weren’t a similar concentration of Japanese living there. Also basic geography: the Japanese apparently weren’t concerned with much beyond the Pacific Fleet because of travel times. If they had been, they would have dispatched something to disable the Panama Canal.
RAH in his alt history later stuff implied the internment timelines avoided widespread lynchings, given public sentiments on the west coast after Pearl Harbor.
Of course he had the US Pacific Fleet sitting at anchor in, I think, San Francisco Bay when the IJN surprise-attack sank all the battle wagons, and the infrastructure parts of the attack waves hit SF and the surrounding Bay Area, so the casualty and damage news came not from the far away Hawaiian territory but from the continental U.S., and was a lot harder to suppress.
But he also wrote one where that IJN attack hit the Pacific Fleet anchored off Lahaina in the ʻAuʻau Channel. That’s alt history for you – it’s so alternate.
It wasn’t the assistance to downed Japanese pilots. It was the crazy downed Japanese pilot who wanted to murder a bunch of civilians on one of the more rural Hawaiian islands, and who managed to intimidate a couple of Japanese residents into helping him.
The amazing thing was that the civilians on the island turned out to be very hard to murder.
Part of the problem was that Nii’hau was designated by the Japanese Navy as a safe emergency landing island because it was “uninhabited.” Heh, not so much. This apparently freaked out NISHIKAICHI Shigenori, especially after the native Hawaiians rescued him and treated him as a guest, but also took his weapons. (They had no idea that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, or that the US was now at war with Japan.)
Everybody went and got the Haradas to translate Japanese, and then later that night, they found out about Pearl Harbor and posted guards.
Basically the situation had dragged on and gotten worse, because Nii’hau was cut off from visitors from Kauai because of war having broken out and travel being restricted by the US Navy. Obviously it was dumb for the US Navy not to have sent guys to check out what was happening on the smaller islands, because anything could have been happening if the Japanese had wanted to dig in.
Nishikaichi got the Haradas to help him escape and wreak havoc. He also got help from another Japanese guy named Shintani. They captured various Hawaiians, some of whom escaped and some of whom were let go to do errands. At the end, they took two native Hawaiians hostage: Benehakaka (Ben) Kanahele and his wife, Kealoha (Ella) Kanahele. This didn’t work out as a fight ensued. Ben was shot three times by Nishikaichi in very bad places but hurled him into a wall and knocked him out, Ella killed Nishikaichi by further bashing his head in with a rock, and Mr. Harada committed suicide in shame (or to appease the Japanese government, or….) Except he committed suicide with a shotgun, which seems unusual.
It’s possible that Nishikaichi only really wanted to escape and destroy papers and his airplane. But if that was what he wanted to do, he didn’t do a good job of it, and he did attack civilians who had been nothing but kind to him. He also threatened to kill every single person in the little town there, which was what set off the Kanaheles to fight his butt.
Ishimatsu Shintani was sent to an internment camp, but returned to Hawaii later and became a citizen.
Umeno Irene Tanaka Harada, who was born in Hawaii and never lived in Japan, was held in jail for 31 months, until June 1944, but was never charged with any crime and did no official prison time. It’s known that she played gramophone music to cover up some of the more violent activities, but it’s not known if she actively participated in any of the arson, attempted murder, and so forth. Mention of her name is generally left out of museum accounts of the events on Nii’hau. Apparently she said that she helped out because she felt sorry for Nishikaichi.
I forgot to say that Shintani (born in Japan), Yoshio Harada (born in Hawaii), and Irene Harada, were the only three people of Japanese heritage on Nii’hau. There were 136 residents total.
Also, Yoshio Harada found out about Pearl Harbor from Nishikaichi, and decided not to tell any of his friends and neighbors, but only to discuss it with his wife and Shintani. Irene Harada went along with all of this craziness, and Shintani also didn’t tell anyone what he knew (and went along with Nishikaichi’s craziness, later).
So you can see why this kind of anti-civic behavior would make people in the US paranoid about other Japanese immigrants or even those born here.
