For most of my life I have been frustrated by the fact that people did not comprehend the all-inclusive meaning of the word “everything” and the all-exclusive meaning of the word “nothing”. “We had lost everything; we had nothing.” “Oh, that must have been just terrible” – yet people were inclined to think it could […]
ANNIVERSARY OF FIREBOMBING RAID ON TOKYO March 10, 1945
SEVENTEEN MONTHS AGO I PUBLISHED A BLOG ABOUT THE DEADLIEST CONVENTIONAL AIR RAID EVER, USING THE NEWLY INVENTED NAPALM BOMBS. AS THE DEAD TOLL OF THIS FIREBOMBING RAID ON TOKYO EXCEEDED THE DEATH TOLL OF EITHER OF THE ATOMIC BOMBS, WE CAN THINK OF IT AS THE DEADLIEST AIR RAID EVER. AND YET THE MEMORY […]
TOTOK, INDO: WHAT IS REALLY THE DIFFERENCE?
Three months ago, I exchanged e-mails with Priscilla K M regarding the fact that there is very little available in English that deals with the horrific circumstances of the Dutch-Indonesians on Java under the Japanese during WWII that I describe in “with nothing but our lives”. Priscilla is the founder of The Indo Project whose […]
Leo Vroman, poet – illustrator – scientist
Leo Vroman April 10, 1915 – February 22, 2014 This Dutch poet, illustrator and scientist died yesterday in Fort Worth, Texas at the age of 98. He lived in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) from 1940 to 1945 and was a POW of the Japanese on Java and in Japan. After the capitulation of […]
WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are subatomic particles making up Dark Matter
“WIMPs” stands for weakly interacting massive particles. This comes from physicists speaking about clouds of subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang that could pass through the Earth like smoke through a screen door, as described in an article of Dennis Overbye in the New York Times about tests to produce evidence of these […]
Save us from the madness – Barry Black on Government Shutdown
Rear Admiral Barry C. Black (RET) is the chaplain of the United States Senate who spoke these words in his morning invocations in the Senate at the beginning of the Government Shutdown: “May they remember that all that is necessary for unintended catastrophic consequences is for good people to do nothing.” Tuesday 10/01/13, the morning […]