Ben Kanahele then picked Nishikaichi up in the same manner that he picked up the sheep that were commercially raised on the island, hurling Nishikaichi into a stone wall. Ella Kanahele then bashed him in the head with a rock, and Ben slit his throat with his hunting knife. Harada then turned the shotgun on himself, committing suicide. Ben Kanahele was taken to Waimea Hospital on Kauaʻi to recuperate; he was awarded with the Medal for Merit and the Purple Heart, his wife did not receive any official recognition.
The anti-Asian sentiment was so strong that grocery stores sold off their rice in stock for pennies on the dollar. My grandmother, having four hungry kids to feed, bought up the rice and served it like any other grain. (Hot, cooked, for breakfast with milk and cinnamon-sugar.) And then my mother continued the practice. So I grew up eating rice for breakfast and considering it “normal”.
(The generations fall into Silent Generation–Mom was born RIGHT before the war, so her earliest memories were of rationing–and Gen. X: I was born in 1970.)
Actually Japan was Dec. 8th, but Germany and Italy were December 11th – a few hours after Adolf and then Benito declared war on the US earlier that day, thus resolving a large issue for FDR. He very much wanted to go to the aid of the UK and USSR first, but had no justification for a war declaration on Germany and Italy based on the Pearl Harbor attack. But Adolf and Benito decided that the Axis pact required them to jump in, so FDR could do the “Europe first” plan he wanted.
One of the major alt history pivot points has Germany and Italy remaining neutral in the US-Japan war, frustrating the heck out of FDR and forcing a Pacific-first strategy, still pushing lend-lease to it’s max yet the US remaining a neutral in the European war.
This is why, if your most famous folklorists are named Grimm, you bribe them into changing their name as a matter of national pride. It’s just bad branding if you let them go around publishing Grimm’s fairytales….
Eh. The native American ones I can recall had some nasty bits to them. And the Asian ones. And… yeah. The Germans weren’t alone, true, but they’re closer to us culturally and linguistically than a bunch of others, plus the popularity of Grimm’s tales, of course.
Cannibalism is a fairly common trait of fairy tales. You’re lucky if it’s an ogre and not your stepmother — and especially not your stepmother serving you up to your father.
I sold a story to Orson Scott Card under my maiden name about a handsome prince held in a tower by his wicked (and kinky) stepmother, who had discovered how to make testosterone and developed the ability to sing the base line in Gregorian chants. Mom not only had the hots for him, she used her biochemical/magical genius to create a giant dragon…fly…..to guard the tower.
He was rescued by an equally talented fighter named James (her father wanted a boy). Let just say she used brains rather than brawn to do the job.
it was a rather fractured fairy tale. (The anthology was, “Dragons of Darkness,” for anyone who cares).
I’m only mostly crazy. I really don’t know if I’d have another story like that in me.(It was, in part, inspired by my all-time favorite M*A*S*H episode, “The Kidnapping of Margaret Houlihan.” Just one perfect zinger after another and it set off a really strange frame of mind).
First time I’ve run across ANYONE who has heard of that anthology, and it’s an authoress! (I only know of it because I have a collection of Michael Whelan’s art, in which he mentions doing the cover art for ‘Dragons of Darkness’ and then the publishing house used it for a different book anyway.)
Amazon did a couple of seasons of a new version with the blessing of Jay Ward’s daughter. Aside from the fact that they have through-plots over several episodes, and that they have all modern conveniences and better animation, they seem to have gotten the feel right.
(My kids really liked them, and I did too. Lots of celebrity cameos including Weird Al.)
Oh, and they’re just The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Since it is no longer in variety show format, the secondary acts are generally not present.
For y’all Americans who may not know, the disabled vet being offered MAiD instead of them getting busy and fixing her wheelchair lift is a Real Thing. They really did that.
“…last week, Quebec announced it would go ahead with accepting advance requests for MAID in cases where a person’s condition, such as Alzheimer’s, renders them incapable of giving consent at a later date.
Quebec will accept those requests as of Oct. 30.
The federal government has repeatedly expressed concern about Quebec moving forward before it modifies the Criminal Code.”
Meaning that the federal government is concerned about getting the paperwork all tiddly-poo, they do not give a F- about people killing themselves, or potentially being murdered.
Ungrateful Child: “I have here a signed affidavit that Mom wants to die.”
Mom: “NO I DON’T!!!”
Government Minion: “Ah yes, all in order, please proceed. MAiD, two doors down on the left.”
I’m so old I remember when election night was fun instead of stomach churning and when you didn’t have to be just as terrified of your candidate winning as of them losing
Those FBI memes remind me of an observation I’ve made a few times:
There is nothing in the US Constitution that permits the FBI to exist at all. In other words, every FBI employee violates the Constitution, simply by walking in the office door every morning. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?
According To Hoyt 
Cats may start the farm revolt, but Pigs quickly take over the revolt.
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Because some animals are more equal than others.
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He is never at the wrong rally, and he doesn’t care if you believe in him or not.
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You always have the choice, whether it be the light or darkness, that is your choice, if you chose not to decide you still have made a choice. We believe in the right to choose, they believe in the right to choose for you. It is no more complicated than that.
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I suggest, “Where Everybody Knows the Memes,” as a possible title for the future.
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easier if you tell me on Friday night. I have very little brain.
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I just thought of it.
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Email her next Friday, as if it were a meme
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Or write an email now, and use your email thingie’s version of send later/schedule send etc to arrange to have it delivered Friday. :)
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1000 years in the future, humanity will be speaking in memes, and will be unintelligible to all other races in the galaxy. But don’t worry, we won’t have lost anything galactically; we’re already unintelligible to the rest of the galaxy.
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Darmak and Jalad at Tanagra.
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Bingo.
An episode devoted to a race that speaks via allegory.
American Heritage Dictionary has allegory defined as:
Wikipedia says:
What I found interesting is that the Wikipedia article on memes doesn’t mention the word “allegory” even once.
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“Stewart, over-acting.”
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Come on, Gad, tell us what you really think.
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Yes, the next few months are going to be rough no matter what.
I’m getting a very bad feeling about Harris’s plan to give a “major speech,” on the Ellipse in D.C. next week.
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“Things, will have to be what they must be, from what they were and are. And we are who we are, because we are and will also be who we are. And the things we are, and we the ones who do things, will be there and again!”
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(I’m going to mess up the spelling)
dadalysian task – I’ll pull itoff, but my idiot son will crash and burn.
Dionysian task – whatever we do, it will involve a lot if drunken debauchery
orphisyian task – well screw it up right at the end.
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Tantalean task – unable to get started
Persephoneian task – forced to quit half-way through
Thesean task – fails if you don’t set up an exit strategy beforehand
Promethean task – good deed, harshly punished
Ulyssean task – takes decades to complete
Parisan task – failure is the only option
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Of the latter three, I think we’ve all had tasks that fit those descriptions. Or at least I have.
Repeatedly. Thank Himself I do not work there, or for them, anymore.
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Reportedly, a lot of programming projects. Definitely been part of “Persephoneian Task” sorry to say.
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Laocoönic task: to disagree with the boss’s plan. Tersely.
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Dionysian task… every college undergrad project evar? And more than a few grad. projects?
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Dionysian task: You have twenty-four hours to disappear all evidence of this pub before the government finds out about it (Prohibition Era).
*glug glug*
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Liberal Task;
I’ll do it the way the experts say and then when it fails blame it on the people it was supposed to help and the people who had nothing to do with it while my buddy’s get rich off it pretending to help the people it was meant for by over charging everyone involved especially the government.
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What a strange way to find out there exists a band named Franz Ferdinand. That’s a bit of pop culture trivia I will hopefully never need again.
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At least it wasn’t AC/DC…which is entirely too kinky.
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Archduke AC/DC sounds like a Steampunk riff on some of the Nikolai Tesla memes. (Serenity has an album thats steampunk WWI, with Tesla as the villain. I will NEVER look at portraits of Franz Josef in quite the same way after hearing that album.)
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I dressed as R2 D2 for Halloween of 77, and my neighbor gave me this line to say “My name is R2 D2! My father is AC DC!”
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Try “Hayseed Dixie”
(grin)
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LOL. I also found it out from the meme. But think about it. Archduke Metallica would rock.
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Performing “Dont Tread on Me”.
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Oh, not nobility here, but fictional? Sure.
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And when you find out what their big hit was…
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Showing my age when “post punk”, my favorite era of rock music (think early U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, Joy Division/New Order, Jesus and Mary Chain, XTC), has spawned “post punk revival” bands that have been around for over twenty years. 😳
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Baking and cooking all afternoon, but this was a welcome break, thank you! The twelve-fingered reactor employee, the possum, and the soda fountain person had me nodding along.
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So many good ones again. Very impressive.
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Well, that was interesting.
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…and you’re still not seeing 10% of how bad it really is…
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I think the Korean Girl one is from last week, but I have no problems with it being repeated.
*loads up XCOM2 because the Berserker Queen is going to show up on the next mission, I suspect. Yay. Pain.*
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…and she didn’t. As soon as I send a weaker squad she’ll be right there and will beat them up with her fists. I just know it.
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Shines in the fleeting bask of glory that another Meme was chosen….
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Rethinking this one
Orphiusyian task – you will do the impossible, you will preform so well the gods will be moved to tears, you will screw up right at the end and have the whole thing fall apart.
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I’m in this picture and feel called out.
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The Italics one is a good one. I’m saving that one. Reminds of the one about “only”
“She said she loved him” Now, insert the word “only” at any point in that sentence.
Only she said she loved him
She only said she loved him
she said only she loved him
she said she only loved him
she said she loved only him
she said she loved him only
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Where should we send memes for consideration?
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two initials last name at the mail of heat.
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I thought of the ‘only’ one, as well; can’t wait to try that with my grandchildren!
As to poisoning alcohol, my high school chemistry teacher, circa 1966, told us he knew chemists who had that task, They were then hired by the bootleggers to take the contamination back out.
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The coke machine, yes, that’s me. And FDR – yes, I can name three off the top of my head, although I’m not sure the ones for interning Germans and Italians count, since that is customary when war is officially declared.
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Nod.
Interning foreign nationals in times of war is/was very common.
The problem with the interning of the Japanese was that they were American citizens (with many born in the US).
Oh, it’s very interesting to read about the interning by Canada of the Japanese Canadians. While it started sooner that the American internment because Canada was at war with Japan sooner, it lasted long after WW2 was won.
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And Jase is offended at the thought of being asked to be useful as well as decorative.
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Two Japanese internment camps come to mind: Tule Lake and Manzanar. The first is fairly close to Flyover Falls, and might explain the dearth of Japanese-Americans living around here. West of the Cascades, there’s a small but noticeable Japanese presence in Medford. OTOH, you still have to go looking for it. Not like San Jose with an honest Japantown. (Recollection relevant as of 2002. YMMV. Set seats in the upright position. Set phasers on stupify.)
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Still here.
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And a friend of mine’s parents, now passed on, were both interned from what is now Silicon Valley to up at Tule Lake, because a concentration camp (since that‘s what they called them in official US government planning documents, before the German use of the term spoiled that name) wouldn’t be a concentration camp without little kids behind the barbed wire.
FDR did so much that’s impossible to not call evil…
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Many years ago, the Murky News did some articles about the internment. I don’t recall if divestiture was required or simply “made sense”, but a lot of the internees from the Santa Clara Valley had flower operations in greenhouses. When the internment order hit, those got sold off (for pennies on the dollar, as I recall) to people who made a killing.
A few buildings are left of the camp at Tule Lake as a museum. We drove by when we were going to Lava Beds Nat’l Monument, but declined to stop. I am decidedly not psych-sensitive, but one got a very bad vibe from that place.
That trip, we hiked part of the Modoc War era “Captain Jack’s Stronghold”. Somebody had a huge sense of irony to locate an internment camp near a site where a rebellion against internment (so to speak) of the Indian tribes had taken place.
Side note: As memory serves, the camps were the source of the Nisei army groups deployed in Europe. “Nisei” == the offspring of the immigrants. One of my coworkers at HP was “Sunsei” == grandchildren of the imigrants.
(Spelling is approximate. The past few days were long and strenuous. The patio project is now in the easy cleanup stage (Yay!) and I’m not up to looking up anything this morning. Ask me after the coffee IV finishes. :) )
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Not a lot of stories, even told to my friend as their son, but basically when they eventually were released and came back “home” those families had absolutely nothing, and had to start from absolutely zero.
That includes those Army vets from the 442nd and the other segregated units who had been recruited from the camps coming home from combat in Europe.
It is said some had a very, very few neighbors who had grabbed what were obviously family heirlooms in the general looting of their “abandoned” properties, kept it safe, and brought that stuff back, apologizing that they could not save more. But as a story that may be comforting urban legend. In general everything was just gone, all taken by their own neighbors.
Amazingly enough to me, instead of forting up in Japantown, most families moved out in to the suburbs as the valley grew and completely integrated. My friend’s dad worked for the post office for his entire career, and had a house a couple miles from where I lived in South San Jose.
Empirically a lesson learned may have been that the Japanese community were perhaps too insular, and if they were staying they needed to be as fully and completely integrated into the community as possible instead of a separate group. That’s how we got Norman Mineta, a camp internee himself who was sent to one of the camps in Wyoming, as first San Jose’s Mayor, then a Congressman, and then cabinet member in DC for both Clinton and GWB.
Quite a path for the little kid walking into the internment camp in 1942 who had his baseball bat taken away by the Army guards as a potential weapon.
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Oh, it happened sometimes. One Japanese family sold their farm to a neighbor for one dollar — and bought it back for one dollar, too.
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There was a either a book or magazine article I read several years ago that chronicled a few people that got rich from the properties that were seized. I think one gentleman that became a federal judge. Darned if I can find the reference now…
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For example, the most decorated US Army unit was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, almost entirely Nisei or later generations.
Magnificent unit.
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Interning the actual Japanese would have been fully legal, and after the Imperial Japanese Navy getting caught lurking around the port of Los Angeles, no surprise. Especially after some Japanese citizens in Hawaii provided assistance to downed Japanese pilots.
The US citizens? If they had to be interned, they probably should have been released once the immediate danger passed. I say probably because of the anti-Japanese propaganda that whipped some people up to the point that they went after American citizens of Asian ancestry, Japanese or Chinese. (A colleague of mine did his dissertation on the lead up to the internment, including discussions inside the US government and what was in the West coast media at the time. He found some very interesting and depressing stuff.)
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About the only good thing about the US internment of Japanese-Americans, is that no Japanese-Americans were deported to Japan after the War.
Canada actually deported some of their Japanese-Canadians.
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It’s even more complicated, as there were laws that prevented prior generations from naturalizing as U.S. citizens (search for “Asian Exclusive Act” or “Immigration Act of 1924”).
It would not have mattered in actual practice in 1942 since they just interned everyone of Japanese ancestry on the west coast (because Japanese spies were no possible problem around Norfolk or the other east coast naval ports?), but it is an interesting question when the law basically suspends people in resident alien status by forbidding naturalization and then says “we can intern those people the law forced to remain as enemy aliens in time of war.”
The whole thing about arbitrarily extending internment to natural born U.S. citizens, including minor children, “because we say so” is a whole ‘nother issue.
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Asian Exclusion Act.
Darn you autocorrupt: darn you to heck!
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Basic demographics: there weren’t a similar concentration of Japanese living there. Also basic geography: the Japanese apparently weren’t concerned with much beyond the Pacific Fleet because of travel times. If they had been, they would have dispatched something to disable the Panama Canal.
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RAH in his alt history later stuff implied the internment timelines avoided widespread lynchings, given public sentiments on the west coast after Pearl Harbor.
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Of course he had the US Pacific Fleet sitting at anchor in, I think, San Francisco Bay when the IJN surprise-attack sank all the battle wagons, and the infrastructure parts of the attack waves hit SF and the surrounding Bay Area, so the casualty and damage news came not from the far away Hawaiian territory but from the continental U.S., and was a lot harder to suppress.
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But he also wrote one where that IJN attack hit the Pacific Fleet anchored off Lahaina in the ʻAuʻau Channel. That’s alt history for you – it’s so alternate.
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That was the belief in some of the camps, that it was for their protection.
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It wasn’t the assistance to downed Japanese pilots. It was the crazy downed Japanese pilot who wanted to murder a bunch of civilians on one of the more rural Hawaiian islands, and who managed to intimidate a couple of Japanese residents into helping him.
The amazing thing was that the civilians on the island turned out to be very hard to murder.
Part of the problem was that Nii’hau was designated by the Japanese Navy as a safe emergency landing island because it was “uninhabited.” Heh, not so much. This apparently freaked out NISHIKAICHI Shigenori, especially after the native Hawaiians rescued him and treated him as a guest, but also took his weapons. (They had no idea that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, or that the US was now at war with Japan.)
Everybody went and got the Haradas to translate Japanese, and then later that night, they found out about Pearl Harbor and posted guards.
Basically the situation had dragged on and gotten worse, because Nii’hau was cut off from visitors from Kauai because of war having broken out and travel being restricted by the US Navy. Obviously it was dumb for the US Navy not to have sent guys to check out what was happening on the smaller islands, because anything could have been happening if the Japanese had wanted to dig in.
Nishikaichi got the Haradas to help him escape and wreak havoc. He also got help from another Japanese guy named Shintani. They captured various Hawaiians, some of whom escaped and some of whom were let go to do errands. At the end, they took two native Hawaiians hostage: Benehakaka (Ben) Kanahele and his wife, Kealoha (Ella) Kanahele. This didn’t work out as a fight ensued. Ben was shot three times by Nishikaichi in very bad places but hurled him into a wall and knocked him out, Ella killed Nishikaichi by further bashing his head in with a rock, and Mr. Harada committed suicide in shame (or to appease the Japanese government, or….) Except he committed suicide with a shotgun, which seems unusual.
It’s possible that Nishikaichi only really wanted to escape and destroy papers and his airplane. But if that was what he wanted to do, he didn’t do a good job of it, and he did attack civilians who had been nothing but kind to him. He also threatened to kill every single person in the little town there, which was what set off the Kanaheles to fight his butt.
Ishimatsu Shintani was sent to an internment camp, but returned to Hawaii later and became a citizen.
Umeno Irene Tanaka Harada, who was born in Hawaii and never lived in Japan, was held in jail for 31 months, until June 1944, but was never charged with any crime and did no official prison time. It’s known that she played gramophone music to cover up some of the more violent activities, but it’s not known if she actively participated in any of the arson, attempted murder, and so forth. Mention of her name is generally left out of museum accounts of the events on Nii’hau. Apparently she said that she helped out because she felt sorry for Nishikaichi.
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I forgot to say that Shintani (born in Japan), Yoshio Harada (born in Hawaii), and Irene Harada, were the only three people of Japanese heritage on Nii’hau. There were 136 residents total.
Also, Yoshio Harada found out about Pearl Harbor from Nishikaichi, and decided not to tell any of his friends and neighbors, but only to discuss it with his wife and Shintani. Irene Harada went along with all of this craziness, and Shintani also didn’t tell anyone what he knew (and went along with Nishikaichi’s craziness, later).
So you can see why this kind of anti-civic behavior would make people in the US paranoid about other Japanese immigrants or even those born here.
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Ben Kanahele and his wife were… impressive:
https://www.hawaiireporter.com/niihau-incident-benehakaka-ben-kanahele-wwii-medal-for-merit-purple-heart-1891-1962/
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Ben and Ella Kanahele:
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The anti-Asian sentiment was so strong that grocery stores sold off their rice in stock for pennies on the dollar. My grandmother, having four hungry kids to feed, bought up the rice and served it like any other grain. (Hot, cooked, for breakfast with milk and cinnamon-sugar.) And then my mother continued the practice. So I grew up eating rice for breakfast and considering it “normal”.
(The generations fall into Silent Generation–Mom was born RIGHT before the war, so her earliest memories were of rationing–and Gen. X: I was born in 1970.)
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Minidoka, where the Feral Gooberment wants to put up a wind farm and claim that it falls under Public Lands Multiple Use
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‘Wind’ is a euphemism for farts. So, a wind farm… :-P
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War was officially declared with Japan, 8 December 1941, as well as Germany and Italy.
By and large FDR and the Donks did not inter US citizens of German or Italian ancestry, naturalized or born.
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Actually Japan was Dec. 8th, but Germany and Italy were December 11th – a few hours after Adolf and then Benito declared war on the US earlier that day, thus resolving a large issue for FDR. He very much wanted to go to the aid of the UK and USSR first, but had no justification for a war declaration on Germany and Italy based on the Pearl Harbor attack. But Adolf and Benito decided that the Axis pact required them to jump in, so FDR could do the “Europe first” plan he wanted.
One of the major alt history pivot points has Germany and Italy remaining neutral in the US-Japan war, frustrating the heck out of FDR and forcing a Pacific-first strategy, still pushing lend-lease to it’s max yet the US remaining a neutral in the European war.
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I see Shoim and Rodney have been figuring out how to handle drone equipped sorcerers….
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The Prohibition one about the government poisoning 10,000 Americans needs another panel, with Fauci saying “hold my beer.”
Or just smiling.
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German fairy tales are not more likely to be horrible than those of other nations. All regions have really nasty tales, and bright sparkling ones.
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This is why, if your most famous folklorists are named Grimm, you bribe them into changing their name as a matter of national pride. It’s just bad branding if you let them go around publishing Grimm’s fairytales….
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Eh. The native American ones I can recall had some nasty bits to them. And the Asian ones. And… yeah. The Germans weren’t alone, true, but they’re closer to us culturally and linguistically than a bunch of others, plus the popularity of Grimm’s tales, of course.
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The African ones involve cannibalism. SO MUCH CANNIBALISM.
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Cannibalism is a fairly common trait of fairy tales. You’re lucky if it’s an ogre and not your stepmother — and especially not your stepmother serving you up to your father.
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Or even your mother. The original Snow White didn’t have a stepmother involved, and “bring me her heart/lungs” isn’t great…
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Or your mother-in-law, who not only wants to eat YOU but your kids, too
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All of them. French, British, Italian, Russian, Polish — it’s true of all of them.
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I remember reading a book of Ancient Egypt myths.
Probably should have waited until I was out of 4th grade…
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Don’t forget about the Fractured Fairy Tales. :-D
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LOL!
Somebody is showing his age by remembering Fractured Fairy Tales.
Of course, so am I. [Very Big Crazy Grin]
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Literary fairy tales are like that.
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I sold a story to Orson Scott Card under my maiden name about a handsome prince held in a tower by his wicked (and kinky) stepmother, who had discovered how to make testosterone and developed the ability to sing the base line in Gregorian chants. Mom not only had the hots for him, she used her biochemical/magical genius to create a giant dragon…fly…..to guard the tower.
He was rescued by an equally talented fighter named James (her father wanted a boy). Let just say she used brains rather than brawn to do the job.
it was a rather fractured fairy tale. (The anthology was, “Dragons of Darkness,” for anyone who cares).
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Grumble Grumble
Not in e-format. 😉
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I’m not surprised. It came out in the late 1970s, when I was young and crazy.
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If you’re not crazy now, why are you here??? [Very Big Crazy Grin]
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I’m only mostly crazy. I really don’t know if I’d have another story like that in me.(It was, in part, inspired by my all-time favorite M*A*S*H episode, “The Kidnapping of Margaret Houlihan.” Just one perfect zinger after another and it set off a really strange frame of mind).
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First time I’ve run across ANYONE who has heard of that anthology, and it’s an authoress! (I only know of it because I have a collection of Michael Whelan’s art, in which he mentions doing the cover art for ‘Dragons of Darkness’ and then the publishing house used it for a different book anyway.)
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I have the original in my living room. It cost me, but I splurged. Talk about unrealistic armor….
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I think I have that one somewhere. Is that the compilation that had the weird story about breaking butterflies and living forever?
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Somebody mentioned Rocky and Bullwinkle? Mr Peabody fan here, as one might guess.
I have the DVDs of the shows.
Just finished Game of Thrones (didn’t have HBO so maybe saw one episode that got posted to YT.
R&B sounds like a good plate cleanser, before doing, say, the Muppet Show.
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Sigh. S/plate/palate !!
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Just don’t mention that Sarah’s charmingly fine and distinctive and totally-not-Russian-sounding accent sounds ANYTHING LIKE Natasha.
And whatever you do, don’t ask her to say “Moose and Squirrel”.
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Amazon did a couple of seasons of a new version with the blessing of Jay Ward’s daughter. Aside from the fact that they have through-plots over several episodes, and that they have all modern conveniences and better animation, they seem to have gotten the feel right.
(My kids really liked them, and I did too. Lots of celebrity cameos including Weird Al.)
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Oh, and they’re just The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Since it is no longer in variety show format, the secondary acts are generally not present.
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SFBS
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I see AI hands are good for something 🤣
Ginger supervisor. Enough said. 🐱
“You’re home early” 🐱
Harris Clown. – Um. Ouch! Too true.
“One ring to trigger them all” 🤣
The rest are good too, and too truthful.
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There is the Atalantan task, where even if you are the best at it, somebody with balls comes in and steals all the glory.
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I’m stealing some of these and posting them to X
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For y’all Americans who may not know, the disabled vet being offered MAiD instead of them getting busy and fixing her wheelchair lift is a Real Thing. They really did that.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/paralympian-trying-to-get-wheelchair-ramp-says-veterans-affairs-employee-offered-her-assisted-dying-1.6179325
So far, no one has gone to jail for doing that.
Funny how few Canadians seem outraged.
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Words fail me. Not even gagging sounds are enough.
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:( I hope your compatriots are merely shocked into silence or keeping their protest plans on the down-low for opsec reasons.
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https://blazingcatfur.ca/2024/10/29/ottawa-will-not-challenge-quebecs-law-allowing-advance-requests-for-maid/
This is what we’re getting right now.
“…last week, Quebec announced it would go ahead with accepting advance requests for MAID in cases where a person’s condition, such as Alzheimer’s, renders them incapable of giving consent at a later date.
Quebec will accept those requests as of Oct. 30.
The federal government has repeatedly expressed concern about Quebec moving forward before it modifies the Criminal Code.”
Meaning that the federal government is concerned about getting the paperwork all tiddly-poo, they do not give a F- about people killing themselves, or potentially being murdered.
Ungrateful Child: “I have here a signed affidavit that Mom wants to die.”
Mom: “NO I DON’T!!!”
Government Minion: “Ah yes, all in order, please proceed. MAiD, two doors down on the left.”
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*grimace* Now that’s real horror.
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Let’s put a face on that:
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2024/10/31/the-doctor-will-kill-you-now-14/
Pic of the “doctor” who “helped” 400 people die.
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I can visualize a few Canadian vets feeding bureaucrats feet first into a woodchipper.
“mmmglph! Ngh!”
“Sorry.”
BLAAAAAWWWWWWWP!
“Next.”
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I’m so old I remember when election night was fun instead of stomach churning and when you didn’t have to be just as terrified of your candidate winning as of them losing
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I’m so old I remember when it was a single night and not a season.
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Those FBI memes remind me of an observation I’ve made a few times:
There is nothing in the US Constitution that permits the FBI to exist at all. In other words, every FBI employee violates the Constitution, simply by walking in the office door every morning. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?
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